The Lighthouse (2019)

THE LIGHTHOUSE  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Eggers

    Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman

There are parts of "The Lighthouse", especially at the beginning, when you'd almost think you were looking at a silent movie. The location is primitive. The photography is high-contrast black and white. The aspect ratio is nearly square. For the first reel or two, there's no dialogue at all. What's maybe most striking is how much Robert Pattinson, who plays one of the two characters in the piece, resembles the early silent star Robert Harron, while his counterpart, a craggy, bearded Willem Dafoe, could've stepped out of something by Victor Sjöstrom. The two men are lighthouse keepers - "lighties", they call themselves - serving a four-week stint as the sole inhabitants on a remote island off the Atlantic Coast. Both are compulsively anti-social - that's one of the reasons they've washed up on this desolate rock - and as the days grind on, their behavior becomes more erratic, more volatile and more dangerous. Eventually, they both go insane. It's a intense workout for the actors, punctuated by brief moments of comic relief, and the atmosphere's so starkly evoked, you can practically feel the cold spray of the sea cutting into your skin and smell the piss and sweat in the cramped sleeping quarters the two men share. Whether you'd want to watch something like this more than once is an open question, but watch it that once, and you might be glad you did.

The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES  (1966)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Gilling

    André Morell,  Diane Clare, Brook Williams,

    Jacqueline Pierce, John Carson, Michael Ripper

When people start to die mysteriously in a small Cornish village, a pair of doctors start digging up the bodies and uncover an epidemic of the undead. A horror thriller from Hammer that owes something to Bela Lugosi's "White Zombie", while anticipating George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". A little talky, but otherwise not bad.

Knives Out (2019)

KNIVES OUT  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Rian Johnson

    Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette,

    Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ana de Armas,

    Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer, Katherine Langford,

    Frank Oz, K Callan, Edi Patterson, M. Emmett Walsh

Daniel Craig plays Benoit Blanc, an extravagantly accented private eye hired anonymously by somebody to investigate the possible murder of a famous mystery novelist (Christopher Plummer), who turns up dead on his 85th birthday in a house overflowing with vicious relatives. Blanc's most reliable witness - his "Watson" - turns out to be the old man's nurse (Ana de Armas), who can't tell a lie without throwing up. The catch: She could also be the murderer. It's a devious good time, with a perfectly typecast cast going at it tooth and nail, and Craig drawling his lines and turning up clues like a corn-pone Columbo. M. Emmett Walsh, who's just a few years younger than Plummer, turns up for a couple of minutes and looks like he couldn't be having more fun. 

Millie (1931)

MILLIE  (1931)  ¢ ¢

    D: John Francis Dillon

    Helen Twelvetrees, John Halliday, Robert Ames,

    Lilyan Tashman, Frank McHugh, Joan Blondell

Pre-C0de melodrama starring Helen Twelvetrees as a divorced cigar-store clerk who decides she'll never marry again, despite an active interest in men - lots of men. Through the course of the movie, Twelvetrees covers the range from freewheeling to cynical to downright morose, and the transitions from one state to another can be kind of abrupt. 

Black White + Gray (2007)

BLACK WHITE + GRAY  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: James Crump

A revealing look at the life and work of Sam Wagstaff, the curator whose personal and professional relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, together with a passion for collecting all kinds of photographs, had a profound effect on the way people look at pictures. Along the way, the movie makes the case for curating as an art in itself: The way art is displayed and promoted has a lot to do with how it's perceived, and whether it's perceived at all. As hedonistic gay men who loved to provoke, Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe were made for each other, a connection that endured to the end of their lives, despite a 25-year age gap. Both men died of AIDS, Wagstaff at 65 in 1987, Mapplethorpe two years later at 42.

