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)