Movie Buzzard

Sextette (1978)

2012-02-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

SEXTETTE (1978) ¢ 1/2

D: Ken Hughes

Mae West, Timothy Dalton, Tony Curtis,

Dom DeLouise, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton,

Walter Pidgeon, George Raft, Regis Philbin

A famous actress with an anachronistic wardrobe and a familiar purr in her voice checks into a London hotel for her honeymoon, but the demands of stardom and the attentions of numerous men conspire to keep her away from the bridal suite. Like some other legendarily godawful films, Mae West's last movie isn't necessarily as bad as its reputation. But it's still pretty bad. West was 83 when she made it, and numerous takes and some artful editing were required to cover for her inability to hit her marks and remember her lines. For all that, she pretty much pulls it off. She might look like some drag queen's grandmother, but she's still Mae West, the grand dame of sexual innuendo, inviting the boys to come up and see her sometime. It's an act nobody else could get away with. Beyond that, the picture's a mess, a jumble of campy cameos, ghastly musical numbers and gags that just don't fly. A geriatric curtain call for a cultural icon who maybe stayed in the game too long, but couldn't do or be anything else.

Hugo (2011)

2012-02-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

HUGO (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Martin Scorsese

Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz,

Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer,

Helen McCrory, Ray Winstone, Jude Law,

Richard Griffiths, Michal Stuhlberg, Frances de la Tour

An inventive kid living in the clockworks of a railroad station in 1930s Paris tries to repair a treasured museum piece - a mechanical man - which leads him to an old shopkeeper, the all-but-forgotten filmmaker Georges Méliès. This is Martin Scorsese's valentine to silent film, and he goes way back, to the Lumière brothers and that late-19th-century shot of the train pulling into the station. There's the shot of the two men dancing, and the shot from "The Great Train Robbery" of the outlaw firing his revolver into the camera, and, of course, there's Méliès. The kids' adventure story line is a departure for Scorsese, but it's unmistakably his work, a movie-lover's movie for the ages. It's action-crammed opening reel might be a little too busy, and some of the side characters and subplots barely get a chance to register, but if Scorsese's ambition sometimes exceeds what the script can grasp, who cares? His passion for the medium and its history is infectious, and the movie looks great, an amber-and-sepia journey back in time, and a tribute to the spirit of invention and magic that made cinema possible in the first place. The line connecting Méliès and Scorsese isn't such a long one, after all.

Previous Scobie Award Winners: Best Picture

2012-02-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

The Scobie Awards don't really exist, which doesn't matter much, because to date no Scobie winner has ever turned up to collect one. The Movie Buzzard does not expect that trend to change. The first Scobies were published 24 years ago in a DIY film annual called Flashback. For the record, here are the previous winners in the best picture category:

1988: "The Moderns"

1989: "Sidewalk Stories"

1990: "The Civil War"

1991: "Thelma & Louise"

1992: "Unforgiven"

1993: "Schindler's List"

1994: "Natural Born Killers"

1995: "The Usual Suspects"

1996: "Lone Star"

1997: "Brassed Off"

1998: "Pleasantville"

1999: "Run Lola Run"

2000: "Ghost Dog"

2001: "Amelie"

2002: "Gangs of New York"

2003: "Mystic River"

2004: "Control Room"

2005: "Good Night, And Good Luck"

2006: "Linda Linda Linda"

2007: "Atonement"

2008: "Milk"

2009: "In the Loop"

2010: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"

The 2011 Scobie Awards

2012-02-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

The Scobie Awards are named after Herman Scobie, a World War Two veteran and free-lance soldier of fortune who died under mysterious circumstances in a Paris hotel room in 1963. (See "Charade".)

Here are the Scobie Award winners for 2011:

Picture: "Hugo"

Actress: Eva Green, "Cracks"

Actor: André Wilms, "Le Havre"

Supporting Actress: Maibritt Saerens, "Happy, Happy"

Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill, "Moneyball"

Ensemble: "The Way Back"

Cameo: Martin Scorsese, "Hugo"

Director: Woody Allen, "Midnight In Paris"

Cinematography: Marcus Waterloo, "Black Field"

Musical Score: Sylvain Chomet, "The Illusionist"

Foreign Language Film: "Baarìa"

B Movie: "The Woman"

Documentary: "Page One: Inside the New York Times"

Revival: "Playtime"

Title Sequence: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

Trailer: "Red Cliff"

Print Ad: "Griff the Invisible"

Career Achievement Award: Lily Tomlin

Behind Locked Doors (1948)

2012-01-30T11:56:00.000-08:00

BEHIND LOCKED DOORS (1948) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Oscar Boetticher

Richard Carlson, Lucille Bremer, Douglas Fowley,

Ralf Harolde, Thomas Browne Henry, Tor Johnson

Efficiently paced, no-frills thriller about a private eye who has himself checked into a mental institution to investigate the disappearance of a crooked judge. There's got to be an easier way for a gumshoe to make $5,000. Mighty Tor Johnson plays one of the inmates. Oscar (Budd) Boetticher went on to direct a series of highly acclaimed westerns starring Randolph Scott.

Magic Trip (2011)

2012-01-27T16:29:00.000-08:00

MAGIC TRIP: KEN KESEY'S SEARCH FOR A KOOL PLACE (2011) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney

Postcards from the edge. There are few things more quintessentially American than a road trip, and it's safe to say there was never a road trip quite like the acid-fueled cross-country journey Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took in 1964 in a psychedelic school bus, with Kesey orchestrating the fun and games and Neal Cassady speeding along behind the wheel. This documentary captures some of what went on back then, but it's a scattershot account and the effect is a little like watching an old home movie of somebody else's party. The magic of the moment can never be recreated, with film or anything else, and whatever cosmic insight these people thought they were pulling out of the smoke-filled air, their personal foibles and romantic entanglements are as mundane as anybody else's. Still, they did all manage to be on board for one of the more celebrated side trips of the 1960s. That must've been one hell of a bus ride.

O. Henry's Full House (1952)

2012-01-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

O. HENRY'S FULL HOUSE (1952) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King,

Henry Koster, Jean Negulesco

Charles Laughton, David Wayne, Marilyn Monroe,

Dale Robertson, Richard Widmark, Gregory Ratoff,

Anne Baxter, Jean Peters, Fred Allen,

Jeanne Crain, Farley Granger, Oscar Levant

Five short films based on O. Henry stories, introduced by John Steinbeck. In "The Cop and the Anthem", Charles Laughton tries to get himself arrested, hoping to spend a comfortable three months in jail. In "The Clarion Call", Richard Widmark's a hoodlum and Dale Robertson's a straight-arrow cop. (Widmark's nasal laugh signals his presence before you even see him.) In "The Last Leaf", an avant-garde painter (Gregory Ratoff) switches to realism, inspired by a girl who appears to be dying. In "The Ransom of Red Chief", Fred Allen and Oscar Levant play con men whose hare-brained kidnapping scheme goes wrong at every turn. In "The Gift of the Magi", Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger exchange Christmas presents. You might guess where most of the stories are going before they get there, but that's part of the fun. Irony was O. Henry's stock in trade. He was a master at it.

Another Year (2010)

2012-01-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER YEAR (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Mike Leigh

Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville,

Oliver Maltman, Peter Wright, David Bradley,

Martin Savage, Karina Fernandez, Imelda Staunton,

Phil Davis, Michele Austin, Stuart McQuarrie

Another slice-of-life ensemble piece from Mike Leigh, who continues to make extraordinary movies about ordinary people. This one's about a small group of mostly older Britons, middle-class people in their early 60s, still working but looking toward the horizon at retirement, and beyond that the time when, as one of them puts it, they'll be history themselves. At the center of it are Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) a long-married couple who kid each other and dote on each other and demonstrably still have the hots for each other after 40 years of marriage. Then there's their son Joe, a good-natured guy who's 30 and still single and not terribly concerned about that. Ken, an old friend who looks like he's eating and drinking and smoking his way to an imminent heart attack. Mary, a coworker of Gerri's, who's on the hunt for a man (any man but Ken), and can put away the wine herself. And (eventually) Joe's girlfriend Katie, Tom's widowed brother Ronnie, Ronnie's belligerent son Carl, and a few more. A lot of it's just people talking, over drinks, or dinner, or tea, trying to find humor, and every now and then a solution, to life's everyday problems. They're not perfect, but they try. The whole cast is terrific, but the player who really gets your attention (maybe because her character demands it) is Lesley Manville as Mary. Mary's a lost soul and a lost cause, the kind of desperately needy relative or acquaintance who ultimately can't be helped, and will only bring grief to anybody who tries. It would be easy to take a role like that over the top, but Manville keeps it real, balanced on the edge, where every tic and twitch and darting look is painful.

The 10 Best Movies of 2011

2012-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

The following list was scraped together from the movies I saw last year, mostly in and around Seattle. Some were released previously in other places.

THE TEN BEST:

"Hugo"

"Another Year"

"Page One: Inside the New York Times"

"Midnight In Paris"

"Le Havre"

"Baarìa"

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

"The Way Back"

"Sound of Noise"

"Cracks"

SECRET TREASURES:

"Happy, Happy"

"Black Field"

"Troll Hunter"

"Apollo 18"

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"The Woman"

"Attack the Block"

"The Thing"

"Cowboys & Aliens"

BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN:

"Playtime"

"The Wolf Man"

"Raiders of the Lost Ark"

"The War Wagon"

FOUR FROM THE VIDEO STORE:

"Trigger"

"Howl"

"Ever After"

"All About Eve"

WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:

"Red State"

Pigalle (1994)

2012-01-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

PIGALLE (1994) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Karim Dridi

Véra Briole. Francis Renaud, Raymond Gil,

Bobby Pacha, Bianca Li, Philippe Ambrosini

Paris down and dirty, about a young couple going to hell in the city's red light district. This is not the romanticized Paris of Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly, or Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It's a shadowland of pimps and thieves, whores and hustlers, junkies and gunrunners, hoodlums and killers, every kind of predatory lowlife you'd never want to meet late at night in the city. It's a human sewer in which there's no redemption, and from which there's no escape. Dridi does an effective job of capturing all that, but whether you'll want to spend an hour and a half of your life there is another matter. You can practically smell the urine on the sidewalk.

Apollo 18 (2011)

2012-01-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

APOLLO 18 (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Gonzalo López-Gallego

Warren Christie, Ryan Roberts, Lloyd Owen

It's generally accepted that the last manned trip to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972. This movie imagines a follow-up flight, dispatched by the Defense Department on a mission so secret, even the astronauts don't know what's going on. When they get to the moon, they find out. It's yet another "found footage" horror movie, and it works better than most, at least partly because the blurry visuals and staticky sound approximate what we're used to from old space shots on television. It also helps that the astronauts are played by relatively unknown actors. It makes them seem more like real astronauts. The effects are visibly low-tech - the fuzzy cinematography and abrupt cutting are an asset there - and the suspense comes more from what you don't see, or kind of see, or maybe think you see, than anything that actually shows up on the screen. Just keep an eye on those moon rocks. And when you start to feel edgy and your eyes get real bloodshot, paranoid psychosis might be a logical response.

Marathon Man (1976)

2012-01-09T10:56:00.000-08:00

MARATHON MAN (1976) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: John Schlesinger

Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider,

Marthe Keller, William Devane, Jacques Marin

William Goldman's paranoid thriller about a grad student at Columbia who gets pulled into a nightmare involving spies, diamonds, Joe McCarthy, an oil truck, a Nazi death camp doctor and some seriously painful dental work. When Laurence Olivier lays out his instruments and starts to go to work on Dustin Hoffman's teeth, you might want to think about leaving the room.

