The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939)

 

THE MYSTERY OF MR. WONG  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: William Nigh

    Boris Karloff, Grant Withers, Dorothy Tree,

    Craig Reynolds, Ivan Lebedeff, Holmes Herbert

A man is murdered playing a game of charades. Whodunit? Could the crime be connected to a valuable stone called the Eye of the Daughter of the Moon? And what about the letter in the dead man's safe, in which he named the person he believed would do him in? There are as many questions as there are suspects in this. Good thing Mr. Wong is on the case.

My Blueberry Nights (2007)

 

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS  (2007)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Wong Kar-Wai

    Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, 

    David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Chan Marshall

A woman named Elizabeth leaves New York in the aftermath of a breakup and travels around the country by bus, taking waitressing jobs and hoping to save up enough money to buy a car. She meets a few desperate characters and covers more than 5,000 miles before ending up back in New York. There are some good moments in this, thanks mostly to the cast, but Elizabeth, played by Norah Jones, is a mostly passive protagonist, and the movie's too episodic to ever completely draw you in. Cat Power has a couple of songs on the soundtrack and a cameo smoking a cigarette out on the sidewalk with Jude Law. 

The Red Badge of Courage (1951)

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2 

    D: John Huston

    Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin, Royal Dano

    John Dierkes, Arthur Hunnicut, Andy Devine

"Picture" by Lillian Ross is one of the best books ever about how Hollywood works and how movies get made. It chronicles the making of John Huston's "The Red Badge of Courage" from pre-production to post-release, through writing, financing, scouting locations, casting, shooting, editing, studio machinations, more editing, preview screenings, still more editing, and finally its distribution as the second feature on a double bill with an Esther Williams movie called "Texas Carnival" in 1951. The finished product was quite a bit different from what Huston had in mind, and the movie lost money, just as MGM boss Louis B. Mayer said it would. It's a visually striking depiction of a Civil War battle, in black and white, with Audie Murphy and Bill Mauldin in the leads and Royal Dano, John Dierkes, Arthur Hunnicut and others marching, shooting, falling, dying, charging into battle and running for their lives. As to what Huston's version might've looked like, there are clues in Ross's book, but all of the principals are gone now, the deleted footage is lost, and we'll never really know.

The Oxford Murders (2008)

 

THE OXFORD MURDERS  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alex de la Iglesia

    Elijah Wood, John Hurt, Leonor Watling,

    Jim Carter, Julie Cox, Burn Gorman,

    Anna Massey, Alex Cox, Dominique Pinon

A university professor and a new grad student, both egghead academics, turn up together at the scene of a murder, and since they both knew the victim, decide to figure out whodunit. You'd need a post-doc in math to understand what these guys are talking about sometimes, but they're still not smart enough to keep themselves off the suspect list. It's a tricky intellectual puzzle and a movie you have to watch with your brain plugged in. Viewers who remember Hurt as the dictator in "V For Vendetta" should appreciate the Guy Fawkes outfit he wears to a concert on (of course) the fifth of November.

North Dallas Forty (1979)

NORTH DALLAS FORTY  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ted Kotcheff

    Nick Nolte, Mac Davis, Dayle Haddon,

    Charles Durning, Bo Svenson, John Matuszak,

    Steve Forrest, G.D. Spradlin, Dabney Coleman

Nick Nolte plays Pete Elliott, a veteran wide receiver with a professional football team that's not called the Dallas Cowboys but might as well be. Elliott's riding the bench, not because he can't run and catch - he's as good at that as anybody - but because he's a free spirit and not considered a "team player." It's one of Nolte's great physical performances - you can feel every twinging muscle and aching joint. It's agonizing just to watch him get out of bed. But he loves to play the game - it's what he excels at - so when Sunday comes around, he takes a needle in his ruined knee and trots back onto the field to get banged up all over again. The script and the novel it's based on are by Peter Gent, a former Cowboys wide receiver who knows all about the game and the toll it takes on its players. (He also has something to say about the big-money owners and executives who actually control things.) One glaring omission, maybe because it wasn't talked about much back then: For all the damage these guys sustain, nobody once mentions head injuries.

Nightmare Alley (2021)

NIGHTMARE ALLEY  (2021)  ¢ ¢ 1/2 
    D: Guillermo del Toro
    Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette,
    Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, David Strathairn,
    Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen,
    Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Beaver, Clifton Collins Jr.
Guillermo del Toro's remake of the 1947 film noir about a carnival hustler's descent into the abyss. One of the things that makes the best noir films work is their narrative economy. They give you just enough information to string you along. This movie gives you a lot of information, maybe too much, and at 2 hours and 30 minutes, it runs into overtime. It's also a movie that probably shouldn't be in color, though del Toro's visuals are always something to look at. He makes the carnival look dirty and depressed, the kind of place you'd never want to be. After a while, even the customers start looking like freaks. Bradley Cooper plays the protagonist, and he's good, but like Joaquin Phoenix in Woody Allen's "Irrational Man", his character's got a deficit when it comes to charisma. You find yourself wondering why all of the story's hot, smart women keep falling for him. That would be Rooney Mara as a sideshow performer whose specialty is being electrocuted, Toni Collette as the fortune teller whose cards predict Cooper's fate, and Cate Blanchett as a psychiatrist with a fabulous art-deco office, the film's resident femme fatale. If they gave Oscars for lipstick, Blanchett would win one, hands down.

