Abilene Town (1946)

ABILENE TOWN  (1946)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Edwin L Marin

    Randolph Scott, Ann Dvorak, Lloyd Bridges,

    Edgar Buchanan, Rhonda Fleming

Abilene, Kansas, 1870, a dusty, noisy, wide-open town, home to settlers, saloon keepers, cattlemen, dance-hall girls, merchants, churchgoers, killers, scoundrels and Marshall Randolph Scott. An old-fashioned, two-fisted western in which the heroic farmers face down the villainous cowboys (villainous cowboys?) with grit, a few pitchforks, and a chorus or two from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". Oh, and Randolph Scott.

Beeswax (2009)

BEESWAX  (2009)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Andrew Bujalski

    Tilly Hatcher, Maggie Hatcher, Alex Karpovsky,

    Katy O'Connor, David Zellner, Kyle Henry

A boring, low-budget, slice-of-life movie about twin sisters (played by twin sisters) and the personal issues they confront (or don't) over a few days in and around Austin, Texas. Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher) rides around in a wheelchair and runs a clothing boutique. Lauren (Maggie Hatcher) is unemployed and haphazardly looking for work. Both are uncomfortably needy, but that's something that applies to just about everybody in this film. So they talk. A lot. And talk. And talk. It's not that Bujalski and the actors don't succeed in making the characters real. They just don't succeed in making them very interesting. It ends without resolving anything, either, but that's okay. By then, you're just glad it's finally over.

The Horse's Mouth (1958)

THE HORSE'S MOUTH  (1958)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ronald Neame

    Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh, Renee Houston,

    Mike Morgan, Michael Gough, Ernest Thesiger

Eccentric comedy starring Alec Guinness as a misanthropic artist who gets out of prison and immediately returns to a life of conning and painting. Guinness wrote the script, based on a novel by Joyce Cary, and his performance makes the movie - a shabby, gravel-voiced curmudgeon whose casual disregard for social convention goes hand in hand with an obsession to make art.

Ronald Neame

(1911-2010)

Absurdistan (2008)

ABSURDISTAN  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Viet Helmer

    Krystyna Malerova, Maximilian Mauff,

    Nino Chkheidze, Ani Amiridze

"Lysistrata" transplanted to a forgotten village in southwest Asia, where the women go on strike till the men do something to repair the town's broken-down water system. Caught in the middle are a pair of literally star-crossed lovers whose relationship can't be consummated if the water crisis isn't resolved in just under a week. Mauff and Malerova bring an appealing, down-to-earth dreaminess to the resourceful young couple, whose destiny is sealed from the start when they're born at the same moment at the local clinic in adjoining beds. Malerova resembles Keira Knightley, if Keira Knightley would eat a meal once in a while, and Mauff has a likeable, gangly quality that anybody who grew up gangly should be able to appreciate. Shooting in Azerbaijan in a visual style that sometimes approximates outdated film stock, Helmer effectively captures the look and feel of a place that time and the rest of the world long ago passed by. Following "Tuvalu" in 2000, this is the second movie he's made in which the primary element driving the story is water. Both are essentially fairy tales, but in a world where the polar ice is melting and a dwindling fresh water supply could trigger future wars, maybe he's onto something.

Fire On the Amazon (1993)

FIRE ON THE AMAZON  (1993)  ¢ ¢

    D: Luis Llosa

    Sandra Bullock, Craig Sheffer,

    Juan Fernandez, Judith Chapman

Ugly American Craig Sheffer barges into Bolivia like a B-movie Brando, and soon finds himself up to his ratty ponytail in a plot that features corruption, murder, the rape of the rainforest, and an exotic native potion that gets him into Sandra Bullock's pants. That drug-induced love scene should be a highlight, but like the rest of the movie, it doesn't amount to much. Note to Bullock's ardent admirers: This is the most you're likely to see of the artfully unclad Sandy.

Frost/ Nixon (2008)

FROST/NIXON  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ron Howard

    Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon,

    Sam Rockwell, Matthew Macfadyen, Oliver Platt,

    Toby Jones, Rebecca Hall, Patty McCormack

Michael Sheen appears to be carving out a small niche for himself playing real-life characters, supposed lightweights who pick just the right moment to overachieve. In "The Queen", he played Tony Blair to Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth. Here he's television personality David Frost, going up against Frank Langella's Richard Nixon. Once again, it's the performance opposite Sheen that got most of the critical attention, and once again, it's Sheen's self-effacing turn as the would-be foil that gives the piece balance and makes it work. Playing Nixon is a little like playing Hitler. You can't get to the man without going through the stereotype. Overdo the stereotype and the man gets lost. Langella nails Nixon's shrewdness and self-loathing, but the real Nixon also had an awkward charm that's missing here. The movie, like the play it's based on, recreates a series of televised interviews Frost conducted with Nixon a few years after Nixon left office. Nixon was paid $600,000 to participate, and hoped to use the exposure to rehabilitate his shattered public image. Frost's motives were just as mercenary: a potential ratings gold mine, and a personal ticket to greater glory on TV. And political partisans on all sides saw it as the closest thing to a trial the disgraced but savvy Nixon would ever get. Ron Howard does his usual workmanlike job with all this, playing up the hype on both sides in the manner of the hoopla surrounding a championship prizefight. The verdict: Frost (and Sheen) on a TKO.

