Now or Never (1921)

 

NOW OR NEVER  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Fred Newmeyer, Hal Roach

    Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Anna May Bilson

Harold Lloyd with a kid on a train. That's about it, really, but that was about all Harold Lloyd needed to make a movie. 

His Royal Slyness (1920)

HIS ROYAL SLYNESS  (1920)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Hal Roach

    Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Harry Pollard,

    Gus Leonard, Noah Young, Gaylord Lloyd

Harold Lloyd poses as a prince who happens to look just like him. The prince is played by Lloyd's brother Gaylord. 

For Me and My Gal (1942)

 

FOR ME AND MY GAL  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Busby Berkeley

    Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy,

    Ben Blue, Marta Eggerth, Horace McNally

A hustling song-and-dance man and a girl with a great voice team up on the vaudeville circuit, hoping to someday play the Palace. There are complications, and then World War One gets in the way. Lots of great songs and a fair amount of flag-waving patriotism, with Kelly in his first movie and Garland in her first adult role. Wisconsin note: One of the tank-town theaters Gene and Judy play is the Beaver in Beaver Dam.

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alfred Hitchcock

    Joel McCrae, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall,

    George Sanders, Albert Basserman, Robert Benchley,

    Edmund Gwenn, Eduardo Cianelli, Harry Davenport

A newspaper publisher dispatches a crime reporter to London to cover events in Europe in the lead-up to World War Two. It gets complicated from there, with an assassination, a kidnapping and a secret line of text in a peace agreement (the movie's MacGuffin). Plus, Herbert Marshall in a role that has some parallels to Claude Rains in "Notorious", Edmund Gwenn (Santa Claus himself) as a hit man, and George Sanders. No matter what movie he's in, or what it's about, you can never really trust George Sanders. Or can you?

Girls In Prison (1994)

GIRLS IN PRISON  (1994)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John McNaughton 

    Anne Heche, Ione Skye, Missy Cryder, Bahni Turpin, 

    Jon Polito, Nicolette Scorsese, Raymond O'Connor,

    Nestor Serrano, Miguel Sandoval, Richmond Arquette

Three newly arrived inmates, all serving life sentences, band together to adjust and survive behind bars. This has a pretty good cast, okay production values and a lot of genre-spoof potential, but only about half a script. Watching Anne Heche act crazy is a little disturbing at this point, and the narrative payoff is thin.

Detention (2011)

 

DETENTION  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Joseph Kahn

    Josh Hutcherson, Stanley Caswell, Spencer Locke,

    Dane Cook, Allison Woods, Parker Bagley, James Black,

    A.D. Johnson, Michael Esparza, Lindsay Morgan, 

    J.R. Osborne, Jon Park, Tiffany Boone, Joe Keane

Remember "The Breakfast Club", where Ally Sheedy and the gang had to do Saturday morning detention as penance for all their high-school transgressions? This movie's not like that. Well, okay, there is a group detention scene, but mostly it's a crazed teen horror comedy in which the protagonist is the school's mascot (she couldn't make the cheerleading squad), the chief bully is a human fly (the Jeff Goldblum type), and a key plot point involves a time machine concealed in a stuffed grizzly bear. Trying to guess what's coming up next in this could be a challenge. The time-travel stuff should appeal to anybody who thinks the most amazing year in all of human history was 1992.

Flashback: Monsters

 

    The first movie monster I can remember seeing as a kid was the Gill Man in "Creature From the Black Lagoon" (1954). I was about seven, and I never saw the movie back then, but I know I saw the preview a couple of times. I couldn't tell whether the movie was any good (I'm not sure I cared), but I knew I'd never seen anything like the Gill Man before. The image took up residence in my young brain and has never quite moved out. 

    Another monster I remember from back then (and another movie I didn't see) was "Rodan" (1957). Rodan was a giant flying reptile, one of many nuclear-age Japanese monsters that followed in the wake of Godzilla, and for a short time, the trailer for the movie was all over television. My folks saw the trailer, too, and said, "Don't waste your money," which was sound but irrelevant advice for a kid who (they knew) didn't have much money. 

