Dead Pigs (2018)

DEAD PIGS  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Cathy Yan
    Vivian Wu, Haoyu Yang, Meng Li,
    Mason Lee, David Rysdahl
Maybe this is what life is like in 21st-century China, at least for those who end up fighting to survive and stay human in a mercenary, rat-race economy. The characters include a pig farmer who's lost all his money in a crooked investment scheme, his sister, a beautician who refuses to sell their family home to a developer, the development company's young American architect, the pig farmer's son, the developer's daughter, a flock of pigeons and a lot of dead pigs. Nobody seems very happy here, though an absurd musical production number at the end allows them to briefly act that way. The pigeons come out of it all right, I guess. At least they've got a chance to. Not so much the pigs.

Nursery Favorites (1913)

NURSERY FAVORITES  (1913)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Allen Ramsey
    Edna Flugrath, Robert Lett, 
    Shirley Mason, Robert Milasch
Before a stationary camera, a troupe of elaborately costumed actors deliver lines from nursery rhymes, impersonating the characters. It's primitive in every way, but as one of the few surviving Edison Kinetophone films, it has some historical value. Kinetophone was a very early sound system that turned out not to be very practical, requiring an oversized phonograph cylinder synched with a 35mm projector by means of a linen cord soaked in castor oil. Production using the process lasted about a year and ended when a fire destroyed most of Edison's filmmaking facility in 1914.

The Movie Buzzard thanks The Sprocket Society for the technical information in this review.

I Think We're Alone Now (2018)

I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Reed Morano
    Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, 
    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Paul Giamatti
As this movie begins, the apocalypse has happened, and the last man on earth (he thinks) is a small-town librarian named Del, played by Peter Dinklage. Del's an orderly, self-sufficient guy who doesn't mind the lack of company, and, in fact, prefers it. He collects and hoards batteries, goes fishing in the lake, maintains the library, and methodically goes through the houses street by street, cleaning, disinfecting, hauling away the bodies and burying them. He catalogues photographs. He keeps things neat. It turns out he's not alone, however, and a lot of the film involves Del adjusting to the presence of a second survivor, a young woman named Grace, played by Elle Fanning, and Grace adjusting to him. The movie doesn't try to explain how the end of the world happened. The two characters puzzle over it briefly, but not for very long. It's more like, here's the situation these people are in, so now what? It's a good question, and the movie, in its dark, quiet way, keeps you wanting to find out. 

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

JOJO RABBIT  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Taika Waititi
    Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, 
    Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi,
    Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Archie Yates
This is a movie I almost didn't see, because I didn't see how anybody could possibly pull it off: a coming-of-age fantasy/war movie/Holocaust drama in which Adolf Hitler provides comic relief. It's set in Germany late in the war, and the protagonist is a ten-year-old boy named Johann (or Jojo), whose career in the Hitler Youth comes to a quick end when he refuses to kill a rabbit and then almost blows himself up with a hand grenade. His mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a Jewish girl behind an upstairs wall in their house, his best friend Yorki (another ten-year-old) ends up in the army, and Jojo, with help from his imaginary pal Adolf, tries to remain loyal and steadfast as it becomes increasingly clear that the war is going to be lost. Another complication: He's falling in love with the Jewish girl. It starts out as a slapstick black comedy, but there's a lot more going on than laughs at the expense of the Führer. At a time when right-wing nationalist movements are slithering out of the muck everywhere, it's not a bad thing to be reminded, even in the context of a dystopian fairy tale, what can happen when the fascists take control. And with Hitler himself representing the dark side, it's no accident that the girl in the attic, played by Thomasin McKenzie, bears a passing resemblance to Anne Frank.

