Rupture (2016)

 

RUPTURE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Steven Shainberg

    Noomi Rapace, Michael Chiklis, Kerry Bishé 

    Peter Stormare, Lesley Manville, Percy Hynes White

A dark, claustrophobic thriller starring Noomi Rapace as a woman who's abducted and whisked off to a grimy-looking facility where she's strapped to a gurney, locked in a room, shot full of drugs and psychologically tortured. Her captors seem especially interested in her skin. There are times when you realize that what you're watching doesn't make much sense, and then you realize that it's a nightmare and it doesn't have to. In the manner of a scary dream, it's effectively unsettling as long as it doesn't try too hard to explain itself. The opening scenes with the woman and her young son are nicely done, and the supporting cast is uniformly creepy.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

 

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack

    Joel McCrae, Fay Wray, Leslie Banks,

    Robert Armstrong, Noble Johnson

A big-game hunter washes up on a remote island after being shipwrecked and finds shelter in the castle of a Russian count. The count's a hunter, too, but what he hunts isn't wild animals, it's people. This clocks in at a brisk 63 minutes, and once the exposition's out of the way, it moves pretty fast. Filmed by the same people, on the same sets and with some of the same cast as "King Kong", which was in production at the same time this movie was. 

I Am Love (2009)

I AM LOVE  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Luca Guadagnino

    Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Flavio Parenti,

    Alba Rohrwacher, Pippo Delbono, Gabriele Ferzetti

The affairs of rich people, who aren't any more interesting than anybody else, they just suffer in more elegant surroundings. Guadagnino's the same guy who directed the "Suspiria" remake and "Call Me By Your Name". 

A Christmas Past (1925)

 

A CHRISTMAS PAST  (1925)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: D.W. Griffith, Edwin S. Porter, others

A compilation of short Christmas movies, most of them from the early silent era. The films are variable and some are quite primitive. (The earliest is from 1901.) Edison's condensed version  of "A Christmas Carol" (1910) goes by pretty quick, but an extended visit to Santa's North Pole headquarters in "Santa Claus" (1925) seems to drag on forever. The highlight is probably "A Winter Straw Ride", shot by Edwin S. Porter in 1906, in which a bunch of young people go for a sleigh ride and get pelted with snowballs. They keep falling out of the sleigh, and eventually just run off chasing each other on foot, and they're having so much falling-down fun, you can't help suspecting some festive seasonal beverage was involved. 

Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity (2015)

 

MARSHA HUNT'S SWEET ADVERSITY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Roger C. Memos

A documentary look at the long life and curtailed career of Marsha Hunt, told mostly in Hunt's own words. Hunt was still in her teens when she started in movies in 1935, and by the late 1940s, her skill and range had earned her a reputation as "Hollywood's youngest character actress." The blacklist threw a wrench into that phase of her life, but she embarked on another, as a social activist with a particular focus on poverty and hunger. She was never a communist, or even (she claims) very political, but she was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment, the planeload of industry figures who flew to Washington in 1947 to protest the HUAC hearings, and unlike some of the others, she wouldn't back down. It cost her professionally. Roles on the big screen all but dried up, and from 1952 on, she worked mostly on the stage, and sporadically on television. She's an articulate witness to an especially dark chapter in Hollywood history, and a voice worth paying attention to. And at 103, she's outlived practically everybody. History isn't just written by the winners. It's written by the survivors. 

Struggle For Life (2016)

STRUGGLE FOR LIFE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Antonin Peretjatko

    Vincent Macaigne, Vimala Pons, Pascal Légitimus

    Mathieu Amalric, Rodolphe Pauly, Fred Tousch

A French/Belgian comedy about a government intern who's dispatched to the Amazon to see that a proposed indoor ski resort meets all the official standards and guidelines. He's determined to do everything by the book, no matter what. What he doesn't count on is meeting a woman named Tarzan and the two of them getting lost in the jungle together. The humor leans toward slapstick - some of it's downright cartoonish - which is fine if that's what you feel like watching. It's a case of bureaucracy gone crazy in a place where rules don't apply, and a lot of it's absurdly funny. Plus, there's Vimala Pons, with her long legs, no-bullshit manner and endless supply of hand-rolled cigarettes. If you had to be stuck in the Amazon for a while, she's a girl you wouldn't mind being stuck with. The original title is "La Loi de la Jungle", or "The Law of the Jungle", which is a much better title and makes way more sense than "Struggle For Life". 

Movie Movie (1978)

 

MOVIE MOVIE  (1978)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stanley Donen

    George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Art Carney,

    Red Buttons, Eli Wallach, Barry Bostwick,

    Harry Hamlin, Ann Reinking, Jocelyn Brando,

    Michael Kidd, Dick Winslow, Charles Lane

A movie done in the style of a 1930s double feature, complete with coming attractions and a repertory cast playing parts in both stories. The first is "Dynamite Hands", a black-and-white boxing drama staring George C Scott as a veteran trainer and Harry Hamlin as a hot young kid (with dynamite hands), who only wants to stay in the ring long enough to pay for the surgery his sister needs to save her eyesight. The second is "Baxter's Beauties of 1933", a Busby Berkeley-style musical in color, starring Scott as a dying Broadway producer trying to mount a last big hit before his own final curtain. Larry Gelbart wrote the script, in which no cliché goes unused or unmangled. It's clever and fun up to a point, but it quickly starts to feel like a gimmick. Donen's affection for the movie conventions of the period is obvious, though, and if it's not like going back to the 1930s exactly, it's an entertaining crack at it. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez played with a similar setup in "Grindhouse", their valentine to drive-in movies, released in 2007.

Ann Reinking

(1949-2020)

Carry On Doctor (1967)

 

CARRY ON DOCTOR  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey,

    Frankie Howerd, Jim Dale, Hattie Jacques,

    Bernard Bresslaw, Barbara Windsor, Joan Sims,

    Peter Butterworth, Anita Harris, Peter Jones

The Carry On Gang takes over a hospital (one of their favorite locations), and much silliness ensues. It's one of the troupe's funniest movies, one where it seems they all got together and said, hey, look, we've got everybody in a hospital, let's see how many jokes we can get out of that. A lot, as it turns out, and the fact that you can see most of them coming from ten miles off actually helps. Like there's the bit where Jim Dale's slipping down off a steep roof, and Anita Harris offers to save  him by hanging onto the peak and stretching down so he can use her as a ladder and climb back up. So he does that, grabbing her feet, and then her legs, and then her skirt, which comes loose, and, well, guessing what happens next is not too difficult. That's "Carry On".

