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."