Such Is Life (1924)

SUCH IS LIFE  (1924)  ¢ ¢

    D: Alfred J. Goulding

    Baby Peggy, Tommy Wonder,

    Joe Bonner, Jack Henderson

Baby Peggy plays an urchin who starts out selling matches on the street and ends up crashing a rich kids' costume party. Just what made Baby Peggy such a big star in the early 1920s is a mystery to me. W.C. Fields would've kicked her across the room. 

Heavy Trip (2018)

 

HEAVY TRIP  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Juuso Laatio, Jukka Vidgren

    Johannes Holopainen, Samuli Jaskio, Max Ovaska, 

    Antti Heikkinen, Minka Kuustonen, Ville Tiihonen

To get an idea where this movie's coming from, try to imagine Spinal Tap as a "symphonic, post-apocalyptic, reindeer-grinding, Christ-abusing, extreme war pagan" Finnish metal band, practicing in the back room of a slaughterhouse. They've got no original material, they've never played for a live audience, and they don't even have a name till they come up with one: Impaled Rectum. The locals hate them till the word gets around that they've landed a gig at a music festival in Norway, at which point they become instant local heroes. It turns out the gig is a myth, but off they go, the corpse of their dead drummer strapped to the roof of a stolen van. It's crazy and hilarious and I guess you could even say heart-warming, if "heart-warming" and "metal band" isn't a contradiction in terms. Loud noise, flying hair and projectile vomiting, too.

Maniac (2012)

 

MANIAC  (2012)  ¢ ¢

    D: Franck Khalfoun

    Elijah Wood, Nora Arnezeder, Megan Duffy,

    Genevieve Alexandra, Liane Balaban, Jan Broberg

Frodo the psycho killer. A blood-and-guts slasher movie in which the former hobbit plays a young man with significant mother issues who works in the family's old mannequin shop and goes around at night stalking and killing women and scalping them. Parallels to "Psycho" are not coincidental, but there's a big difference between Janet Leigh being stabbed in the shower (in black and white, with Hitchcock and Herrmann pulling the strings) and Elijah Wood with a straight razor slicing the top of somebody's head off. The singular focus on women as frightened, helpless victims is fairly disturbing, but it's not like this is the only film out there that revels in that. The scalpings are extremely graphic. Fans of that sort of thing should have a good time. 

Keyhole (2011)

 

KEYHOLE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Guy Maddin

    Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini. Udo Keir,

    Kevin McDonald, Louis Negin, David Wontner,

    Brooke Paisson, Daniel Enright, Olivia Rameau

This Guy Maddin movie is about a bunch of gangsters who hole up in a haunted house. So there are gangsters and ghosts. And a lot of ticking clocks. And a bicycle-powered electric chair. And a Boy-Scout knife. And a bathtub. And a lot of guns. And a naked old man in chains. And a stuffed wolverine named Crispy. And whatever else happened to be rattling around in the attic of Guy Maddin's subconscious at the time. It's based on Homer, more or less. At least the main character's named Ulysses. There's a message in it, too. You can't go home again. Not without bumping into a few ghosts. 

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

 

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alfred Hitchcock

    Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre

A couple on a skiing holiday in Switzerland get caught up in some cloak-and-dagger work when a gang of assassins kidnap their daughter. Hitchcock had found his groove by the time he made this. It's playful, suspenseful, sadistic and coldly detached: a triumph of technique, not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Peter Lorre's first film in English, and he really knows how to get on your nerves.

Palm Springs Weekend (1963)

 

PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND  (1963)  ¢ ¢

    D: Norman Taurog

    Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, Ty Hardin,

    Stephanie Powers, Robert Conrad, Andrew Duggan,

    Jack Weston, Carole Cook, Jerry Van Dyke,

    Zeme North, Billy Mummy, Dorothy Green

College kids spend Easter weekend in Palm Springs. There's a nice comic performance by Zeme North as a love-starved girl who knows judo, but it's really just a beach-party movie without the beach, so what's the point?

The Malibu Bikini Shop (1986)

 

THE MALIBU BIKINI SHOP  (1986)  ¢ 1/2

    D: David Wechter

    Michael David Wright, Bruce Greenwood, Debra Blee,

    Barbara Horan, Ami Julius, Galyn Görg,

    Jay Robinson, Frank Nelson, Jon Rashad Kamal

Leering idiocy about a pair of brothers who inherit a swimsuit boutique on the boardwalk at Malibu. Bruce Greenwood, who plays one of the young hunks, would go on to do much better things. Here his main task is to act like a frat boy at a beach party and ogle the eye candy. Jay Robinson, who played the mad emperor Caligula in a couple of films, and Frank Nelson, who had a regular gig tormenting Jack Benny, pass the time in supporting roles.

It's Bikini World (1967)

IT'S A BIKINI WORLD  (1967)  ¢ ¢

    D: Stephanie Rothman

    Deborah Walley, Tommy Kirk, Bob Pickett,

    Suzie Kaye, Jack Bernardi, Sid Haig,

    Jim Begg, Lori Williams,  William O'Connell

A boy named Samson meets a girl named Delilah in a screwball beach-party movie. Musical diversions include the Animals and the Castaways, but the rest is slight, even by the standards of beach-party movies.