Barbara Windsor

(1937-2020)

The Hallelujah Trail (1965)

 

THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL  (1965)  ¢ ¢

    D: John Sturges

    Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Jim Hutton,

    Brian Keith, Pamela Tiffin, Donald Pleasence,

    Dub Taylor, Martin Landau, John Anderson

A broadly played western comedy in which a cavalry regiment, a gang of thirsty miners, a women's temperance group, a bunch of Irish teamsters and an army of Indians all converge on 40 wagons loaded with booze. A fine cast, a boisterous Elmer Bernstein score and plenty of comic potential, but a textbook example of Hollywood throwing money at everything except a decent script. Everybody tries hard, but it's just never funny enough to justify a running time of two hours and 45 minutes.

Pamela Tiffin

(1942-2020)

Weirdos (2016)

 

WEIRDOS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bruce McDonald

    Dylan Authors, Julia Sarah Stone, Molly Parker,

    Rhys Bevan-John, Allan Hawco, Gary Levert

A couple of teenagers pack their overnight bags, head out of town and hit the road hitchhiking. They're not leaving home exactly, though the boy thinks they might be. They're not really a couple, either, but they're working on that. The boy is gay but hasn't come out. The girl suspects it and wonders if that's why he keeps putting off having sex. They're smart but uncertain about how they're supposed to play the game, still trying to figure stuff out. Under the circumstances, it only makes sense that when a character appears out of the blue (or out of somewhere) to offer spectral advice, it'd be the prince of ambivalence himself, Andy Warhol. The movie's in black and white. It's well-acted, with an especially sharp performance by Julia Sarah Stone as the girl. Molly Parker appears in the middle of it as the boy's mother, who goes from eccentric to batshit crazy in a matter of minutes. That episode's intense, and feels like it belongs in another film. It was all shot in the small towns and back roads of Nova Scotia, which is light-years away from Hollywood. Sometimes that's not a bad thing.

Hollywood On Trial (1976)

HOLLYWOOD ON TRIAL  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David Helpern Jr.

An Oscar-nominated documentary ab0ut the McCarthy-era blacklist, with the focus on the Hollywood Ten, the filmmakers - mostly screenwriters - who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and paid a steep price for their courage. John Huston delivers the straightforward narration, but mostly what you get here is filmed testimony from the HUAC hearings and interview footage shot years later with most of the key witnesses. Whatever side you came down on back then, the Red Scare and the industry's response to it were chilling. Some people went to jail. Others named names. Some lost their homes and their jobs. Some went to Europe and some never worked in Hollywood again. Everybody was scared, except maybe Ronald Reagan, who blithely dismisses the whole thing with the same relaxed cunning that would get him elected president someday. Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr. and Edward Dmytryk are among the other  witnesses. 

Baby Driver (2017)

 

BABY DRIVER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Edgar Wright

    Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm,

    Jon Bernthal, Eiza Gonzalez, Lily James,

    Flea, Jamie Foxx, Hal Whiteside, Walter Hill

A getaway driver with chronic tinnitus does one last job to pay off an old debt, but finds that walking away from the game is not so easy. This is Edgar Wright's chance to do a little riff on the kinds of wise-guy crime pieces Scorsese and Tarantino and Guy Ritchie specialize in. (There's a point-blank reference to "GoodFellas" that couldn't be more obvious.) What's missing is the fanboy wit that makes Wright's best movies such a kick. Ansel Elgort, who plays the lead, has a real gift for movement - an exceptionally long take in which he dances through the streets of the city could stand as a film on its own - but beyond that, he hasn't got much in the way of charisma. There might be a point to that, but it's in contrast to Jon Hamm, who plays one of the bank robbers and has lots of charisma. He's the one you'd like to be seeing more of. Kevin Spacey, whose fall from grace was just around the corner, plays the ruthless gangster boss, a role he could probably knock off in his sleep. There's an abrupt shift in his character's behavior in the last reel that helps wrap up the story but doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The car chases, the real reason for a  movie like this to exist, are all quick cuts and chaos. Good luck trying to figure out what's going on in them. Maybe there should be a rule in Hollywood that anybody making a foot-to-the-floor car-chase movie has to watch "Bullitt" and "Ronin" a few times first, and prove that they've learned something in the process.

The Drowning Pool (1975)

 

THE DROWNING POOL  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Stuart Rosenberg

    Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa,

    Murray Hamilton, Melanie Griffith, Gail Strickland

    Richard Jaeckel, Linda Haynes, Coral Browne,

    Andy Robinson, Helena Kallianotes, Leigh French

Los Angeles private eye Lew Harper (Paul Newman) drops down in New Orleans, where he's soon up to his neck in greed, deceit, corruption and murder. This was Newman's second outing as Harper, the detective created (as Lew Archer) by mystery novelist Ross Macdonald. The story's a little complicated. Mrs. Newman plays Harper's client, the unhappy wife of a millionaire. Murray Hamilton plays a flamboyant oilman. Richard Jaeckel's a corrupt cop. Melanie Griffith plays a nymphet who could give Lolita a run for her money. Andy Robinson plays (what else?) a psycho. Somebody's guilty of homicide, but who? It all gets kind of crazy toward the end, but these folks are kind of crazy, anyway. The cinematography's by Gordon Willis, who wasn't called the prince of darkness for nothing. Take a look. 

Legion of Decency Pledge 1933

 

    "I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion. 

    I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting sex mania in our land . . .

    I make this protest in a spirit of self-respect, and with the conviction that the American public does not demand filthy pictures, but clean entertainment and educational features."