    Another note about "Rodan". I finally saw it more than 50 years later on cable TV, and at first I thought I was watching a remake. Then it occurred to me: The televisions we were watching that trailer on back in 1957 were all black-and-white, and I always assumed the movie was, too. I had no idea "Rodan" was in color. 

    My favorite monster movies as a kid were the classics from Universal, the Dracula/Frankenstein/Wolf Man/Mummy movies from the '30s and '40s. I watched them all on television, starting when I was 10 or 11, and I loved their shadowy atmosphere, gothic sets and the actors who played the monsters, especially Lon Chaney Jr. and Boris Karloff. I don't remember ever being frightened by them. What struck me was that the monsters - almost all of them - were tragic. They didn't want to be monsters. They were cursed.

    "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) creeped me out, partly because its satanists were so ordinary - your friendly, aging neighbors in the coven down the hall - and (especially) because Roman Polanski (spoiler alert!) never shows you the baby.

    But the scariest monster movie I ever saw, that's easy: "Alien" (1979). I was an adult by then, in my 30s, and I knew the setup, and I knew it was just a movie, and it still scared the crap out of me. Part of that had to do (again) with the ordinariness of the characters, but mostly it was H.R. Giger's set and monster designs and the direction of Ridley Scott. 

    The ship - a rust-bucket freighter - was such a dimly-lit mass of pipes and tubes and odd pieces of junk, that you never knew for sure that the monster wasn't part of the ship. And once the alien chewed its way out of (spoiler alert!) John Hurt's stomach, you knew that all bets were off, the monster could be anywhere, and nobody on the ship was safe. 

    A monster that's infinitely resilient, apparently unkillable, scary as hell and ugly as sin? What's not to like about that?

    And did anybody else watch Sigourney Weaver taking Jonesy with her at the end and think, oh, no, don't do that, the alien could be in the cat?

    I sure did.

Demented Death Farm Massacre (1971/1986)

 

DEMENTED DEATH FARM MASSACRE 

 (1971/1986)  1/2 ¢

    D: Donn Davidson, Fred Olen Ray

    Ashley Brooke, George Ellis, Michael Battlesmith, 

    Trudy Moore, Pepper Thurston, Frank Jones, 

    Valarie Lipsey,  Jim Peck, John Carradine

There's this movie. It's called "Demented Death Farm Massacre". John Carradine's in it. Alternate titles include "Honey Pie", "Honey Britches", "Shantytown Honeymoon" and "The Hillbilly Hooker". It's even worse than you think.

Colewell (2019)

 

COLEWELL  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Tom Quinn

    Karen Allen, Kevin J. O'Connor, Hannah Gross,

    Craig Walker, Daniel Jenkins, Malachy Cleary

Karen Allen, well into her sixties and looking it, plays a woman named Nora, a widow who runs the post office in the dot-on-the-map town of Colewell, Pennsylvania. When she gets the word that the Postal Service is closing her office down (and eliminating her job), it hits her hard - it hits the whole town hard- but there's nothing anybody can do. Nora's options are to retire or relocate, and neither choice is acceptable. It's an idealized portrait of small-town life, in which everybody's friendly, everybody knows everybody else, almost everybody's old, and the post office is the social center of the community. Most of the townsfolk appear to be played by locals, but the heart of the movie is Allen, who doesn't just let the years and miles show, but uses them to define her character. It's almost as if she had waited her whole life to be able to play parts like this. That's not such a bad thing, if you've got the skill to pull it off, the material to pull it off with, and the luck to grow old like Karen Allen.

Carry On Up the Jungle (1970)

CARRY ON UP THE JUNGLE  (1970)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Sidney James, Frankie Howerd, Joan Sims,

    Kenneth Connor, Jacki Piper, Bernard Bresslaw,

    Terry Scott, Charles Hawtrey, Valerie Leon

The Carry On Gang goes on safari, where they're captured by a tribe of cannibals and then by a tribe of amazons. It's nonstop nonsense, blatantly lewd and broadly played, lechery run amok till the amazons put the men to work and the perils of getting what you wish for become apparent. The full title is "Cary On Up the Jungle or The African Queens or Stop Beating About the Bush or You Show Me Your Waterhole and I'll Show You Mine". Uh huh. That's "Carry On". 

