Trenchcoat (1983)

TRENCHCOAT  (1983)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Tuchner
    Margot Kidder, Robert Hays, David Suchet,
    Gila von Weiterhausen, Daniel Faraldo, Ronald Lacey,
    John Justin, Pauline Delaney, P.G. Stephens
Margot Kidder plays an aspiring mystery writer who jets off to Malta to work on a book and soon finds herself stumbling over dead bodies at a rate that most tourists in Malta would probably find unusual. This has some fun moments, all of them playing off Kidder's talent for screwball comedy. (The sequence where she zones out on sodium pentathol is a deadpan highlight.) The film never quite finds a groove, though, and the results are uneven. Malta and Margot are the visual attractions. Both are worth a look.

Teknolust (2002)

TEKNOLUST  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
    Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Davies, James Urbaniak,
    Karen Black, John O'Keefe, Thomas Jay Ryan
Tilda Swinton plays a lab rat named Rosetta Stone, who downloads herself into her own bio-genetic research, creating a self-replicating virus that results in three more Tilda Swintons. The duplicate Tildas are supposed to be confined to their own virtual world, but sometimes they get out into the real one, where their limited social skills, learned from the dialogue in old movies, plus the fact that they all look like Tilda Swinton, makes it difficult to blend in. This is every bit as strange as it sounds, but the story's told with wit and imagination, and it's another one of those movies that you watch and think, of course, Tilda Swinton, who else would you cast in something like this? The visual highlight comes when the three cloned Tildas, all wrapped in billowing yellow sheaths, dance together, each in her own distinct style, an early 21st-century variation on the late 19th-century "Danse Serpentine".

10 Rillington Place (1971)

10 RILLINGTON PLACE  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Fleischer
    Richard Attenborough, John Hurt, Judy Geeson,
    Pat Heywood, Isobel Black, Phyllis MacMahon
Richard Attenborough plays real-life serial killer John Christie, a whispering psychopath and accomplished practitioner of murder by strangulation and poison gas. John Hurt plays an illiterate bloke who's framed and then executed for one for Christie's crimes, a case that led Britain to abolish the death penalty. Attenborough's scary as hell in this, and the movie commands your attention, in its quiet, disturbing way, from start to finish. Creepy and horrifying.

Rubber (2010)

RUBBER  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Quentin Dupieux
    Stephen Spinelli, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser,
    Roxane Mesquida, Remi Thorne, Tara O'Brien
The title character in this movie is an old tire. Seriously. Well, not too seriously. The tire's half-buried in a rural dump site somewhere in the Southwest, and it pokes its way out of the sand slowly, a little at a time. It moves tentatively at first. It's wobbly and falls down a lot, and takes a while to find its footing, or it would, if, you know, tires had feet. But once it hits the road - an empty desert highway - it can't be stopped. The tire's name is Robert, and before long, Robert's on a killing spree, cornering unsuspecting lawmen and motel maids and making their heads explode. It also enjoys kicking back in an easy chair watching auto races on TV, and can be observed sneaking a peek at a naked girl taking a shower. (One thing Robert does not know how to do is swim.) Who would've thought a tire could be so dynamic and resourceful? Well, the folks who dreamed up this movie did, and it's way better than you'd probably expect. The tire really is a character - I have no idea how they got it to move like that - and the film doesn't just break down the fourth wall, it makes the audience part of the process - and then poisons the audience. You've really got to see it to know what I'm talking about, and I recommend that you do.

Tarzan and the Amazons (1945)

TARZAN AND THE AMAZONS  (1945)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Kurt Neumann
    Johnny Weissmuller, Brenda Joyce, Johnny Sheffield,
    Henry Stephenson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Barton MacLane
Tarzan kills a panther with a rock, wrestles a crocodile, frolics with Jane in the jungle, and tries to keep some greedy explorers from a hidden city inhabited by warrior women. The hidden city's in Africa and the women there are all Caucasian, but I guess we're not supposed to think too much about that. A relatively late entry in Weissmuller's Tarzan career, made at a point when he was starting to look less like a young Olympian and more like a middle-aged guy in a loincloth. Joyce was Maureen O'Sullivan's replacement and would play Jane in four more Tarzan films  before retiring in 1949.