Marshall (2017)

 

MARSHALL  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Reginald Hudlin

    Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson,

    James Cromwell, Sterling K. Brown, Dan Stevens

A good-looking biopic that covers what would probably be just a page or two in the long, eventful life of Thurgood Marshall. The year is 1941, and Marshall, as the NAACP's only lawyer, is traveling the country nonstop, specifically to defend African Americans who are wrongly accused and couldn't get a fair trial otherwise. That brings him to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a black chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) stands accused of raping a white woman (Kate Hudson), a crime he's confessed to but claims he didn't commit. The case is more complicated than that, and Marshall's mission is made even tougher because he lacks a license to practice in the state and the crusty, no-nonsense judge (James Cromwell) won't let him speak in court. To help out, Marshall recruits a reluctant local attorney (Josh Gad) with zero experience in criminal law. It's one of those period pieces where all the cars are new and shiny, all the suits are impeccably tailored, and all the city streets are clean. In other words, it risks looking a little too good. But it tells a compelling story, and the late Chadwick Boseman effectively captures the jokey persuasiveness and uncompromising sense of justice that would eventually carry Marshall to a seat on the Supreme Court. As for the other 498 pages of Marshall's life, it'd take a Ken Burns miniseries to accommodate that. 

Sing and Like It (1934)

 

SING AND LIKE IT  (1934)  ¢ ¢

    D: William A. Seiter

    Zasu Pitts, Edward Everett Horton, Nat Pendleton,

    Pert Kelton, John Qualen, Ned Sparks

When a gangster overhears Zasu Pitts sing a heartfelt but tone-deaf rendition of the sentimental tune "Your Mother", he's overcome with emotion and decides to make her a star on Broadway. Acting and dialogue as stilted and stiff as this can't be an accident, especially in a comedy, which makes you wonder: Is this a bad movie, or a spoof of a bad movie, or just a bad spoof? It's kind of hard to say, but Pitts and Horton are good in it, and it's got a few laughs. 

Thelma (2017)

 

THELMA  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joachim Trier

    Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen,

    Ellen Dorrit Peterson, Marie Magnusdotter Solem

"Thelma" is where "Carrie" meets "Let the Right One In", a Norwegian thriller about a girl who goes off to college, where she starts having seizures that appear to trigger supernatural events. Is the cause her strict Christian upbringing? Her controlling, manipulative parents? Stress from school? Or the anxiety that goes with falling in love? And what's the connection with her infant kid brother, who died under mysterious circumstances when the girl was six? It's all very quiet and creepy, with a restrained, sympathetic performance by Eili Harboe, who has the self-contained stillness of a young Isabelle Huppert. There's a much happier ending for Thelma here than there was for Carrie. At least there seems to be. It depends on how much is real and how much is playing out in Thelma's head. But if she isn't dead or dreaming that idyllic final encounter, good for her. 

Black Magic (1949)

 

BLACK MAGIC  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gregory Ratoff

    Orson Welles, Nancy Guild, Akim Tamiroff,

    Frank Latimore, Valentina Cortese, Raymond Burr

Orson Welles hams it up as a gypsy magician who cons his way to the court of the French king by hypnotizing a young woman who's a dead ringer for Marie Antoinette. He's too ambitious, though, and that's his undoing. Read this as a metaphor for Welles' own career and it becomes kind of interesting. Apparently Orson co-directed it (without getting a screen credit), and it's not hard to see why he'd be attracted to the role and the material.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

 

PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Angela Robinson

    Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote,

    Connie Britton, Monica Giordano, Oliver Platt

In some dramatic ways, the real story of the origin of Wonder Woman could rival anything in a comic book. The center of it all was a Harvard psychologist and shameless self-promoter named William Moulton Marston, who in addition to creating the world's most widely recognized female superhero, developed an early prototype of the lie detector. Every bit as crucial were the two women in Marston's life: his wife Elizabeth and their live-in friend and mutual love interest, Olive Byrne. This movie follows their unconventional three-way relationship from the late 1920s to Marston's death in 1947, which means that Wonder Woman herself appears relatively late in the story. (She didn't make her first comic-book appearance till 1941.) You can see Wonder Woman's silver bracelets (Olive wore them), the preoccupation with bondage (Marston had an interest in that), and Wonder Woman's "Lasso of Truth" (a de facto lie detector) long before they became fixtures in ink on paper. You don't learn much about who drew the comic - Marston was the writer, not the illustrator - and while acknowledging that Byrne was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the film mostly sidesteps the influence of early feminism on some pf the imagery. It's probably not a movie for fans who just want to watch Gal Gadot soar through the air and slash away at the bad guys. It's more like a movie for grownups who aren't put off by a little discreetly staged kinky sex. Finally, there's Rebecca Hall as Elizabeth, smart, strong and lethally cynical, at war with how much she's willing to risk (a lot) and when to back off and play it safe. The real Elizabeth Marston lived to be 100, and watching Hall's performance, you can see why. Any time she's on screen, you'd better be paying attention. 

For a more comprehensive look at this subject, the Movie Buzzard recommends "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

 

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Rex Ingram

    Rudolph Valentino, Josef Swickard, Alice Terry,

    Alan Hale, Bridgetta Clark, Virginia Warwick

A silent anti-war epic and the movie that made Valentino a star, about a family from Argentina who relocate to France where they're eventually caught up in the war to end all wars. Rudy dances the tango. Several million women take notice. 

Sausage Party (2016)

 

SAUSAGE PARTY  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon

This is the kind of animated movie a bunch of drunk, stoned, brain-damaged frat boys might've dreamed up between tequila shots and bong hits. It's about what happens when the products in a supermarket - hot dogs, buns, jars of mustard, potatoes, bagels and everything else - learn that the giant creatures taking them out of the store aren't gods, and their destination is not the promised land but the food equivalent of hell. It's as funny as it is gross, and it's plenty gross: political and cultural incorrectness trashing its way to a satirical point. So the potatoes are Irish (naturally), and Salma Hayek does the voice of a lesbian taco, and a Jewish bagel and some Arab flatbread feud over shelf space, and a bun and a hot dog trade sexually unambiguous notions about what they'd like to do when they finally get together, and it ends with a food orgy that rivals anything on "South Park". I had no interest in watching this till a friend recommended it, and darned if I didn't find myself laughing. Out loud. A lot. An unexpected guilty pleasure. 

The Fatal Hour (1940)

 

THE FATAL HOUR  (1940)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Nigh

    Boris Karloff, Marjorie Reynolds, Grant Withers,

    Frank Puglia, Charles Trowbridge, Jason Robards 

Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff) takes on the case of a murdered police detective and a smuggling ring. An undistinguished Monogram whodunit, notable mostly for Karloff's understated presence and the supporting work of Frank Puglia as a gangster with a string of convenient alibis and Marjorie Reynolds as a feisty newspaper reporter. Karloff's in the background much of the time, which almost makes Mr. Wong a secondary character in his own movie. The Jason Robards listed in the credits is not the actor who played Ben Bradlee in "All the President's Men", but his father. 