The League of Gentlemen (1960)

 

THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Basil Dearden

    Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Roger Livesy,

    Richard Attenborough, Kieron Moore, Norman Bird,

    Terence Alexander, Robert Coote, Nanette Newman,

    Bryan Forbes, Patrick Wymark, Melissa Stribling

The first time you see Jack Hawkins in this, he's climbing out of a sewer wearing a tuxedo and getting into a Rolls Royce. He's playing a retired army colonel who recruits seven fellow war veterans, all with specialized skills and checkered pasts, to pull off an elaborate bank robbery. Will they get away with it? That's hard to say, but it'll be fun watching them try. Check out Nigel Patrick when he's wearing a watch cap and see if you don't think he's a dead ringer for Bill Murray, and keep an eye out for a swishy Oliver Reed.

Night of the Comet (1984)

 

NIGHT OF THE COMET  (1984)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Thom Eberhardt

    Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran,

    Mary Woronov, Geoffrey Lewis, Sharon Farrell

When an apocalyptic event reduces most of humanity to murderous zombies or dust on the sidewalk, two teenaged girls survive with their shopping habits, fabulous hair and unlikely commando skills intact. It's the end of the world, but they're alive. Good thing they know how to handle an automatic weapon. A sci-fi zombie comedy with enough going on in it to keep you amused for an hour and a half, and probably not much more. Mary Woronov as a no-nonsense medic is the best thing in it and deserves more screen time. Original title: "Teenage Mutant Horror Comet Zombies".

Made In Dagenham (2010)

 

MADE IN DAGENHAM  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nigel Cole

    Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James,

    Daniel Mays, Jaime Winstone, Andrea Riseborough,

    Rosamund Pike, Miranda Richardson, Rupert Graves

When the women machinists at a Ford auto plant in England go on strike to demand equal pay, nobody's unaffected. The company's top guns tell the girls to be reasonable and threaten to close the plant down and move the work elsewhere. The union bosses tell them to be patient and they'll go to bat for them . . . someday. Their male colleagues at the factory learn soon enough that you can't roll cars off the assembly line if nobody's there to stitch the upholstery together. The women are adamant. And united. And pissed off. And before long, the Labour government is paying attention and getting involved. It's not hard to figure out who to root for here. Heck, I'd join Sally Hawkins on a picket line, wouldn't you?

Interstate 60 (2002)

 

INTERSTATE 60  (2002)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Bob Gale

    James Marsden, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd,

    Chris Cooper, Amy Smart, Kurt Russell, Ann-Margret,

    Michael J. Fox, Amy Stewart, Amy J. Johnson

A young would-be artist, torn between his desire to paint and the pressure from his father to go into law, embarks on a very strange road trip over a highway that in the real world seems not to exist. An episodic fantasy in which every stop along the way has its own particular touch of weirdness. Just go west off Bob Dylan's Highway 61. Be careful what you wish for. And watch out any time Gary Oldman starts smoking his pipe. 

The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1934)

 

THE MYSTERIOUS MR. WONG  (1934)  ¢ ¢

    D: William Nigh

    Bela Lugosi, Wallace Ford, Arline Judge, Lee Shumway,

    Lotus Long, Robert Emmett O'Connor, E. Allyn Warren

I could be wrong, but something tells me not all the actors who play Chinese characters in this movie are Chinese, and one of them is Bela Lugosi.

Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976)

 

MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED  (1976)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Peter Yates

    Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel,

    Allen Garfield, Larry Hagman, L.Q. Jones,

    Bruce Davison, Valerie Curtin, Dick Butkus

A hit-and-miss slapstick comedy about ambulance drivers played by Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel. If you can't guess gong in which of the three actors plays Jugs, the movie's probably too deep for you. It's hard to watch Bill Cosby in anything now without thinking about, you know, Bill Cosby.

Movie Star Moment: Hal Holbrook

Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat

in "All the President's Men" (1976) 

    Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) goes into a parking garage late at night. The place is empty and dark and quiet. He's there to meet somebody. He stops, waits, looks around, sees nothing. Then a sound, a voice, a word you can't quite make out. Woodward looks, but, still, nothing. Then the sound of a cigarette lighter. A small, orange flame. In the shadows, next to a concrete pillar. Somebody's there. The lighter flicks off. And a closeup. A face, shrouded in darkness. Wary, watchful eyes. Like an owl. Or a ghost. The darkness suits this guy. It's where he operates. It's where he belongs. The man is Deep Throat, Woodward's deep-cover government source in the Watergate investigation. The actor playing him is Hal Holbrook. 

    Holbrook famously played Mark Twain on stage for over 50 years, but the centerpiece of his legacy onscreen is this man in the shadows, this nocturnal entity, a mystery within a mystery, a face you barely see. 

    Redford produced the movie. He and Dustin Hoffman are the stars, and the cast, from top to bottom, is solid. But for the handful of minutes he's on the screen, there in the parking garage, the actor you can't look away from is the one who's almost invisible, eyes peering out of the dark. Hal Holbrook. Deep Throat.

Absolute Power (1997)

ABSOLUTE POWER  (1997)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris,

    Laura Linney, Judy Davis, Scott Glenn,

    E.G. Marshall, Dennis Haysbert, Richard Jenkins

Clint plays a jewel thief who witnesses a murder that directly involves the president of the United States. William Goldman wrote the screenplay from David Baldacci's novel, and you could pick it apart in all kinds of ways, if that's what you want to do. Or you could suspend a massive amount of disbelief and just appreciate the old-fashioned skill with which a satisfying piece of pulp can be delivered. Jack N. Green (cinematography), Lennie Niehous (music), Henry Bumstead (production design) and Buddy Van Horn (stunts) are longtime Eastwood collaborators, and the supporting cast is probably the best Clint's ever worked with. (Judy Davis reaches a dizzying level of neurotic zeal as the president's cutthroat chief of staff.) A guilty pleasure.