Twenty Bucks (1993)

 

TWENTY BUCKS  (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Keva Rosenfeld

    Linda Hunt, Brendan Fraser, Elisabeth Shue, 

    Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, Melora Walters,

    Gladys Knight, William H. Macy, Diane Baker,

    Jeremy Piven, Rosemary Murphy, Spalding Gray

A collection of stories all connected to a $20 bill as it passes from hand to hand. This started out in the 1930s as an unfilmed screenplay by Endre Bolem, and finally made it to the screen some 60 years later as an indie production. (Bolem's son Leslie had a hand in the finished script.) The ensemble includes Christopher Lloyd as a coldly efficient armed robber, Diane Baker as a woman whose husband dies playing bingo, and Melora Walters as a stripper at a bachelor party who later turns up showing caskets at a funeral home. Linda Hunt plays a character whose luck, or lack of it, brings her into contact with the bill more than anybody else. 

You Won't Be Alone (2022)

 

YOU WON'T BE ALONE  (2022)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Goran Stolevski

    Noomi Rapace, Anamaria Marinca, Alice Englert,

    Sara Klimoska, Felix Maritaud, Arta Dobroshi

Earthy folktale horror from Macedonia about a girl trying to escape a witch's curse. Slow-moving and episodic, with a protagonist who can change shapes and identities in an environment that would be rough to live in even if you weren't suspected of being a witch. One of the girl's incarnations is Noomi Rapace.

Slap Shot (1977)

 

SLAP SHOT  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: George Roy Hill

    Paul Newman, Michael Ontkean, Strother Martin,

    Lindsay Crouse, Jennifer Warren, Melinda Dillon, 

    Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson, David Hanson,

    M. Emmett Walsh, Swoosie Kurtz, Paul Dooley

A raucous jock comedy with a distinctly woking-class edge, starring Paul Newman as the player/coach of a rust-belt minor-league hockey team called the Charlestown Chiefs. The local mill is closing (and with it goes the team's paying fan base) and the Chiefs are slumping through what looks to be their final season, when the general manager (Strother Martin) signs the brawling but intellectually challenged Hanson brothers, three goons with matching haircuts and eyeglasses, along with sharp elbows and high sticks. The Chiefs start to win. So you get the inevitable lead-up to the big game for the league trophy, but there's an underlying fatalism about it all. These guys are not going on to the NHL. They're not going anywhere that's any different from where they've been. The diners and bars and horsing around on the team bus are as good as it gets. And the screaming fans. And the drop of the puck. And the blood on the ice. 

Thanksgiving (2023)

 

THANKSGIVING  (2023)  ¢ ¢

    D: Eli Roth

    Patrick Dempsey, Nell Verlaque, Jalen Thomas Brooks,

    Gabriel Davenport, Milo Manheim, Addison Rae

    Tomaso Sanelli, Joe Delfin, Rick Hoffman,

    Gina Gershon, Jenna Warren, Karen Cliche

A blood-and-guts slasher movie that opens on Black Friday (actually Black Thursday Night) with a mob of rabid shoppers breaking down the doors of a department store and trampling anybody who stands between them and a hundred free waffle irons. Skip ahead a year, and people involved in the riot are turning up dead, dispatched and dismembered in gory, horrible ways. It's Thanksgiving with all the trimmings, and the trimmings include characters being beheaded, eviscerated, stabbed with a pitchfork, chopped with an ax, sliced with a power saw and baked alive in an industrial-sized oven. That's good for some shock value, but there's nothing original, or even especially interesting, going on here, the plot and characters pulled straight out of the timeworn, holiday-themed, slasher-movie playbook. You don't even care who the killer is, really. It just doesn't matter. The film started out as one of the fake trailers in "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was better than this.

Who Is Bill Rebane? (2021)

 

WHO IS BILL REBANE?  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David Cairns

At some point in this documentary, you learn that Bill Rebane once had an offer to direct a movie for American International, but made the mistake of telling Samuel Arkoff he didn't like the script. So Rebane never made it to Hollywood, and instead built his own studio in rural Wisconsin, where he turned out such classics as "The Demons of Ludlow", "The Capture of Bigfoot" and "The Giant Spider Invasion". Writer/director David Cairns treats Rebane as the auteur he aspired to be, the same way Mark Cousins (who appears briefly as a witness) might approach a piece on Orson Welles. That Rebane had limited storytelling skills and created monsters out of Volkswagens hardly seems to matter. What does matter is that, working on the margins and against ridiculous odds, he got his movies made. The artistry might be minimal, but the dedication that went into it was not. Bill Rebane. Wisconsin's own Ed Wood.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING 

    D: George Miller                        (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Tilda Swinton,  Idris Elba, Burcu Gölgedar,

    Aamito Lagum, Nicolas Mouawad, Ece Yuksel

An expert in the history of storytelling travels to Istanbul to attend a convention of people who are experts in the history of storytelling. In a curiosity shop, she buys a small bottle that appears to have little value beyond the possibility that it might contain a story, which it does. It's the old genie-(or djinn)-in-a-bottle tale, all tied up with the number three, the color red, and the matter of being careful what you wish for when it comes to making a wish. Tilda Swinton plays the woman who buys the bottle, Idris Elba plays the djinn she releases when she opens it, and the movie is mostly the two of them telling and talking about stories. Director George Miller is the guy who made the Mad Max movies, but this is more like something you'd expect from Guillermo del Toro, intelligent, literate and beautifully imagined, a fantasy for grownups. So go ahead. Make three wishes. But you know what they say. Be careful. There's always a catch.