Vox Lux (2018)

VOX LUX  (2018)  ¢ ¢
    D: Brady Corbet
    Natalie Portman, Raffey Cassidy, Jude Law,
    Willem Dafoe, Jennifer Ehle, Stacy Martin
This movie starts out with a jolt. You're in a classroom in a school. It's a music class and the kids are just coming back from break, and the teacher is patiently waiting for them to file in and get their instruments out and settle down. It's business as usual, till a scruffy-looking kid with a buzz cut walks in and guns down the teacher at point-blank range. Then (offscreen) he shoots up the rest of the class. The scene has an almost documentary feel to it, and in this gun-crazy age of ours, it's more than enough to get your attention. It's creepy and disturbing and it's the high point of the film. As it turns out, one of the students who survives the shooting is an aspiring songwriter, and at a memorial a year later, instead of speaking, she performs one of her songs. The song goes viral and becomes a hit, the girl becomes a pop star, and - flash forward another 16 years - she's a glam-rock diva played by Natalie Portman. At that point, Natalie Portman acting like the drama queen from hell effectively takes over the movie, and while you kind of admire the actress for taking the risk, the character's unrelieved nastiness gets tiresome fast. The ending's inconclusive - a powerpop performance by Natalie choreographed by her husband, with lots of noise and pyrotechnics. What any of it's supposed to signify gets lost in all the glitter. 

Silent Running (1971)

SILENT RUNNING  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Douglas Trumbull
    Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint
Bruce Dern had one of his best early-career roles in this science-fiction thriller about a botanist caring for the earth's last surviving forest in a giant terrarium in space. It's like Francis of Assisi wandering onto the set of "2001", a singular movie with a simple ecological message that only gets more timely as time goes on. Dern's character, self-righteous, anti-social and obsessed to the point of psychosis, can be difficult to like, a loner by nature who's been in space way too long and appears to be coming unglued. If he was more sympathetic, or played by anybody other than Bruce Dern, the movie wouldn't be half as interesting, and Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind "2001", "Close Encounters" and "Blade Runner", knows what a movie like this is supposed to look like. Peter Schickele and Joan Baez collaborated on the music. 

Your Highness (2011)

YOUR HIGHNESS  (2011)  ¢ 1/2
    D: David Gordon Green
    Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman,
    Zooey Deschanel, Rasmus Hardiker, Justin Theroux,
    Damian Lewis, Charles Dance, Toby Jones
A raunchy fratboy comedy set in the Dark Ages, starring James Franco, Danny McBride and Natalie Portman as adventurers on a quest to rid the world of an evil wizard (Justin Theroux) who's kidnapped Franco's bride, played by Zooey Deschanel. From the bonus features on the DVD, it looks like one of those movies that was more fun to make than it is to watch: a cast that's ready and willing to do something totally silly, but a script (by McBride) with a surplus of dick jokes and a shortage of wit. If you want to see Natalie Portman in a thong, there's a scene by a lake where she models one, and I guess there are worse reasons to watch a movie. That's about it for this movie, though. There's nothing wrong with Natalie's caboose. It's a nice one. It's just not always enough.

The Unforgiven (1960)

THE UNFORGIVEN  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Huston
    Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy,
    Lillian Gish, Charles Bickford, Doug McClure,
    John Saxon, Albert Salmi, Joseph Wiseman
In a sort of reversal on John Ford's "The Searchers", Audrey Hepburn plays a young woman who was taken from the Kiowa as an infant and raised by white settlers after the massacre of an Indian village. Now it's 20 years later, and a Kiowa warrior claiming to be her brother has found out her whereabouts and a war party has come to take her back, and the racism that's never far from the surface on the frontier starts to boil over. What makes this interesting isn't the storytelling or the execution, which are fairly routine, but the varying levels of bigotry represented by the main characters. The source material's a novel by Alan LeMay, who wrote "The Searchers", and if you keep an eye on Doug McClure in the final shot - the way he stands with one arm crossed in front to clasp the other at about the elbow - that's a direct reference to John Wayne at the end of Ford's movie.

