My Winnipeg (2008)

MY WINNIPEG  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Guy Maddin

    Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage,

    Amy Stewart, Louis Negin

Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the movies Guy Maddin films there, always looks like the coldest place on earth. Snow piles up in the streets. People go around everywhere in parkas and boots. Clouds of steam issue like frozen smoke from every mouth. Maddin grew up in Winnipeg and still lives there, and this movie is about his love/hate relationship with his own hometown. It's like a Chamber of Commerce documentary from somewhere beyond the Twilight Zone, in which the main obstacle to getting out of the city is staying awake. And then there's this obsession the filmmaker has with his mother. Something weird going on there, definitely. And is Maddin ever bitter about losing the Winnipeg Jets! So he's on the train. The snowy streets glide by out the window. He has to leave Winnipeg. He's determined. He's going to do it this time. But he's so tired. And then Winnipeg closes in, an irresistible force-field of soul-sucking ambivalence. It's a trick. It's a trap. He's stuck in Winnipeg. He'll always be stuck in Winnipeg. The native son who can't escape, no matter how much he wants to, or how hard he tries. It's no use. He can never leave.

Spirits of the Dead (1968)

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini

    Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon,

    Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp

A trilogy of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations by three very different European filmmakers. The first episode, Vadim's "Metzengerstein", has Jane Fonda modeling a "Barbarella"-style wardrobe and obsessing over a wild black horse. It's eye candy, silly and disposable. Call it the appetizer. The second segment, Malle's "William Wilson", stars Alain Delon as a sadistic medical-student-turned-soldier haunted and hounded by a doppelgänger who turns up at the most inopportune times (though not in time to prevent Delon from flogging Brigitte Bardot). It's the most coherent of the three stories, and probably the closest to Poe. Call it the soup. In the third piece, Fellini's "Toby Dammit", Terence Stamp plays an alcoholic movie star entranced by a spooky-looking girl in a white dress. It's, well, it's Fellini, a hallucination come to life. Call it the dessert, if a severed head is your idea of dessert. There is no main course.

Mamma Mia! (2008)

MAMMA MIA!  (2008)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Phillida Lloyd

    Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan,

    Stellan Skarsgard, Julie Walters, Christine Baranski

A young woman about to be married decides to invite her father to the wedding. The thing is, she's never met the old man, who could be any one of three guys her mother hooked up with way back when. So she invites all three of them, and they all show up. Wait till mom finds out about this. There are some great screwball possibilities here, but the movie's pure kitsch, not that it's trying real hard to be anything else. It's a chick flick with an ABBA soundtrack, and the players throw themselves into their songs with varying degrees of abandon, the show-stopper being Streep's lively, foot-stomping rendition of "Dancing Queen". The jump-suited production numbers that play with the end credits have to be seen to be believed.

Behold a Pale Horse (1964)

BEHOLD A PALE HORSE  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Fred Zinneman

    Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif,

    Mildred Dunnock, Christian Marquand

Twenty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, the battle continues in the cat-and-mouse duel between an officer in the Guardia Civil (Anthony Quinn) and an aging Republican guerilla (Gregory Peck) gone to ground across the border in France. Despite its A-list director and cast, this couldn't look much less like a Hollywood movie: a deliberately paced character study whose main character is difficult to like, an action adventure with all of its action bunched up in the final reel. The black-and-white cinematography and street-level locations are a throwback to Italian neo-realism. And it ends on a downbeat note of irony and fatalism that no producer who just wanted to send 'em home happy would touch. Which, it turns out, are all good reasons to see the film. But the best is Peck, who gives a compelling performance in a role for which he might seem miscast. When Manuel Artiguez creaks out of bed in his run-down room in Pau, he greets the day with a cough and immediately lights a cigarette. (In this picture, you almost never see Peck without a half-smoked butt clenched between his lips.) Artiguez is not Atticus Finch. He's ornery, mean and abusive to those around him. He trusts nobody, dislikes people generally, and absolutely hates priests. Peck does next to nothing to evoke your sympathy, and yet when he sets out on foot over the mountains to his last mission in Spain, you can't help rooting for him anyway. That he's doomed, that he knows it and you know it, that's just part of the bargain. He's still Gregory Peck, after all.

Ratatouille (2007)

RATATOUILLE  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Brad Bird

Another animated diversion from Pixar, in which a rat with a nose for fine cuisine and a talent for creating it helps a garbage boy move up the food chain in the kitchen of a high-end Paris restaurant. In fact, a lot of the characters in this movie are rats, and it's a mark of the skill that went into it that the furry critters can be cute while still looking like, well, rats. That should keep the little ones happy. Grownups are more likely to appreciate the discourse on artists and critics delivered by a ruthless restaurant reviewer played (or at least voiced) by Peter O'Toole. If any animated movie in the world could make you hungry just watching it, it's probably this one.

