Jungle Jim (1948)

JUNGLE JIM  (1948)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Berke
    Johnny Weissmuller, Virginia Grey, George Reeves,
    Lita Baron, Rick Vallin, Holmes Herbert
When he got too old to play Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller kept his career going by putting on a few clothes and playing another B-movie hero, Jungle Jim. The first entry in the series, released the same year as his last Tarzan film, has Johnny fighting a leopard and shooting a crocodile and dodging an avalanche and almost falling off a cliff, while leading a safari in search of a substance that could cure infantile paralysis. Johnny's acting is painful - he was better cast as Tarzan, where he didn't have to grapple with complete sentences - but nine-year-old boys back then didn't much care about that. George "Superman" Reeves plays the villain.

Green Book (2018)

GREEN BOOK  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Farrelly
    Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, 
    Sebastian Maniscalco, Mike Hatton, Joe Cortese
It'a not hard to see how Viggo Mortensen bulked up for his role in "Green Book". Playing nightclub bouncer Tony Vallelonga (aka "Tony Lip"), he practically never stops eating, except when he's smoking or beating somebody up, and he often eats and smokes simultaneously. It's 1962, and Tony, temporarily unemployed when the Copa closes for repairs, hires on as the driver and de facto bodyguard for Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a black pianist whose upcoming concert tour includes several dates in the Deep South. All the stuff you'd except to happen, does. The street-wise Tony and the cultured Doc are at odds starting out, but bond over time as they learn more about each other. They're both fish out of water in the South. Racism comes into play, and Tony's forceful way of handling things doesn't always help. Doc helps Tony write intelligible letters to his wife back in the Bronx. Tony introduces the classically trained Doc to Aretha Franklin and Little Richard. It's all resolved in a way that feels a little too good to be true, and the movie leans noticeably more in the direction of Tony's story than Doc's. (Nick Vallelonga, the real-life Tony's son, was one of the writers.) But as long as Mortensen and Ali are sharing the screen, you've got a road movie that's worth the trip. And if you want to study Viggo's technique for devouring a whole large pizza, you can do that, too.

Barabbas (1961)

BARABBAS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    Richard Fleischer
    Anthony Quinn, Silvana Mangano, Arthur Kennedy,
    Katy Jurado, Harry Andrews, Vittorio Gassman,
    Valentina Cortese, Jack Palance, Ernest Borgnine
If there's such a thing as a biblical film noir, it's probably this: a speculation on what might've happened to the thief who got reprieved when Christ was sentenced to death. Spared from the gallows for reasons he can never understand, Barabbas becomes convinced he can't be killed, and he does survive an awfully long time, through 20 years as a slave in a Sicilian sulfur mine, gladiatorial combat in the arena and the burning of Rome, till he finally meets his own death, ironically, by crucifixion. Anthony Quinn plays Barabbas as a dark, tortured soul, and darkness, both visual and metaphorical, is a key element in the story. (The recreation of Christ's crucifixion was filmed during a solar eclipse.) Christopher Fry wrote the script from the novel by Pär Lagerkvist, and the mournful main theme (for Catholics who remember the ancient musical past) is the Kyrie from Mass XI. It's a brooding, compelling film with a protagonist who's impulsively violent and barely articulate, which makes it a departure from most Hollywood biblical epics. Like some other historical figures, Barabbas inhabits the shadows, a minor player remembered for his accidental role in a brief, pivotal moment recorded in a line or two of biblical text. When he steps out into the light, he's blinded by it. In the darkness, he's right at home. 

Adrift (2018)

ADRIFT  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Baltasar Kormákur
    Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin, Grace Palmer,
    Jeffrey Thomas, Elizabeth Hawthorne
I suppose at this point, the movie all other lost-at-sea adventures should be compared to is the 2013 Robert Redford vehicle "All Is Lost". No backstory. No dialogue. Just one man in a broken boat in the middle of the ocean, alone. It doesn't get much more primal than that. "Adrift" starts out with two people on a boat - a young couple (Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin) sailing from Tahiti to San Diego. That's the plan, anyway, till the mother of all storms comes up and pulverizes them. It's a tense time on the water, based on a true story, with a sunny, down-to-earth performance by Woodley, who's equally convincing as a free-spirited vagabond and the battered, strung-out survivor of 40 days at sea. As the ordeal drags on, Woodley's not afraid to let herself look really rough, though you can't help wondering why a fair-haired girl in an open boat, in possession of a stylish, wide-brimmed hat to protect her from the sun, doesn't spend more time wearing the thing.