Wajib (2017)

WAJIB  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Annemarie Jacir
    Mohammad Bakri, Saleh Bakri, Karma Zoabi
    Rana Almuddin, Maria Zriek, Tarik Kopty
You wouldn't even get through the door trying to pitch this movie in Hollywood. Its protagonists are two Palestinian Arabs, an aging schoolteacher and his expatriate son, driving around delivering wedding invitations in Nazareth. It's a knowing, street-level look at life in Israel's Arab community, reflected in the relationship between the two men. The younger one, an architect living in Italy, is a bit of a dandy, in red trousers and a pink printed shirt, his long hair tied back in a fashionable bun. He deplores the mounds of trash in the streets, the ubiquitous presence of Israeli soldiers and the prevailing fondness for covering up classic old buildings with pieces of tarp, and wonders how the old man can accommodate all that. For his father, accommodation is simply the price of survival, and he's spent a lifetime living with it. It's not the world as he'd like it to be, but that's the way it is. What divides them might be political, but what connects them is personal, and the ending quietly captures that. Just don't expect to see a Hollywood remake anytime soon. 

Movie Star Moment: Robert Redford

Robert Redford as Bob Woodward
in "All the President's Men" (1976)

    This scene is all done in closeup in a single shot that goes on for something like six minutes. Robert Redford, playing Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, is in the newsroom working the phones, and ends up juggling two calls from two different sources simultaneously, putting one on hold while he talks to the other. At one point, he forgets who he's talking to and calls one source by the other's name. He quickly corrects himself and the scene goes on, and it's so smoothly handled that it's impossible to tell whether Redford blew a line there and finessed it, or if the goof was in William Goldman's script. It's a brilliant piece of movie acting, either way. Redford nails it. 

St. Louis Blues (1929)

ST. LOUIS BLUES  (1929)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dudley Murphy
    Bessie Smith, Jimmy Mordecai, Isabel Washington
At early sound short featuring the only on-screen appearance of Bessie Smith. The framing device has Bessie coming home to find her man with another woman. The centerpiece has her at the bar in a Harlem nightclub delivering a mournful rendition of the title song. Smith wasn't crazy about being filmed, which might explain why in some shots she's barely visible. W.C. Handy did the arrangement, and the story goes that the filmmakers got the nightclub extras in the mood for the shoot by supplying them with bootleg beer. 

A Very English Scandal (2018)

A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Stephen Frears
    Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings,
    Patricia Hodge, Monica Dolan, Paul Hilton,
    Rhys Parry Jones, Michele Dotrice, Morgan Watkins
A three-part, three-hour miniseries from Amazon, based on the true story of Jeremy Thorpe, the British member of Parliament and Labor Party leader whose career came crashing down when he was charged with plotting the murder of his gay lover, a sometime stableboy and dog walker named Norman Scott. It's done as a black comedy, and as with a lot of British films, much of the narrative tension revolves around class. Thorpe feels so secure in his world of privilege, he believes he can get away with murder - and he may be right. Norman, who has a sizeable working-class chip in his shoulder, knows he's screwed no matter what, but desperately wants his voice to be heard. It's really a movie about people who lie, and what happens when they're found out. Hugh Grant plays Thorpe as if he'd just eaten something awful and can't get the taste out of his mouth. He's so good, you'd like to kick his teeth in. Whishaw plays Norman as a walking wound, needy, angry, instinctively shrewd, and from Thorpe's point of view, dangerous. Through it all and despite it all, gnawing away at both men is the painful, inescapable fact that they love each other. They can't help it. It's their tragedy. It's their curse.

Blame It On Rio (1984)

BLAME IT ON RIO  (1984)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Stanley Donen
    Michael Caine, Joseph Bologna, Michelle Johnson,
    Demi Moore, Valerie Harper, José Lewgoy
A lightweight tropical farce starring Michael Caine as a middle-aged businessman who gets involved with a colleague's teenaged daughter while on vacation in Brazil. Stanley Donen directed, and it's a long way from "Charade" and "Singin' In the Rain", but there's a nice, subversive streak running through it that's kind of fun, and Caine's so good, you might get a kick out of it, anyway. Young Demi Moore, playing Caine's daughter, has a nominally topless beach scene in which her hair appears to be glued to her chest. Michelle Johnson, whose hair is shorter than Moore's, plays the object of Caine's lust. 

Stanley Donen

(1924-2019)