Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019)

WHERE'S MY ROY COHN?  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Matt Tyrnauer
A documentary on Roy Cohn, the brilliant, ambitious, cutthroat lawyer whose scorched-earth tactics as a legal and political hatchet man left a slime trail from Joe McCarthy all the way to Donald Trump. If Cohn didn't write the demagogue's handbook, he at least codified it, and he comes across as a truly malignant human being, a compulsively vicious bully, a thug. He knew how to game the system, though, and a combative nature, combined with a transparent willingness to ruin anybody who stood in his way, allowed him to get away with it for years. A few too many scams and a tendency to rip off his own clients got him disbarred eventually, and he died of AIDS in 1986, denying to the end that he had AIDS.

Movie Star Moment: Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton as The Groom
in "One Week" (1920)

   "One Week" is the two-reel comedy in which Buster Keaton and his new bride build a house out of a kit. The fact that all the pieces in the kit are misnumbered doesn't stop Buster from building the house. It just results in an unusual house. 
    There's a part of the movie, somewhere in the middle, where shots of Buster working up on the roof are intercut with shots of his wife (Sybil Seely) inside the house taking a bath. You're looking at the girl in the tub when a bar of soap slips out of her hand and lands a few feet away on the floor. The girl could get out of the tub and get it, but then she realizes that the camera's there, and if she gets up, the audience will see her naked. It's one of those physical dilemmas that occur constantly in Keaton's movies, and he solves it in the most practical way possible. A hand (presumably Buster's) appears out of nowhere and covers the lens for a couple of seconds, which is just long enough. When the hand moves away again, the girl's back in the tub with the soap in her hand, her modesty mostly intact. 
    Problem solved. Fourth wall demolished. A gag that still gets a laugh after 100 years. Pure Buster Keaton.

The Railrodder (1965)

THE RAILRODDER  (1965)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Gerald Potterton
    Buster Keaton 
Buster Keaton rides a small but well-equipped railcar from coast to coast in a short comic travelogue produced by Canada's National Film Board. It's one of the last things Keaton did, and appropriately, it's done entirely without dialogue. 

Sidewalks of New York (1931)

SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK  (1931)  ¢ ¢
    D: Zion Myers, Jules White
    Buster Keaton, Anita Page, Cliff Edwards,
    Frank Rowan, Clark Marshall, Norman Phillips Jr.
Buster Keaton plays a landlord who takes on a gang of street kids in what turned out to be his most profitable movie at MGM. There are flashes of the old Buster in some of the physical gags - nobody could do a fall like Keaton - but there's not much going on otherwise, which makes the picture's commercial success ironic. Keaton was miserable working on it and thought the movie was terrible, and some critics agree. The directors, Zion Myers and Jules White, were the auteurs behind the "Dogville" movies, a series of short comedies in which all the parts were played by talking dogs. For them, a film like this was a step up. No wonder Buster hated working at MGM.

The Goat (1921)

THE GOAT  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Buster Keaton, Mal St. clair
    Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Virginia Fox, Mal St. Clair
A gag-filled, two-reel comedy that starts with Buster Keaton trying to hold on to his place in a bread line and ends with him wanted for murder and chased by the cops. It's Buster on the run, which was about all Keaton needed to make a movie. 

The Mark (1961)

THE MARK  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Guy Green
    Stuart Whitman, Maria Schell, Rod Steiger,
    Brenda de Banzie, Maurice Denham, Donald Houston
A controversial movie at the time (and maybe even now), about a child molester trying to go straight after three years in prison, and facing down a past that keeps crowding in on him. The group therapy sessions are disturbing and might not meet recognized professional guidelines, but that's something I don't know much about. Whitman, who got an Oscar nomination for this, gives the performance of his career. 

Stuart Whitman

(1928-2020)

Tel Aviv On Fire (2018)

TEL AVIV ON FIRE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sameh Zoabi 
    Kais Nashif, Lubna Azabal, Yaniv Biton,
    Maisa Abd Elhadi, Nadim Sawalha, Salim Dau,
    Amer Hlehel, Laetitia Eido, Yousef "Joe" Sweid 
A production assistant on a Palestinian soap opera starts contributing script ideas with the not-always-welcome help of an Israeli checkpoint officer. A comedy that doesn't try to shortchange the ongoing horror in Palestine, but uses its underlying absurdity as a backdrop for laughs. The Palestinians are good at this. They have to be. They have no choice. The word "explosive" gets a real workout here.