Invasion of the Star Creatures (1963)

INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES  (1963)  ¢ ¢  

    D: Bruno Ve Sota

    Robert Ball, Frankie Ray, Gloria Victor,

    Dolores Reed, Mark Ferris, Slick Slavin

Two idiot army privates break off from their unit and come up against two amazon space babes on a mission to explore the earth as a possible target for invasion. This movie is so completely and deliberately stupid that at times it almost reaches a level of inspired silliness. It'd be easy to blow it off after the first 10 minutes, but then you'd miss the giant walking carrot men, the Indian who breaks into an impromptu jig whenever the mood strikes him, the G.I. whose repertoire of impressions includes Peter Lorre, Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, and the stern, swimsuited aliens with their long, sturdy legs and bullet-shaped breasts. For the record, their names are "Puna" and "Tanga". Classy, huh?

La Vie en Rose (2007)

LA VIE EN ROSE  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢       

    D: Olivier Dahan

    Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Clotilde Courau,

    Pascal Greggory, Emmanuelle Seigner, Gerard Depardieu

Ernest Hemingway once said of Marlene Dietrich that if she had nothing but her voice, she could break your heart with it. Dietrich, played by look-alike actress Caroline Sihol, makes a brief appearance in "La Vie en Rose", turning up to pay her respects to another 20th-century icon, the French singer Edith Piaf. The movie tells Piaf's life story in fragments, skipping around in time, from the streets of Paris late in World War One to Piaf's death in 1963. It looks real good, and Dahan makes some interesting choices along the way, but the portrait that emerges is never much more than the sum of its parts. The supporting characters don't register very strongly - you don't even know who some of them are - and it's not till a deathbed flashback in the last reel that you learn Piaf once had a young husband and a kid. Missing entirely is any mention of World War Two, which Piaf spent living above a brothel in occupied Paris. The extent to which she may or may not have collaborated with the Germans has stirred speculation and controversy over the years, and seems to be a place the French still don't want to go. It's a glaring omission. But Piaf's the role of a lifetime for any French actress, and Marion Cotillard, who played Russell Crowe's love interest in "A Good Year", doesn't waste the chance. With her stooped, birdlike body language, Cotillard makes herself small, and she seems to be living her character's shifting moods and contradictions, from the temperamental diva to the fun-loving party girl to the tough street survivor who melts into a rapturous grin whenever she's with her great love, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. Whatever you think of the rest of the movie, you won't forget Cotillard's performance anytime soon. And there's all that great music to listen to. If anybody could break your heart with her voice, it was Edith Piaf.

Disorder In the Court (1936)

DISORDER IN THE COURT  (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Preston Black

    The Three Stooges, Bud Jamison,
    Suzanne Kaaren, Edward LeSaint

The Three Stooges tear up a courtroom. Moe slaps Larry, pokes Curly in the eyes a bunch of times, slaps Larry some more, pokes Larry in the eyes, slaps Curly, pokes Curly in the eyes again, and, well, you get the idea. On top of that, Larry tries to kill a parrot with a  hammer, Curly blasts the jury with a fire hose, and Moe swallows a harmonica and shoots a toupee. All in 16 minutes.

Girls Rock! (2007)

GIRLS ROCK!  (2007)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arne Johnson, Shane King

Girls aged 8 to 18 come together at a rock-&-roll camp in Oregon, where they form bands, jam, bicker, create, learn how to play their instruments (sort of), and at the end of five days, perform what they've come up with for an audience of several hundred people. A documentary with attitude, most of it supplied by its precocious subjects. Not surprisingly, it's the older girls who have the more complex issues and the more interesting stories to tell. Spending more than a few seconds in a small room filled with screaming 8-year-olds can be excruciating, especially when somebody hasn't taken her anti-diva medication. Rock on, grrrrls.

Quote File

"New York was his town, and it always would be."

  Woody Allen    

  in "Manhattan"

"We'll always have Paris."

  Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman

  in "Casablanca"                                      

"I may be from Ohio, but I'm not from Ohio."

  Heather Graham

  in "Bowfinger"    

"Maybe that's what hell is, the entire rest 

  of eternity spent in fucking Bruges."         

  Colin Farrell  

  in "In Bruges"

"Aw, Bartleby, was Wisconsin really that bad?"

  Alan Rickman to Ben Affleck

  in "Dogma"