Cuban Rebel Girls (1959)

CUBAN REBEL GIRLS  (1959)  1/2 ¢
    D: Barry Mahon
    Errol Flynn, Beverly Aadland, John McKay,
    Jackie Jackler, Marie Edmund, Ben Ostrowsky
Errol Flynn's monumentally awful last movie, with Flynn playing himself as a Hemingway-style journalist and his underaged girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, cast as an American girl who joins the rebels fighting for Fidel. As an unfortunate note to go out on, this rivals Bela Lugosi in "Plan 9 From Outer Space", but where "Plan 9" is fun in a bad movie way, this one's more like just sad and ploddingly, painfully dull. Flynn, who was almost 50, looks heavy and tired. Aadland, who was just 16, affectionately calls him an ox. Flynn wrote the misguided script and died before the picture's release. "Captain Blood" and "Robin Hood" seem a million light years away.

Nostalgia (2018)

NOSTALGIA  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mark Wellington
    Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener,
    Bruce Dern, James Le Gros, Mikey Madison,
    Nick Offerman, John Ortiz, Amber Tamblyn
This is a movie about stuff, specifically the material objects we treasure and hang on to as we move through life, or navigate the transitions from one phase to another. It's a series of stories connected by a character who moves from one story to the next and then drops away while another character moves on to the next story, and on and on. It makes you think about what matters and what doesn't, and how something that has value for one person might not mean much to somebody else. The approach to what that means when much of what you care about - music, photographs, correspondence - is digital is especially interesting. 

Prime Cut (1972)

PRIME CUT  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Ritchie
    Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek,
    Gregory Walcott, Angel Tompkins, Janit Baldwin
In his entry on Lee Marvin in "The Biographical Dictionary of Film", David Thomson calls Marvin "the last of the great wintry heroes," and you can see some of that in "Prime Cut". Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a mob enforcer dispatched to Kansas City to collect a payment from a cattleman named Mary Ann (Gene Hackman), who's been skimming the profits and denying the boys in Chicago their share of the take. In addition to beef and pork, Mary Ann sells women, specifically teenaged girls, exhibited naked in livestock pens like all the other animals. One of them, a wide-eyed kid named Poppy (Sissy Spacek), catches Devlin's eye and he whisks her away, a visibly aging knight and an adolescent damsel in distress. This is a movie that could only have gotten made and released in the early 1970s, during the five or six years between "Easy Rider" and "Jaws", when the studios were grasping at straws and a filmmaker with enough daring and originality could break the rules sometimes, which Ritchie did. The movie's compulsively transgressive, from the way Hackman chows down on a plateful of guts (I'm not kidding) to the squalid flophouse where one of the girls gets passed around to the resident bums at a nickel a throw. Marvin's white-haired, gray-suited Devlin is the film's hard, cold moral center, a guy who's revolted by what he sees, but knows he can't always do much about it. His relationship with Poppy is ambiguous. Nothing really happens between them, at least on screen, but there's something in the way he looks at her, especially when she's not wearing much, that makes you wonder. She says she loves him, and apparently means it, but his motives remain mysterious to the end. Gregory Walcott's casual grossness as a butcher named Weenie stands out in a movie that's all about meat, and if the opening credits don't cause you to weigh the positive aspects of becoming a vegetarian, you'll probably be a carnivore for life. Spacek's first film. 

The Girl In the Spider's Web (2018)

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB  (2018)  ¢ ¢
    D: Fede Alvarez
    Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith Stanfield,
    Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant, Christopher Convey,
    Vicky Krieps, Cameron Britton, Synnove Macody Lund
Lisbeth Salander hacks into the National Security Agency and downloads the computer program for a high-tech weapons system its geek creator wants to destroy. The Americans want it back, Swedish intelligence is after it, and so is a Russian organization called the Spiders, who aren't exactly out to promote world peace. This is the first Salander feature not based on a Stieg Larsson novel, and while the book, by David Lagercrantz, wasn't bad, the story's way too involved to track all the way if you don't know something about it going in. You get lots of scenes where characters conveniently turn up in the right place at the right time, with no hint at how they knew where to go or how to get there. Claire Foy's a very good actress, but she's wrong for Salander. She's too open and expressive. Salander's deeply fucked up, a damaged, angry soul who keeps her emotions locked up tight below the surface. Both Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara did a better job of capturing that. They had a tougher edge. Sverrir Gudnason as Mikael Blomkvist doesn't do any better. He's younger than either Michael Nyqvist or Daniel Craig, and it's not hard to imagine him hooking up with Salander, but he barely has a role to play in the story, and for Larsson a key part of the dynamic between the two (not always stated) was their age differential. There's an attraction there that's intense, and from time to time they act on it, but they both know that in too many ways they don't match up. This time out, they hardly connect at all. They never get the chance. With the edges smoothed off and the accent on stunts and effects, this "Dragon Tattoo" entry is less a character study than a formula action movie, and the world already has plenty of those. Fans of the books and the previous films are likely to be unimpressed.