Rango (2011)

2012-01-06T12:43:00.000-08:00

RANGO (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Gore Verbinski

A lizard on a family road trip drops onto the highway and out of his broken terrarium and wanders through the desert into the Wild West. In a dusty, godforsaken town called "Dirt", he gets involved in a war over water rights that mirrors the story in "Chinatown", complete with a wheelchair-bound villain transparently modeled on John Huston's Noah Cross. It's hard to tell what the intended audience for this is supposed to be. The references to older films will fly right by young kids, who might be frightened by some of the imagery and violence. But with its furry (and scaly) critters and cartoon cuteness, it's not playing just to grownups, either. Which doesn't make it a bad movie, just kind of a puzzling one for the marketing department. Roger Deakins helped with the cinematography, Hans Zimmer and a mariachi band of owls play around with the musical score, and there's an amusing encounter between the lizard (voiced by Johnny Depp) and another Depp character from a previous film. And for anybody who's watched even a couple of westerns in the last 50 years, wait till you see who turns up as "The Spirit of the West".

Final Reel 2011

2012-01-03T10:55:00.000-08:00

Dust to the wind:

ANNE FRANCIS, 80, actress
"Bad Day At Black Rock"
"The Blackboard Jungle"
"Forbidden Planet"

PETE POSTLETHWAITE, 64, actor

"The Usual Suspects"

"Brassed Off"

"Among Giants"

PETER YATES, 81, director

"Bullitt"

"The Deep"

"Murphy's War"

SUSANNAH YORK, 72, actress

"Freud"

"Tom Jones"

"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

JOHN BARRY, 77, composer

"The Lion In Winter"

"Out of Africa"

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service"

MARIA SCHNEIDER, 58, actress

"Last Tango In Paris"

"The Passenger"

"Mama Dracula"

LENA NYMAN, 66, actress

"I Am Curious (Yellow)"

"I Am Curious (Blue)"

"Autumn Sonata"

TURA SATANA, 72, actress

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

"The Doll Squad"

"The Astro-Zombies"

DAVID F. FRIEDMAN, 87, producer

"Blood Feast"

"Two Thousand Maniacs!"

"Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S."

ANNIE GIRARDOT, 79, actress

"The Dirty Game"

"No Time For Breakfast"

"The Piano Teacher"

JANE RUSSELL, 89, actress

"The Outlaw"

"The Paleface"

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"

CHARLES JARROTT, 83, director

"Anne of the Thousand Days"

"Mary, Queen of Scots"

"Lost Horizon"

MICHAEL GOUGH, 94, actor

"The Horse's Mouth"

"Sleepy Hollow"

"The Cherry Orchard"

ELIZABETH TAYLOR, 79, actress

"National Velvet"

"Cleopatra"

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

RICHARD LEACOCK, 89, director, cinematographer

"Bernstein In Israel"

"Monterey Pop"

"Lulu In Berlin"

JOE WIZAN, 76, producer

"Jeremiah Johnson"

"Tough Guys"

"Wrestling Ernest Hemingway"

FARLEY GRANGER, 85, actor

"Rope"

"They Live By Night"

"Strangers On a Train"

SIDNEY LUMET, 86, director

"12 Angry Men"

"Dog Day Afternoon"

"The Verdict"

KEVIN JARRE, 56, writer

"Glory"

"Tombstone"

"The Devil's Own"

JACKIE COOPER, 88, actor

"Skippy"

"The Champ"

"Superman"

ARTHUR LAURENTS, 92, writer

"The Turning Point"

"The Way we were"

"Rope"

WILLIAM CAMPBELL, 87, actor

"Backlash"

"Night of Evil"

"Dementia 13"

YVETTE VICKERS, 81, actress

"Attack of the 50 Foot Woman"

"Attack of the Giant Leeches"

"Hud"

DOLORES FULLER, 88, actress

"Jail Bait"

"Glen or Glenda?"

"Bride of the Monster"

MARY MURPHY, 80, actress

"The Wild One"

"The Mad Magician"

"The Desperate Hours"

LEONARD KASTLE, 82, writer, director

"The Honeymoon Killers"

BILL HUNTER, 71, actor

"Gallipoli"

"Strictly Ballroom"

"Australia"

JAMES ARNESS, 88, actor

"The Thing From Another World"

"Them!"

"Big Jim McLain"

LAURA ZISKIN, 61, producer

"Pretty Woman"

"As Good As It Gets"

"Spider-Man"

PETER FALK, 83, actor

"Husbands"

"The Princess Bride"

"Wings of Desire"

EDITH FELLOWS, 88, actress

"Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch"

"Jane Eyre" (1934)

"Pennies From Heaven" (1936)

ROBERTS BLOSSOM, 87, actor

"Escape From Alcatraz"

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

"The Quick and the Dead"

MICHAEL CACOYANNIS, 89, director

"Zorba the Greek"

"The Cherry Orchard"

"The Day the Fish Came Out"

G.D. SPRADLIN, 99, actor

"Apocalypse Now"

"North Dallas Forty"

"Ed Wood"

POLLY PLATT, 72, producer

"Bottle Rocket"

"I'll Do Anything"

"Broadcast News"

BUBBA SMITH, 66, actor

"Police Academy"

"Stroker Ace"

"Black Moon Rising"

RAOUL RUIZ, 70, director

"Three Sad Tigers"

"Mysteries of Lisbon"

"Klimt"

GEORGE KUCHAR, 69, director

"Hush, Hush, Sweet Harlot"

"The Fury of Frau Frankenstein"

"Honey Bunnies On Ice"

CLIFF ROBERTSON, 88, actor

"Charly"

"Obsession"

"Three Days of the Condor"

CHARLES NAPIER, 75, actor

"The Grifters"

"Philadelphia"

"The Silence of the Lambs"

DIANE CILENTO, 77, actress

"Tom Jones"

"Hombre"

"The Wicker Man" (1973)

FRITZ MANES, 79, producer

"Tightrope"

"Sudden Impact"

"Pale Rider"

JOHN NEVILLE, 86, actor

"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen"

"The Fifth Element"

"The Statement"

KEN RUSSELL, 84, director

"Tommy"

"The Devils"

"Women In Love"

HARRY MORGAN, 96, actor

"The Ox-Bow Incident"

"High Noon"

"Inherit the Wind"

BERT SCHNEIDER, 78, producer

"Easy Rider"

"Five Easy Pieces"

"The Last Picture Show"

ROBERT EASTON, 81, actor, dialect coach

"Working Girl"

"Paint Your Wagon"

"The Giant Spider Invasion"

PEDRO ARMENDARIZ JR., 71, actor

"Old Gringo"

"Tombstone"

"The Mask of Zorro"

CHEETAH, 80, actor

"Tarzan the Ape Man"

"Tarzan and His Mate"

"I've had a good career, a lot of laughs. I don't know if that's enough, but it beats coal mining."

Harry Morgan

Radio Days (1987)

2011-12-31T17:28:00.000-08:00

RADIO DAYS  (1987) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
   D: Woody Allen
   Mia Farrow, Seth Green, Julie Kavner,
   Dianne Wiest, Michael Tucker, Josh Mostel,
   Wallace Shawn, Danny Aiello, Jeff Daniels,
   Tony Roberts, Diane Keaton, Kitty Carlisle Hart
Woody Allen's loving, episodic memoir about his time growing up in Brooklyn before and during World War Two, when nobody had much money and the radio was everybody's window on the world. This ends up being a lot less about Woody Allen and a lot more about an era that's fading away, along with those who remember it. A beautifully reconstructed time capsule, and one of Woody's best movies.

Hurt (2003)

2011-12-29T12:21:00.000-08:00

HURT (2003) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Mark Romanek
In what was probably one of the last things he did, a visibly frail Johnny Cash sings Trent Reznor's "Hurt", while sifting through the memories and souvenirs in a personal roadside museum. They say that when you're dying, your life passes before your eyes, and that's exactly what seems to be going on here. In the film's eeriest image, wife June Carter, who died before Cash did, stands at his shoulder like a guardian angel, waiting to take the old man home. He looks like he's ready to go.

Walk the Line (2005)

2011-12-26T18:06:00.000-08:00

WALK THE LINE (2005) ¢ ¢ 1/2
   D: James Mangold
   Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Shelby Lynne,
   Robert Patrick, Ginnifer Goodwin, Tyler Hamilton
Johnny Cash gets the Hollywood biopic treatment in a movie that follows the Man in Black from the cotton fields of Arkansas (and a horrifying sawmill accident that killed his older brother) through a hitch in the Air Force, his early days with Sun Records, marriage, kids, addiction, jail, music and the road, and most significantly, his ongoing romantic pursuit of muse, collaborator and eventual life partner June Carter. It's a well-intended misfire that covers most of the bases without ever capturing the essence of Johnny Cash. Phoenix plays Cash as a sullen, self-pitying jerk (which he no doubt sometimes was), but mostly misses his dark, playful wit. In the movie, Cash seems to suffer for his sins while he's still committing them, and while transgression and atonement were a big part of his mystique, Cash understood the flip side, too: that sinning was fun, or folks wouldn't keep on doing it. He might've come at you like the wounded voice of God, but you could tell he'd danced with the devil a few times, too, and his songs let you know he'd had a good time, to boot. Give Phoenix credit for taking the risk and doing his own singing, but watching the movie is like going to a bar to check out a decent cover band. It gets the look right sometimes, and sometimes comes close to the sound, but it's not the real thing.

How To Murder Your Wife (1965)

2011-12-23T12:24:00.000-08:00

HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE (1965) ¢ ¢

D: Richard Quine

Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas,

Claire Trevor, Eddie Mayehoff, Jack Albertson

A happily single comic-strip artist gets drunk at a friend's bachelor party and wakes up the next day married to the girl who jumped out of the cake. Before you can say, "What's the problem when the girl looks like Virna Lisi?", the guy's moping around grumping about how miserable he is, and hatching an elaborate plot to do her in. You can sense the potential for black comedy in this - imagine Jack Lemmon as Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" - but what you get is a mean and mostly unfunny sex farce in which all the wives are manipulative bitches and all the husbands are henpecked fools. All sarcasm. No wit.

Plagues and Pleasures On the Salton Sea (2004)

2011-12-20T16:14:00.000-08:00

PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA

D: Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer (2004) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

A funny but horrifying postcard documentary, narrated by John Waters, about an evolving ecological train wreck: the perfect storm of ignorance, greed, bad planning, bad luck and the indifferent, unyielding power of nature converging around California's biggest inland body of water, the Salton Sea. Situated below sea level, just upwind from Palm Springs (bad news for Palm Springs), the sea was created by flooding from the Colorado River and polluted by runoff from nearby farms. Once thriving, promoted as California's Riviera, its main features today are the hulks of old boats and old businesses, 120-degree heat, water with a salt content higher than the ocean's, welfare recipients, crusty eccentrics, decay and dead fish. And with the salinity of the water increasing year by year, it's only going to get worse. Congressman Sonny Bono tried to do something about it, but then he ran into a tree. Sonny used to be the mayor of Palm Springs, too, of course. Maybe he knew which way the wind was blowing.

