Amateurs (2018)

AMATEURS  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Gabriela Pichler
    Zahra Aldoujaili, Yara Aliadotter, Fredrik Dahl,
    Shada Ismaeel, Maria Nohra, Susanne Hedman
When the somewhat rundown Swedish city of Lafors finds itself in the running for a big new German superstore, the town's civic leaders decide that what's needed is a promotional video showcasing all the benefits of building there. When they decide to make it a competition open to students at the local high school, two immigrant girls take up the challenge, using a cellphone camera and a selfie stick to show the town they really see. What they come up with is as silly, loose and ragged as you might expect, revealing aspects of the community not everybody wants the world to look at. "Amateurs" has a brash, shot-on-the-fly quality, too, the two films - the one the girls are making and the one that frames it - effectively reflecting each other. If some of the performances seem amateurish, it's because they're supposed to, and the actresses playing the young protagonists - one heavyset and the other distinctly androgynous - capture their giddy, dreamy, go-for-broke energy in a way that's completely convincing. 

The Last Run (1971)

THE LAST RUN  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Richard Fleischer
    George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere,
    Tony Musante, Colleen Dewhurst
The first thing you see in this movie is George C. Scott in a garage somewhere, tinkering with the engine of a souped-up convertible. The next thing you see, he's out on one of those winding, blind-corner highways that follow the seacoast in Portugal and Spain. He's taking it up to speeds that can accurately be described as insane, and at first you think he's out to kill himself. Then you realize that, no, he's practicing. Scott's character, Harry Garmes, is a retired getaway driver, living comfortably but getting bored in Albufeira, when he decides to go out on another job to see if he still has what it takes. The job involves driving an escaped convict and his girlfriend over the border from Spain into France. The convict is played by Tony Musante, who deserves a spot next to Andy Robinson in the screen psycho hall of fame. The girl is played by Trish Van Devere, who would eventually become Scott's wife. Interestingly, Colleen Dewhurst, Scott's wife at the time of the shoot, is in the movie, too. It's a good, literate action thriller, with European locations that let you know why movies get made there. Fleischer replaced the original director, John Huston, who, among other things, was not especially fond of George C. Scott. 

Annihilation (2018)

ANNIHILATION  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alex Garland
    Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac,
    Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Tessa Thompson,
    Sonoya Mizuno, David Gyasi, Benedict Wong
On the surface, at least, "Annihilation" is a little like "The Descent", a 2005 movie in which a handful of adventurous women head down into an unexplored cave and meet all kinds of horror. In this movie, a handful of adventurous women head into something called "the shimmer," a mysterious, expanding entity that has taken over a national park and makes hideous stuff happen to anybody who goes in there. One of the women, played by Natalie Portman, is a biological researcher whose specialty is studying cancer cells. By testing her own blood using a microscope she carries in her backpack, Natalie discovers that the shimmer, whatever it is, can duplicate itself the same way the cells do. What's more, it can approproate the DNA of anything it comes in contact with, and that would include the women. There are monsters in the shimmer, too, an alligator that's bigger than anything anybody's ever seen, and another creature that at first appears to be a bear, but turns out to be more like a bear-sized rat. So you've got "The Descent", in which an all-female cast finds something awful in a cave, and "Annihilation", where a key plot point involves reproduction and the climactic goal is a lighthouse. Dr. Freud might have something to say about that. 

Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: James Marsh
    Jeff Golden, Jo Vukelich, Marcus Monroe,
    Marilyn White, John Schneider, John Baltes
A one-of-a kind documentary about murder, arson, suicide, madness, bad news, hard times, guns, graveyards and broken glass. The setting is Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between 1890 and 1900, and the film's slant on local history is not one you'd expect the chamber of commerce to go out of its way to promote. The stories are lifted directly from contemporary newspaper accounts, the black-and-white recreations look every bit as authentic as the period photographs, and the overall effect is mournful and creepy. Wisconsin in the late 19th century wasn't necessarily much weirder than any other place on earth, but a movie like this could make you wonder about that. If the subject matter is inescapably morbid, it's also an inescapable part of the human condition. Take a look.

The Leisure Seeker (2017)

THE LEISURE SEEKER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Paolo Virzi
    Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Christian McKay,
    Janet Moloney, Dana Ivey, Dick Gregory
This plays like a variation on the 1981 Henry Fonda/Katharine Hepburn movie "On Golden Pond", with Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren in the Fonda and Hepburn roles. It's about an older couple named John and Ella Spencer, who decide to take off on one last road trip in their vintage Winnebago, before his dementia and her cancer make that impossible. They don't have any time to lose. It's a leisurely ride most of the way, and Mirren and Sutherland play off each other the way two people might after being married for 5o or 60 years. While she chatters away to anybody who will reluctantly listen, he drifts in and out, alert and attentive one moment, lost and confused the next. It's a beautifully acted duet, reminiscent of the work Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay did together in "45 Years". John and Ella both know what they're up against, and they know that life for either of them without the other is no longer an option. It's their last ride together in more ways than one. The late Dick Gregory does a cantankerous cameo as an old flame of Mirren's. 