Innocent Bystanders (1972)

INNOCENT BYSTANDERS  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Peter Collinson

    Stanley Baker, Geraldine Chaplin, Donald Pleasence,

    Dana Andrews, Sue Lloyd, Derren Nesbitt

A transparent James Bond knockoff starring Stanley Baker as a veteran agent who takes on a final assignment to prove he still belongs in the game. Geraldine Chaplin plays an American woman he kidnaps along the way, an "innocent bystander" who may know more than she's letting on. This hasn't got the flippancy or the slick production values you associate with the Bond films, but there are car chases, fistfights and gunplay enough to keep things moving along, and Baker's resemblance to Sean Connery, under the circumstances, can't be accidental.

The Hit List: Audrey Hepburn

"I'm too thin. And my ears stick out and my teeth 

  are crooked and my neck's much too long."

  Audrey to Gary Cooper

  in "Love In the Afternoon"

    In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably start this off by admitting that Audrey Hepburn was my first movie crush. Together with Jean Seberg in "The Mouse That Roared", it was Hepburn in "Funny Face" who made me aware that certain women on the screen were interesting in a way my young adolescent self hadn't previously considered. There would be others, of course, quite a few, actually, but Audrey Hepburn was the first. 

    She was born in Belgium in 1929, and spent the war years in Nazi-occupied Holland. She trained as a dancer and played small parts in British films in the early 1950s, before scoring a hit as "Gigi" on Broadway and winning an Oscar as the runaway princess in "Roman Holiday" in 1953. In the age of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren, Hepburn was the skinny, flat-chested exception to the voluptuous rule, refined and unerringly elegant and frequently cast opposite much older men. 

    She made almost all of her movies in the 15 years between 1953 and 1967. The list includes these:

"Laughter In Paradise" (1951/Mario Zampi)

Hepburn at 21 made a brief early impression with a  walk-on role as a cigarette girl.

"Roman Holiday" (1953/William Wyler)

Audrey and Gregory Peck scoot around Rome in the movie that made her a star. 

"Sabrina" (1954/Billy Wilder)

Audrey's a chauffeur's daughter torn between a straight-arrow played by Humphrey Bogart and his wayward brother played by William Holden.

"Funny Face" (1957/Stanley Donen)

Fred Astaire and Audrey cut the rug.

"Love In the Afternoon" (1957/Billy Wilder)

Audrey falls for an aging rake played by Gary Cooper.

"The Nun's Story" (1959/Fred Zinnemann)

Hepburn plays a novice nun working as a medical missionary in Africa and struggling with her vow of obedience.

"Breakfast At Tiffany's" (1961/Blake Edwards)

The cat, the cigarette holder and the little black dress. Hepburn's most iconic role.

"Charade" (1963/Stanley Donen)

Audrey and Cary Grant in Paris, with music by Henry Mancini.

"My Fair Lady" (1964/George Cukor)

Wouldn't it be loverly?

"Robin and Marian" (1976/Richard Lester)

Audrey and Sean Connery play the lovers of Sherwood Forest in middle age.

"Always" (1989/Steven Spielberg)

Hepburn plays an angel in Spielberg's remake of "A Guy Named Joe". Her last appearance on film.

    From 1968 on, her film roles were infrequent, but by then her place in the culture as an icon of style and class was secure. In her later years, she spent more time working for UNICEF than she did in front of a movie camera, and her concern for the victims of famine was genuine. During the war and just after it, her family had come close to starvation. She died in 1993, and was awarded a posthumous Oscar that year for her humanitarian work.

                   "Everything about you is perfect."

                      Gary Cooper to Audrey

                      in "Love In the Afternoon"

Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019)

MARIANNE & LEONARD: WORDS OF LOVE 

    D: Nick Broomfield                                   (2019)  ¢ ¢

The relationship between songwriter Leonard Cohen and his muse and sometime lover Marianne Ihlen turns out to be not much of a thread to hang a feature-length documentary on, at least in the case of this one. It's a matter of too much irrelevant information and (for Cohen fans, anyway) not nearly enough music. She was a free spirit who fed and supported and inspired him for a few years on a Greek island back in the hippie-era '60s. He was an artist who liked to fuck around and hated to stay long anywhere. He wrote "So Long, Marianne" about her as they drifted apart, but they never lost touch completely, and in what's easily the film's most affecting moment,  a dying Marianne listens to somebody reading Leonard's final letter to her. He was dying himself by then, and three months after she passed away, he was gone, too.

