Midsummer Madness (2007)

 

MIDSUMMER MADNESS  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alexander Hahn

    Orlando Wells, Gundars Abolins, Maria de Medeiros,

    Dominique Pinon, Detlev Buck, Birgit Minichmayr

A sweetly wacked-out comedy made in Latvia, about a bunch of travelers who get off the plane in Riga just in time for the summer solstice celebration. It's like six or eight stories that separately wouldn't amount to much, but together kind of do. A sleeper the starts out slow and grows on you. Keep your ears tuned for a brief exchange that's straight out of "Casablanca", and watch out for the kangaroo.

Tony Rome (1967)

 

TONY ROME  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gordon Douglas

    Frank Sinatra, Jill St. John, Richard Conte,

    Gena Rowlands, Simon Oakland, Sue Lyon,

    Lloyd Bochner, Rocky Graziano, Shecky Greene

Equipped with an arsenal of wisecracks and a hairpiece that looks like a million bucks, Frank Sinatra checks in as Tony Rome, a Miami private eye who lives on a boat, bets on the ponies, eyes every woman who crosses his radar, and gets into all kinds of trouble trying to track down some missing diamonds. How you respond to this will depend on how you feel about its mercurial star. It's designed to fit his persona like one of his perfectly tailored suits, from his punk sophistication (and underlying combativeness) to his frank (or Frank) appraisal of Jill St. John's butt. Followed by a sequel, "Lady In Cement".

Irrational Man (2015)

 

IRRATIONAL MAN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Woody Allen

    Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey,

    Jamie Blackley, Betsy Aidem, Ethan Phillips

Recycled Woody. Here's a convenient checklist. A protagonist getting away with murder (or trying to). Smug intellectuals discussing arcane points of philosophy. An older man in a relationship with a younger woman. (Bet you didn't see that one coming.) Emma Stone modeling another closetful of cute schoolgirl outfits. Had enough? Joaquin Phoenix plays a college professor with a prominent pot belly and an equally prominent drinking problem. Stone and Parker Posey play two smart women who inexplicably find him adorable. As good as they are, and as good as they look, it's all kind of a yawn, and the music ("The In Crowd" by Ramsey Lewis played over and over) gets tiresome. You know the saying, "Everything old is new again"? Not this time.

The White Buffalo (1977)

 

THE WHITE BUFFALO  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: J. Lee Thompson

    Charles Bronson, Will Sampson, Jack Warden,

    Kim Novak, Clint Walker, Stuart Whitman,

    Slim Pickens, Cara Williams, John Carradine,

    Shay Duffin, Ed Lauter, Douglas Fowley

Eccentric myth-making with Charles Bronson as Wild Bill Hickock and Will Sampson as Crazy Horse, both operating under assumed names and both on the trail of an elusive and seemingly murderous white buffalo. (Parallels to "Moby Dick" are not coincidental.) As a  movie star who could more or less choose his own projects, Bronson had a distinct appreciation for offbeat stories, and this is one of them. He was his own subgenre, really, with a career based solidly in the top end of B movies distinguished by their ruthlessness, their primitive outlook on humanity, and a sense that he was always slightly amused by it all, more than happy to be doing what he was doing, because he knew it was way more fun than shoveling coal.

Let the Good Times Roll (1973)

 

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Abel, Sidney Levin

Participants in a rock-&-roll revival show take turns cranking it out for a mostly young audience. The acts include Bill Haley & the Comets, Danny & the Juniors, the Coasters and Fats Domino, and clips and stills from the 1950s provide the music with a valid historical context. Little Richard looks to be the showstopper till Chuck Berry steps on stage, trading guitar licks with Bo Diddley in a blistering finale.

Tarzan's Peril (1951)

 

TARZAN'S PERIL  (1951)  ¢ ¢

    D: Byron Haskin

    Lex Barker, Virginia Huston, Dorothy Dandridge,

    George Macready, Douglas Fowley, Glenn Anders,

    Alan Napier, Frederick O'Neal, Edward Ashley

A jungle adventure off the Tarzan assembly line, in which Tarzan kills a giant snake with a knife, battles a man-eating plant and goes after some evil white men who are selling guns to the natives. Lex Barker had replaced Johnny Weissmuller two years before, and he was a better actor than Weissmuller - who wasn't? - but Weissmuller had more charisma, at least in the early Tarzan films, and a sort of goofy, amateur charm. Barker's most revealing moment in this movie comes when he and Cheetah come up to a pool to get a drink and Tarzan pauses to admire his reflection in the water. We get it, Lex. You're pretty. Now go fight a lion or something. Virginia Huston as Jane and Dorothy Dandridge as a jungle queen both look like they just spent the day at the jungle beauty salon, and neither of them get enough screen time to do much else. The scenes with Tarzan and Jane at home show them in their treehouse with a table and chairs and pots and pans and silverware and a stove. Tarzan eating with a fork? That's just way too civilized.

Movie Star Moment: Sally Hawkins

 

Sally Hawkins as Elisa Esposito

in "The Shape of Water" (2017)

    Sally Hawkins' career isn't close to being over, but at this point it looks like the role she'll be most remembered for is Elisa Esposito, the mute janitor in Guillermo del Toro's romantic fantasy "The Shape of Water". Elisa cleans sinks and mops floors in a secret government research facility. The year is 1962. Octavia Spencer plays Elisa's work-place colleague Zelda and Michael Shannon's a sadistic security official named Strickland

    Strickland's interrogating Zelda and Elisa to find out what they know about the disappearance of an amphibious, humanoid creature he's been torturing in a sort of steampunk dungeon. The women know more than they're telling. In a previous scene, Strickland made a crude pass at Elisa, who rejected him, and the two don't like each other. Failing to get any useful information, he dismisses them as "shit cleaners" and "piss wipers" who couldn't possibly know anything, anyway, and Elisa, who can hear but not speak, shoots him a look that says, unambiguously, "Fuck you." 