Tortilla Flat (1942)

TORTILLA FLAT  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Victor Fleming
    Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, Hedy Lamarr,
    Akim Tamiroff, Frank Morgan, Sheldon Leonard,
    John Qualen, Donald Meek, Connie Gilchrist,
    Allen Jenkins, Henry O'Neill, Arthur Space
One of John Steinbeck's most laid-back novels, brought to the screen by MGM, with Tracy, Garfield and Tamiroff playing life-loving, wine-drinking, work-avoiding paisanos and Hedy (not Hedley) Lamarr as the Portuguese girl Garfield's character falls in love with. Normally I'd say you can't go wrong with a cast like that, but here the cast seems a little miscast. Trying to match their wine intake while you're watching it could be lethal.

Listomania / Take 9

          More multiple generations on the screen:

                 Charlie Chaplin
                     and Geraldine Chaplin
                 John Carradine
                     and David, Keith and Robert Carradine
                 Henry Fonda
                     and Jane and Peter Fonda
                 Peter Fonda
                     and Bridget Fonda
                 Donald Sutherland
                     and Kiefer Sutherland
                 Geoffrey Lewis
                     and Juliette Lewis
                 Lloyd Bridges
                     and Jeff and Beau Bridges
                 Don Johnson
                     and Dakota Johnson
                 Walter Huston
                     and John Huston
                 John Huston
                     and Anjelica Huston
                 George C. Scott & Colleen Dewhurst
                     and Campbell Scott

22 Bullets (2010)

22 BULLETS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Richard Berry
    Jean Reno, Marina Foïs, Kad Merad,
    Jean-Pierre Darrousin, Richard Berry,
    Venantino Venantini, Josephine Berry
Jean Reno brings his implacable presence to the role of a Marseilles mob boss who gets shot 22 times in a gangland hit. Miraculously, he survives, which is not good news for the ex-colleagues who set him up and drilled him. Family, honor, loyalty and betrayal are key elements in the story, and the violence is brutal. It's where Martin Scorsese meets Luc Besson. The original French title translates literally as "The Immortal".

The Threat (1949)

THE THREAT  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Felix Feist
    Michael O'Shea, Virginia Grey, Charles McGraw,
    Julie Bishop, Frank Conroy, Robert Shayne,
    Anthony Caruso, Don McGuire, Frank Richards
Charles McGraw was one of those B-movie actors who looked and sounded like a guy who could chew rusty nails and shit barbed wire. I have no idea what he was like in real life, but on screen he was tough. In "The Threat", McGraw plays Red Kluger, a vicious killer who escapes from Folsom and wastes no time getting even with everybody who got him sent up in the first place. It's a mean, economical film noir with a long segment in a hideaway shack in the middle of a broiling desert that plays like a low-budget variation on "Key Largo". McGraw made his last screen appearance in 1977, and achieved some unwanted notoriety in 1980, when, according to noir historian Eddie Muller, he slipped in the shower and the glass door broke and he impaled himself on the broken glass and bled to death. That California now has a law requiring safety glass in shower doors is because of B-movie tough guy Charles McGraw.

A Room With a View (1985)

A ROOM WITH A VIEW  (1985)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Ivory
    Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott,
    Julian Sands, Simon Callow, Daniel Day-Lewis,
    Judi Dench, Rupert Graves, Patrick Godfrey
An elegant period comedy from Merchant-Ivory, starring 19-year-old Helena Bonham Carter as a girl who falls for one guy, gets engaged to another, and ends up lying to everybody. Julian Sands plays the sympathetic suitor who adores her. Daniel Day-Lewis plays the arrogant twit she promises to marry. Maggie Smith and Denholm Elliott play older relatives who give Helena and Julian a lot of not-always-welcome advice. The locations are Florence and the English countryside. There's a skinny-dipping scene, but in a switch from what you might expect, it's the men, not the women, going naked in the pond. A breakout role for Bonham Carter, whose precocious screen presence and not-quite-grownup poise are reminiscent of Judy Davis in "My Brilliant Career". Based on a novel by E.M. Forster