Hidden Figures (2016)

 

HIDDEN FIGURES  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Theodore Melfi

    Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae,

    Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons

Most of us probably don't think much about the civil-rights movement and the space race being integral to each other, but they did share a timeline through the '50s and '60s, a period when, as the saying goes, shit happened. This movie tells the story of three black women, mathematicians working for NASA around the time of the first manned space flights. It's a movie that gets the period right, from the NASA techs in their uniform white shirts and narrow ties to the rabbit ears on the television sets to Kevin Costner's government-issue eyeglasses. More significant is the way it captures the inherent racism of the time, when overt segregation was still pervasive (though not necessarily legal) and even NASA had separate restroom facilities for its colored workers. All three women run into that wall. For Dorothy (Octavia Spencer), it's being passed over for a job she's already doing. For Mary (Janelle Monae), it's a night class she needs to take at a high school that still bars blacks. For Katherine (Taraji P.Henson), it's not being able to put her own name on the papers she's initiating, researching and writing. It helps that they're all brilliant, but if they weren't also to varying degrees persistent and assertive, they'd never get anywhere in a system designed to limit and contain them. That they were successful is a tribute to their heroism and tenacity in the face of prohibitive odds. A mind, to recycle another old saying, is a terrible thing to waste. 

The Boy Friend (1971)

 

THE BOY FRIEND  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ken Russell

    Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Moyra Fraser, 

    Max Adrian, Vladek Sheybal, Georgina Hale, 

    Murray Melvin, Glenda Jackson, Tommy Tune

Ken Russell's razzle-dazzle tribute to the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, a giddy, backstage/onstage artifice starring Twiggy as the understudy who goes on when the star actress (Glenda Jackson) breaks a leg. It's gaudy, superficial and transparently theatrical, way too much of everything, really, but it wouldn't be a Ken Russell movie otherwise. The Busby Berkeley-style production numbers are the highlight. When you're knocking off a Busby Berkeley routine, too much is barely enough. 

Score: A Film Music Documentary (2016)

 

SCORE: A FILM MUSIC DOCUMENTARY 

    D: Matt Schrader                     (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

A documentary in which some of the world's most accomplished composers of movie music talk about their work, while film clips illuminate what they're talking about. Hans Zimmer, Marco Beltrami, Danny Elfman, Alexandre Desplat and Mark Mothersbaugh are among those checking in, and respects are paid to the old masters: Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and John Barry. A couple of things you take away from this: The best movie music is great music, and the people who create it are passionate about what they do. If you're up for a double feature, see if you can find "Visions of Light", a 1993 documentary that took a similar approach to the art of cinematography. 

Blithe Spirit (1945)

BLITHE SPIRIT  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David Lean

    Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond,

    Margaret Rutherford, Hugh Wakefield, Joyce Carey

A crackpot medium conjures up the spirit of a man's dead wife, much to the displeasure of his current (still living) one. Noel Coward's spectral comedy has a bitchy edge, but the dialogue really flies by, and it could take American ears a while to catch up. Rutherford's a hoot as the medium.

Among Wolves (2016)

 

AMONG WOLVES  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Shawn Convey

A leisurely, low-key documentary about a Bosnian motorcycle gang called the Wolves, whose members have taken on the care of a herd of wild horses. They also give blood and help out at schools and hospitals. The club's older members are veterans of the Balkan War, and the town they live in is dying. There are no jobs there, and really no future. The men and the horses are effectively metaphors for each other. The pace is slow, the shots are drawn out, the film almost meditative, with a dreamlike musical score. Unusual for a movie about a motorcycle gang. 

Quote File / Take 18

 

Some lines from the movies of Sean Connery:

"My name is Bond, James Bond. May I offer you a 

  drink?"

  Connery in "Never Say Never Again"

"I've got lunatics laughing at me from the woods."

  Connery in "A Bridge Too Far"

"Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a 

  whorehouse at low tide."

  Connery in "The Untouchables"

"I've never kissed a member of the clergy before. 

  Would it be a sin?"

  Connery to Audrey Hepburn in "Robin and Marian"

"It's been a bad year. Next one will probably be 

  worse."

  Connery in "The Wind and the Lion"

"But what is so alarming about laughter?"

  Connery in "The Name of the Rose"

(1930-2020)

The Mummy (1999)

 

THE MUMMY  (1999)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Stephen Sommers

    Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, 

    Arnold Vosloo, Kevin J. O'Connor, Jonathan Hyde

A pointless remake of the 1932 horror classic about an ancient Egyptian high priest who comes back to life after 3,000 years as a corpse and unlocks an ancient curse, hoping to resurrect his long-dead mate. The trailer for this looked promising, but the movie's a flop, an obvious Indiana Jones rip-off in which Brendan Fraser proves he's not Harrison Ford, Arnold Vosloo proves he's not Boris Karloff, and Stephen Sommers proves that Steven Spielberg has nothing to worry about. The script's anachronistic, the one-liners are terrible, the continuity defies logic, and the computer-generated monsters don't look any more convincing than their analog counterparts did decades before. Jerry Goldsmith's music is good, but even that's derived from other Goldsmith scores. If you're looking for a little mummified Halloween horror, skip this and watch the Karloff version instead.

Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971)

 

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB  (1971)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Seth Holt

    Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon, James Villiers,

    George Coulouris, Hugh Burden, Mark Edwards,

    Rosalie Crutchley, Aubrey Morris, David Markham

You wouldn't think there'd be any blood left in the old sarcophagus after 5,000 years, but this is no ordinary mummy. It's an Egyptian queen who's made it into the 20th century miraculously preserved, except for her right hand, which was lopped off long ago and literally thrown to the dogs. Now her spirit has started to slip into the body of a woman who looks just like her, and the severed hand has escaped from its box (having survived the dogs, I guess), and is crawling around on its own. This was the Hammer Studio's last mummy movie, and it's okay, as mummy movies go. James Villiers acts like he's trying to channel Kenneth Williams from the "Carry On" films, and the ending's playfully twisted. It's based on a novel by Bram Stoker, and the character played by David Markham is called "Tod Browning". Coincidence? Probably not. 