Number 17 (1932)

2011-12-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

NUMBER 17 (1932) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Alfred Hitchcock

Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, John Stuart,

Barry Jones, Anne Casson, Donald Calthrop

Early Hitchcock, part suspense comedy and part knockabout farce, about some shady characters who come together in an empty house on a dark and windy night. Roles and identities keep changing right up to the end, and the extended action set piece that wraps things up is a high-speed chase involving a hijacked bus and a runaway train. At 63 minutes, the movie moves right along, too.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

2011-12-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE (2010)
D: Jalmari Helander ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

Onni Tommila, Tommi Korpela,

Rauno Juvonen, Ilmari Järvenpää

There's the frozen north and there's the frozen north, and then there's Lapland in the north of Finland, which is about as north and as frozen as you'd ever want to get. That's where this strange story takes place. It starts out with some sort of research excavation into a desolate, snow-covered mountain, which leads to the discovery of the world's most imposing grave, the final resting place of Santa Claus. Apparently, this Claus wasn't the jolly old elf you know from Clement Moore, but a storybook demon, and while you never get a clear look at Santa himself, you do get a couple hundred old elves running around, and they're scary enough, stealing the local children and making a real mess of the local reindeer herd. It's the strangest, darkest, least cute-and-cozy Santa Claus movie ever, and if you're in the mood for it, one of the funniest. Another odd thing: There are no female characters at all. Not one. It's like this twisted, frozen universe where all you've got are men and boys and ice and snow and elves and reindeer and the cold mountain grave of Santa Claus. And gingerbread. Don't go into this movie without some gingerbread.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

2011-12-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: William A. Wellman

Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Dana Andrews,

Anthony Quinn, Mary Beth Hughes, Jane Darwell.

A couple of cowpokes reluctantly join a posse riding out after some rustlers, only to end up on the short end of the argument when the posse turns into a lynch mob. William Wellman's spare, gripping indictment of mob justice, a classic western based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. There's a lot of Tom Joad in Fonda's incorruptible cowboy, and a lot of Henry Fonda in both of them. Harry Morgan, then in his 20s, plays Fonda's sidekick, the best movie role of his career.

Harry Morgan

(1915-2011)

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

2011-12-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Andrew Adamson

Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley,

Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy,

Jim Broadbent, Kiran Shah, James Cosmo

The Disney version of the much-loved C.S. Lewis tale about four kids who find the doorway to an ice-bound fantasyland in a wardrobe full of old fur coats. This hasn't got the obsessive craftsmanship Peter Jackson brought to the "Lord of the Rings" movies, but on the level of a children's story it hooks you just the way the book did, and Tilda Swinton as the coldly psychotic White Witch rates a spot next to Margaret Hamilton in the Wicked Witch Hall of Fame. The Christian symbolism can be heavy-handed (it goes with the territory), but it's worth noting that in the final confrontation with the White Witch, the Christ figure, Aslan, doesn't turn the other cheek. He rips her face off.

Naked Edge/Take 2

2011-12-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

Dennis Hopper and Amy Irving

in "Carried Away"

Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil

in "Walkabout"

Keith Carradine and Valentina Vargas

in "Street of No Return"

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe

in "Antichrist"

Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello

in "A History of Violence"

Marina Hands and Jean Louis Coullo'ch

in "Lady Chatterley"

David Wenham and Susie Porter

in "Better Than Sex"

Helen Mirren and Alan Howard

in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"

Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox

in "Intimacy"

Veronica Cartwright and Stephen Davies

in "Inserts"

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

2011-12-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Ken Russell

Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg,

Sammi Davis, Peter Capaldi, Stratford Johns

The old dark cave where evil lurks . . . the wicked priestess preparing the ritual sacrifice to honor the undead . . . the innocent maiden, stripped to her underwear, writhing at the end of a rope . . . and waiting in the pit below, the legendary monster, the White Worm . . . A lurid, tongue-in-cheek horror show, based on Bram Stoker's last novel and catered by Ken Russell, who never did anything, except to excess. Donohoe bares more than her fangs as the sleek, serpentine vampire.

Ken Russell

(1927-2011)

The Statement (2003)

2011-11-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

THE STATEMENT (2003) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Norman Jewison

Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam,

Noam Jenkins, Charlotte Rampling, Matt Craven,

Alan Bates, John Neville, Ciaran Hinds,

David De Keyser, Frank Finlay, Edward Petherbridge

Michael Caine plays an old Frenchman on the run from his past and the evil shit he did as a collaborator during World War Two. Tilda Swinton plays the investigating judge who's determined to track him down, if a heart attack or some hired assassin doesn't kill him first. What makes this interesting, beyond the cat-and-mouse game, is that while the characters are French, the actors playing them are British. That won't please hard-core Francophiles, or fans of suspended disbelief, but it's a fine cast, and the locations, all over France, make a real nice backdrop for the chase.

John Neville

(1925-2011)

David and Bathsheba (1951)

2011-11-26T15:59:00.000-08:00

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA (1951) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Henry King

Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Raymond Massey,

Kieron Moore, James Robertson Justice, Jayne Meadows

A former shepherd, now the king of Israel, fiddles around with the wife of an army commander and learns what a harsh, unforgiving bastard that Old Testament God can be. A slow, stately biblical romance from the time before CinemaScope, which didn't stop the marketing department at 20th Century Fox from calling it "A Goliath of a Motion Picture!" Slog your way through it if you want to, or to save time, just read the Second Book of Samuel.

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

2011-11-23T18:54:00.000-08:00

LINDA LINDA LINDA (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Nobuhiro Yamashita

Doona Bae, Yu Kashii,

Aki Maeda, Shiori Sekine

A captivating little sleeper from Japan, about an all-girl high-school rock-&-roll band looking for a new lead vocalist and finding her in a Korean exchange student who's not exactly fluent in Japanese. A movie that, without seeming to do anything special, or even much of anything at all, totally gets what it's like to be a teenager. Winning performances by all four bandmates, and if you're not humming the title tune by the time it's over, you're either deaf or dead.

Age of Consent (1969)

2011-11-20T11:58:00.000-08:00

AGE OF CONSENT (1969) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Michael Powell

James Mason, Helen Mirren, Jack MacGowran,

Neva Carr-Glyn, Michael Boddy, Frank Thring

Powell and Mason teamed up to produce this idyll, set on an island off the Great Barrier Reef, and starring Mason as a painter happily on leave from the city and a young, naked Helen Mirren as the local girl who becomes his model and muse. Whether the scenery on view is Dame Helen or Dunk Island, it sure is nice to look at. Mirren's first movie, and Powell's last.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

2011-11-18T17:54:00.000-08:00

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog introduces you to the world's oldest discovered art - cave paintings found in France in the 1990s, dating back some 30,000 years. The paintings are so accomplished, and so well-preserved, you wonder how they could possibly be authentic. With their realistic shadings and sense of proportion, and the contours of the cave walls providing an extra dimension and sometimes even the illusion of movement, they don't seem primitive at all. Herzog, viewing them with a filmmaker's eye and shooting them with a 3-D camera, even suggests that one eight-legged beast could be an example of "proto-cinema." The movie leaves you with a sense of amazement and a lot of unanswered questions. Like, how did the artists who painted the lions and leopards and rhinos and mammoths get close enough, while the animals were presumably still breathing, to get the look just right? The miracle's not just that the paintings survived into the current millennium. It's that the Stone-Age Gauguins and Picassos who created them survived their own research.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

2011-11-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Alan Crosland

Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland,

Eugenie Besserer, William Demarest, Roscoe Karns

Al Jolson was a vaudeville headliner who made a singular mark on movies with just one film - this one. He plays a cantor's son torn between his inflexible father's demand that he sing in the synagogue and his own unquenchable passion for jazz. (To what extent Jolson's music could be considered jazz is a matter for musicologists.) It's an odd thing to watch, shifting between silent melodrama and primitive sound, showcasing Jolson's arm-waving exuberance, and closing with the star singing "Mammy" in blackface. But it marks the pivotal moment in the transition from silents to sound, and its impact was immediate and irreversible. Within two or three years, every studio in Hollywood had converted to sound, and movies would never be the same.

The Illusionist (2010)

2011-11-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

THE ILLUSIONIST (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Sylvain Chomet

A French animated feature based on an unfilmed screenplay by Jacques Tati, about an aging music hall magician who ends up in Scotland, where there's barely enough work to get by on, let alone provide for the servant girl who's moved into his life. True to Tati, it's done in pantomime, with music and sound effects and a few incidental words in a variety of languages. It's whimsical in a way only animated movies (0r Jacques Tati movies) can be, but it's not your typical cartoon for children. Its themes are more in line with real life. Sometimes, matter-of-factly, bad things happen, and a happy ending is not guaranteed. It's funny and it looks great and it's emotionally honest and it captures a time in the late 1950s, when the music halls were closing, television and rock & roll were taking over, and the old clowns and ventriloquists and rabbit-in-the-hat magic acts were running out of time. Highlight: when the magician walks into a cinema where Tati's "Mon Oncle" is playing, comes face-to-face with his live-action doppelgänger, watches for a moment, and walks back outside.

Quicksand (1950)

2011-11-09T11:37:00.000-08:00

QUICKSAND (1950) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Irving Pichel

Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre,

Barbara Bates, Taylor Holmes, Minerva Urecal

Mickey Rooney plays a garage mechanic who borrows $20 from the till to finance a hot date. Nothing goes right from then on, not that you expect it to. This is film noir, after all. And there's a reason it's called "Quicksand".

V For Vendetta (2006)

2011-11-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

V FOR VENDETTA (2006) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: James McTeigue

Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea,

John Hurt, Stephen Fry, Rupert Graves,

Sinead Cusack, Tim Pigott-Smith, Eddie Marsan

Sympathy for the devil, or at least for the terrorist in the Guy Fawkes mask. A subversive, futuristic thriller set in a totalitarian society where an acquiescent population has traded freedom for the illusion of security, the government rules through secrecy and fear, and owning a copy of the Koran is punishable by death. Based on Alan Moore's graphic novel, it's a lot less concerned with blowing stuff up than with making you think. It blows stuff up, too, of course, at the beginning and the end, while daring to suggest that there might be more to terrorism than mindless evil, and that certain governments may, in fact, have it coming to them. Hugo Weaving plays V, the man behind the mask. Natalie Portman plays a television production assistant who becomes his protégée, protector, soulmate and confidante. Stephen Rea plays the police inspector who uncovers more than the government wants him to know as he tries to track V down. John Hurt, in a stark reversal from his role in "1984", plays Big Brother. The music threatens to overpower the dialogue at times, but the message comes through loud and clear. A great movie to keep on hand for those times when you feel like blowing up a building yourself. Watch for the references to "A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Grapes of Wrath". Penny for the Guy?

Screen Test/Take 2

2011-11-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

Match the following actors with their real names:

1. Boris Karloff

2. Kirk Douglas

3. Peter Lorre

4. Tony Curtis

5. John Wayne

6. Robert Taylor

7. Cary Grant

8. Michael Caine

9. Roy Rogers

10. Ray Milland

a. Archibald Leach

b. Marion Morrison

c. Reginald Truscott-Jones

d. Maurice Mickelwhite

e. Issur Danielovitch

f. William Henry Pratt

g. Leonard Slye

h. Bernard Schwartz

i. Laszlo Löwenstein

j. Spangler Arlington Brugh

Answers:

1-f / 2-e / 3-i / 4-h / 5-b / 6-j / 7-a / 8-d / 9-g / 10-c

House On Haunted Hill (1958)

2011-10-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1958) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: William Castle

Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Elisha Cook Jr.,

Richard Long, Carolyn Craig, Alan Marshall

A mysterious millionaire invites five guests to spend the night in a haunted mansion, with the promise that whoever survives till morning will take home $10,000. So you get 75 minutes of creaking doors, guttering candles, thunder and lightning, loaded guns in miniature coffins, severed heads, blood dripping from the ceiling, an organ that plays itself, a vat of acid in the cellar, Elisha Cook Jr. acting fidgety, and Vincent Price. None of it's especially scary. William Castle was an inventive (and shameless) B-movie marketeer with a gift for turning schlock gimmicks into quick profits. "House On Haunted Hill" was his showcase for "Emergo", which involved a skeleton planted somewhere in the theater darting out toward the audience at a particular point in the film. Theaters sold tickets and popcorn. Moviegoers screamed and laughed. Castle collected his money. Everybody had a good time. And except for the rare midnight screening on Halloween, "Emergo" never showed up again.