S*P*Y*S (1974)

S*P*Y*S  (1974)  ¢ ¢
    D: Irvin Kershner 
    Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Zouzou, Joss Ackland,
    Vladek Sheybal, Nigel Hawthorne, Jacques Marin
Gould and Sutherland play bumbling spies in a frantic but feeble espionage comedy. This was promoted as a throwback (or followup) to "M*A*S*H", complete with asterisks between the capital letters in the title. That might've made marketing sense, but when it comes to making a movie, asterisks aren't enough. The final shot, made in fading light on the last day of filming, has the boys improvising a little song-and-dance routine as they head on down the road. It's nice to see them having such a good time, but by then you kind of wonder if they're not just making their escape, as happy as you are that the movie's finally over.

Double Lover (2017)

DOUBLE LOVER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Francois Ozon, 
    Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier, Jacqueline Bisset
A creepy psychological thriller about a woman who gets involved with her psychiatrist, and then with the psychiatrist's twin brother. The second brother's a shrink, too, and one of these guys, at least, could use a refresher course in professional ethics and lessons learned from the #MeToo movement. It's plenty disturbing, though, with references to Hitchcock, De Palma and Cronenberg, and at least a touch of "Fifty Shades of Grey". Multiple images abound in this. That's kind of the point.

Comanche Station (1960)

COMANCHE STATION  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Budd Boetticher
    Randolph Scott, Nancy Gates, Claude Akins,
    Skip Homeier, Richard Rust, Dyke Johnson
Randolph Scott plays a retired cavalry officer who rescues a white woman from a band of renegade Comanches and then has to deal with three outlaws who decide to tag along on the long ride back into town. A good, spare western, the last collaboration between Boetticher and Scott, and Scott's next-to-last movie. Claude Akins plays the outlaw leader, a role Lee Marvin or Richard Boone might've played in previous Scott/Boetticher films.

Screen Test / Take 12

Name the movies in which the following things take place:

 1. Hal Holbrook tells Robert Redford to follow the money.
 2. Jean Seberg hawks the New York Herald Tribune.
 3. Uma Thurman and John Travolta do the twist. 
 4. Sterling Hayden starts World War III.
 5. Clint Eastwood throws his badge into San Francisco Bay. 
 6. Paul Newman and Katharine Ross go for a bicycle ride. 
 7. Charlie Chaplin eats a boot.
 8. Jimmy Cagney shoves a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face. 
 9. Steve Buscemi buries the money in the snow.
10. The Marx Brothers go to war.

                  Answers:
                  a. "The Public Enemy"   

                  b. "The Gold Rush"  

                  c. "Dr. Strangelove"   

                  d. "Pulp Fiction"   

                  e. "Duck Soup"   

                  f. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"  

                  g. "Fargo"   

                  h. "Breathless"  

                   i. "Dirty Harry"   

                   j. "All the President's Me"

       Answers:

       1-j / 2-h / 3-d / 4-c / 5-i / 6-f / 7-b / 8-a / 9-g / 10-e

Leave No Trace (2018)

LEAVE NO TRACE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Debra Granik
    Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie, Dana Millican,
    Jeffery Rifflard, Jeff Kober, Michael Prosser
Somewhere outside Portland, Oregon, two people, a traumatized Army vet and his teenaged daughter, are living in a forest, off the grid. They drink rain water, forage for food, sleep in a tent and hoard their dwindling supply of propane. Their life is far from idyllic, but it works for them. Eventually they're busted and come under the protection of social services, and that's when things start to change. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie play the two people, and one of the more striking features of Debra Granik's script is how little they say to each other. It's almost as if they can read each other's thoughts. Granik, who made "Winter's Bone", has an obvious affinity for resilient young women in hardscrabble environments, and McKenzie is every bit as compelling as Jennifer Lawrence was in the previous film. Foster has never been better, playing a decent guy who's damaged in a way he knows he can never fix or escape. His love for his daughter is transparent, unequivocal and agonizing. You feel for these people. You want them to be together and safe. At the same time, you  can sense, as they do, that their situation can't last. "I don't have the same problem you have," she says at the end, and they both know it's true. In an imperfect world, you do the best you can. You pick each other up. You help each other out. But everybody, sooner or later, has to let go.