All of Me (1984)

ALL OF ME  (1984)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Carl Reiner    
    Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant,
    Madolyn Smith, Dana Elcar, Selma Diamond
A wealthy invalid played by Lily Tomlin cashes in her chips, hoping that a mumbling guru will transfer her spirit into the body of her stablekeeper's healthy young daughter. Instead, she winds up sharing the body of a middle-aged lawyer (Steve Martin), who hasn't moved out himself yet. So for a good part of the movie, you've got Martin and Tomlin, whose characters can't stand each other, duking it out over how to cooperate and who's in control, as they jointly try to accomplish such tasks as walking, talking, driving, strumming a guitar, getting laid and going to the bathroom. That's it, pretty much, but the stars play it for all it's worth, and in their hands, that's a lot. Their giddy, spirited dance through the end credits should not be missed.

Avatar (2009)

AVATAR  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: James Cameron
    Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver,
    Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Wes Studi
Jake Sully, a disabled Marine now confined to a wheelchair, reports to his next duty station, a moon called Pandora. Pandora's rich in a valuable mineral called unobtanium, but it's inhabited by a race of blue-skinned, humanoid giants called the Na'vi, who fight back when they sense that their way of life is about to be destroyed, which it is. Thanks to some scientific wizardry, Jake takes on the body of a Na'vi warrior and infiltrates the tribe, which allows him to go native, literally. Then he has to choose sides. I'm not sure how this body-transfer stuff works, but James Cameron apparently does, and he spent something like $230 million getting the story on film. He shot it in 3-D, too, which wasn't really necessary, but when you're throwing that kind of money around, hey, 3-D, why not? It's like an eco-sci-fi western, the cavalry against the Indians, and the cavalry in this case are not the good guys. Which makes it subversive, in a way, as much as you can be subversive with $230 million. It broke records at the box office, too. That's the kind of subversion Hollywood likes.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

APOCALYPSE NOW  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Francis Ford Coppola

    Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall,

    Dennis Hopper, Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forrest,

    Larry Fishburne, Harrison Ford, Scott Glenn

Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter John Milius transplant Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" to Vietnam, dispatching a military assassin named Willard (Martin Sheen) up a danger-infested river to take out a rogue army colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Probably the best movie ever made about war as hallucination. It starts out with its protagonist cracking up (before he's even assigned to the mission), and gets progressively more insane as it goes along. The deeper into the jungle Willard goes, the more the military command structure and its illusion of social order breaks down, till at last a pure, perfect savagery replaces it. Surprisingly, the actor who redeems the last 30 or 40 minutes isn't Brando, but Dennis Hopper as a brain-fried photographer modeled partly on Sean Flynn. Hopper's drug-fueled ravings are a lot more entertaining (and often more coherent) than Brando's self-indulgent monologues. The 2001 "Redux" edition contains at least two extended sequences that didn't make the cut in 1979: a dinner party at a French plantation that's useful for the context it provides but goes on way too long, and a revealing second encounter with three Playboy centerfolds, first seen dancing at a souped-up USO show, now stranded and reduced to squalor and prostitution in a ruined army outpost, another zoned-out stopover in Coppola's journey through hell. A good companion piece to this is the 1991 documentary "Hearts of Darkness", which chronicles all the moviemaking hell Coppola went through to finish the picture.

Dennis Hopper

(1936-2010)

Screen Test

Match the following sets of characters with the movies they appeared in:

  1. Miles Archer, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo

  2. Don Lockwood, Kathy Selden, Cosmo, Lina Lamont

  3. Dallas, Ripley, Ash, Jonesy

  4. Jake Gittes, Evelyn Mulwray, Noah Cross

  5. Hawk, Coop, Wanda, Hilly Blue

  6. Fenster, McManus, Hockney, Verbal Kint

  7. William Munny, Ned Logan, English Bob

  8. Rick, Ilsa, Ugarte, Victor Laszlo

  9. Pike, Dutch, Freddie Sykes, Deke Thornton

10. Black Bart, Mongo, Hedley Lamarr, the Waco Kid

a. "The Usual Suspects"

b. "Casablanca"

c. "Trouble In Mind"

d. "Singin' In the Rain"

e. "Alien"

f. "Unforgiven"

g. "The Maltese Falcon"

h. "Blazing Saddles"

i. "Chinatown"

j. "The Wild Bunch"

Answers:

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