The Party (2017)

THE PARTY  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sally Potter
    Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson,
    Timothy Spall, Cherry Jones, Cillian Murphy, Bruno Ganz
There are seven people at this party. One's a politician. One's a self-styled life coach. One's a cynical bitch. One teaches women's studies, and one (her wife) is pregnant with triplets. One's doing way too much coke, and one's getting seriously drunk. Oh, and one of them's got a gun. A wickedly dark psychocomedy shot in hand-held black and white, with the actors - all of them - perfectly cast. The last shot's a kicker, and echoes "The Great Train Robbery", almost.

The Outlaws Is Coming (1965)

THE OUTLAWS IS COMING  (1965)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Norman Maurer
    The Three Stooges, Adam West, Nancy Kovack,
    Mort Mills, Don Lamond, Emil Sitka, Henry Gibson
Stooges out West, with Moe, Larry and Curly Joe heading to Wyoming with newspaper editor Adam West to try to prevent an Indian war. It's the usual moronic nonsense, but these guys knew how to deliver that sort of thing, and for a feature-length Three Stooges movie, it's not too bad. Glue plays a key role in the slapstick, and there are amusing references to the Beatles, "The Music Man" and westerns on TV, along with a gunman named Trigger Mortis and a skunk named Elvis. The climactic chase, culminating in a pie fight that materializes out of nowhere, is surreal. West and Henry Gibson would both break through later in the decade, on television's "Batman" and "Laugh-In" respectively.

Naples In Veils (2017)

NAPLES IN VEILS  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ferzan Ozpetek
    Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Alessandro Barghi, 
    Anna Bonito, Peppe Barra, Lina Sastri, 
    Isabella Ferrari, Loredana Cannata
A police pathologist meets a handsome young guy at a party and they go back to her place and spend the night together. The next day, she goes to work and he turns up dead with his eyes gouged out on a table in the morgue. The movie takes off from there, a mystery in which it's up to you to decide what's real, what's imagined, and who might (possibly) be a ghost. It keeps you guessing right up to its final, mystifying shot. Compelling performances by Giovanna Mezzogiorno as the pathologist and Naples, playing itself.

The Naughty Flirt (1930)

THE NAUGHTY FLIRT  (1930)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Edward Cline
    Alice White, Paul Page, Myrna Loy,
    Robert Agnew, Douglas Gilmore
Pre-Code fluff about a fun-loving rich girl and the men she might marry. It's not all that naughty, really. Myrna Loy plays the money-hungry sister of one of the suitors. 

Revenge (2017)

REVENGE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Coralie Gargeat
    Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens,
    Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchède
My colleague Dr. Sporgersi didn't like this movie very much. He didn't think it left any room for suspension of disbelief, and he's right about that. You can't believe any of it. It would be hard to even pretend to. The setting's a modern luxury house surrounded by what appears to be 1,000 square miles of desert. The main way to get there is by helicopter. A man and a woman have gone there for a weekend getaway, and then two of the man's buddies show up out of nowhere with their hunting rifles. They all spend an evening partying, and the woman, whose wardrobe leans toward short skirts and bikini bottoms, flirts with the men in a provocative way, and the next day she's violently assaulted and pushed off a cliff. She lands on a dead tree, where she's impaled on a sharp branch, and she's bleeding at the rate of a gallon a minute, but she frees herself by setting the tree on fire and crawls away, and the guys figure she can't get far with a tree branch in her gut, so they go back for their guns and vehicles and set out to hunt her down. They'd be better off catching the next helicopter out of there. It's pure grindhouse exploitation, primitive and outlandish, like "I Spit On Your Grave" dropped down into "Mad Max" territory, a film in which vengeance is served with plenty of gore, and you can track every character by following a trail of blood. Also, if you're out in the desert alone with a tree branch stuck through you, you can remove it by doing the surgery yourself with a hunting knife, a beer can and a hit of peyote. Which is good to know, I guess, if you're ever in that situation. Just don't expect much in the way of suspended disbelief.

Quote File / Take 13

"Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
  Werner Herzog

"The length of a film should be directly related to 
  the endurance of the human bladder."
  Alfred Hitchcock

"A successful film is one that's finished."
  Robert Altman

"As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film."
  Frank Capra

"Film lovers are sick people."
  Francois Truffaut

Night People (1954)

NIGHT PEOPLE  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Nunnally Johnson
    Gregory Peck, Broderick Crawford, Anita Björk,
    Rita Gam, Buddy Ebsen, Peter van Eyck
Vintage Cold War spy stuff starring Gregory Peck as an Army intelligence officer in Berlin and Broderick Crawford as an axel-grease tycoon whose G.I. son has gone missing, abducted by the Russians. It's not Graham Greene or John Le Carré, but as a product of its era this holds up fairly well. A throwback to a time when we generally knew the good guys from the bad guys, especially when the good guys were played by Gregory Peck.