The Nun of Monza (1969)

THE NUN OF MONZA  (1969)  ¢ ¢
    D: Eriprando Visconti
    Anne Heywood, Hardy Krüger, Antonio Sabato,
    Anna Maria Allegiani Margarita Lozano, Laura Belli,
    Caterina Boratto, Renzo Giovampietro, Maria Michi
A handsome young rake takes sanctuary in a 17th-century convent, causing much disquiet among the nuns. Maybe the community's resident chaplain, Father Hardy Krüger, can help. Then again, maybe not. Imagine a world where a woman can be raped and then blamed for the assault, tortured by the Inquisition, and finally walled up in a prison cell to die for her sins. Those were the days.

A Night At the Garden (2017)

A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Marshall Curry
Archival footage of a Nazi Party rally attended by 20,000 people in New York City in 1939. Think it can't happen here? Think again. Scary and then some.

The Kremlin Letter (1970)

THE KREMLIN LETTER  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Huston
    Patrick O'Neal, Richard Boone, Bibi Andersson,
    Nigel Green, Barbara Parkins, Max von Sydow,
    George Sanders, Orson Welles, Dean Jagger,
    Lila Kedrova, Raf Vallone, John Huston
An important document has gone missing, and the Americans and the Russians both want it back. Orson Welles and Max von Sydow are on the Russian side, but they don't like each other very much. Playing for the Americans are a bunch of old-school agents, plus Barbara Parkins and Patrick O'Neal. An offbeat spy caper with a touch of perversion, a jaded sense of humor and some voiceover translation in the place of subtitles that's odd and doesn't quite work. It's not Graham Greene or John Le Carré, but with a cast like that, it's not hard to watch. If Richard Boone's not high up on your list of avuncular, cold-blooded bad guys, you probably haven't seen him in this.

Max von Sydow

(1929-2020)

Sodom and Gomorrah (1962)

SODOM AND GOMORRAH  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Aldrich
    Stewart Granger, Pier Angeli, Anouk Aimee,
    Stanley Baker, Rossana Podestà, Rik Battaglia
The Lord God Jehovah smites the Sodomites for being sinful, because if there's one thing the Big Guy hates, it's folks being sinful, and if there's one thing He loves, it's a good smiting. So what I want to know is, if Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt for looking back at the city, and if we're seeing what she's seeing when she does that, shouldn't we be getting salt-pillarized, too? It'd make sense, right? Just wonderin'.

Crazy Horse (2011)

CRAZY HORSE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Frederick Wiseman
The girls of the French nude dance club Crazy Horse, on and off the stage, in costume and in not much of anything at all. Sometimes it's good to have eyes. This is one of those times.

Halls of Montezuma (1951)

HALLS OF MONTEZUMA  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lewis Milestone
    Richard Widmark, Karl Malden, Richard Boone,
    Reginald Gardiner, Jack Palance, Jack Webb,
    Richard Hylton, Skip Homeier, Philip Ahn,
    Robert Wagner, Martin Milner, Neville Brand
Richard Widmark leads a Marine platoon in the assault on a Japanese-held island during World War Two. Old-fashioned heroics done real well, with an impressive ensemble of young actors who would turn up a lot more in movies and on TV. That includes Richard "Have Gun Will Travel" Boone, Jack "Dragnet" Webb, Robert "It Takes a Thief" Wagner, and Martin "Route 66" Milner, who recites the Lord's Prayer while "God Save the Queen" plays reverently in the background. Anybody who's watched Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" a time or two will recognize this as one of the would-be morale boosters announced over the camp PA.

The Captive (2000)

THE CAPTIVE  (2000)  ¢ ¢
    D: Chantal Akerman
    Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merher, Olivia Bonamy,
    Aurore Clément, Anna Mouglalis, Berenice Bejo
This film starts out with what looks like a home movie of some young women goofing around at the beach. The women are all beautiful in the way that French women in French movies generally are, and as the camera pans over their faces, one in particular stands out, not because she's cuter than the rest, but because there's something about her that's, somehow, striking. You want to see more of her, and the camera does, too. The woman is Sylvie Testud, and the character she's playing is called Ariane, and the next time you see Ariane, she's being followed around the city, sometimes in a car and sometimes on foot. She's being stalked. The stalker is an impeccably tailored and well-groomed young man, and what you learn soon enough is that he and the woman are in a relationship, and stalking is one of the ritual games they play. You start out wondering what's going on between them and how it all fits together. He's rich. She has a room in his apartment. He controls her, up to a point, but wants to own her completely. She does what she's told, up to a point, but with an air of bored indifference. He wants her soul. She won't give it up. It's driving him crazy. Who's the captive here? Which is interesting, up to a point, as long as they're not spending all their time brooding and analyzing and talking about it. The more they talk, the less you really care. They're beautiful people, though, that's for sure, and one of them's Sylvie Testud. You could do worse than spend a couple of hours watching her.