    That's reinforced a moment later, when Elisa stops on her way out the door and starts to sign "F - U - C - . . . " Strickland asks Zelda to translate. "She's saying thank you," Zelda replies, which is not what she's saying at all. What she's saying is unmistakable, even if you don't know sign, and Hawkins said it perfectly with that look.

Curious Alice (1971)

 

CURIOUS ALICE  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: [?]

A girl named Alice finds herself in a psychedelic Wonderland where the Caterpillar is smoking pot, the March Hare is doing speed, the Dormouse is on downers and the Mad Hatter is tripping on LSD. An animated public-service short designed to warn young kids about the dangers of drug use. Stoners will love it. 

Alice In Wonderland (1903)

 

ALICE IN WONDERLAND  (1903)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Percy Stow, Cecil M. Hepworth

    May Clark, Mrs. Margaret Hepworth, Norman Whitten,

    Cecil M. Hepworth, Geoffrey Faithfull, Stanley Faithfull

Alice goes down the rabbit hole in the earliest screen adaptation of the Lewis Carroll tale. The only surviving print of this is pretty beat-up, but the effects that allow Alice to grow bigger and smaller and disappear aren't bad for 1903. The Cheshire Cat appears and vanishes, too, but good luck trying to spot a grin anywhere. That's one grumpy-looking cat.

Hemingway (2021)

HEMINGWAY  (2021)   ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick

The wonderful, terrible life of Ernest Hemingway, chronicled in six hours by American history's resident documentarian, Ken Burns. As a writer, Hemingway's spare, declarative style revolutionized American prose. As a human being, he was mean, bombastic, contradictory, insecure, egotistical, and as he grew older and the cumulative impact of alcohol and head injuries caught up with him, increasingly paranoid and unstable. Behind the outsized bravado was a man obsessed with death and suicide and afraid of sleeping alone, a public manifestation of unalloyed machismo whose private sense of gender lines was fluid. It's all there in the film. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that we are what we pretend to be, so we'd better be goddamn careful what we pretend to be. Some famous people (Cary Grant, for example) carry off the deception by becoming the personas they invent for themselves. Others take on roles that can't be sustained, and when they can't stop playing those parts, are doomed by them. Case in point: Ernest Hemingway.

Circus World (1964)

 

CIRCUS WORLD  (1964)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Henry Hathaway

    John Wayne, Claudia Cardinale, Rita Hayworth,

    Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, John Smith

Melodrama under the big top, with John Wayne as the proprietor of a turn-of-the-century circus and Wild West show. A time filler that fills way too much time, with lots of vintage circus acts sandwiched into a slow-moving plot. Nothing was going to derail Wayne's career at that point, but the movie was an expensive flop and signaled the end of Samuel Bronston's production enterprise. The three-ring acts include a Roman-riding stunt like the one in "Rio Grande", and Wayne on top of a stagecoach twirling a rifle, just like he did in "Stagecoach". 

Rio Lobo (1970)

 

RIO LOBO  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Howard Hawks

    John Wayne, Jorge Rivero, Jennifer O'Neill,

    Christopher Mitchum, Jack Elam, Victor French,

    Sherry Lansing, Mike Henry, David Huddleston,

    Bill Williams, Jim Davis, Hank Worden

In the space of 11 years, John Wayne and Howard Hawks made what was basically the same movie three times. For viewers who don't know and are curious, here's how you can tell them apart. In "Rio Bravo" (1959), Ricky Nelson plays a young gun named Colorado and Dean Martin plays the drunk. In "El Dorado" (1967), James Caan plays a young gun named Mississippi and Robert Mitchum plays the drunk. In "Rio Lobo", (1970), Mitchum's son Christopher plays a young gun named Tuscarora and everybody drinks. Leigh Brackett wrote all three screenplays, and Wayne plays the hard-nosed father figure in all of them. The good guys might be outnumbered, but they've got each other and they've got the Duke, and the bad guys don't stand a chance. That's the way it was back then. Howard Hawks' last film.

Ride Him, Cowboy (1932)

 

RIDE HIM, COWBOY  (1932)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Fred Allen

    John Wayne, Ruth Hall, Henry B. Walthall,

    Frank Hagney, Otis Harlan, Harry Gribbon

John Wayne rides into town playing "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" on a harmonica, and the first thing that happens is that a horse is about to be sentenced to death for being a mean horse, but John Wayne persuades the judge to let the horse live if he can ride him, which he does, so the horse goes free, and he's a really smart horse and he becomes John Wayne's horse, and wouldn't you know it, the horse's name is Duke. The rest of the movie has Duke and the Duke riding out after a no-good varmint called the Hawk, and it's pretty routine - a hard-ridin' two-fisted B movie from Wayne's salad days. He was a good-lookin' kid back then, not far removed from "The Big Trail" and the football team at USC. It's just hard to believe he was ever that young. 

Two For the Road (1967)

 

TWO FOR THE ROAD  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stanley Donen

    Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Eleanor Bron,

    William Daniels, Claude Dauphin, Jacqueline Bisset

Hepburn and Finney play a couple whose marriage is breaking up on a road trip in France. In flashbacks, they reflect on similar trips at other points in their relationship. It seems that the more they love each other, the more they hurt each other, and vice versa. A sharp, brittle comedy, neatly edited as it flips around between time frames. The dialogue stings, the French countryside looks beautiful, the opening titles are cool and the music's by Henry Mancini. It's one of Hepburn's most adult roles, and one of her best performances.