The Mummy's Curse (1944)

 

THE MUMMY'S CURSE  (1944)  ¢ ¢

    D: Leslie Goodwins

    Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Virginia Christine,

    Dennis Moore, Holmes Herbert, William Farnum

At the end of the previous mummy movie ("The Mummy's Ghost", released the same year), the mummified, bandage-wrapped Kharis and the reconstituted Princess Ananka had sunk into a swamp somewhere in New England. At the start of this movie, they're emerging from a swamp in Louisiana, and the princess is being played by a different actress. On the other hand, the princess, whose hair had turned white in the earlier film, has become a brunette again, so I guess that's a plus. Mummy Movie Rule #7: Never trust anybody wearing a fez.

The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

 

THE MUMMY'S TOMB  (1942)  ¢ ¢

    D: Harold Young

    Lon Chaney Jr., Elyse Knox, Turhan Bey,

    Dick Foran, Wallace Ford, George Zucco

A routine entry in Universal's ongoing mummy franchise, starring Chaney as an ancient corpse with a bad arm and a bum leg. Even the monster looks tired in this one. 

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

 

THE MUMMY'S HAND  (1940)  ¢ ¢

    D: Christy Cabanne

    Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Wallace Ford,

    George Zucco, Tom Tyler, Siegfried Arno

Two impoverished archaeologists go out looking for the burial chamber of an Egyptian princess and uncover the tomb of a mummified priest, who turns out to be not quite dead. An uninspired followup to "The Mummy", released eight years after the Karloff original, with too much tiresome comic relief, and not enough of anything to keep your attention from wandering off. Tom Tyler, who spent most of his career in low-budget westerns, plays the moldering monster. 

The Mummy (1932)

THE MUMMY  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Karl Freund

    Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, 

    Edward Van Sloan, Bramwell Fletcher, Arthur Byron

An Egyptian mummy, the corpse of a priest cursed and sealed in a tomb 37 centuries ago, comes back to life, an occurrence that does not bode well for a woman who strongly resembles his ancient mate. One of the best Universal horror movies, released just a year after "Dracula" and "Frankenstein", distinguished by its ghostly atmosphere, inescapable eeriness, and Karloff's gaunt, sinister grace.

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court (1949)

 

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Tay Garnett

    Bing Crosby, Rhonda Fleming, Cedric Hardwicke,

    William Bendix, Murvyn Vye, Virginia Field,

    Joseph Vitale, Henry Wilcoxon, Alan Napier

In a Technicolor musical based on Mark Twain's novel, a blacksmith-turned-auto-mechanic in 1905 gets conked on the head and comes to in the court at Camelot, where he introduces the Dark Ages to matches, safety pins, magnets and firearms. He also teaches Rhonda Fleming how to wink. Fleming makes faces. Hardwicke wheezes and sneezes. Bendix plays the movie's equivalent of Sancho Panza. (There's even a Rocinante, a horse named "Tex".) Bendix, Hardwicke and Crosby cavort down the road in a musical number that looks like something out of "The Wizard of Oz". Bing is Bing, no matter what era he drops down in.

Rhonda Fleming

(1923-2020)

Hard Candy (2005)

 

HARD CANDY  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David Slade

    Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh, Odessa Rae

A 32-year-old photographer and a 14-year-old girl connect online, exchange flirtatious texts and meet up at a coffee shop. When she gets into his car and they drove off to his place, you're thinking, uh-oh, that was a big mistake, and it is, but not in the way you'd expect. An intense, two-person psychodrama, very well-acted by Wilson and Page, with moments - a lot of them - that could make you real uncomfortable. The Korean movie "Audition" is a variation on the same theme.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2 

    D: Eiichi Yamamoto

A Japanese animated film revolving around a woman's hellish sexual fantasies, or (more likely) the fantasies of the animators. It's set in 17th-century France and the story involves a beautiful young woman, an evil feudal lord and the Price of Darkness. If you're going to watch this movie, try to smoke some pot first. You'll find out why soon enough.

Hail Satan? (2019)

 

HAIL SATAN?  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Penny Lane

A documentary about the Satanic Temple, a congregation of free-wheeling, free-thinking Satanists, who always seem to incur the wrath of the self-righteous right by insisting that state and local governments actually enforce the First Amendment. If the movie's a little rough around the edges, so are its subjects, a disparate collection of rebels, outcasts, pranksters and provocateurs who view Satanism not as an evil, but as a vehicle to promote humanistic values and personal freedom. They're crusaders for the separation of church and state, religious diversity and tolerance, and they're pretty sure the Bill of Rights is on their side. Making matters worse, they've got a sense of humor. No wonder the far right hates them. 

Cat People (1942)

 

CAT PEOPLE  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jacques Tourneur

    Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway,

    Jane Randolph, Jack Holt, Alec Craig

A guy meets a woman and they hit it off and fall in love, but she has this thing about not wanting to be kissed, and spends a lot of time at the zoo, watching the big cats. Groundbreaking horror, famous for its shadowy atmosphere, and a classic argument for the notion that the less you can see, the more creeped out you will be. You know how sometimes you meet somebody who you're really attracted to, and something about them says, be careful, don't go there, this could be dangerous? That's Simone Simon in "Cat People".

Arctic (2018)

 

ARCTIC  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Joe Penna

    Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Thema Smáradottir

Somewhere in the Arctic, a small plane has gone down and its lone occupant has made a camp around the wreckage. He sleeps on a makeshift cot in the fuselage, catches fish through a hole in the ice, and spends hours each day cranking a portable radio, hoping to alert somebody, anybody, to his existence. In the unlikely event anybody else flies by that way, he's carved a giant SOS in the snow. His toes are showing signs of frostbite. He's trying to survive and figure out what to do next. His options are limited. Like the Robert Redford movie "All Is Lost", "Arctic" contains nothing resembling a subplot, though a second character does appear, a woman who survives when her helicopter crashes during a rescue attempt. So now there are two of them, but the woman's hurt and can't move or talk, and they're a long way from anywhere, and to top it off, there's a hungry polar bear prowling around the neighborhood. Mads Mikkelsen plays the protagonist, and he's one of those actors (like Redford) who can command the screen for prolonged periods alone. It's a bare-bones, man-against-the-elements adventure story, a textbook  example of just how well something like this can be done. If you watch it in a place that's below room temperature, wear a coat.