Nowhere Boy (2009)

2011-10-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

NOWHERE BOY (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Sam Taylor-Wood

Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff

The early days of John Lennon, as a bespectacled kid in late-'50s Liverpool, shuffling between his caring but straight-laced Aunt Mimi and his caring but unbalanced mother Julia. There's a school suspension relating to a pornographic magazine, and banjo lessons from his mum, and Aunt Mimi buys John his first guitar, and he forms a rock-&-roll band called the Quarrymen, and then Paul and George join the group, and the rest, of course, is history. There's some overdone melodrama here, not that John's life didn't have some of that, but mostly it's a sweetly evocative portrait of the artist as a Beatle-in-the-making. Aaron Johnson effectively captures Lennon in all his funny, arrogant, impish, prickly complexity, and Beatles fans will have a good time picking out incidental references to the songs he'd write later on. Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas are annoyingly good as the two older women in Lennon's life.

Quintet (1979)

2011-10-19T17:43:00.000-07:00

QUINTET (1979) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Robert Altman

Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey,

Vittorio Gassman, Nina Van Pallandt, Brigitte Fossey

Cryptic, ice-age sci-fi about a seal hunter (Paul Newman) who walks in out of a frozen wasteland to look for work in the city, because there are no more seals to hunt. In the city, icicles hang down everywhere. Packs of wild dogs feast on corpses left in the streets. Food and fuel are scarce. There is no work. Instead, everybody plays Quintet, a board game that both reflects and determines the fates of its players. It's hard to know what to make of this, but it's definitely not like anything else, terse and ghoulish, somber and playful, one of Altman's most mystifying visions, and probably the strangest thing Newman ever did. Filmed in the middle of a Canadian winter, in and around the crumbling remains of the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, it doesn't look like anything else, either.

Micmacs (2009)

2011-10-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

MICMACS (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Jean Pierre Jeunet

Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon, Julie Ferrier,

André Dussolier, Yolande Moreau, Omar Sy,

Marie-Julie Baup, Nicolas Marié, Michel Crèmandés

This movie opens with a soldier somewhere out in the desert, trying to defuse a land mine. The mine goes off and the soldier is killed. Flash ahead 20 years, and the soldier's son, now grown up and clerking in a Paris video store, gets shot in the head during a robbery. The clerk recovers, with a bullet still lodged in his skull, and joins small band of eccentrics living under a junk yard, where he hatches an elaborate plan to get back at the weapons manufacturers who made both the mine and the bullet. Which could be the setup for a shoot-'em-up action flick, but it's not. It's a comedy, like what you might get if Terry Gilliam made a Buster Keaton movie (or maybe the other way around), by the same guy who made "Amélie" and "Delicatessen". Like John Waters, Jeunet has a real affection for his misfit characters and a cinematic vision that's uniquely his own, and he sees to it that the merchants of death get what's coming to them in a way that's both funny and satisfying. Humanity triumphs, if only for a moment, and only on film. Justice is served.

Gold (1972)

2011-10-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

GOLD (1972) ¢ 1/2

D: Bill Desloge, Bob Levis

Del Close, Garry Goodrow, Caroline Parr,

Sam Ridge, Orville Schell, Dorothy Schmidt

Hmmmm . . . okay . . . let's see . . . There's a gold rush. And a train. And a blonde in a tight white dress. And a corrupt politician. And a crooked cop. And a guy on crutches. And some people called the Mud People, rolling around naked in the mud. And a revolution. And none of it makes any sense, because everybody who worked on this (apparently) was higher than a kite. It's an hour and a half of narrative incoherence and improvised gibberish, next to unwatchable, except for the naked hippie chicks and some tunes by the MC5. Good luck getting through it all, if you're not high on something yourself. Filmed in 1968, but not released theatrically till years later. You can kind of see why.

A Single Man (2009)

2011-10-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

A SINGLE MAN (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Tom Ford

Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult,

Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena, Paulette Lamori

Colin Firth, looking strangely a lot like Nelson Rockefeller, plays George Falconer, a gay English professor coming apart in the wake of his longtime lover's unexpected death. The year is 1962 - the Cuban Missile Crisis is playing out in the background - and for men like George, being closeted isn't an option. It's a fact of life. Firth, who plays several key scenes in tight close-up, gives a wrenching performance, showing the anguish of a man trying desperately not to let his anguish show, and Ford's visual style has a nice way of showing the world from George's vantage point. When he's checking out a cute young guy, there's no doubt what he's looking at, because that's what you're looking at, too. The flashbacks tend to be in bright colors or black and white, with more muted tones for the later scenes. And the straight neighbors across the street are shot in gauzy slow motion, reinforcing the professor's sense of isolation. He's as closed off from their world as they are from his.

Hell and High Water (1954)

2011-10-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

HELL AND HIGH WATER (1954) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Samuel Fuller

Richard Widmark, Bella Darvi, Victor Francen,

Cameron Mitchell, Gene Evans, David Wayne

Two-fisted action with Widmark as a submarine captain on a mission to investigate some suspected nuclear activity in the Arctic. An exciting Cold War thriller from a time when the only good commie was a dead one and everybody knew it. Bella Darvi plays the only woman on board, a dishy scientist who appears to be fluent in all of the world's languages.

Four Lions (2010)

2011-10-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

FOUR LIONS (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Christopher Morris

Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Riz Achmed,

Adeel Akhtar, Preena Kalidas, Mohammad Aquil

A British black comedy about a small band of self-styled jihadis who decide to become suicide bombers. First they have to assemble the means to make the bombs (they need lots of bleach), and then there's the matter of deciding what, besides themselves, they want to blow up. (Possible targets include a pharmacy, the Internet, a mosque and the London Marathon.) So, okay, these aren't the brightest amateur terrorists on the block, a liability that's only slightly offset by the fact that they're completely delusional. You've got to admire a movie that would take on terrorism as a subject for comedy in the first place. But you've really got to admire one that would take a premise like this to its logical conclusion, which this film does. I saw it in a small theater with about ten other people, half of them watching in stony silence and the other half laughing hysterically. Me, I was one of the ones laughing. When a trainee in a terrorist camp in Pakistan tries to fire a rocket at an American drone and accidentally kills Osama Bin Laden instead, what's not funny about that?

Mr. Moto's Gamble (1938)

2011-10-02T20:32:00.000-07:00

MR. MOTO'S GAMBLE (1938) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: James Tinling

Peter Lorre, Keye Luke, Lynn Bari,

Maxie Rosenbloom, Ward Bond, Harold Huber,

Douglas Fowley, Jayne Reagan, Lon Chaney Jr.

Peter Lorre was one of the screen's most distinctive character actors, a gnome-like figure who alternated between leads and supporting roles throughout his career. In the late 1930s, he got to play the impeccably smooth-mannered detective Mr. Moto, in a series of mysteries based on the novels of John P. Marquand. In this entry, Mr. Moto takes on the case of a boxer killed in the ring. It's a lively B-movie whodunit, and while Lorre was Hungarian and Marquand's sleuth is Japanese, you wouldn't want anybody else to play Mr. Moto. It started shooting as a Charlie Chan film, and went over to Mr. Moto when Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan, backed out. Which explains why Keye Luke, Charlie Chan's #1 son, shows up here, too, doing broad comic relief with ex-pug Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom.

Mad Cowgirl (2006)

2011-09-29T20:17:00.000-07:00

MAD COWGIRL (2006) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Gregory Hatanaka

Sarah Lassez, James Duval, Linton Semage,

Walter Koenig, Devon Odessa, Vic Chao

Sarah Lassez, who looks enough like Julia Roberts to be her her sister, plays a meat inspector named Therese, whose voracious appetite for the stuff she inspects could be leading to symptoms of mad cow disease. A chaotic social satire in multiple languages that gets by for an hour or so by taking random potshots at televangelists, Hong Kong action movies, self-serving political hacks (on C-Span, playing themselves) and, most damningly, the beef industry. (The odds that you'll want to go out for a steak after watching it are minimal.) Eventually, the lack of anything close to a coherent story takes its toll, and the movie concludes with a spoof of "Kill Bill" that might seem more inspired, or less redundant, if "Kill Bill" weren't already a spoof of itself. To the extent that the film holds together at all, it's because of Lassez, who tears into her role the way Therese might tear into a prime fillet. No Julia Roberts movie ever left its heroine covered in this much blood.

Movie Star Moment: John Wayne

2011-09-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

I don't even remember what movie this was in. It was something I saw in an Army/Air Force theater around 1970 with my buddy Dave, a fellow airman and a big John Wayne fan. It's a real short scene, really just a shot, of John Wayne walking into a saloon. That's all. Just the Duke walking in through the swinging doors. The thing was, John Wayne had a way of walking that wasn't like anybody else. He had a barrel chest and no hips and a midsection that expanded some as he got older. And he had this distinct way of walking, where his arms would swing from side to side across his body as he moved. So when he walked into the saloon swinging his arms like that, Dave and I broke out laughing. Nobody else did. Except for the movie's soundtrack and the faint whir of the projector, you could've heard a pin drop. And then we remembered where we were: in an armed forces theater, with the Vietnam War going on a few thousand miles away, surrounded by people who probably didn't care much for these two low-ranking goofballs laughing at the Duke. We were both real quiet after that, and while I've pretty much forgotten the rest of the picture, I still remember that shot of John Wayne walking into the saloon. We weren't laughing at the Duke. We were laughing because it was perfect. It was pure John Wayne.

Rio Grande (1950)

2011-09-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

RIO GRANDE (1950) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: John Ford

John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson,

Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen, Claude Jarman Jr.,

J. Carrol Naish, Chill Wills, Grant Withers

The final entry in John Ford's cavalry trilogy, with the Duke as an Army colonel fighting Indians along the Mexican border and haunted by a Civil War incident that cost him his family. The story ultimately has less to do with the Indian war than the conflict within Wayne's character. Like Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers", Kirby York is a man whose pathological sense of duty - in this case to the Army - is integral to his heroism, even as it cuts him off from those he most wants to protect. The resolution might be less unforgiving here, but the underlying elements are pure John Ford: the suggestion of something unfathomably dark in a movie that's almost meditative in its sentimentality.

Directed By John Ford (1971/2006)

2011-09-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD (1971/2006) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Peter Bogdanovich

When he made the original version of this, Peter Bogdanovich managed to coax John Ford out to Monument Valley, got him to sit in front of a camera for a while, and asked him a bunch of questions about his long life as a director of Hollywood movies. Even more remarkably, Ford actually answered some of the questions. (A typical Ford response, when asked how he filmed a particular scene: "With a camera.") Bogdanovich also sat down with Henry Fonda, James Stewart and John Wayne to get their Ford stories, and hired Orson Welles to do the narration. That was in 1971. In 2006, Bogdanovich recut the picture, integrating new interview footage (Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Walter Hill) with what he'd done before. The result is one of the best movies ever made about the movies, and maybe the truest picture we'll ever get of the irascible, contradictory Ford. Ford's reputation for meanness is well documented, and just about everybody who worked for him became a target of his legendary cruelty sooner or later. At the same time, they all seem to be glad for the experience, and there's real insight in what they have to say. All of it's illuminated with film clips - lots of them - corresponding to whatever aspect of Ford's career is being discussed. The riverbank scene in "Two Rode Together" is a highlight, but the most revealing moment is a startlingly personal one captured by accident. It's a conversation between the dying Ford and Katharine Hepburn, recorded on an audio machine neither of them knew was running. "I love you," Ford says at one point. "It's mutual," Hepburn replies. Nothing fancy. No fuss. Straight to the point. A simple exchange between two old friends (and ex-lovers), one of them close to the end. Just the kind of thing you could put in a John Ford movie.

