The Raven (1963)

 

THE RAVEN  (1963)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Roger Corman

    Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff,

    Hazel Court, Jack Nicholson, Olive Sturgess

Price, Lorre and Karloff play rival magicians in a horror comedy based only nominally on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe. If it's not the best of the Price/Poe/Corman collaborations, it's at least the goofiest, with a cranky (and substantially improvised) performance by Lorre, whose character has the bad luck to turn into both a bird and a pool of raspberry jam. Very tongue-in-beak.

Roger Corman

(1926-2024)

Asteroid City (2023)

ASTEROID CITY  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Wes Anderson

    Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks,

    Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, 

    Rupert Friend, Liev Schreiber, Tony Rev0lori,

    Matt Dillon, Steve Carell, Hope Davis, Tilda Swinton,

    Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe,

    Margot Robbie, Bob Balaban, Fisher Stevens 

Wes Anderson reaches into his magic toy box and comes up with this distinctly Wes Anderson sci-fi fantasy, set in 1955 in the desert somewhere in the vicinity of a nuclear test site.There's a story, kind of, about an alien, but, face it, nobody goes to see a Wes Anderson movie for the plot. You go for the chance to step into his eccentric dream world and hang out for a while. Viewers familiar with the director's work will feel right at home. For those who are not, welcome to Asteroid City.

After Blue (2021)

 

AFTER BLUE  (2021)  ¢ ¢

    D: Bertrand Mandico

    Elina Löwensohn, Paula Luna, Vimala Pons,

    Agata Buzek, Anaïs Thomas, Pauline Lorillard

Maximum weirdness in a dreamscape sci-fi western set on a nightmare planet inhabited entirely by women, two of them on a quest to track down and kill a devious outlaw named Kate Bush. (Drinking Game Advisory: Downing a shot whenever somebody in this movie says "Kate Bush" could be lethal.) It's all kind of pretentious, but Elina Löwensohn looks good in a broad-brimmed hat, and in the progression of strange and mystifying encounters, the almost-dead horse and the screaming caterpillars are only the beginning.

Lisbon Story (1994)

 

LISBON STORY  (1994)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Wim Wenders

    Rudiger Vogler, Patrick Bauchau, Madredeus

A sound man named Winter travels to Lisbon from Germany to connect with a director tor named Friedrich who wants him to help with a film he's working on. When the sound man gets there, the director has disappeared, and Winter spends the next two weeks waiting for Friedrich and wandering around the city with his microphone and equipment, recording what he hears and sees. The result is part "Heart of Darkness" (only not as dark), part street-level travelogue, and part meditation on the nature of film. Like his protagonist, Wenders feels no special commitment to a tight plot. When he comes on something interesting, he'll hang around for a while, watching and listening in. That's especially true when Winter encounters the lead singer for a group called Madredeus, whose beauty and charisma (and voice) are not lost on Winter, or on Wenders. If you won't be going to Portugal anytime soon, you might want to go to this movie instead. 

The White Gorilla (1945)

THE WHITE GORILLA  (1945)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Harry L. Fraser

    Ray Corrigan, Lorraine Miller, George J. Lewis,

    Francis Ford, Budd Buster, Charles King

Jungle explorers dodge lions, tigers, monkeys, elephants and a hippo while looking for a legendary white gorilla. Incoherent storytelling with stock shots of wild animals and footage lifted from a 1927 silent called "Perils of the Jungle" randomly tossed into the pot. Exactly where it's supposed to take place (tigers in Africa?) is never very clear. Ray "Crash" Corrigan plays both the male lead and the white gorilla.

Bikini (2014)

 

BIKINI  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Óscar Bernàcier

    Sergio Caballero, Carlos Areces, Rosario Pardo

You'd think a movie called "Bikini" would have a bikini in it somewhere, but you don't see one. It's about the mayor of a resort town on the Spanish coast who calls on the country's strongman, Francisco Franco, seeking permission to allow bikinis on the local beach. Also in on the conversation, and threatening to gum up the works, is Franco's straight-laced, music-loving wife. Who knew that a little two-piece swimsuit could be the cause of so much concern? Or that the mere prospect of making money could be enough to bring bikinis to the beach?

White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

 

WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART  (1990)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Clint Eastwood, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, 

    Marisa Berenson, Charlotte Cornwell, Timothy Spall,

    Boy Matthias Chuma, Alun Armstrong, Richard Vanstone

Clint Eastwood plays a larger-than-life Hollywood director named John Wilson (think John Huston), who goes off to Africa to shoot a picture (think "The African Queen"), but determined to shoot an elephant first. There are layers and layers of artifice in this, a movie based on a novel about the making of a movie based on a novel, and Eastwood, appropriating just enough of Huston's distinctive drawl and lose-limbed body language to make the connection obvious, gives his most expansive performance. It's a departure, both behind the camera and in front of it, and whether or not it entirely works, Clint's never done anything else quite like it. The final shot, a closeup with one spoken word followed by a cut, is a twisted joke, the movie-making equivalent of point-blank nihilism.