BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1999) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Alan Rudolph
Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, Albert Finney,
Glenne Headly, Barbara Hershey, Lukas Haas
If Kurt Vonnegut's books make kind of straggly movies, it because they're kind of straggly books. They're a kick to read - playful, cynical, wise and weird, filled with eccentric characters and a prevailing sense of bemused despair - but there isn't always much holding them together. That's sort of the way it is with Alan Rudolph's screen version of Vonnegut's 1973 novel "Breakfast of Champions". The eccentrics traipsing through and crossing paths include a suicidal auto dealer, his devoted receptionist, his cross-dressing sales manager, his narcotized wife and his oddball son. Hitchhiking toward them is Vonnegut's bitter, cantankerous alter ego, Kilgore Trout, a barely published science fiction writer whose work has appeared mainly in porno magazines. As expected, you don't get a real tight story - it's all kind of a mess - but you do get a little magic, a lot of strangeness and a dash of Vonnegut's comically skewed sensibility, plus Bruce Willis in a bad toupee, Barbara Hershey in yellow rubber boots, Glenne Headly in white lingerie, Nick Nolte in red lingerie, Lukas Haas in bunny slippers and Albert Finney munching the scenery as Kilgore Trout. Nolte, who once made a movie called "I'll Do Anything", really proves it here.
Albert Finney
(1936-2019)
DOWNFALL (2004) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler,
Ulrich Matthes, Corinna Harfouch, Heino Ferch,
Christian Berkel, Matthias Habich, Thomas Kretschmann
The last days of the Third Reich, with Bruno Ganz as the ranting, disintegrating Führer. It's hard to play Hitler without slipping into caricature, but Ganz inhabits the role in a way that's truly frightening. You wonder how he did it without scaring himself. At the same time, the movie's concerned with much more than the dictator's fate. As the Red Army closes in and Hitler disengages from reality, the others in and around the bunker must choose: life or death, loyalty or escape, suicide or surrender to the dreaded Russians. This is what the end of a war looks like from the losing side, and as grim as it sounds (and often is), there's a moral struggle going on, too, and in that there are moments of genuine heroism, a suggestion that even among the damned, there's a glimmer of humanity.
Bruno Ganz
(1941-2019)
COMA (1978) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Michael Crichton
Genevieve Bujold, Michael Douglas, Richard Widmark,
Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley, Lois Chiles, Hari Rhodes
A creepy but overwrought thriller based on Robin Cook's novel about a doctor in a Boston hospital who becomes suspicious when young, healthy patients start to come out of surgeries comatose. Look at it this way: If you ever find yourself being wheeled down to the OR for an emergency appendectomy, better hope you actually need the procedure, and that the doctor wielding the scalpel is not Richard Widmark.
HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN (2012) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Philip Kaufman
Nicole Kidman, Clive Owen, David Strathairn,
Molly Parker, Tony Shalhoub, Parker Posey,
Joan Chen, Anthony Brandon Wong, Peter Coyote,
Santiago Cabrera, Diane Baker, Robert Duvall
That would be Ernest Hemingway (of course) and his third wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn. The movie tracks their relationship from their first meeting at a bar in Key West to the Spanish Civil War, Cuba, Finland, China, and finally Europe late in World War Two. It's not hard to see why Hemingway (Clive Owen) would be attracted to Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman). As he remarks to a drinking buddy after that first encounter in Key West, "Her legs begin at her shoulders." She can match him drink for drink and sometimes word for word, and she's fearless in places and situations where she's repeatedly told women just don't go. She's got balls and she can write, and in Hemingway's macho universe, that means she's not just a romantic partner, she's competition. You know that sooner or later they'll clash, and they do. Hemingway scholars won't learn anything new here, but you do get a good sense of the history the two of them shared, and the makeup and cinematography are exceptional. When you see the old man in Idaho late in the film, you're no longer looking at Owen as Hemingway, you're looking at Hemingway, the effect is that convincing. Molly Parker plays second wife Pauline and Parker Posey plays fourth wife Mary, but you don't learn much about either of them, and it's not their story, anyway. The great Hemingway movie is still waiting to be made, and it's a life that would require a miniseries, at least. This is like a middle chapter in a story that should be much longer - it's over two-and-a-half hours as it is - and if it's not as complete or insightful as some might like, it'll do till something better comes along.
A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Roger Corman
Dick Miller, Barboura Morris, Antony Carbone,
Julian Burton, Ed Nelson, Bert Convy
A busboy in a beatnik coffeehouse longs to mix with the hipsters by being a cool artist. He has no talent at all, but he has a stroke of luck. In a moment of morbid inspiration, he sculpts the figure of a dead cat by molding a layer of clay over the carcass of a real dead cat. Now his work's being hailed for its disturbing realism, but what will he do for an encore? A legendary Roger Corman cheapie, shot in five days on a budget of $50,000, a no-frills black comedy that casually spoofs the pseudo-bohemian culture Corman had observed firsthand. Crazy, offbeat fun, with B-movie mainstay Dick Miller in his most celebrated role.
Dick Miller
(1928-2019)
PITCH PERFECT (2012) ¢
D: Jason Moore
Anna Kendrick, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp,
Rebel Wilson, Hana Mae Lee, Alexis Knapp,
Skylar Astin, Ben Platt, Adam Devine
An insipid musical comedy about a coed a cappella group singing its way to the big national competition at Lincoln Center. Like most of its characters, it's mean, lame, shallow and dull, but a must-see for fans of projectile vomiting.
EMPIRE OF THE AIR (1991) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Ken Burns
Ken Burns' history of radio focuses on the lives of three pioneers: obsessive, lone-wolf inventors Lee De Forest and Edwin H. Armstrong, and David Sarnoff, the cutthroat head of RCA and NBC, who knew how to exploit the medium and sell it to the masses. The movie's only two hours long, and you can't help wishing it had a wider bandwidth. As crucial as the technological breakthroughs of Armstrong and De Forest were, it was the programming those breakthroughs made possible that defined radio's social and cultural impact, and the attention that gets here is limited. Part of the challenge is what do you do visually when the subject of your movie is by definition not visual. (At several points, Burns solves that problem by letting the screen go black, with just the sound of a radio transmission on the soundtrack.) The movie effectively ends around 1950, with the advent of television, and a lot of radio history has gone down since. The impact of radio on rock & roll, and talk radio's influence on American political life, would both rate extended chapters in a longer, more comprehensive film. Radio might not be as close to Burns' heart as baseball, or jazz, or the Civil War, but the subject deserves more screen time than he gives it here. Jason Robards narrates.