Chocolate (2008)

2011-09-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

CHOCOLATE (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Prachya Pinkaew

JeeJa Yanin, Pongpat Wachirabunjong,

Hiroshi Abe, Taphon Phopwandee

This was made in Thailand and I watched it without subtitles, so I couldn't tell you everything that's going on. The main character's a young deaf girl whose singular preoccupations are kick boxing and the Thai equivalent of M&Ms. By the time the movie's over, she's wiped the floor with about 300 guys, just like Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill", but without the bright yellow jumpsuit. The kid's good, and as long as she's beating the shit out of people, you really don't need the subtitles. The footage that plays with the end credits suggests that the first-aid unit got plenty of work during the shoot.

Too Late the Hero (1970)

2011-09-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

TOO LATE THE HERO (1970) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Robert Aldrich

Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Denholm Elliott,

Ian Bannen, Percy Herbert, Harry Andrews,

Ronald Fraser, Henry Fonda, Lance Percival

A reluctant American officer, assigned to a British combat unit in the New Hebrides, heads out into the jungle with a bunch of misfit commandos to take out a Japanese radio transmitter in advance of a planned U.S. attack. To some extent, this parallels "The Dirty Dozen" (another Aldrich movie), but the mood is more somber and there's a grim edge to the violence. Robertson's good as the cynical Yank, but it's Caine's insolent self-assurance as a Cockney medic that keeps you hooked. When Caine sticks a rifle in Ronald Fraser's face, and fixes him with those unblinking eyes, and tells him matter-of-factly that he'd just as soon shoot him as the Japanese, you believe it, and Fraser does, too. The attitudes reflect the time the movie was made more than the time it's about. The war might be World War Two, but the sensibility is unmistakably Vietnam.

Cliff Robertson

(1923-2011)

Goya's Ghosts (2007)

2011-09-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

GOYA'S GHOSTS (2007) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Milos Forman

Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman,

Randy Quaid, Michael Lonsdale, Blanca Portillo

It's clear from the opening frames of this that Milos Forman has spent a lot of time looking at the work of Francisco Goya. Enough to wonder what stories might be behind the artist's startling images. Enough to write a script and make a movie about them. Stellan Skarsgård plays Goya, working incessantly, turning out paintings, sketches and prints, and eluding the Inquisition at least partly because he's the official portrait painter to the Spanish king. Not so lucky is his model and muse (Natalie Portman), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who's arrested, imprisoned, tortured and forced to confess to an offense she knows nothing about. Also unlucky in the long run is her inquisitor (Javier Bardem), whose intelligence and ruthlessness can't save him from the shifting currents of history. It plays like one of those 19th-century novels where characters keep turning up and finding each other again and again over years and years, no matter the odds against them. Portman, who you'd think would've suffered enough in "V For Vendetta", emerges from 15 years of captivity in ruins, her beauty gone, her spirit, her mind and apparently her jaw shattered beyond repair. A ghost, for sure. It's not a great movie, but it's a good one, and its best moments are the ones that show Goya at work, scratching with charcoal or dabbing with paint, an eyewitness to a terrible time, who had the skill and the luck and the passion to record what he saw for the rest of us.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2011-09-08T20:24:00.000-07:00

SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983) ¢ ¢

D: Robert Hiltzik

Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten,

Mike Kellin, Desiree Gould

Gender-bent horror thriller about a serial killer terrorizing a summer camp. Slasher movie rule #18: If you're hanging out at a summer camp where your fellow campers and counselors keep getting bumped off in horrible ways, it's probably not a good idea to make fun of that weird, quiet girl who watched her dad and brother die in a grisly boating accident out on the lake eight years before. Something bad is bound to happen if you do.

Midnight In Paris (2011)

2011-09-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Woody Allen

Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams,

Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen,

Nina Ariadna, Léa Seydoux, Carla Bruni,

Adrien Brody, Corey Stoll, Kathy Bates,

Alison Pill, Tom Hiddleston, Adrien de Van,

Marcial Di Fonzo, Yves Heck, David Lowe

Woody Allen's valentine to Paris starts out with a series of idealized, picture-postcard shots of the city. The story has to do with an American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) and his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) who have checked into the kind of luxury hotel the rest of us will never be able to afford, to spend a few days playing tourist, sometimes in the company of the fiancée's parents. Wilson loves the city and has a passion for its cultural past, specifically the 1920s. He'd like to stay and work on a novel. The others just want to do some shopping, see a few sights, and as quickly as possible get back to California. Then one night, Wilson's out walking the streets alone when, at the stroke of midnight, a vintage limo pulls up and a well-dressed gent offers him a lift. The next thing he knows, he's at a swank party with all authentic-looking '20s decor, and he could swear that's really Cole Porter playing the piano, and then Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald introduce themselves and offer to show him the town. He's still in Paris, but he's not in the 21st century anymore. For what it's worth (a lot, if you're a fan), this is Woody Allen's most purely enjoyable movie in years, in which he lovingly recreates an imagined "golden age," and then questions whether, given the chance, you'd actually want to go back and live there. All the key players from the Lost Generation turn up. Corey Stoll plays Hemingway, who can't speak except in sentences that sound like bad Hemingway. Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and T.S. Eliot come and go, and Djuna Barnes, Alice B. Toklas and Josephine Baker make cameo appearances. The actor who appears to be having the most fun is Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, and there's an amusing bit where Wilson corners Luis Buñuel and pitches an idea for a film, which Buñuel finds incomprehensible, and which, of course, Buñuel will turn into an actual movie a few decades down the line. In contrast to the '20s scenes, the contemporary ones and the characters in them are so annoying, you can see why Wilson would want to escape to another time. (You'd like to escape from them yourself.) What you don't see is what Wilson and McAdams have in common as people that would make them want to hook up in the first place. It's not just a lack of chemistry. They don't seem connected at all. But that's a small complaint in a movie that suggests Allen might be moving on at last from his preoccupation with guilt and murder. To say it's a welcome return is to understate the obvious.

Quo Vadis (1951)

2011-09-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

QUO VADIS (1951) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Mervyn LeRoy

Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov,

Leo Genn, Patricia Laffan, Finlay Currie

In the year 64, General Marcus Vicinius returns to a hero's welcome after the conquest of Britain, but finds that his adventures are just beginning when he falls head-over-heels for a devout Christian girl. Meanwhile, the cruel, petulant Emperor Nero is making his own plans to torch Rome and then rebuild it. So Rome burns. And there's a high-speed chariot race along the Appian Way, as Robert Taylor dashes back to the burning city to rescue Deborah Kerr. And a lot of sanitized carnage in the Colosseum, when the Christians are tossed to the lions. It's the old DeMille formula: a calculated measure of Sunday-school piety to counter (and justify) the violence, decadence, mammoth sets and proverbial cast of thousands. Peter Ustinov chews up the imperial palace as Nero, but it's Leo Genn as Petronius, Nero's cynical adviser and confidant, who gets most of the good lines.

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

2011-08-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

THE KILLER INSIDE ME (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Michael Winterbottom

Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba,

Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas, Tom Bower,

Simon Baker, Bill Pullman, Caitlin Turner

With his boyish look and high-pitched drawl, Casey Affleck would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the Movie Psycho Hall of Fame. And yet in "The Killer Inside Me", there he is, playing an outwardly personable small-town deputy named Lou Ford, just the kind of guy you'd trust to enforce the law and maybe even date your daughter, right up to the point where he starts beating up women and torturing drunks and shaking down witnesses and killing them. In fact, Lou's been committing atrocities, covering them up and framing others for his crimes since childhood, and he's always gotten away with it, till now. Jessica Alba plays a prostitute Lou hooks up with. Ned Beatty's a contractor with a hand in all the local corruption. Kate Hudson is Lou's girlfriend. Elias Koteas plays a union boss. In flashbacks, Caitlin Turner plays Lou's mother, and you really don't want to know what went on between Lou and his mother. Or maybe you do. If the key to Lou's present is his past, he didn't become this fucked-up overnight. It goes way back. The story comes from a book by Jim Thompson. The style is pure pulp fiction. The whole thing could make you feel like taking a bath. But what'll really creep you out, what could make you never trust a kid with a badge and a gun again, is this character Lou Ford. Played with calculating ease and cold, dead eyes by Casey Affleck.

A Trip To the Moon (1902)

2011-08-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès, Henri Delannoy, Bleuette Bernon

A turn-of-the-century fantasy about some scientists who build a rocket and blast off to the moon, where they're chased and captured by a tribe of disappearing imps. Méliès was a French magician and the first filmmaker to realize the medium's potential for pure illusion. His effects look primitive now, but at a time when viewers were still getting used to pictures that moved, they were revolutionary. The shot of the rocket hitting its target square in the eye is one of the most widely recognized images from the early days of film.

The Company Men (2010)

2011-08-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

THE COMPANY MEN (2010) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: John Wells

Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones,

Maria Bello, Kevin Costner, Rosemarie DeWitt

I always thought the George Clooney movie "Up In the Air" should've ended with Clooney's character being fired by Anna Kendrick, the young go-getter he'd trained. Something like that does happen in "The Company Men", with Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones playing executives at various levels on the corporate food chain, all let go in the name of efficiency, but in reality as part of a scheme to drive up the value of the company's stock. It's the Great Recession hitting home for the men with the six-figure incomes and lifestyles to match. There are no surprises in it at all, but Jones and Cooper effectively capture the anguish of men whose best working years have gone to a system that's throwing them away, and Kevin Costner does what amounts to a movie-star disappearing act with a supporting role as Affleck's crotchety, blue-collar brother-in-law. The most wrenching moments in "Up In the Air" weren't focused on Kendrick or Clooney, but on the point-blank testimony of real people who had lost their jobs. Getting downsized is grim at any income level, but somehow it's harder to sympathize with a guy in a tailored suit who's behind on his country club dues and facing the loss of his Porsche.

D.O.A. (1981)

2011-08-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

D.O.A. (1981) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Lech Kowalski

Neatly edited documentary about the English punk scene, revolving round the Sex Pistols' aborted 1978 U.S. tour. Kowalski does an especially good job of connecting the punks and their music with the era of working-class despair that produced them. For the morbidly curious, or the just plain morbid, there's some creepy footage of a heroin-glazed Sid Vicious nodding off during an interview, while horror-show girlfriend Nancy Spungeon tries to goad him into something resembling consciousness and prevent his frequently dropped cigarettes from setting the bed on fire. D.O.A., for sure.

Garage Days (2002)

2011-08-17T20:45:00.000-07:00

GARAGE DAYS (2002) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Alex Proyas

Kick Gurry, Pia Miranda, Brett Stiller,

Chris Sandrinna, Russell Dykstra, Maya Stange

We've all known somebody, at some point, who had a rock-&-roll band. It's practically universal. Usually just a group of friends practicing in somebody's basement and trying to write a few original songs to go with some standard repertoire of covers. Sometimes they landed gig at a local club or bar, or opened for some better-known act. A few might've gone beyond that, but not many. This movie is about a group of bandmates kicking around Sydney, Australia, and trying to keep the dream alive, hoping for that one big break. You can tick off the essential plot points as they occur - the fights, the breakups, the shifting alliances, the romantic entanglements, the rivalries, the drugs taken and the lessons learned - but it's all handled with a refreshing lack of pretense, a loopy sense of humor and a genuine affection for its characters, two of whom share one of the great screen kisses of all time. The climactic big break doesn't come off the way you might expect, but it's perfect in the context of the film.