Great Guns (1941)

 

GREAT GUNS  (1941)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Montague Banks

    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Sheila Ryan,

    Dick Nelson, Edmund MacDonald, Mae Marsh

    Charles Trowbridge, Ludwig Stossel, Russell Hicks

Laurel and Hardy join the Army in the first movie they made after leaving Hal Roach. They look older than before - they were both about 50 - and with the move to 20th Century Fox, they'd lost some creative control. They do a few funny bits, but nothing that compares to their previous work. Silent star Mae Marsh has a small role, and if you look real close, you might spot Alan Ladd in an uncredited bit as one of the soldiers. 

Aniara (2018)

 

ANIARA  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Pella Kågerman, Hugo Lilja

    Emelie Jonsson, Bianca Cruziero, Arvin Kananian,

    Jennie Silfverhjelm, Dakota Trencher Williams

Swedish sci-fi about an expedition to Mars that's thrown off course when some space debris pierces the hull and the ship has to ditch its entire supply of fuel. There are hundreds of people on board, and the movie ends up being about what happens when an expected three-week voyage drags on for years. And years. And years. It's not necessarily a journey you'd want to be on yourself, but it's a head-tripping, challenging film, and Emelie Jonsson, who plays the protagonist - a sort of virtual-reality tour guide - could be Sweden's answer to Jessica Chastain.

Down To Their Last Yacht (1934)

 

DOWN TO THEIR LAST YACHT  (1934)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul Sloane

    Mary Boland, Polly Moran, Ned Sparks,

    Sidney Fox, Sidney Blacker, Sterling Holloway

A yacht the size of an ocean liner sets sail with a passenger list of nouveau riche and a crew of nouveau poor. It goes aground on a tropical island where the natives and shipmates trade roles and clothes. Escapist idiocy with a few disposable musical numbers. Ned Sparks as the ship's deadpan captain has all the good lines. The rest of the cast should've never come on board. 

Ronin (1998)

 

RONIN  (1998)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Frankenheimer

    Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård,

    Michael Lonsdale, Natascha McElhone, Sean Bean,

    Jonathan Pryce, Skipp Sudduth, Katarina Witt

This foot-to-the-floor action movie is essentially a series of high-speed car chases stuck to a story about a gang of free-lance mercenaries trying to track down a suitcase that has something in it that somebody wants very badly and will pay a lot of money to get. That you don't know what's in the suitcase is irrelevant, along with just about everything else except for fast cars that go lickety-split all over Paris and Nice. The script's tricky enough to get by, the cast knows just what to do with it, and Frankenheimer keeps things humming along, even when the actors (and their Formula One stunt drivers) step out from behind the wheel. For analog car-chase fans, this ranks right up there with "The French Connection" and "Bullitt". David Mamet co-wrote the screenplay under the pen name Richard Weisz.

Michael Lonsdale

(1931-2020)

Flashback: "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"

 

"Why do you persist in rescuing me, Mr. Bond?

  Diana Rigg as Tracy

"We'll head him off at the precipice."

  Telly Savalas as Blofeld

"This never happened to the other fellow."

  George Lazenby as James Bond

    I spent most of the spring and summer of 1974 working at the youth hostel in Grindelwald, Switzerland, up in the Alps. It was basically a janitor job that I lucked into while I was bumming around Europe hitchhiking and riding trains. I loved it. 

    There was a cinema in town, but I didn't go to many movies there. The movies only played at night, and the hostel closed up early and I had to be up early the next morning to sweep the patio and help serve breakfast. 

    One movie I did see in Grindelwald was "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". I had to. The movie was five years old by then, but it had been filmed in the area, some of it right there in town, and it played at the Kino at least every couple of months. When it came around, we went. 

    I watched it again a couple of weeks ago, a sort of memorial screening after Diana Rigg died. It's the only James Bond movie I actually own on DVD. It seemed like the least I could do. 

    I'm not sure I'd call "OHMSS" the best Bond movie - that might be one of the ones with Daniel Craig - but it's got some good things going for it. The location work, for one thing. The usual supervillain-with-a-plan-to-blackmail-the-world-or-destroy-it plot (and Telly Savalas as the villain). Exciting action sequences and lots of them (fistfights, gun battles, car wrecks, chases on skis and bobsleds, an aerial assault on the villain's headquarters and an avalanche). One of John Barry's best Bond scores (with a vocal assist from Louis Armstrong, apparently the last thing Armstrong ever recorded). Groan-worthy puns, one of them, at least, in horrible taste. And Diana Rigg, the classiest Bond Girl ever, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks that.

    It's based on what's arguably Ian Fleming's best novel, and famously, it's the only one in which Bond falls seriously in love and (gasp!) gets married. It's also the only Bond movie to star George Lazenby, filling in for Sean Connery, who would return to the role two years later in "Diamonds Are Forever". Lazenby doesn't have Connery's smugness, Roger Moore's smirk, Timothy Dalton's underlying psychosis, Pierce Brosnan's cuteness, or Craig's ice-cold eyes. He's like a guy trying to play Bond and doing a pretty good job of it, without quite convincing you that he's the real thing.       

    At the same time, there's a boyishness about him that works real well in this particular film, and it would be a mistake to underestimate Bond's appeal back then to teenaged boys. Like, there's a scene where Bond's in a lawyer's office, cracking a safe, and he comes across a copy of Playboy stashed in with some newspapers there. He leaves in the nick of time (of course), having lifted not just the documents he needs, but the magazine's centerfold, which he studies on his way to the elevator. What adolescent male wouldn't think of doing the same thing? As Miss Moneypenny would say, with a knowing sigh, "Oh, James."

    According to IMDb, Lazenby's the only actor to date to get a Golden Globe nomination for playing James Bond. That might say more about the Golden Globes than it does about the actors who have played Bond, but when Lazenby at the end has to show Bond's emotional vulnerability, he nails it. That's something none of the other movie Bonds have really been called on to do. 

    There are things in the film that don't work so well. Bond in a kilt and a ruffled shirt, for example. Maybe Connery could've pulled that off. I'm not sure. Maybe he would've looked just as silly. The back projection in the skiing scenes is pretty obvious (though some of the stunt work is impressive). And there's a cartoonishness about the whole enterprise that most of the Bond films are subject to. 

