First Man (2018)

FIRST MAN  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Damien Chazelle
    Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke,
    Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit,
    Ciarán Hinds, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas
Neil Armstrong's moonwalk on July 20, 1969, was one of those historic moments that anybody who was around back then can remember. This movie tells Armstrong's story, from his time as a test pilot flying X-15s to the voyage of Apollo 11. The space stuff is suspenseful, even if you know the history in advance, and Ryan Gosling is ideally cast as Armstrong, a technocrat whose calm, analytical approach to a tense, demanding job makes him the perfect candidate to lead a mission to the moon. It's not that he lacks emotions, it's that he doesn't show them very much, and that's become a strain on his relationship with his wife Janet, played by Claire Foy. Foy's very good, too, but her role gives her less to grab onto, and for all the screen time devoted to it, the melodrama surrounding the Armstrongs' marriage is essentially a subplot. Neil and Janet would eventually split up, and their silent encounter through a pane of glass at the end of the film contains a revealing visual clue that something between them doesn't quite connect. 

House of Wax (1953)

HOUSE OF WAX  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andre de Toth
    Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk,
    Carolyn Jones, Paul Picerni, Roy Roberts,
    Paul Cavanagh, Dabbs Greer, Charles Buchinsky
Vincent Price plays an artist who specializes in wax sculptures. When a fire destroys his entire collection of historical figures, Vincent's work takes a turn toward the macabre. This was one of the first features shot in 3-D, but even without the gimmick, it's a pretty good horror movie, the one that established Price as a specialist in the genre for the rest of his career. Granite-faced Charles Buchinsky (aka Charles Bronson) makes his presence known in an early role as Igor, Price's mute assistant. 

Don't Let Me Die On a Sunday (1998)

DON'T LET ME DIE ON A SUNDAY  (1998)  ¢ ¢
    D: Didier Le Pêcheur
    Elodie Bouchez, Jean-Marc Barr, Martin Petit-Guyot,
    Patrick Catalifo, Gérard Loussine, Patrick Magee
This movie opens with a young woman on a slab in the hospital morgue, the apparent victim of an ecstasy overdose. The morgue attendants (a fairly sick bunch) stash her away and go home, but one of them slips back in later on to perform a little sexual post-mortem on his own. And guess what? The woman comes to, aroused from a drug-induced coma. The rest of the movie has the woman and the guys from the morgue hanging out together, engaging in some discreetly shot kinky sex, and standing watch with a friend who's dying of AIDS. They talk a lot, too, but it's hard to care about anything they're saying, and the subtitles are hard to read, anyway. (I guess it helps to know French.) The girl who turns out not to be dead is played by Elodie Bouchez, who's never hard to watch, but if getting it on with a corpse is something you'd like to spend more time learning about, you'd be better off checking out Jorg Buttgereit's "Nekromantik", or the 1996 Molly Parker movie "Kissed".

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fredric Hobbs
    Christopher Brooks, Stuart Lancaster, Richard Marion,
    E. Kerrigan Prescott, Karen Ingenthron, Peggy Browne
Somewhere outside Reno, Nevada, some toxic gas from an abandoned mine contaminates a flock of sheep. One of the sheep gives birth to an embryo that grows into a giant sheep monster that lumbers around the countryside on its hind legs, frightening little children and bumping off the occasional gun-toting vigilante. It'd be easy to dismiss this as one of the worst movies ever made, but that would miss the point that it's also one of the most bizarre. The underlying themes are greed, racism and mob justice, and it ends in complete chaos, as avarice triumphs and society collapses and devours itself. So, yeah, it's a ridiculous, terrible movie, but it's also crazy in a way that's hard to ignore. The monster's the most sympathetic character in the film. Welcome to Indian Flats. 

Listomania / Take 10

Some American actors who have portrayed nationalities other than their own (or tried to):

John Wayne in "The Conqueror" (Mongol)
Burt Lancaster in "The Train" (French)
Jack Palance in "The Professionals" (Mexican)
Myrna Loy in "The Mask of Fu Manchu" (Chinese)
Henry Fonda in "War and Peace" (Russian)
Marlon Brando in "The Young Lions" (German)
Gregory Peck in "Behold a Pale Horse" (Spanish)
Spencer Tracy in "The Old Man and the Sea" (Cuban)
Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast At Tiffany's" (Japanese)
Gary Cooper in "The Adventures of Marco Polo" (Italian)

Between the Lines (1977)

BETWEEN THE LINES  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joan Micklin Silver
    John Heard, Gwen Welles, Jeff Goldblum,
    Lindsay Crouse, Jill Eikenberry, Bruno Kirby,
    Stephen Collins, Joe Morton, Michael J. Pollard
The prospective sale of a once-scrappy alternative newspaper to a profit-driven mainstream publisher causes the paper's staff to evaluate the costs of selling out and the risks of moving on. A smart, lively ensemble piece with a great young cast, and a pretty good time capsule for the counter-culture '70s. It'd fit nicely on a double bill with "Return of the Secaucus Seven".

Michael J. Pollard

(1939-2019)

Hudson Hawk (1991)

HUDSON HAWK  (1991)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Lehmann
    Bruce Willis, Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell,
    James Coburn, Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard
Bruce Willis co-wrote this alleged caper comedy about a cat burglar who gets out of prison and immediately goes back to work stealing priceless Da Vinci artifacts. You know how some movies get a lot of bad ink, and then you see them and they turn out to be better than you expected? That's  not the case with "Hudson Hawk". It's cartoonish, categorically stupid and mostly just flat-out dull. Grant and Bernhard go way over the top as the villains, and even they're not any fun. One thing you'll see in this movie and nowhere else: the pope adjusting his TV so he can watch "Mr. Ed".