The Swimmer (1968)

2011-08-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

THE SWIMMER (1968) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Frank Perry

Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, Janet Landgard,

Kim Hunter, Marge Champion, Bill Fiore

An unusual study in disintegration, starring Burt Lancaster as an affluent suburbanite who decides to swim home by cutting across all the swimming pools in the county. It's a story that demands understatement, which it doesn't get, either from Frank Perry's direction or Marvin Hamlisch's musical score. What it does get is a devastating performance by Lancaster in a role that's as physical as it is psychological. His wardrobe for the entire film is a pair of swimming trunks, and he's not even always wearing those. Lancaster was in his mid-50s then, but he was still an athlete, in amazing shape, and more than most other movie stars, he knew how to act with his body. He does that here. By the time he reaches the end of his epic swim, you realize that what you've been watching is really an internalized horror movie. Based on a story by John Cheever, who appears briefly in a party scene. The Michael Douglas thriller "Falling Down" is a partial remake of this.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

2011-08-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE (2010) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Paul W.S. Anderson

Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates,

Shawn Roberts, Spencer Locke, Boris Kodjoe

Alice against the zombies, round four. This installment of the action movie/video game franchise starts out in Tokyo, with multiple versions of Alice (Milla Jovovich) blasting their way through the security system of the evil Umbrella Corporation. Tokyo ends up in ashes, but Alice escapes, and after a stopover in Alaska, she flies down the coast to Los Angeles, where a handful of survivors are holed up in an abandoned prison, trying to escape about a million undead. Some of this looks so much like "The Matrix", you wonder why Keanu Reeves doesn't turn up in his shades and long black coat. Firepower: extensive. Icky special effects: yes. Nudity: none. Zombie count: impossible to determine. Odds of another sequel: 100%. By the way, if you're doing some long-term investing, it appears from the evidence presented here that two commodities guaranteed to survive the apocalypse are high-tech weaponry and cosmetics. Consult your financial adviser today.

Listomania/Take 2

2011-08-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

Be glad you weren't the guy who had to fit these movie titles on a theater marquee:

"The Return of the Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe"

"Come Back To the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean"

"The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love"

"The Effect of Gamma Rays On Man-In-the-Moon
Marigolds"

"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb"

"Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You In the Closet and
I'm Feeling So Sad"

"Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But
Were Afraid To Ask)"

"The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and
Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?"

"Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and
Find True Happiness?"

"The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage To the
Waters of the Great Sea Serpent"

Carry On Behind (1975)

2011-08-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

CARRY ON BEHIND (1975) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Gerald Thomas

Kenneth Williams, Elke Sommer, Kenneth Connor,

Bernard Bresslaw, Jack Douglas, Joan Sims,

Windsor Davies, Peter Butterworth, Liz Fraser

Archeologists uncover some Roman ruins buried beneath a caravan site, and who should be on holiday there but the "Carry On" gang. A late entry in the comedy series, a nonstop barrage of sexual gags and puns. Throw in Elke Sommer as an archeologist with a thick Russian accent, and the language really gets twisted. Cesspools play a key role in what passes for a plot. There are two of them. One is freshly dug. The other is filled to the top with the stuff cesspools are typically full of. Guess which one Kenneth Williams falls into. That's "Carry On".

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009)

2011-08-02T17:57:00.000-07:00

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

D: Daniel Alfredson (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre,

Annika Hallin, Mikael Spreitz, Jacob Ericksson

Part three of Lisbeth Salander's story starts out with Salander, broken and bloody, in an ambulance after being buried alive, shot three times and beaten to a pulp at the end of part two. And she's about to be charged with attempted murder, after trying and failing to kill her father. While she's recovering, investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist rallies the staff at Millennium magazine for an issue that will exonerate Salander and expose the creeps who have spent the last 15 years abusing her, trying to shut her up or do her in. It all gets pretty outlandish, a conspiracy involving a top-secret society of corrupt old men high up in the power structure of Sweden. (In these movies, men are not to be trusted, and men over 80 are not to be trusted at all.) What grounds it again are the performances. Nyqvist inhabits Blomkvist's bleary-eyed persona so completely, you can almost smell the coffee on his breath. As Salander, Noomi Rapace spends most of the movie confined to a courtroom, a jail cell, or a hospital bed, and for much of that time, she barely moves. Playing a character who's willed herself never to betray an emotion, she keeps you watching and wondering. The last encounter between the two is inconclusive. Or maybe not. He comes to the door of her apartment. They exchange a few words. Say they'll see each other around. But there's a real sense that their time together is over. More than the words, there's the way they look at each other. He's an open book. His face reveals everything. She's walled off, a cipher behind a dark-eyed mask. She's free, and she's a survivor, but she's been hurt too much for too long, and her wounds are too deep, for anybody or anything ever to repair the damage.

Felix the Cat Woos Whoopee (1928/1929/1930)

2011-07-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

FELIX THE CAT WOOS WHOOPEE (1928/1929/1930)

D: Otto Messmer ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

A collection of seven Felix the Cat cartoons from the late silent/early sound era, released as a bargain DVD in 2004. All of them take place in a black-and-white cartoon universe where every body part is detachable, any object can become something else without warning, and reality as a concept in theory or practice simply does not apply. You don't have to be a stoner or a four-year-old to appreciate Felix the Cat, but it probably wouldn't hurt. These things are strange.

The American (2010)

2011-07-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

THE AMERICAN (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Anton Corbijn

George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten,

Paolo Bonacelli, Johan Leysen, Irina Björklund

In "The American", George Clooney plays a hit man named Jack. Or maybe it's Edward. Or Mr. Butterfly. In any case, he's come to this town in northern Italy to lie low for a while and wait for instructions from his minder in Rome. So he spends a lot of time in cafes, makes the acquaintance of the local priest, gets involved romantically with a local prostitute and helps a fellow assassin procure a weapon for a hit, while trying to avoid being bumped off himself. None of this is very plausible, but it plays out in a deliberate, tangential way that's much more in the style of a European movie than a Hollywood one. The frank approach to nudity and the existential conclusion are more European, too, and Clooney carries the movie-star load with a guarded, furtive look, his character's wary tension fitting him like a pair of well-worn shoes. You can tell it was made with a grownup audience in mind, and it might be the kind of thing that sneaks up on you, getting better with repeated viewings.

The Dawn Patrol (1938)

2011-07-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

THE DAWN PATROL (1938) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Edmund Goulding

Errol Flynn, David Niven, Basil Rathbone,

Donald Crisp, Barry Fitzgerald, Melville Cooper

Daredevil aviators take on the Germans in rickety biplanes and party like there's no tomorrow once they're back on the ground. Exciting World War One adventure with some pointed observations on the futility of war, remade from a 1930 version that starred Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Flynn and Niven were cutting a wide swath through Hollywood around the time they made this, and their hard-partying camaraderie may not be entirely an act.

SuicideGirls: The First Tour (2005)

2011-07-21T21:19:00.000-07:00

SUICIDEGIRLS: THE FIRST TOUR (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Mike Marshall

On tour with a punk burlesque troupe. Tattoos and piercings. Thongs and electrical tape. Attitude and neon hair. It could be a little rougher around the edges, especially in the music video segments that showcase the individual dancers, but the eyeshow's not bad. Grrrrls just wanna strip and have fun.

Love Is a Dancer (1985)

2011-07-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

LOVE IS A DANCER (1985) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Alan Clapp

A striptease video in which 14 exotic dancers take turns taking it off on the stage of an empty nightclub. Nothing else happens, but if that's what you're in the mood for, it'll probably be enough. It's like "Orgy of the Dead", but without the graveyard, the ghouls and the fog machine to distract you from the exhibition. The g-strings come off in this one.

Behind the Burly Q (2010)

2011-07-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

BEHIND THE BURLY Q (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Leslie Zemeckis

A valentine to the golden age of bump and grind, with vintage film clips and testimony from some long-retired headliners recalling the time they spent taking it off in the spotlight. The musicians and comics get some attention, too, but the focus is on the strippers, who talk with insight and humor about origins, ambitions, fears, rewards, long days, hard work, tired feet, wardrobe malfunctions and staying ahead of the law. (And nobody seems to have liked Gypsy Rose Lee.) It's a snapshot history of burlesque, but Zemeckis packs a lot of information into those briskly edited snapshots, and she got to some of her witnesses just in time. The end credits list those who cashed in their pasties and g-strings for good, before the finished movie could be released.

Mata Hari (1931)

2011-07-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

MATA HARI (1931) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: George Fitzmaurice

Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro,

Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone

Greta Garbo in one of her signature roles, as the notorious World War One spy, the woman no man could resist. Overwrought melodrama, but it's from MGM, so it looks real good. The real Mata Hari didn't look an awful lot like Garbo, but I guess that's what movies are for. Ramon Novarro plays Mata's chief love interest, a dashing Russian pilot with an accent by way of Guadalajara, not St. Petersburg.

Hell Ride (2008)

2011-07-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

HELL RIDE (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Larry Bishop

Larry Bishop, Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour,

Dennis Hopper, Leonor Varela, Vinnie Jones,

David Carradine, Julia Jones, Michael Beach

A neo-spaghetti biker movie in which rival gangs of outlaws trade pithy one-liners as they tear around the desert gunning each other down. Madsen's especially entertaining, playing a trigger-happy lowlife called "The Gent". Others motoring in and out of the dust include "Pistolero" (Larry Bishop), "Comanche" (Eric Balfour), "Eddie Zero" (Dennis Hopper), "Billy Wings" (Vinnie Jones) and "Deuce" (David Carradine). Throats are slit. Bodies are burned. Hopper gets an arrow in the back. Carradine loses his head. Most of the women are topless. Some viewers will find it reprehensible. Others will be amused. Either way, it's a picture with a fuck-you spirit all its own and plenty of cult potential, if a cult audience ever catches up with it.

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)

2011-07-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)

D: Freddie Francis ¢ ¢ 1/2

Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson,

Barbara Ewing, Barry Andrews, Ewan Hooper

It's a plain, cold fact that no matter how many times you kill Count Dracula, he won't stay dead for long. Some melting ice, a trickle of blood, an incantation or two, and there he is in the next sequel, climbing out of his coffin and stealing through the night, looking for a neck to bite. True to the formula, this Dracula movie starts out with the count still dead from the last time, brings him back for a spell, and ends with him dead again, impaled on a large silver crucifix. If you think I've spoiled it for you, relax. We haven't seen the last of Count Dracula. We never do. We never will.

Wanted (2008)

2011-07-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

WANTED (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Timur Bekmambetov

Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman,

Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, Kristen Hager

Insane, hyperkinetic action thriller about a timid office drone who's recruited into a medieval cult of textile-weaving assassins. So reality's straight out the window, something that can't always be said for the trajectory of the bullets, but the movie does blast away, practically nonstop, for most of its 110 minutes. The highlight could be the train wreck over the yawning gorge, or the garbage truck full of exploding rats, or the two-second shot of Angelina Jolie naked. But, hey, why be picky? It's nice when you don't have to choose.

The Princess Bride (1987)

2011-07-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Rob Reiner

Robin Wright, Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin,

Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon,

Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane,

Peter Falk, Fred Savage, Peter Cook, Mel Smith

Princess Buttercup. The Dread Pirate Roberts. Vizzini, Inigo and Fezzik. Prince Humperdinck. The Cliffs of Insanity. Iocane powder. The Fire Swamp. The R.O.U.S.s. The Machine. Miracle Max. The six-fingered man. Four white horses. True love. Inconceivable. Anybody want a peanut? As you wish.

Peter Falk

(1927-2011)

Flashback: "Broken Flowers"

2011-06-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

I first met Wendy McKendrick in a roundabout way through my brother Tom. It was 1973, and I'd just gotten out of the Air Force. Tom was living in an old house on Rutledge Street in Madison, and I sublet a room there that summer for $30 a month. Tom and I had a housemate named Joan Heller, and Joan had this friend named Wendy, who lived an hour away in Wisconsin Dells and usually stayed at the house when she came to Mad City.

Somehow Wendy and I hit it off and ended up spending a lot of the summer together. It was the kind of summer you tend to remember, but it ended and our lives moved on. We stayed in touch for a while, ran into each other off and on, wrote a few letters, drifted apart. I don't know where she'd be today. I wouldn't even know where to look.