    But then there's Diana Rigg. And the snowblower. And those incredible mountains. And the Restaurant Oberland, where I used to drink beer on the terrace with the other ex-pats all those years ago. And the tree branch over the bobsled run. And Diana Rigg

    And Diana Rigg.

"James, where have you been?"

                        Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018)

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Pamela B. Green

Jodie Foster narrates a revealing documentary about a cinema pioneer, a woman whose work has influenced virtually every filmmaker since 1900, but whose name remains practically unknown. Alice Guy was a 22-year-old secretary working for the French camera manufacturer Gaumont in 1895, when the Lumière Brothers first demonstrated their Cinematographe machine. She was there at the demonstration. Talk about getting in on the ground floor. Within a year, she was making her own films and running Gaumont's movie production facility. Years before D.W. Griffith stepped behind a camera, Guy was shooting closeups, experimenting with sound and special effects, and telling stories with film. Moving to the U.S., she directed literally hundreds of pictures for her own company, but after it folded, she had trouble finding work. By the early 1920s, her career in film was over. She lived to be 94, long enough to be rediscovered, despite the systematic efforts of Gaumont's corporate historians to erase her name. This movie should introduce her to a few more students of film, and you can't help thinking there's another great movie waiting to be made, one that will maybe do for Alice Guy what Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" did for Georges Méliès.

Sam Whiskey (1969)

 

SAM WHISKEY  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Arnold Laven

    Burt Reynolds, Angie Dickinson, Ossie Davis,

    Clint Walker, William Schallert, Woodrow Palfrey

Angie hires Burt to retrieve a fortune in stolen gold from a sunken steamboat in a frontier comedy that's about as loose and laid back as Reynolds' screen personality. Davis and Walker provide good-natured support. 

The Last Movie Star (2017)

 

THE LAST MOVIE STAR  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Adam Rifkin

    Burt Reynolds, Ariel Winter, Clark Duke,

    Ellar Coltrane, Chevy Chase, Al Jaleel Knox

Burt Reynolds gives the performance of his life - literally - as Vic Edwards, an old Hollywood actor who flies off to Nashville to accept a career-achievement award at what turns out to be the world's least prestigious film festival. His driver and personal assistant while he's there is a punk teenager played by Ariel Winter, and in the couple of days they spend together, they clash and bicker and bond, and mostly predictable things happen. What's not predictable necessarily is how low-key and affecting Reynolds is, playing a barely fictionalized version of himself. In a couple of key moments, CGI allows old Burt to slip into scenes in "Deliverance" and "Smokey and the Bandit" and warn his younger self how he's going to fuck up. (Young Burt, who still has life by the tail, couldn't care less.) Rifkin wrote the movie specifically for Reynolds, to the point where it's impossible to imagine Vic Edwards being played by anybody else. It's a matter of luck and timing that they got to make the picture while Reynolds was still around to play in it. For all the throwaway work he did, the guy really could act. Watch "The Last Movie Star". You'll see. 

Nickelodeon (1976)

NICKELODEON  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Peter Bogdanovich 

    Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds, Tatum O'Neal,

    Brian Keith, Stella Stevens, Jon Ritter, 

    Jane Hitchcock, Brion James, James Best,

    M. Emmett Walsh, Harry Carey Jr., Don Calfa

A slapstick valentine to the early days of cinema, about an independent movie company struggling to turn out films against the wishes of a syndicate of major producers who don't welcome the competition. It's early in the 20th century and movies have barely been invented, so there aren't many rules about how to shoot pictures, or even who should do that. Which means that a lawyer with limited courtroom skills (Ryan O'Neal) can become a director, more or less by accident. An alligator wrestler from Florida (Burt Reynolds) can charm, lie and stumble his way to stardom. And a 12-year-old kid (Ryan's daughter Tatum) can leverage her ostrich farm and pet rattlesnake into a successful career as a screenwriter, cribbing her stories from Shakespeare. Bogdanovich plays it fast and loose, never letting a plot point interfere with a pratfall or a pie in the face. That it's a labor of love becomes evident in the last ten minutes, when the now-prosperous members of the movie company attend the premiere of  D.W. Griffith's "The Clansman", soon to be retitled "The Birth of a Nation". Tatum's the scene-stealer, with her studious demeanor and wire-framed specs, and her dad does a pretty good Harold Lloyd impression. 

Theater of Blood (1973)

 

THEATER OF BLOOD  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Douglas Hickox

    Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Robert Morley,

    Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, Michael Hordern,

    Jack Hawkins, Diana Dors, Milo O'Shea

Vincent Price plays a ham actor who survives a flamboyant suicide attempt and comes back to take revenge on his critics by killing them off in horrible Shakespearean ways. Price is so shamelessly over-the-top, you'd think he'd be the whole show, but Diana Rigg as his daughter and chief accomplice has a good time, too. Robert Morley's demise, based on "Titus Andronicus", is particularly nasty.

Diana Rigg

(1938-2020)

The Bookshop (2017)

 

THE BOOKSHOP  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Isabel Coixet

    Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson,

    Honor Kneafsey, James Lance, Frances Barber

In this screen adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, Emily Mortimer plays Florence Green, a widow who realizes a lifelong dream by opening a bookshop in a town on the coast of England. Bill Nighy plays a reclusive bibliophile who becomes her unlikely ally against the town's resident harpy and self-appointed arbiter of everything, played with imperious venom by Patricia Clarkson. Everything about this - the writing, the acting, the direction and the music - is pitched a couple beats over the top, and watching it is like reading one of those 19th-century novels where you know exactly who to sympathize with and who to hate. If the execution didn't balance out perfectly, it wouldn't work at all. Mortimer and Nighy are beautifully matched as two people whose passion for each other is obvious but are destined to not quite connect, while Clarkson is so cold and condescending, even her lipstick looks mean. Anybody who loves books, or movies about books, or movies based on books, would do well to stop by "The Bookshop". Chances are, you'll find a copy of "Lolita" there, too.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

 

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Mike Newell

    Lily James, Tom Courtenay, Michiel Huisman,

    Katherine Parkinson, Jessica Brown Findlay,

    Matthew Goode, Glen Powell, Nicolo Pasetti

Before I read the novel this movie's based on, I didn't even know that during the Second World War, the Germans had invaded the Channel Islands between Britain and France, causing some 70 thousand British citizens to spend the war under Nazi occupation. The story revolves around books and letters and tells how a handful of neighbors on one of those islands survived by banding together over Charles Lamb, a roast pig, bottles of homemade gin and potato peel pie. The novel's done entirely in letters, which would be hard to pull off on film, but the movie finds its own way to do the job, with the kind of acting and location work that make you wish you could go there and meet these people. It'd fit nicely on a double bill with "The Bookshop", the Emily Mortimer movie released the same year.

