Zeta One (1969)

ZETA ONE  (1969)  ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Cort

    Robin Hawdon, Dawn Addams, Anna Gaël,

    Charles Hawtrey, James Robertson Justice,

    Brigitte Skay, Yutte Stensgaard, Rita Webb

Secret agent James Word, whose Bond is his Word, I guess, goes undercover to track down the Angvians, a race of amazons with great curves, variable accents and supernatural powers. A low-budget nudie spoof from swingin'-'60s Britain: 86 disposable minutes of flat acting, bad continuity, leering camerawork and cheesy-looking psychedelic effects. The Angvian warriors in their uniform pasties and purple bikini bottoms should appeal to those with an eye for geometry and color-coded costume design. Alternate title: "The Love Factor".

Sin City (2005)

SIN CITY  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

    Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke,

    Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba,

    Carla Gugino, Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood,

    Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, Rutger Hauer

Robert Rodriguez and graphic novelist Frank Miller collaborated on this sadistic, groundbreaking film noir, with an assist somewhere along the line from Quentin Tarantino. The narrative traces three vaguely connected stories set in and around a hyperviolent hellscape called Basin City. (The title comes from a sign at the city limits, where the first two letters in "Basin" are shot full of holes.) The stories all feature tough-guy heroes who absorb and dispense insane amounts of punishment, and invariably see themselves as knights, protecting the city's female population from the myriad forces of evil who want to do them harm. The women are all strippers or hookers who favor revealing, form-fitting outfits with an accent on leather, stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and thongs. It's testosterone run amok, with a snarky twist: Most of the women these guys are trying to save don't need saving. They're as lethal as the men are, and they mainly get into trouble when the men who believe they're riding to the rescue get involved. Visually, the picture's stunning, the live-action players blending into a computerized environment that looks like the real thing - "real" being an entirely relative term in a movie like this. It's all in black and white, with an occasional splash of color - a woman's red dress or lips, a pair of blue eyes, a murder victim's yellow blood. The writing is terse and hard-boiled. The actors are strikingly cast. And it's funny, besides. As cool as it is to watch, the movie risks going on a little too long. By the time it circles back to the original episode, starring Bruce Willis as an old cop with a bad heart, you're starting to realize that there's a sameness to all the story lines and not much depth to the characters. But even then, it's hard not to be blown away by what Miller and Rodriguez have put on the screen. Psych students looking for a term-paper topic might want to consider how these guys became so fixated on unflushed toilets and severed limbs.

Major League (1989)

MAJOR LEAGUE  (1989)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David S. Ward

    Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen,

    Margaret Whitton, James Gammon, Rene Russo,

    Wesley Snipes, Dennis Haysbert, Bob Uecker

An ex-showgirl inherits the Cleveland Indians and plots to move the team to Florida by hiring a bunch of misfit players who can only finish dead last. A good, foul-mouthed comedy, reminiscent of the Paul Newman hockey movie "Slap Shot". It's not after anything profound, like "Eight Men Out", or mythical, like "The Natural", or magical, like "Field of Dreams". It's more like a day at the ballpark, where you just go out and sit in the bleachers and drink a couple of beers and have a good time. Baseball fans, and fans of baseball movies, should appreciate that.

James Gammon

(1940-2010)

Listomania

Some actors who played the same character in the same film:

Clark Gable and Mickey Rooney

    in "Manhattan Melodrama"

Gary Cooper and Donald O'Connor

    in "Beau Geste"

Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell

    in "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"

Lillian Gish and Mary Steenburgen

    in "The Whales of August"

Harrison Ford and River Phoenix

    in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

Saoirse Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave and Romola Garai

    in "Atonement"

Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney

    in "Big Fish"

Kate Winslet and Judi Dench

    in "Iris"

Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart

    in "Titanic"

Bela Lugosi and Ed Wood's wife's chiropractor

    in "Plan 9 From Outer Space"

The Ghost Writer (2010)

THE GHOST WRITER  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Roman Polanski

    Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams,

    Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton,

    James Belushi, Jon Bernthal, Eli Wallach

Ewan McGregor plays a character identified in the credits as "The Ghost". He's the ghost writer, hired for reasons he can't quite fathom to polish up the memoirs of a retired British prime minister (a testy, combative Pierce Brosnan), who's about to face war-crimes charges at the International Criminal Court. Protecting the P.M. and competing for influence are his shrewd, long-suffering wife (Olivia Williams) and his coldly efficient aide and apparent mistress (Kim Cattrall). None of these people can be trusted, and when the ghost finds out his predecessor might have been murdered, he starts to do a little investigative work on his own. It all plays out like a deliberately paced Hitchcock movie, and if there are few big surprises, you can still appreciate the skill with which it's done. And there's the odd sense of displacement that goes with a story that's set mostly in the Northeastern United States, but couldn't be filmed there because of Polanski's persistent travel restrictions. 93-year-old Eli Wallach does a feisty bit as a local who knows the tides and wonders why the body of the previous ghost washed up where it did on the beach.

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph Green

    Herb Evers, Virginia Leith, Adele Lamont

A doctor and his fiancee are driving out to his laboratory in the country, when, wouldn't you know it, they crash the car and the woman ends up decapitated. Grabbing her head like a football with the game on the line, the doc races to the lab, where he puts the head in suspended animation. Now he's got 48 hours to find the head a new body, so he goes shopping. Who will the unwary donor be? A stripper? A hooker? A contestant in a swimsuit pageant? A photographer's model? Or just an old girlfriend walking down the street? A low-budget horror movie with a distinct undercurrent of tabloid sleaze. The gory highlight comes when the doctor's lab assistant loses his arm at the shoulder and bleeds all over the wall. Nice performance by Virginia Leith as the severed head.

I'm Not There (2007)

I'M NOT THERE  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Todd Haynes

    Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger,

    Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw,

    Bruce Greenwood, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore

Some of the many sides of Bob Dylan, a fractured, impressionistic portrait with six different actors playing various Dylan personas, real or imagined. There's Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, a surly folk singer who can't handle the demands of fame. Heath Ledger as a boorish actor playing Rollins in an early-'60s film. Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud. Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody Guthrie. Richard Gere as an aging Billy the Kid. The most literal, and the most compulsively watchable, is Cate Blanchett as Dylan circa 1965, fingernails, frizzed hair, shades and all, chain smoking, flying on amphetamines, impish, jittery, egocentric and a near-total asshole. How much of Bob Dylan any of it captures is open to debate, and I'm not sure it matters. A hundred different filmmakers could make a hundred different Dylan movies, and all of them would get at some part of the truth (or none at all), while the shape shifter himself slips away on the next available boxcar. That's kind of what "I'm Not There" is getting at. The real Bob Dylan wouldn't want it any other way.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)

NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Martin Scorsese

Bob Dylan: the early years. Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour documentary charts Dylan's life and career from northern Minnesota's Iron Range to the coffee houses of New York City, from 1963's March on Washington to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan went electric and pissed off a lot of his fans. The focus is on Dylan the artist, with lots of great archival footage providing the political and cultural context. Toward the end, it becomes a reflection on celebrity and the absurd demands of fame, as Dylan reaches icon status and becomes a template on which the public projects whatever it wants to be there. A series of news-conference clips is especially revealing, with Dylan artfully turning every question back on the person who asked it. Through it all, Dylan remains elusive, constantly toying with his image and identity, shrugging off labels as if they were second-hand coats, and then changing again before another label can stick. What's astonishing, when you think about it, isn't just the amount of material Dylan cranked out in the five years the movie zeroes in on, but that he's still at it more than 40 years later, writing, touring, recording, and leaving 'em guessing as he goes. As a chronicle of his ongoing work, "No Direction Home" could be just the beginning.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

MASKED AND ANONYMOUS  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Larry Charles

    Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz,

    John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson,

    Angela Bassett, Bruce Dern, Ed Harris,

    Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, Mickey Rourke,

    Giovanni Ribisi, Susan Tyrell, Fred Ward

Scowlin' Bob Dylan plays Jack Fate, a legendary, washed-up singer-songwriter tapped to headline a big benefit concert. The other actors all appear to be improvising their scenes around Bob, who spends most of the movie standing around frowning. He knocks off a few songs, including a cover of "Dixie" that doesn't exactly conjure up visions of the Old South, but Dylanologists looking for clues to the man's ever-shifting mystique will find more questions than answers here. That's the idea, of course. Dylan cowrote the screenplay, using the pen name "Sergei Petrov".