I thought about Wendy when I was watching the Jim Jarmusch movie "Broken Flowers". In the movie, Bill Murray plays a guy in his 50s who gets a mysterious letter and embarks on a personal odyssey to look up several old flames. It's a quest he approaches with ambivalence, and that's where the film strikes a chord.

Anybody who's made it into late middle age (or beyond) has a gallery of ghosts, people we knew long ago and can't forget, who continue to haunt us long after the last moment of contact. Murray's character has four of them (or five), and as he works his way down the list, going from airport to airport and house to house, the reception he gets from these women turns increasingly cold and forbidding.

"Broken Flowers" isn't everybody's kind of movie. Jarmusch and Murray are low-key extremists, and working together they take minimalism to a whole new realm. If the movie moved any slower, it'd stop. But watching Murray confronting his ghosts, you start to consider your own. You can understand his reluctance to make the journey. And you can understand what makes the trip hard to resist.

I took a picture of Wendy in Madison the last time we got together. It's a simple black-and-white snapshot and she's smiling, looking straight into the camera, and you can tell it's summer, because she's wearing a tank top, with a pair of sunglasses pushed up on her head. She looks great. It was 1979.

More than 30 years later, I still think about her sometimes. Wonder what she's up to, what she's thinking, what she looks like, who she's with. Like Bill Murray in "Broken Flowers", there's a part of me that can't help being curious. And another part, a bigger part, I guess, that doesn't want to know.

Sometimes life leaves you hanging like that, just like in the movies.

Sometimes it's better not to disturb the ghosts.

Broken English (2007)

2011-06-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

BROKEN ENGLISH (2007) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Zoe Cassavetes

Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, Melvil Poupaud,

Justin Theroux, Tim Guinee, Gena Rowlands,

Peter Bogdanovich, Roy Thinnes, Josh Hamilton

To buy into this movie starting out, you've got to believe (or pretend to believe) that in all of New York City, a woman who looks like Parker Posey wouldn't be able to find a decent date. It's a romantic comedy with Posey as a troubleshooter working for a boutique hotel, who, after a series of bad passes, meets her potential Mr. Right in the person of a Frenchman played by Melvil Poupaud. So she follows him to Paris, where she loses his address. That's about all the movie hangs on, but it's just enough, if you like watching Parker Posey, which some of us do. Her flat vocal delivery can be liability when the script bails out on her, but after more than 40 movies, most of them independents, she knows what to do with a close-up. There are some interesting parallels between this and Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation", but there's more of an edge to Posey's performance than there was to Scarlett Johansson's. Maybe that goes with being a little older. Or maybe she's just more adept at getting beneath the surface, to the face behind the ever-shifting mask.

Broken Blossoms (1919)

2011-06-23T20:14:00.000-07:00

BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: D.W. Griffith

Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp

Probably one of the saddest movies ever made, a romantic tragedy starring Lillian Gish as a 15-year-old waif who escapes from her abusive father in London's squalid Limehouse District, and finds temporary comfort and safety in the care of a Chinese shopkeeper who adores her. Donald Crisp as the girl's father is way over the top, but Gish and Richard Barthelmess, as the sympathetic "Yellow Man", play their roles with heartbreaking restraint. This is the film that established Gish's reputation as the silent era's finest actress, and her hunched body language speaks volumes, suggesting a cowering creature who's been beaten all her life and knows that, sooner rather than later, she's going to be beaten again. Two famous scenes stand out. In one, the girl's father orders her to smile, and she responds by using two fingers to push up the corners of her mouth. In the other, she hides in a closet, waiting for the old man, armed with a hatchet, to break the door down, a portrayal of emotional disintegration that prefigures "The Wind".

Broken Flowers (2005)

2011-06-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

BROKEN FLOWERS (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Jim Jarmusch

Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange,

Julie Delpy, Frances Conroy, Tilda Swinton,

Jeffrey Wright, Alexis Dziena, Christopher McDonald

The first time you see Bill Murray in this, he's moping out on the couch, watching Douglas Fairbanks in "The Private Life of Don Juan". Before the Fairbanks movie is over, Murray's girlfriend has left him and a letter has dropped through the door informing him of a 19-year-old son he never knew he had. The letter has no legible postmark, no signature and no return address. Roused from a state of terminal lethargy by his next-door neighbor, Murray hits the road, dropping in on each of the four women who might be the mystery kid's mother: another old Don Juan coming face-to-face with his past. Every Jim Jarmusch movie has its share of eccentric pleasures. In "Dead Man", Jarmusch referenced William Blake. Here he throws in a riff on "Lolita", with flirty, bare-assed Alexis Dziena as the kind of girl for whom the term "jailbait" was probably invented. But mostly the movie shuffles along the way Murray does, as if it's not really sure it wants to get anywhere, and leaving some of the screen's most interesting women with nothing very interesting to do. Both Jarmusch and Murray have honed their deadpan talents to a fine edge, but if either of them gets much more deadpan than this, they'll be dead.

Diabolique (1996)

2011-06-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

DIABOLIQUE (1996) ¢ 1/2

D: Jeremiah Chechik

Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani, Chazz Palminteri,

Kathy Bates, Shirley Knight, Spalding Gray

A persuasive argument against remaking classic movies, in which Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller about a murder in a boys' boarding school gets transplanted from France to Pennsylvania, dropping its subtitles and all of its subtlety in between. Bates as a cagy, down-to-earth police detective almost saves it in the last half hour, but it's a case of too little too late. If you were one of those unlucky students whose seventh-grade math teacher did not look and act like a B-movie streetwalker, Stone's performance could make up for that.

Bridge To Terabithia (2007)

2011-06-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA (2007) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Gabor Csupo

Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Zooey Deschanel,

Robert Patrick, Bailee Madison, Kate Butler

Okay, I caught this on a night flight between Seattle and Denver with the sound off and I was reading a book at the time, but here's what I think was going on. It's somewhere in the Midwest and there are these kids who live out in the country and ride the school bus to school. The two main kids are this boy and girl, and she kind of teases him at first, but then they end up liking each other, and because this is the world according to Disney, they're, like, really cute. The boy has a sketch book he likes to draw in and one day this guitar-playing, foxy-looking teacher sees it and takes him to the Art Institute of Chicago. And there's this CGI fantasyland that the girl and the boy escape to by crossing a creek on a rope swing with a giant tree monster and weird flying batlike monkey creatures and stuff. Then I think the girl dies, or maybe she doesn't, I missed that part, and it looks like the rest of the movie is about how the boy deals with the loss. Finally, he builds a bridge across the creek and he and his kid sister walk across it into the fantasyland where they're crowned king and queen or something. You know, like in "The Chronicles or Narnia", but not quite. The end.

Them! (1954)

2011-06-11T11:03:00.000-07:00

THEM! (1954) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Gordon Douglas

James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn,

Joan Weldon, James Arness

During the 1950s, a whole series of monster movies came out of Hollywood, in which radiation from the atom bomb caused various kinds of creatures to mutate and grow real big. In the case of "Them!", it's ants. James Arness, who played the monster himself in "The Thing From Another World", plays a gung-ho FBI agent in this one, and he sure looks like he's having fun machine-gunning those ants. If the ants were smart, they'd just stay away from James Arness.

James Arness

(1923-2011)

Australia (2008)

2011-06-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

AUSTRALIA (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Baz Luhrmann

Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brandon Walters,

David Wenham, David Gulpilil, Bryan Brown,

Jack Thompson, Bill Hunter, Bruce Spence

Baz Luhrmann's dazzling, romantic, go-for-broke epic starts out in 1939. Nicole Kidman plays an Englishwoman who travels Down Under to sell a ranch she owns there, and instead finds herself going native (in a ladylike way, of course), embarking on a cattle drive and falling for a cowboy played by Hugh Jackman. There are bad guys (David Wenham and Bryan Brown), and the Japanese are getting ready to bomb Darwin, and it's all told through the eyes and voiceover narration of a half-caste boy whose grandfather (David Gulpilil) materializes and vanishes seemingly at will, an outback apparition, watching, beckoning and sometimes showing the way. Luhrmann's most conspicuous references (no accident) are "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz". He loves the romance and artifice of old movies, and he knows the conventions and cliches well enough to take narrative shortcuts more conservative (or less shameless) filmmakers wouldn't attempt. There might not be much depth to it, or maybe there is. (Keep an eye on Gulpilil as the old Aborigine King George, and see what you think.) And it seems fair to ask why the boy's mother has to be killed off for the rich white woman to show how much she loves this brown-skinned child. There's a giddy transparency to Luhrmann's movies that leaves you with a choice going in. You either surrender to them or you don't. One thing's for sure. He doesn't leave anything at home. Whatever he knows how to do with film, it all ends up on the screen. Better surrender, I'd say.

Bill Hunter

(1940-2011)

Paint Your Wagon (1969)

2011-06-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

PAINT YOUR WAGON (1969) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Joshua Logan

Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg,

Harve Presnell, Ray Walston, William O'Connell

A big, long, boisterous musical with Eastwood and Marvin as partners during the California Gold Rush, and Jean Seberg as the woman they share. There's nothing very subtle about this, but the people who made it don't seem to care, and probably neither should you. Clint talks to the trees, Harve Presnell calls the wind Maria, and Seberg imagines a life behind closed doors, but the unlikely musical highlight is Marvin, trudging through the wind and rain singing "Wand'rin' Star". You could skip the rest of the movie if you had to, but that's the part you don't want to miss. The songs are by Lerner and Loewe.

The Tillman Story (2010)

2011-06-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

THE TILLMAN STORY (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Amir Bar-Lev

There's that old saying that the first casualty in war is always the truth. Case in point: Cpl. Pat Tillman, whose friendly-fire death in Afghanistan in 2004 was being covered up and lied about within moments after it occurred. The lies continued for years and went all the way to the top, and that's what this documentary ends up being about. As a famously hard-hitting defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, Tillman was the most widely recognized enlisted man in the war. His death gave the Army a chance to rally public support with a tale of battlefield heroism that, like the reported exploits of Jessica Lynch, had little or nothing to do with reality. What the Army didn't count on was the tenacious resolve of Tillman's family, especially his mother Mary, to find out what really happened. What they found out wasn't the fiction the Pentagon wanted people to hear, and the spectacle of Donald Rumsfeld and the top brass citing collective amnesia and wiggling off the hook before a congressional committee with the family in the room just a few feet away is revolting. You'd like to see them all in jail. But more than anything, like the Tillmans, you just wish they'd finally tell the truth.

Pandora's Box (1929)

2011-05-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

PANDORA'S BOX (1929) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: G.W. Pabst

Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer,

Carl Goetz, Alice Roberts, Gustav Diesel

In a movie based on a couple of plays by Franz Wedekind, Louise Brooks plays Lulu, a seductive free spirit whose life follows a downward spiral through a series of relationships with mostly older men, the last of them Jack the Ripper. A classic silent melodrama, and a stunning showcase for one of the screen's most enigmatic stars. In retrospect, it's not hard to see parallels between the impish, hedonistic Lulu and Brooks herself. Like Lulu, Brooks loved to party and was good at burning her bridges. She played only a handful of leads before her career stalled out, just as the silent era came to a close. Shot in Germany when she was 22, this is the picture that made her a legend, and you can see why. With her pageboy bob, no-frills acting style and good-time-girl persona, she brought something to the screen that remains altogether unique, and Pabst more than anybody knew how to capture it with a camera. There was nobody else like her. Ever.

Desert Island Classics

2011-05-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Movie Buzzard would watch these films again any time.

"Intolerance" (1916/D.W.Griffith)

Humanity through the ages. Griffith's masterpiece.

"Duck Soup" (1933/Leo McCarey)

The Marx Brothers go to war.