For Sama (2019)

FOR SAMA  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Waad Al-Khateab, Edward Watts
Here's a movie that's hard to watch and even harder to forget: a documentary about the siege of Aleppo, the Syrian city that paid for its role as the center of resistance to the Assad regime by being bombed into the ground. I'm not sure why it's considered more heinous for a government to kill its own people than to kill somebody else's, but there's no doubt that what the Syrian government and its Russian allies did to Aleppo was an atrocity, and Waad Al-Khateab, a journalist at ground zero with a video camera, doesn't cut away from any of it. This is not war as an abstraction. It's dead bodies and mass graves, little kids with PTSD and blood on the floor of the city's only remaining hospital, wailing women clutching the corpses of their children and bombing so constant that when a shell explodes just a block away, you don't even flinch anymore. In the middle of it all, and in the middle of the movie, there's a birth at the hospital. The mother's been brought in wounded, and the baby comes out lifeless, still. The doctors massage it, try CPR, slap its bottom, massage it some more. There's no response. This goes on for a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and still nothing. It's hopeless. You wonder why they bother. And then - the baby opens its eyes and begins to stir. It's not moving much, but it's wriggling. In the middle of hell, a miracle. A single human life. It takes your breath away.

School For Scoundrels (1960)

SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Hamer
    Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Janette Scott,
    Alistair Sim, Dennis Price, Peter Jones
A guy who gets walked on and pushed around by practically everybody learns the art of one-upmanship at an academy established for that purpose and run by a dodgy old gent played by Alistair Sim. Like some other British comedies, this achieves a sort of crazy balance by being good-natured and underhanded at the same time. Once the protagonist starts to turn the tables, at a car dealership and a tennis match, the fun really kicks in. Peter Ustinov (uncredited) wrote the original script, and Sim is hilarious, as always. Even the way he smokes is funny.

Peppermint (2018)

PEPPERMINT  (2018)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Pierre Morel
    Jenifer Garner, John Gallagher Jr., John Ortiz,
    Juan Pablo Raba, Annie Ilonzeh, Jeff Hephner
When some drug thugs gun down Jennifer Garner's family in a drive-by, and shoot Jennifer Garner in the head for good measure, you can assume they're not expecting Jennifer Garner to recover and go all Michelle Rodriguez on them. But she does. Sometimes these "Death Wish" knockoffs can be done really well, like Jodie Foster in "The Brave One". And sometimes your interest in what's going on just stalls out and dies, in an inverse ratio to the casualty count, which is what you get with "Peppermint". The conclusion leaves the potential for a sequel wide open, but it takes most action franchises three or four episodes to get as dull and perfunctory as this. When the original is dead on arrival, the prospect of a followup is almost too depressing to think about. 

Pauline At the Beach (1983)

PAULINE AT THE BEACH  (1983)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Eric Rohmer
    Amanda Langlet, Arielle Dombasie, Pascal Greggory,
    Féodor Atkine, Simon de la Brosse, Rosette
This movie starts out with two women - a girl in her mid-teens and her older cousin - on a seaside h0liday. Their first day at the beach, they meet two men, and over drinks the four of them compare notes on love. Their ideas and expectations are diverse, and this is an Eric Rohmer movie, so you know that the more they think they know what they want, the more you can count on love to throw in a wrinkle or two. The stakes aren't especially high, but they don't really need to be. There are worse ways to while away 95 minutes than watching beautiful people try to navigate the pitfalls of romance in a beautiful place where the pace is relaxed, the possibilities are yours to imagine, and you can practically taste the salt in the air and feel the sand between your toes. 

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)

STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI 
    D: Riann Johnson                                     (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill,
    Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac,
    Kelly Marie Tran, Domhnall Gleeson, Laura Dern,
    Lupita Nyong'o, Benicio Del Toro, Andy Serkis
We've reached the eighth chapter in the never-ending space opera, the middle episode in the third trilogy, so let's take a look at where we're at. Rey (Daisy Ridley) has tracked down Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), living in self-imposed isolation on a Jedi island in the remotest corner of the galaxy. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is still split over whether to embrace the Force, or go over to the Dark Side. General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and a First Order armada are chasing what remains of the Resistance, commanded by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). Hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is wreaking havoc on the First Order fleet, but his impulsiveness is getting on Leia's nerves. Finn (John Boyega) is trying to locate Rey, with the help of fellow commando Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) and outlaw decoder DJ (Benicio Del Toro). Leia somehow survives a trip into the vacuum of space and relinquishes her command to Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). By the end, Poe has exchanged a suggestive look with Rey, while Finn, who's been eyeing Rey since Episode VII, has developed an apparent interest in Rose. That's all between battle scenes in which massive giant space platforms are vaporized and an untold number of beings die, with ear-blasting sound effects and the inevitable martial score by John Williams. The filmmakers (as always) keep a safe distance from all that carnage. It's cooler (and more abstract) just to stand back and watch stuff explode. But when you think about it, the casualty count in a movie like this must be staggering.