Day of the Warrior (1996)

 

DAY OF THE WARRIOR  (1996)  ¢

    D: Andy Sidaris

    Julie Strain, Shae Marks, Julie K. Smith,

    Tammy Parks, Kevin Light, Marcus Bagwell,

    Darren Wise, Gerald Okamura, Raye Hollit

The plot of this movie has something to do with a well-oiled, massively muscled brute called the Warrior, who's not only cornered the market in pornography, diamonds and stolen art, he's also cracked the computer system of the Legion to Ensure Total Harmony and Law (L.E.T.H.A.L.), whose epically built female agents are the only thing that can stop him. What it's really about is this: boobs. Big boobs. Enormous, gigantic, colossal boobs. Straight-to-video exploitation auteur Andy Sidaris is certainly not one to let such boobs go to waste, so every now and then in this inane enterprise, one of the top-heavy agents sheds what she's wearing to make out with some muscle-bound bodybuilder guy. That's not nearly as much fun as it should be, but if it sounds like something you'd like to spend 96 minutes of your life looking at, go for it. See which actress you think makes the biggest impression. 

Shine a Light (2008)

SHINE A LIGHT  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Martin Scorsese

Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie - and friends - captured in concert in 2006 by Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson. There are archive clips, too, and the friends include Buddy Guy, Christina Aguilera and Jack White. Whatever you think of the Rolling Stones, the band's a phenomenon for sheer longevity. And if there's anybody else out there Mick Jagger's age with the balls to even try to do what he's still doing, it ain't anybody I know. Considering what it costs to get into one of their shows these days, this movie's about as close to a Rolling Stones concert as most of us are ever going to get. 

Carry On Up the Khyber (1968)

CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER  (1968)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gerald Thomas
    Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey,
    Roy Castle, Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw,
    Peter Butterworth, Angela Douglas, Peter Gilmore
The Carry On Gang's dispatched to India to take up the defense of the empire in the name of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. This leads to the usual punning silliness, right up to the last 20 minutes, when the rebels attack the governor's palace and the Brits fall back on their stubborn refusal to abandon decorum, even in the face of imminent, violent death. That part is bloody brilliant. Sticklers for cultural correctness might cringe at the casting of Anglos in brownface as Indians, but in these movies, nothing is sacred and nobody's safe. The plot hinges on what, if anything, the troops in the Third Foot and Mouth Regiment might be wearing under their kilts. That's "Carry On". 

Draft Day (2014)

DRAFT DAY  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ivan Reitman
    Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary,
    Frank Langella, Chadwick Boseman, Ellen Burstyn,
    Sam Elliott, Tom Welling, Terry Crews
Another entry in the ever-expanding subgenre of Kevin Costner sports movies. This one's set in the massively popular, relentlessly marketed, rabidly overhyped world of professional football. Kevin's the beleaguered general manager of the Cleveland Browns, under pressure from everybody (and orders from his boss) to make "a big splash" on draft day. So he trades away the future for the #1 pick, and then starts to realize that the most coveted "sure thing" available, a hotshot quarterback from Wisconsin, might not be such a sure thing, after all. Reitman makes effective use of split screens and a ticking clock to crank up the tension, and Costner's edgy self-assurance compensates somewhat for a script that has more than its share of sports-movie clichés and a couple of needlessly melodramatic subplots. Sam Elliott plays the Wisconsin football coach in a scene that Badger fans will probably guess was not filmed anywhere in Madison. 

Chadwick Boseman

(1976-2020)

The Wanderers (1979)

THE WANDERERS  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Philip Kaufman
    Ken Wahl, John Friedrich, Karen Allen,
    Tony Kalem, Alan Rosenberg, Linda Manz
Philip Kaufman's evocative account of an Italian-American street gang fighting an ongoing turf war in the dark streets and broken-glass alleys of the Bronx. While the Wanderers scrap and battle to rule their rundown corner of the world, there's a strong underlying sense that they're trapped in it, as well. The year is 1963. The television sets in the window of the appliance store are tuned to the death of a president. The Marine recruiter down the street is signing up every potential fighting man he can get. In a smoke-filled coffee house, a kid calling himself Bob Dylan is trying out a few songs nobody's heard before. The Wanderers don't know it yet (or maybe they just can't admit it), but the days of ducktail haircuts and cigarettes stashed behind the ears are numbered. History is about to pass them by. It would be interesting to see a sequel to this, to find out what happened to these guys in the years ahead. But Kaufman wisely chooses to leave them there, still swaggering, still talking tough, the self-appointed kings of the block. Wanderers forever.

Linda Manz

(1961-2020)

Blackthorn (2011)

BLACKTHORN  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mateo Gil
    Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau,
    Stephen Rea, Pádraic Delaney, Dominique McElligott
Anybody who's seen "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" knows that the two outlaws died in a hail of gunfire at the hands of the Bolivian army back in the first decade of the 20th century. So, okay, what if it didn't happen that way? Like, suppose it's 20 years later and Butch is an old man raising horses on a ranch in Bolivia, and one day he gets word that Etta Place has died in San Francisco and decides it's finally time to go back home. The thing is, he's been away a long time, and getting back there, or even out of Bolivia, is not going to be easy. Sam Shepard plays Butch Cassidy in this, and it's not hard to imagine Paul Newman in the role - if Newman had still been around - late in his career. The movie's got a different vibe than the earlier film. It's more melancholy and less flippant. You can still see the wiseguy romantic in the old man, but the years have taken a toll. So it's a different kind of movie, but it's a good one, and it's one of those films you could watch just for the images director Gil and cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia put on the screen. The Bolivian landscapes are breathtaking. One quirk in the casting, though: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays young Butch in the flashback scenes, looks way more like Robert Redford than he does like Paul Newman.