"The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935/James Whale)

Gods and monsters.

"The Crimson Pirate" (1952/Robert Siodmak)

Lancaster channels the ghost of Fairbanks.

"Charade" (1963/Stanley Donen)

Cary Grant. Audrey Hepburn. Paris. A mystery. Romance.

"Dr. Strangelove" (1964/Stanley Kubrick)

"Mein Führer! I can walk!"

"The Wild Bunch" (1969/Sam Peckinpah)

Peckinpah's ode to death and laughter.

"High Plains Drifter" (1973/Clint Eastwood)

Clint paints the town red.

"The Usual Suspects" (1995/Bryan Singer)

Who's Keyser Soze?

"Good Night, and Good Luck" (2005/George Clooney)

Murrow, McCarthy and '50s TV.

Cache (2005)

2011-05-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

CACHE (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Michael Haneke

Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Annie Girardot

Guilt and paranoia in a French mystery about an upper middle-class couple who find they're under surveillance when anonymous videotapes start showing up at their door. The question: Who's watching them, and why? There's no big cathartic payoff here, but the underlying sense of unease stays consistent throughout. From the opening shot, you're acutely aware of the act of watching, and never quite sure if what you're watching is real (in the context of the movie), or something recorded on videotape. In fact, somebody could be watching and recording you right now. Think about it.

Glen or Glenda (1953)

2011-05-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

GLEN OR GLENDA (1953) ¢ ¢

D: Edward D. Wood Jr.

Bela Lugosi, Daniel Davis, Dolores Fuller,

Lyle Talbot, Timothy Farrell, Conrad Brooks

Ed Wood's painfully sincere (and fabulously silly) docudrama about a troubled transvestite who pines for his fiancee's angora sweater. Nobody made bad movies like Ed made bad movies, and "Glen or Glenda" rivals "Plan 9 From Outer Space" in the annals of bad movie legend. Bela Lugosi rattles on about "snips and snails and puppy dog's tails," and Ed himself, as "Daniel Davis", plays the title role. Wood really cleaned out the closet for this one. It's got to be seen to be believed.

Dolores Fuller

(1923-2011)

Nanny McPhee (2005)

2011-05-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

NANNY MCPHEE (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Kirk Jones

Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Kelly Macdonald,

Imelda Staunton, Angela Lansbury, Derek Jacobi

The unruly offspring of an impoverished undertaker come under the stern care and watchful eye of a horrid-looking governess named Nanny McPhee. W.C. Fields' longstanding antipathy for children would be entirely justified by the behavior of these hooligans, but of course there are lessons to be learned, and Nanny McPhee is just the one to teach them. Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay, and has a wonderful time slithering around in the title role.

Backlash (1956)

2011-05-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

BACKLASH (1956) ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: John Sturges

Richard Widmark, Donna Reed, William Campbell,

John McIntire, Harry Morgan, Edward C. Platt

Reed and Widmark track down a killer and a fortune in gold in the aftermath of an Indian attack. Things get a lot more complicated before they reach the end of the trail. A good cast and director, but not a high watermark for either Widmark or Sturges. Look for the late William Campbell as Johnny Cool, a gunslinging dandy who's just begging to be shot. Widmark obliges.

William Campbell

(1923-2011)

Splice (2009)

2011-05-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

SPLICE (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Vincenzo Natali

Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley,

Delphine Chanéac, Simona Maicanescu

Brody and Polley play scientists whose genetic research results in a mutant life form, a strange, temperamental girl-creature called "Dren". Brody, sensing danger, wants to cancel the experiment, and Dren with it. But Polley grows attached and protective, so Dren gets a reprieve. When Brody discovers the reason for Polley's care and concern, he's drawn closer to Dren himself. And Dren keeps evolving. It's like "Frankenstein" for the 21st century, with DNA patches replacing recycled body parts, a crazy bit of sci-fi with a new implausibility turning up about every other minute. Which doesn't mean the questions it raises - a lot of them as old as "Frankenstein" - aren't worth thinking about. Delphine Chanéac makes the grown-up Dren both vulnerable and frightening. The scene where she and Brody dance in the barn unmistakably echoes Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford in "Witness". And the costume designer who came up with Brody's T-shirts and lab coats must've had a real good time.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

2011-05-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958) ¢ 1/2

D: Nathan Juran

Allison Hayes, William Hudson,

Yvette Vickers, Roy Gordon

Famously cheesy monster movie about a woman who gets radiated by a satellite and grows to be 50 feet tall. The producers apparently couldn't afford an entire 50-foot woman, so for most of the picture you just see part of one - a clumsy-looking giant hand. The poster art for this one looks way better than the actual film. Remade in 1993 with Daryl Hannah in the title role.

Yvette Vickers

(1928-2011)

Public Enemies (2009)

2011-05-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Michael Mann

Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard, Christian Bale,

Billy Crudup, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi,

David Wenham, Lily Taylor, Leelee Sobieski

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. Rat-a-tat-tat.

This Gun For Hire (1942)

2011-04-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Frank Tuttle

Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Robert Preston,

Tully Marshall, Laird Cregar, Marc Lawrence,

Pamela Blake, Frank Ferguson, Roger Imhof

Alan Ladd is one of those 1940s movie stars who looks like he was born wearing a fedora and a trench coat. In his first starring role, he plays a hit man called Raven, who does a job and gets paid off in counterfeit money. With the cops closing in, he teams up with a nightclub singer (Veronica Lake) to go after the guys who set him up, who, it turns out, are dealing chemical secrets to the Japanese. A tense, efficient thriller, released at a time when even a hard-boiled assassin could be called on to do his part for the war effort. That's a cool-looking trench coat and fedora, too.

Hamlet 2 (2008)

2011-04-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

HAMLET 2 (2008) ¢ ¢

D: Andrew Fleming

Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener,

Amy Poehler, Elisabeth Shue

Fitful comedy about a frustrated high school drama teacher who decides to stage an original play, a sequel to "Hamlet", complete with music, low-riders, sex, dancing, much foul language, a time machine, a gay chorus, aerial combat and Jesus Christ. It's not exactly what Shakespeare had in mind, and it's never quite as funny as it probably sounded in the concept phase. Show-stopping highlight: a raucous production number called "Rock Me Sexy Jesus". Nope, it's not what Shakespeare had in mind at all.

Sometimes a Great Notion (1971)

2011-04-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION (1971) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Paul Newman

Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Lee Remick,

Richard Jaeckel, Michael Sarrazin, Linda Lawson

Paul Newman plays Hank Stamper, the hard-headed, beer-guzzling older son in a family of loggers living together in a waterbound fortress somewhere around Coos Bay, Oregon. Henry Fonda plays Henry Stamper, Hank's crotchety old man, and if you think Hank's a hard case, you ain't met Henry. Richard Jaeckel plays cousin Joe Ben, who's found the Lord and a loving wife, and refuses to see the serious side of anything. Michael Sarrazin plays Leland, Hank's half-brother, newly arrived from the East, full of anger and self-pity after a comically botched suicide attempt. There's a strike going on, and all the local loggers are in on it except the Stampers, who have a contract and will make sure they honor it, come hell or high water, which is pretty much what they get. Newman's screen version of the Ken Kesey novel can't capture what Kesey did with prose. What it does capture fairly well is the lifestyle and attitude of loggers and logging towns, and the inherent danger that goes with that line of work. And it works as a character study, with the leads all perfectly cast, including Lee Remick as Hank's wife Viv, a girl from Colorado whose dreams have stalled out in this rain-drenched spot on the Oregon coast. But the movie ultimately belongs to Fonda as the ornery, foul-mouthed patriarch, stomping around banging on doors to wake everybody up at four in the morning and railing against pinkos and Bolsheviks, a philosophical counterpoint to Tom Joad. He might not be on screen at the end, but the grisly, defiant gesture that concludes the film belongs to him, too.

Michael Sarrazin

(1940-2011)

The Warrior's Way (2010)

2011-04-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

THE WARRIOR'S WAY (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢

D: Sngmoo Lee

Dong-gun Jang, Kate Bosworth, Geoffrey Rush,

Danny Huston, Tony Cox, Lung Ti

A samurai spaghetti western about a master swordsman who wanders into a baroque frontier hellhole inhabited by a few grimy settlers and a broken-down carnival. So there's a little Fellini, a little Mad Max, a little Hawks, a little Eastwood, parts snatched from a hundred different sources, all pitched into this hyperviolent dream. Geoffrey Rush plays the town drunk, Dean Martin being no longer available. Kate Bosworth channels Hilary Swank as a plucky young woman who's good with a knife. Dong-gun Jang as the warrior slices and dices the bad guys and looks real cool doing it. Danny Huston oozes vileness as the outlaw leader. The colors are vivid. The music is knockoff Morricone. The believability quotient is zero, but then, dreams aren't required to play by the rules, or even make sense. Filmed in New Zealand.

Murder On the Orient Express (1974)

2011-04-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974)

D: Sidney Lumet ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

Albert Finney, Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark,

Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Lauren Bacall,

Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York,

John Gielgud, Jacqueline Bisset, Wendy Hiller

This starts out with a dozen characters, all played by famous movie stars, boarding a train in Istanbul, bound for Paris and Calais. One of them is nasty old Richard Widmark, who very quickly turns up dead, the victim of a heavy sedative and multiple stab wounds. With the train stuck in a Balkan snowdrift, the owner of the railroad (Martin Balsam) enlists his old friend and fellow passenger Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) to question the suspects and solve the case before the coach reaches Prague. It's all a bit over the top, from the posh production values to Finney's fussy performance, but it's over the top done real well, with elegant star turns by just about everybody. By the time the mystery's solved and each actor takes what amounts to a curtain call before the end credits, you half expect Widmark to come back from the dead for a final bow, too.

Sidney Lumet

(1924-2011)

Shadows and Fog (1992)

2011-04-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

SHADOWS AND FOG (1992) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

D: Woody Allen

Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, John Malkovich,

John Cusack, Lily Tomlin, Donald Pleasence,

Jodie Foster, Fred Gwynne, Julie Kavner,

David Ogden Stiers, Kathy Bates, Madonna,

Kate Nelligan, Josef Sommer, Robert Joy,

Kenneth Mars, John C. Reilly, Wallace Shawn

The first thing you see is a man's shadow, shrouded in fog. The man's short and round and vaguely resembles Peter Lorre in "M". The second thing you see is another man, tall and gaunt, with a bald head. He vaguely resembles Max Schreck in "Nosferatu". The second man approaches the first man with a piece of piano wire and strangles him. The visual references to Schreck and Lorre are no coincidence, and neither is Kurt Weill's music. The picture looks like something out of Germany between the wars. The story's about a fidgety little nebbish named Kleinman (Woody Allen), who's enlisted to be part of a late-night street patrol out to track down a serial killer (the guy who looks like Schreck). So Kleinman goes out on the street, not knowing what role he's supposed to play in the manhunt, and soon finds himself a suspect, and then a target of the mob, when the Schreck figure, now working with the vigilantes, fingers him as the murderer. It's a nightmare that gets progressively more sinister and unsettling, and it's not going to end when he wakes up, because he's not asleep. It's a comic study in mass hysteria and the psychology of lynch mobs, and it's one of Woody Allen's best movies, not like anything else he's done, though it's hard to imagine anybody else doing it. There are passing references to Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus" and Tod Browning's "Freaks", and scenes often play out with key characters outside the frame, off screen. Characters in other Woody Allen films found temporary salvation at the movies, with the Marx Brothers, or Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Here they turn up at a circus, or a brothel, seeking relief, or at least a diversion, from a world gone horribly wrong, an evil it's not in their power to prevent. Kleinman's solution is the ultimate magician's trick, an escape into pure illusion. When you're trapped in the night in the shadows and fog, that's as close to a happy ending as you're likely to get.