The Goonies (1985)

THE GOONIES  (1985)  ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Donner

    Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Martha Plimpton,

    Corey Feldman, Kerri Green, Jeff Cohen,

    Joe Pantoliano, Robert Davi, Anne Ramsey

To begin with, the Goonies aren't some little gremlin-like creatures out to terrify some nice American kids. They are the kids, the offspring of working-class families about to be evicted from their homes to make way for a country-club golf course in this scenic spot on the Oregon coast. On their way to saving the day and the neighborhood, the gang comes across a map in an attic that sends them off in search of a legendary pirate treasure. Many predictable, theme-park-style adventures follow. It's a shrill, frantic, repetitive movie, likely to appeal to kids of a certain age. Grownups can decide for themselves what to make of a pirate captain named One-Eyed Willie, and a camera that can't stop playing peek-a-boo with Kerri Green's tennis dress. Highlights include Robert Davi, who almost tries to keep a straight face as an opera-singing villain, and Martha Plimpton in an early role as a girl whose sexual ambiguity the others seem to accept without much thought. Don't ask, don't tell, don't really care.

Revanche (2008)

REVANCHE  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Götz Spielmann

    Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko,

    Andreas Lust, Ursula Strauss

An Oscar-nominated movie from Austria, about a handful of characters whose lives intersect in the aftermath of a small-town bank robbery. There's the thief, an ex-con working as a janitor in a Viennese brothel. His girlfriend, a hooker from the Ukraine. A cop they encounter by accident during the getaway. The cop's emotionally frustrated wife. And the thief's aging grandfather. The story plays out at its own pace, mostly in long takes with a stationary camera. It's a celebration of stillness, a thoughtful and somewhat somber reflection on guilt and loss. Viewers with short attention spans should probably stay away.

Hula (1927)

HULA  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Victor Fleming

    Clara Bow, Clive Brook, Arlette Marchal,

    Arnold Kent, Patricia Dupont, Albert Gran

Clara Bow might be the screen's most naked actress, not literally, but in terms of technique. You never have to guess at what she's up to. It's transparent in every frame. In "Hula", she plays the daughter of a Hawaiian plantation owner, which gives the irrepressible flapper a chance to go skinny-dipping, eat with her fingers, dance in a grass skirt, and bat her eyes at a British engineer played by Clive Brook. It's about as frivolous as it sounds, but it's not a bad showcase for Bow, who was then at her career peak. "It", the movie that made her a silent film legend, was released the same year.

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Michael Moore

Look out, corporate America. Puck is at it again. With his shambling bulk, baggy clothes and baseball cap, Michael Moore more closely resembles a working-class Falstaff, but if he could somehow magically turn the chairman of Goldman Sachs into a jackass, there's no doubt he'd do it. He does the next best thing, indicting those at the top of our financial system on broad-based charges of greed and corruption at the expense of everybody else. As usual, Moore's weapon of choice is a scattergun, not a laser, but also as usual, his sense of purpose is unwavering. He doesn't just want to make you laugh or piss you off. He wants you to think and act. So he takes aim at the mortgage debacle and the bank bailout, but his most provocative finding here is a policy practiced by Wal-Mart and other big corporations, to take out life insurance policies on their employees (referred to, in writing, as "dead peasants"), and collect huge payoffs - the money going to the company, not the survivors - when the "peasants" pass. To suggest that Moore loads the dice, stacks the deck and engages in what might be called grandstanding is to overstate the obvious. He does that stuff, sure. But he also makes the point, emphatically, over and over, that the real face of our free-market economy doesn't belong to the crooks in the glass towers, but the dispossessed. He's mischievous, that Puck.