The Wedding Night (1935)

THE WEDDING NIGHT  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: King Vidor
    Gary Cooper, Anna Sten, Helen Vinson,
    Ralph Bellamy, Siegfried Rumann, Walter Brennan
Gary Cooper plays a writer who moves back to rural Connecticut when his career starts to slip. His wife (Helen Vinson) soon becomes bored and heads back to the city, while a young Polish neighbor (Anna Sten) inspires Cooper to start a new novel. Middling melodrama, watchable thanks to Cooper's typically low-key performance. Sten was Russian and a discovery of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to make her the next Greta Garbo. That didn't quite work out. 

The Third Murder (2017)

THE THIRD MURDER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Hirokazu Koreeda 
    Masaharu Fukuyama, Kôji Yakusho, Mikako Ishikawa,
    Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Izumi Matsuoka, Suzu Hirose
A legal thriller that starting out would seem to be not much of a mystery. A factory worker has confessed to the murder of his boss, and the only real question for his legal team is whether they can keep him off death row. The case gets to be way more complicated than that, filled with unreliable witnesses telling contradictory stories, and incidents and images that merge, reflect and play off each other. How much of the truth can be known, and how much does it matter in a court of law? Are our lives predetermined before they even begin? Does anybody, even a murderer, deserve to have his life taken away? Koreeda gives you plenty to think about. After watching this, I'm still not sure what the third murder in the title refers to, but I've got an idea. See if you can figure that out. 

Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976)

WON TON TON: THE DOG WHO SAVED HOLLYWOOD  (1976)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Winner
    Bruce Dern, Madeline Kahn, Art Carney,
    Teri Garr, Ron Liebman, Phil Silvers
In 1923, the world's smartest German shepherd becomes Hollywood's biggest star, which works out well for an aspiring filmmaker (Bruce Dern) and a would-be actress (Madeline Kahn), after they save the dog from the gallows. Something like "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World", it's a comedy in which the funny stuff is kind of secondary  to the cameos. Everybody from Rory Calhoun, Virginia Mayo and Andy Devine to Johnny Weissmuller, Victor Mature and the Ritz Brothers turns up in it, some for no more than a couple of seconds, and that's pretty much the point of the film. You'll have to look fast for your favorites. 

Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Morgan Neville
A documentary on the television career of Fred Rogers, the beloved kids' show host whose message of kindness and tolerance earned him millions of young admirers and the enmity of the goons on the far right. According to everybody who knew him, Rogers really was as gracious and unassuming off-camera as he was on TV, but he was passionately committed to his work, and he could be a formidable advocate for causes he believed in. Footage from a Senate hearing in which he argues for - and wins - government funding for PBS demonstrates that. Whether or not you're a part of the generation that grew up with "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", it's hard not to be moved by his plain decency and empathy toward children. At a time when much of the public discourse has dissolved into meanness and vitriol, Fred's appeal to our better instincts can seem like a relic from another age. Call it the lost art of caring. But if we hope to survive the current mess we're in with our humanity intact, we're going to need all the old-fashi0ned love we can get. The world has plenty of bullies and demagogues. It could do with a few more people like Mr. Rogers.

The Yesterday Machine (1965)

THE YESTERDAY MACHINE  (1965)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Russ Marker
    Tim Holt, James Britton, Jack Herman,
    Ann Pellegrino, Linda Jenkins, Robert Kelly
This starts out on an empty country road, where a drum majorette is dancing and twirling a baton. This is before the credits even roll, and it's arguably the high point of the film, which goes on for another 70-odd minutes to tell a time-travel story about a crazy German scientist whose goal is to bring the Führer back to life. It'd make a decent "Twilight Zone" episode, if it had a more economical running time and Rod Serling tapping on the typewriter keys. It even has a good "Twilight Zone" title. But it drags on way too long, the pace is way too slow, and when the professor launches into a marathon lecture expounding on his theory of time, it pretty much grinds to a halt. Nice baton-twirling, though.

In the Fade (2017)

IN THE FADE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fatih Akin
    Diane Kruger, Denis Moschitto, Numan Adar,
    Samia Muriel Chancrin, Johannes Krisch, Ulrich Tukur
A nail-bitting thriller from Germany starring Diane Kruger as a woman whose husband and son are killed in a terrorist bombing. The screening I saw this at included a trailer for the Bruce Willis remake of "Death Wish", and at first I thought the two movies wouldn't have much in common, but they kind of do. There's no smirky humor in this one, though, and the ending's grimmer and way more nihilistic. You can count on the Germans for that, I guess.

The Big Noise (1944)

THE BIG NOISE  (1944)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mal St. Clair
    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Doris Merrick
    Arthur Spade, Veda Ann Borg, Bobby Blake
Laurel and Hardy play janitors who answer the call at the detective agency where they're sweeping floors, and come into the possession of an experimental bomb. This is relatively late Stan and Ollie, made at Fox after they'd moved on from Hal Roach. (It's even missing "The Cuckoo Song".) It's got some amusing moments, but nothing that compares to their previous work. The sequence in the railroad sleeper is a variation on "Berth Marks", one of their early sound shorts, released in 1929.

Coco (2017)

COCO  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina
An animated fantasy from Disney/Pixar about a Mexican boy who longs to be a musician like his great-great-grandfather. Defying his family's wishes - they've all disowned their musical heritage and become shoemakers - he ends up in the afterlife on the Day of the Dead, trying to patch things up with his deceased relatives and somehow get back to his living ones. It's a dazzling eyeshow, a story told with humor, imagination and an underlying respect for the culture it's drawing from. On Oscar winner for best animated feature. Watch it with your kids.