Our Relations (1936)

OUR RELATIONS  (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Harry Lachman

    Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson,

    Daphne Pollard, Betty Healy, Alan Hale,

    Sidney Toler, Iris Anderson, Lona Andre

A comedy of mistaken identity starring Laurel and Hardy as brothers who cross paths with another pair of brothers, their long-lost twins, also played by Laurel and Hardy. The gags are typical Stan and Ollie, and as the film goes on and the brothers start to get mixed up, you really have to pay attention from one scene to the next to know which Stan-and-Ollie characters you're looking at. There are two pairs of women in the story, too, and true to the Laurel-and-Hardy formula, the boys can't catch a break from any of them.

Sahara (1983)

SAHARA  (1983)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Andrew V. McLaglen

    Brooke Shields, Lambert Wilson, Horst Buchholz,

    John Rhys-Davies, Ronald Lacey, Cliff Potts

    John Mills, Steve Forrest, Perry Lang

An adventurous young woman enters a motorcar race in 1920s Morocco and gets caught in a Bedouin war. Brooke of the Sahara. Ridiculous.

Ennio Morricone

(1928-2020)

The Highwaymen (2019)

THE HIGHWAYMEN  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Lee Hancock

    Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates,

    John Carroll Lynch, Kim Dickens, William Sadler

Costner and Harrelson play old Texas Rangers coaxed out of retirement to help take down Bonnie and Clyde. Costner's career circles back on itself with this, to 1987, when he played Eliot Ness in "The Untouchables" and went after Al Capone. Both stars look a bit weathered - they're at an age where that happens - and it suits a couple of characters who have been out of the game for a while and can feel the years and the rust, but still know more about how to track bank robbers than all the young hotshots from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. They play off each other with cantankerous ease, and it's fun just watching them work. There's plenty of Depression-era detail in the set design - when was the last time you saw a box of Pep Wheat Flakes? - and Thomas Newman's musical score sets the mood, letting you know when things are about to get tense. Even Costner's haircut looks authentic to the period. It's an interesting narrative choice that you don't get a good look at Bonnie and Clyde till their bullet-riddled demise. The lawmen know they're all to real, from the way they keep finding clues and the bodies keep piling up, but the outlaws are elusive, phantoms almost, always slipping away before the cops show up. At least until the end.

Pope Joan (1972)

POPE JOAN  (1972)  ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Anderson

    Liv Ullmann, Maximillian Schell, Franco Nero,

    Olivia de Havilland, Trevor Howard, Patrick Magee,

    André Morell, Jeremy Kemp, Lesley-Anne Down

In the middle of the 9th century, a studious young monk - actually a devout young woman disguised as a monk - ascends to the rank of cardinal, and on the death of the pope, assumes the throne of St. Peter. Most modern historians discount Pope Joan's brief reign as a myth, but the historical record from the Dark Ages is murky, and the story persisted for centuries. Liv Ullmann plays Joan in the film, and as hard as she tries, it's difficult to believe she could pass as a man, even a very young one. More than that, her character looks lost. The movie feels kind of static, too, though Trevor Howard as the old pope and Maximillian Schell as an artist priest both breathe some life into it. The ending, in which Joan gives birth in the street and the mob tears her to pieces, is just  one speculation on what might've happened to the possibly fictitious Pope Joan. 

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

OCEAN'S TWELVE  (2004)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Steven Soderbergh

    George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts,

    Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould,

    Carl Reiner, Andy Garcia, Vincent Cassel, 

    Catherine Zeta-Jones, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan,

    Robbie Coltrane, Eddie Izzard, Cherry Jones

The boys are back and the con is on in a sequel to a remake that's all flash and no depth. The script is clever but paper-thin, and nobody appears to be taking any of it too seriously, which is just about enough to keep you amused. That's really all it's aiming at. Highlight: Julia Roberts as Tess, trying to pass herself off as Julia Roberts.

Carl Reiner

(1922-2020)