Frankenstein Island (1981)

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND  (1981)  ¢
    D: Jerry Warren
    Robert Clarke, Steve Brodie, Cameron Mitchell,
    Robert Christopher, John Carradine, Andrew Duggan,
    Katherine Victor, George Mitchell, Dana Norbeck
Four balloonists wash up on a remote island whose inhabitants include two idiot sailors, a zombie security force, some alien women in animal-skin bikinis, and a disembodied John Carradine. (The Frankenstein Monster makes a lumbering appearance toward the end, but he's an afterthought.) Numbingly stupid, thrift-shop horror, in which the balloonists, faced with a choice between going off with the idiot sailors or hanging around with the alien women, decide to go with the idiots. After a bonehead move like that, they deserve whatever happens to them, including being stuck in this movie. 

The Death of Stalin (2017)

THE DEATH OF STALIN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Armando Iannucci
    Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor,
    Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Adrian McLoughlin,
    Paddy Considine, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi
A dark, crazy, fascist farce about what happens in the upper echelons of the Kremlin when Josef Stalin has a massive stroke and all the minions who have climbed through the ranks (and stayed alive) by toadying up to the old man start maneuvering to see who will succeed him. Anybody who was tracking the news during the 1950s will recognize the names: Molotov, Bulganin, Mikoyan and others. Stalin's immediate replacement, Georgy Malenkov, is a ditherer, and the battle for the top job becomes a duel between the much-feared security chief Lavrenti Beria and the jocular Moscow Party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Beria (Simon Russell Beale) has the edge starting out. He's cagey, ruthless, ambitious, and as Stalin's enforcer, he knows where the bodies are buried. He should. He buried them. Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) comes off as a sort of buffoon, which masks a fine-tuned sense of the ever-shifting game and a shrewd, calculating instinct for survival. An exchange at the end between Khrushchev and Stalin's daughter Svetlana is pivotal. Throughout the film Khrushchev has deferred to Svetlana, accommodating her whims and wishes any way he can. Now, after engineering the execution of his main rival, he tells her the way things are going to be, and you realize that a shift has occurred, and so does she. The Politburo's class clown has effectively seized control. It's all played for laughs, but the reality behind the comedy wasn't all that funny. Beria, especially, was a monster, and real Russians were tortured, gunned down and shipped off to the gulag, not just under Stalin, but later, too. Sometimes you just have to laugh, I guess. But you feel a little uneasy, just the same. 

Steamboat Willie (1928)

STEAMBOAT WILLIE  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
Disney's become such a vast spinoff empire over the last 90 years, that it's easy to forget that what it all spun off from is this early sound cartoon featuring the first screen appearance of Mickey Mouse. Watch it with "Fantasia" (1940) for a sense of how radically movie animation would evolve in the decade that followed. 

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (1930)

COME TAKE A TRIP IN MY AIRSHIP  (1930)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
A remake of the Fleischer brothers' 1924 cartoon and apparently the movie that introduced the follow-the-bouncing-ball audience sing-along device. It's not a hard tune to sing along to, if you feel like doing that. 

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (1924)

COME TAKE A TRIP IN MY AIRSHIP  (1924)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
Four years before Disney's "Steamboat Willie", Dave and Max Fleischer produced this sound cartoon in which various animated animals get into a spaceship and sail off to the moon. The song, with music by George Evans and lyrics by Ben Shields, dates to 1904.

Certified Copy (2010)

CERTIFIED COPY  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Abbas Kiarostami
    Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, Jean-Claude Carrière,
    Agatha Natanson, Gianna Giachetti, Adrian Moore
A middle-aged man and woman spend a Sunday walking around a small town in Tuscany, talking about life and art, and playing a mind game that blurs the lines between pretense and identity and becomes more intense and unsettling the longer it goes on. At first, they barely seem to know each other. Then they seem to slip into pretending they're married. Then they seem to be married, as if they were only pretending to be strangers in the first place. They're pretentious, anyway, and not real likeable, and you kind of get tired of them after a while, which is too bad, because Binoche and Simell are both very good playing them. The Tuscan scenery is beautiful, and the setup feels a little like of one of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight" movies, only way more disturbed and dysfunctional.

The Defector (1966)

THE DEFECTOR  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Raoul Levy
    Montgomery Clift, Hardy Krüger, Macha Méril,
    David Opatoshu, Hannes Messemer, Roddy McDowall 
In his last movie, Montgomery Clift plays an American scientist who's recruited/blackmailed by the CIA to go behind the Iron Curtain and get some information from a Soviet colleague. It's decent Cold War cloak-and-dagger stuff, not great, but better than its reputation and the collective opinion of Clift's biographers would suggest. Clift was a wreck at that point. He hadn't worked in four years, and took the project to prove he could still act, while being considered for the lead in "Reflections In a Golden Eye". He holds it together, pretty much, but he seems distracted, not quite there. The film was shot on location, sometimes in the snow, and Clift insisted on doing his own stunts, even when that meant going in and out of a freezing river. It took a toll. He died before the movie's release, and Brando replaced him in "Reflections In a Golden Eye".

Bio Picks / Take 3

More memorable performances by actors 
playing people who actually lived:

                  Sean Penn as Harvey Milk 
                      in "Milk"

                  Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking 
                      in "The Theory of Everything"

                  Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin 
                      in "Wolf At the Door"

                  Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway 
                      in "Midnight In Paris"

                  Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck 
                      in "Shadow of the Vampire"

                  Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf 
                      in "La Vie en Rose"

                  Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain 
                      in "Gettysburg"

                  Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page 
                      in "The Notorious Bettie Page"

                  James Franco as Allen Ginsberg 
                      in "Howl"

                  David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow 
                      in "Good Night, and Good Luck"