Flashback: Silents, Please

   When my colleague Dr. Sporgersi and I were, like, 13, we had these fat-tire, one-speed bicycles that we'd ride all over Madison. One of our favorite places to bike to was the public library just off the Square, and our favorite place to hang out in the library was where the books about movies were. 
    Two books especially caught my attention back then. Both were oversized coffee-table books with lots of pictures in them. One was titled simply "The Movies", and covered the history of film from the beginning to 1956, the year of the book's publication. The other was "Classics of the Silent Screen" by the longtime New York television host and silent film buff Joe Franklin. 
    At about the same time, Ernie Kovacs was on TV - when he wasn't doing one of his marvelously weird comedy specials - with a weekly program called "Silents Please", in which he'd introduce a movie from the teens or '20s, cut down from feature length to about 25 minutes, with a voiceover narration to explain the story you were seeing on the screen. 
    Looking back on it now, it was a horrible way to watch a movie, but even in such a mutilated form, I was fascinated by what I saw. That was where I first saw John Barrymore in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Lon Chaney in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", Valentino in "The Son of the Sheik" and the Gish sisters in "Orphans of the Storm". I'd been watching movies my whole admittedly short life, but these films weren't like anything else I'd seen. 
    They still aren't, and I still love watching silent films. 
    Like early live television, silents covered a relatively brief time frame - roughly from the turn of the century through the 1920s. Viewed today, the earliest silents look primitive and quaint. The sets are spare. The camera's mostly static. The acting owes way too much to the conventions of 19th-century melodrama. But the medium evolved rapidly over 20 or 30 years, as production values became more elaborate, cinematography became more expressive, and acting (some of it, anyway) became more natural and restrained. It could be argued (as Charlie Chaplin said) that silents were just getting good when the silent era came to a close. 
    The end was abrupt. 
    Warner Brothers released Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer" (not a very good movie) in 1927. By 1930, everybody in Hollywood except Chaplin had switched to sound, and even he was composing a musical score for his next picture, "City Lights".
    While it's our good fortune that so many silent movies have survived, it's a cultural tragedy that so many more (about 90 percent, by some estimates) are lost. These days, not many casual viewers would bother to look at silent movies at all. But those who manage to track them down can see an art form grow from a low-end novelty to (in some cases) greatness, right before their eyes. 
    For anybody with a passing interest in silent films, or cinema history in general, here are ten titles worth looking for:

                    "A Trip To the Moon" (1902)
                    "The Great Train Robbery" (1903)
                    "Intolerance" (1916)
                    "Tumbleweeds" (1925)
                    "Metropolis" (1926)
                    "The General" (1926)
                    "The Black Pirate" (1926)
                    "Napoleon" (1927)
                    "The Circus" (1928)
                    "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928)

   And if anybody out there should come across a dusty print of "London After Midnight" in an attic or a closet or a vault somewhere, let the rest of us know.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS  (1956)  ¢ ¢
    D: Fred F. Sears
    Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor, Donald Curtis,
    Morris Andrum, John Zaremba, Grandon Rhodes
Hugh Marlowe takes on the aliens in a sci-fi thriller with some distinct parallels to "The Day the Earth Stood Still", including the fact that it stars Hugh Marlowe. The highlight comes when Hugh Marlowe puts on one of the alien space helmets, which is like a big, round bucket with no holes for the eyes or ears or anything. When you're a B-movie actor in a movie called "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", you end up doing stuff like that. 

Darkest Hour (2017)

DARKEST HOUR  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joe Wright
    Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott thomas, Lily James,
    Ben Mendelsohn, Ronald Pickup, Stephen Dillane,
    Samuel West, David Schonfield, Nicholas Jones
A dramatized history lesson covering three critical weeks in the chronicle of World War Two and the life and career of Winston Churchill. It's 1940, and the movie starts with Churchill's elevation to prime minister, against the wishes of practically everybody. The Germans are smashing through France, Belgium and Holland, and the entire British army is about to be wiped out unless somebody can figure out how to get 300,000 men off the beach at Dunkirk. The old prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, still believes the best way to avert annihilation is to work out a peace deal (again) with Hitler. Churchill doesn't see it that way. It's going to be a hectic three weeks. Gary Oldman got an Oscar playing Churchill, doing justice to the inevitable stereotype, while finding the humor and humanity behind the gruff, bulldog image. Whether addressing Parliament, growling at his secretary (Lily James), taking an unscheduled ride on the tube, or just padding around the house in his bathrobe, Churchill is never not in command, and it's the same with Oldman. If it's hard to recognize the actor under all the prosthetic makeup, consider that this is the same guy who (with a lot less makeup) was just as convincing as Sid Vicious and Lee Harvey Oswald. Nobody seems to do that sort of disappearing act better than Gary Oldman.

Mark of the Gorilla (1950)

MARK OF THE GORILLA  (1950)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Berke
    Johnny Weissmuller, Trudy Marshall, Suzanne Dalbert, 
    Onslow Stevens, Robert Purcell, Pierce Lyden
Johnny Weissmuller fights a leopard and a giant eel and a gorilla, only it's not a real gorilla, and, okay, I just gave away an important plot point there, but it's not that important, believe me. 

Captive Girl (1950)

CAPTIVE GIRL  (1950)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Berke
    Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Anita Lhoest,
    Rick Vallin, John Dehner, Rusty Wescoatt
Johnny Weissmuller fights a crocodile and falls off a cliff and a tiger fights a panther and there's a wild woman in a leopard skin living in the jungle and a villain played by Buster Crabbe and a hidden treasure you can only get to by diving down into the Lagoon of the Dead. John Dehner's performance as a native witch doctor is probably not the one he'd want to be remembered for. In the climactic duel of the former Tarzans, Weissmuller wins.