Zaza (1923)

 

ZAZA  (1923)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alan Dwan

    Gloria Swanson, H.B. Warner, Mary Thurman, 

    Lucille La Verne, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Yvonne Hughes

Gloria Swanson pulls out all the stops as a temperamental music-hall headliner who falls (literally) for an elegant but stiff-mannered diplomat. Swanson was one of the great stars of the 1920s, and there's a reason for that - she was good - but in this one, she's way over the top: silent-movie acting that makes silent-movie acting look like silent-movie acting, a prelude to her classically deranged performance in "Sunset Blvd." Lucille La Verne steals a moment or two as Zaza's alcoholic aunt, and Gloria and Mary Thurman duke it out in a memorable catfight. 

Desert Island Characters / Take 2

 

More actors who had notable careers in (mostly) supporting roles: 

                             John Vernon

                             Claude Akins

                             William Schallert

                             Lloyd Nolan

                             Lionel Stander

                             Harry Morgan

                             Akim Tamiroff

                             Simon Oakland

                             Murray Hamilton

                             Harry Dean Stanton

War of the Planets (1966)

 

WAR OF THE PLANETS  (1966)  ¢ ¢

    D: Anthony M. Dawson

    Tony Russell, Jane Fate, Franco Nero, Carlo Giustini,

    Enzo Fiermonte, Bert Raho, Claudio Scarchilli

Deadly green light that looks like green smoke when you see it up close starts attacking space stations and turning their passengers into zombies. Daring astronauts take off in rockets that look like Crackerjack toys and fight off the deadly green light with laser guns that look like miniature flame throwers. It's all pretty innocuous, but there are worse low-budget sci-fi movies out there. This one even has a spacewalk ballet. 

American Time Capsule (1968)

 

AMERICAN TIME CAPSULE  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Chuck Workman

200 years of American history, from colonial times to Richard Nixon, compressed into just under three minutes. The images fly by, often faster than the mind can keep up with them, timed to a drumbeat soundtrack. Blink and you'll miss something, for sure. Don't blink, and you still won't catch it all.

Striptease 1996)

 

STRIPTEASE  (1996)  ¢ ¢

    D: Andrew Bergman

    Demi Moore, Burt Reynolds, Armand Assante,

    Ving Rhames, Robert Patrick, Rumer Willis

    Paul Guilfoyle, Frances Fisher, Pandora Peaks

A Florida stripper, locked in a draining custody battle with her scumbag ex-husband, catches the eye of a sleazy congressman who wants to get into her g-string. This is based on one of Carl Hiaasen's crazed, comic novels, but with most of the crazed, comic stuff inexplicably removed. What's left is a generic thriller doubling as a vanity project for Demi More, who strips down to a thong about every 20 minutes to show off her obsessively toned physique. If you watch it on a device that allows you to scene select, fast forward to the dance routines and with the time you save by skipping everything else, check out Hiaasen's book instead. 

Siren of the Tropics (1927)

 

SIREN OF THE TROPICS  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Henry Étiévant

    Josephine Baker, George Melchior, Pierre Batcheff,

    Régina Dalthy, Regina Thomas, Wladimir Kwanine

In her first feature film, Josephine Baker plays a native free spirit who, through the machinations of a melodramatic storyline, goes to Paris, where her dance moves make her the toast of the town. It's a mixed bag, with some period stereotyping that includes a comic chase on an ocean liner with Baker, first in blackface and then in whiteface, alarming her fellow (all-white) passengers. Some of Baker's dance numbers are recreated from her stage act, and if you've never seen Josephine Baker dance - wow!

Talk About a Stranger (1952)

TALK ABOUT A STRANGER  (1952)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: David Bradley

    Billy Gray, George Murphy, Nancy Davis, 

    Kurt Kasznar, Lewis Stone, Kathleen Freeman

Life lessons are learned when a young boy becomes convinced that a reclusive neighbor has poisoned his dog. Some of this plays like "To Kill a Mockingbird", if you just cut to the part about Boo Radley. I watched it with my colleague Ms. Applebaum, who thought the kid was out of control and needed to be locked up. That might sound harsh, but she has a point. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joel Coen

    Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Alex Hassell,

    Bertie Carvel, Brendan Gleeson, Corey Hawkins,

    Harry Melling, Moses Ingram, Kathryn Hunter

Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and Macbeth goes on a murderous rampage, hoping to dodge a witch's curse. (It doesn't do any good.) Duncan gets it in the throat, Macduff's wife and kids are slaughtered, and Mrs. Macbeth can't seem to get rid of that damned spot. It's blood everywhere, really, in black and white, with spare sets, ominous music by Carter Burwell, and lots of mist and fog. Apart from Frances cracking up, the character you won't forget real soon is the witch played by Kathryn Hunter. You'll see why.