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (2019)

 

GORDON LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ 

MY MIND  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Martha Kehoe, Joan Tesoni

Gordon Lightfoot, pushing 80 and looking skeletal, talks about his life and career, while film clips and concert footage document what he's talking about, and others testify to his stature in music and Canadian culture. Lightfoot was still performing when these interviews took place, and it's striking how many refer to his work in the past tense. The movie opens with several minutes devoted to an early Lightfoot tune, "For Lovin' Me", till he finally gets fed up. 

"I hate this fuckin' song," he declares, and it sounds like he means it. Yet everybody from Dylan on down defers to his skills as a songwriter. "Everything I've done has been basically a figment of the imagination," he says late in the film. "You just want to make sure it rhymes."

Gordon Lightfoot

(1938-2023)

Caboblanco (1980)

 

CABOBLANCO  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: J. Lee Thompson

    Charles Bronson, Dominique Sanda, Jason Robards,

    Fernando Rey, Simon McCorkindale, Camilla Sparv,

    Gilbert Roland, Denny Miller, James Booth

What if they did a remake of "Casablanca" with Charles Bronson in the Bogart role? Well, they did, sort of. It's called "Caboblanco" and it's set in Peru and it stars Bronson as a saloonkeeper named Giff Hoyt, an expat with a shady past who can't go back to the States. Dominique Sanda plays a mysterious French woman and Fernando Rey plays the local police chef, who's under the thumb of a Nazi played by Jason Robards. There are no letters of transit, but there's a ship at the bottom of the bay that the French woman, the Nazi and British intelligence all want to get their hands on.There are ceiling fans and shifting alliances and treachery and even a parrot, but no Sydney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre, no night plane to Lisbon, no Warner Bros. backlot magic and no "As Time Goes By". It's about what you'd expect a Charles Bronson movie to be, but "Casablanca" seems a long way off.

Bull Durham (1988)

 

BULL DURHAM  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ron Shelton

    Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins,

    Trey Wilson, Robert Wuhl, Jenny Robertson,

    William O'Leary, David Neidorf, Danny Gans

Ron Shelton's smart, funny jock comedy is like the "Slap Shot" of minor-league baseball, with Kevin Costner as a catcher on the way out, Tim Robbins as a pitcher on the way up, and Susan Sarandon as a baseball priestess with a hankering for both of them. The language is colorful and the movie's take on life in the minors and the guys on the bus who cling to the dream but will mostly never see the show is dead on. Shelton played minor-league ball and knows what the game's all about. A lot of fans consider this the best baseball movie ever, and if it's not, it has to be high on the list. Play ball.

Berlin, I Love You (2019)

 

BERLIN, I LOVE YOU  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Dianna Agron, Peter Chelsom, Claus Clausen, 

    Dani Levy, Fernando Eimbcke, Justin Franklin, 

    Dennis Gansel, Daniel Lwowski, Stephanie Martin, 

    Josef Rusnak, Til Schweiger, Massy Tajedin, 

    Gabriela Tscherniak

    C: Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, Luke Wilson, 

    Toni Garrn, Jim Sturgess, Mickey Rourke,

    Diego Luna, Katja Riemann, Rafaelle Cohen, 

    Sibel Kikelli, Iwan Rheon, Carol Schuler

The "Cities of Love" world tour continues with ten short pieces set in Berlin. Some are whimsical and some are cute. Some are funny and some are vaguely unsettling. One (the episode starring Mickey Rourke) is downright creepy. The characters include a cab driver, a filmmaker, a social worker, a puppeteer, a spy and an angel. Like most anthologies, it's a mixed bag, but the best segments are worth tuning in for. You can decide for yourself which ones those are.