John Wick (2014)

 

JOHN WICK  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Chad Stahelski

    Keanu Reeves, Michael Nykvist, Willem Dafoe, 

    Adrianne Palicki, John Leguizamo,  Ian McShane

A retired hit man, mourning the death of his wife, goes back to work when the son of a Russian gangster steals his car and kills his dog. 91 corpses later, or 84, or 77 - it depends on who's keeping score - the movie ends. That's it for the plot, pretty much.   Keanu Reeves plays the title role. Michael Nykvist plays the gangster. Willem Dafoe's a fellow assassin, a sort of guardian angel of death. A primitive, stylish, absurdly violent and strangely satisfying action flick, followed by a couple of sequels in which the body count goes even higher. More are on the way.

Ship of Fools (1965)

 

SHIP OF FOOLS  (1965)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stanley Kramer

    Vivien Leigh, Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret,

    Lee Marvin, George Segal, Elizabeth Ashley,

    Michael Dunn, Jose Ferrer, Charles Korvin

Ensemble melodrama based on Katherine Anne Porter's novel, with the usual cross-section of humanity sailing from Mexico to Germany in 1933. Passengers include a washed-up ballplayer (Lee Marvin), a cynical divorcee (Vivien Leigh), an ambitious young artist (George Segal), a woman on her way to prison (Simone Signoret), the ship's doctor (Oskar Werner), a philosophical dwarf (Michael Dunn), a Nazi (Jose Ferrer), and more. There's some overstatement in this (Kramer had a reputation for that), but it has its moments, too. The best matchups: Marvin and Dunn talking about baseball, Werner and Signoret talking about anything, and Vivien Leigh, in her last screen role, talking to herself.

La Vallee (1972)

 

LA VALLEE  (1972)  ¢ ¢

    D: Barbet Schroeder

    Bulle Ogier, Michael Gothard, Jean-Pierre Kalfon,

    Valérie Lagrange, Monique Giraudry, Jérôme Beauvarlet

French-speaking hippies head off into the wilds of New Guinea to look for pretty feathers. Or something. They get high and pick fruit off the trees and the blonde-haired hippie girl plays with a snake and they talk to each other a lot in French. Also, some pigs get clubbed to death and slaughtered while you watch. Then the hippies go native, and then they go out too far, 0r maybe they get to where they want to go, I couldn't tell, because I watched this without subtitles and I don't know French. A definite product of its time, good-looking but slow, part travelogue, part adventure story, part anthropological study and part "Heart of Darkness". Music by Pink Floyd.

Not Quite Hollywood (2008)

 

NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mark Hartley

An amusing and informative documentary about the evolution of Australian exploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s. Lots of revealing clips and cheeky commentary from the filmmakers responsible, a crazed band of auteurs whose simply stated goal was to pack their movies with as much sex and violence as censorship boards and severely limited budgets would allow. Their stories about how close they came to killing people are as hair-raising as anything they actually put on the screen. There's a lot of gore and nudity (of course), and (speaking of crazed), some behind-the-scenes footage of Dennis Hopper, clowning around on the set of "Mad Dog Morgan", stoned out of his mind. Fred Schepisi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Stacy Keach and Quentin Tarantino are among the witnesses.

Thale (2012)

 

THALE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Aleksander Nordaas

    Silje Reinåmo, Erlend Nervold, Jon Sigve Skard

Leo and Elvis are a couple of sanitation technicians working for an outfit called the No Shit Cleaning Service, hired to mop up grisly crime and accident scenes. One day, they're looking for body parts in and around an outhouse, when they discover a squalid but well-stocked laboratory hidden away under the loo. What they find in the lab is both wonderful and terrifying: a strange, mute, young woman with a tail, a creature straight out of Nordic myth. This leads to an hour's worth of well-tuned suspense, where you're down there with the cleanup guys and the creature, the impulsive Elvis unable to keep his hands off anything, the methodical Leo suggesting they leave the place alone and wait for reinforcements. The conclusion comes unexpectedly, leaving it unclear whether the filmmakers ran out of story to tell, or just didn't know where to go with it, but as fantasy thrillers go, this is a good one, playing on what you don't know and can't quite see. You could wish  for the none-too-bright and much-too-curious Elvis not to go down those stairs, or open that door, or venture into that next dark room, but what good would that do? The fun is in knowing he will.

Quote File / Take 19

"You can't open a car with a coat hanger anymore."

  Christopher Walken in "Stand Up Guys"

"You can't drop an atom bomb on Chicago."

  Peter Graves in "Beginning of the End"

"You can't be funny and be the principal of a 

  prep school."

  Joan Cusack in "School of Rock"

"You can't have a revolution in a country where the 

  people love hot dogs and boogie woogie."

  Clark Gable in "Comrade X"

"You can't dry a girl's tears with a gun."

  Charles Bronson in "Showdown At Boot Hill"

"I can do anything. I'm the chief of police."

  Roy Scheider in "Jaws"