Danny Aiello

(1933-2019)

On the Basis of Sex (2018)

ON THE BASIS OF SEX  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mimi Leder
    Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux,
    Sam Waterston, Kathy Bates, Wendy Crewson
A dramatized account of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's early days as a wife, mother, law student, university professor and finally plaintiff's attorney in her first big gender-equality case. Felicity Jones plays the brilliant, forceful, unstoppable RBG. Armie Hammer plays her husband Marty, who lends a hand with the cooking (at which Ruth does not excel), while she helps him through law school when a cancer diagnosis threatens to derail his career. Sam Waterston plays the starched-collar dean of Harvard Law, and in the context of recent events, his resemblance to Robert Mueller is hard to ignore. If Ginsburg wasn't a real-life folk hero already, the movie's final shot should just about seal the deal. 

Fedora (1978)

FEDORA  (1978)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Billy Wilder
    William Holden, Marthe Keller, Hildegarde Knef,
    José Ferrer, Frances Sternhagen, Henry Fonda,
    Stephen Collins, Michael York, Mario Adorf
An impoverished producer flies to Corfu on borrowed money to try to coax a Garboesque movie star into reading a script he's trying to sell. Then things start to get perverse. This is like a throwback to Wilder's "Sunset Blvd.", with an aging William Holden cast as the producer and an aging actress again at the center of a seriously twisted story. There's little of the dark, morbid wit that Wilder brought to the earlier film - it's plenty dark and morbid, but the wit has mostly gone missing - and while Marthe Keller (as the actress) and Hildegarde Knef (as the countess who houses and protects her) aren't bad, neither has the star power their roles demand. (Apparently, Wilder had hoped to cast Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich.) Henry Fonda plays himself as the president of the Motion Picture Academy, and Michael York plays himself as Michael York. 

Suspiria (2018)

SUSPIRIA  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Luca Guadagnino
    Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Grace Moretz,
    Sylvie Testud, Mia Goth, Angela Winkler, Alek Wek,
    Elena Fokina, Ingrid Caven, Fabrizia Sacchi
A horror art film starring Dakota Johnson as an Amish girl from Ohio who moves to Berlin in 1977 to join a modern dance company. Berlin looks drab and colorless, terrorism is all over the news, the dance studio is full of shadows, and there's something sinister about the women who run the place. What's going on here? Our Amish girl from Ohio is about to find out. This isn't a remake of Dario Argento's 1977 "Suspiria" as much as it is a reimagining. The story's told in six acts and an epilogue, and if the dots don't always seem to connect, it's good to remember that dreams don't always make perfect sense, either. Just keep an eye on what Guadignino puts on the screen, and especially keep an eye on Tilda Swinton - all three of her. She does something here that not many actors could pull off. If you know what that is in advance, you'll still be amazed at how well she does it. The movie itself is a trip to hell - at the end, literally. If the best horror movies are nightmares at 24 frames per second, this one achieves that, for sure.

The Lost Tribe (1949)

THE LOST TRIBE  (1949)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Berke
    Johnny Weissmuller, Myrna Dell, Elena Verdugo,
    Joseph Vitale, Ralph Dunn, Nelson Leigh 
Johnny Weissmuller fights a crocodile and kills a shark, and a lion fights a gorilla and then Johnny fights the lion and stabs it to death. Also, there's a lost city deep in the jungle and some thieves want to steal all the treasure there, but they'll have a tough time doing that as long as Johnny's around, at least that'd be my guess.

Hal (2018)

HAL  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Amy Scott
A documentary on Hal Ashby, the shaggy-bearded, pot-smoking filmmaker who turned out some of the most influential movies of the 1970s, battling the studios he worked for every step of the way. "Harold and Maude", "The Last Detail", "Coming Home", "Bound For Glory" and "Being There" are all Ashby films, all made within a period of about seven years when he was at his creative peak, and a time when a director with a reputation for reckless independence could still make films more or less on his own terms within the system. The era didn't last, and Ashby's work fell off in the decade that followed, but for a few years there, he was as good as anybody around, and his movies prove it. Ashby died at 59 in 1988.

The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Florey
    Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe,
    George E. Stone, John Tyrell, James Seay
Peter Lorre plays a Hungarian immigrant who has some terrible luck and ends up running a criminal gang. An efficiently paced thriller and a textbook example of a really good B movie. Lorre gives one of his best performances. 

West Side Stories (1972)

WEST SIDE STORIES  (1972)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tristram Powell
    Jonathan Miller, Patti Smith
A ground-level  portrait of New York City, with your tour guides, British theater director Jonathan Miller and punk poet Patti Smith. Miller, who's 12 years older than Smith, first came to New York with "Beyond the Fringe" in 1961. He comes back when his work requires it, but he's an outsider who still finds the city intimidating. It's definitely not his home. Smith turned up a few years later, a scrawny kid from South Jersey, and unlike Miller, moved in. She looks like a thrift-store rag doll, at home on the streets and alive to the city's rough energy. So you've got these two creative artists with two sets of eyes and two distinct appraisals of a place where they've both done time. It's not clear from this whether Smith and Miller ever met. They appear in alternating segments, but never together. It'd be fun to see them talking over coffee somewhere, comparing notes. Call it an opportunity missed. Produced for the BBC.

Jonathan Miller

(1934-2019)