Love Me Tonight (1932)

LOVE ME TONIGHT  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Rouben Mamoulian

    Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Charlie Ruggles,

    Myrna Loy, Charles Butterworth, C. Aubrey Smith

A visually impressive early sound musical, groundbreaking for its integration of music and cinema to tell a story. The story has Maurice as a Paris tailor romancing a princess played by Jeanette MacDonald. Musical highlights include "Mimi", "Isn't It Romantic?" and the opening production number set to the everyday sounds of the city. Lots of playful pre-code dialogue, including the exchange that occurs when MacDonald collapses and somebody asks Myrna Loy if she can go for a doctor. "Certainly," Loy replies. "Bring him right in."

An Education (2009)

AN EDUCATION  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Lone Scherfig

    Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina,

    Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, Rosamund Pike,

    Cara Seymour, Emma Thompson, Sally Hawkins

A teenager hoping to get into Oxford hooks up with a real-estate speculator and part-time thief who shows her the ways of the world. The acting's real good in this, and that's partly why it feels so creepy. You can understand why David (Peter Sarsgaard) and Jenny (Carey Mulligan) would be attracted to each other. He's cultured and charming. She's smart and impressionable. As much as you wish she'd just kick him in the balls and walk away, you can kind of see why she doesn't. Both Sarsgaard and Mulligan do a good job with that. The rest of the actors are stuck playing stereotypes, though Alfred Molina as Jenny's blustering father and Olivia Williams as a sympathetic teacher get one scene each late in the film to stretch a little. There's more than a hint of Audrey Hepburn in what Mulligan does here, especially in the scenes set in Paris. It's no guarantee of anything, but she has a look the camera loves and the talent to back it up, and that's a combination that could make a girl a star.

Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1957)

THE SAGA OF THE VIKING WOMEN

AND THEIR VOYAGE TO THE WATERS

OF THE GREAT SEA SERPENT  (1957)  ¢ ¢

    D: Roger Corman

    Abby Dalton, Susan Cabot,

    Brad Jackson, Jonathan Haze

Curvy Viking babes sail out after their men, who went to sea three years before and never came back. It's a big world out there, but amazingly, the girls get sucked into the same vortex guarded by the same giant reptile and are captured by the same tribe of barbarians who captured their menfolk all that time ago. An early Roger Corman cheapie, made for midnight viewing. Corman once wrote a book called "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime". Judging from pictures like this, he never spent more than 10 cents, either. That's some title for a B movie, though, huh?

Flashback: How We Watch Movies

    The first time I saw Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" was in the Stiftskeller in the Memorial Union in Madison. I don't remember what year. Late '60s would be a good guess. The Stiftskeller was a small room and the screening was packed, standing room only. So I stood. Through the whole movie. I was not alone.

    The thing was, back then, if an old movie you really wanted to see turned up anywhere, you went. There was no guarantee you'd ever get a chance to see it again. It seems unbelievable now, but as recently as the 1970s, that was the deal. A new picture would get a theatrical run, often no more than a week, and then disappear. Maybe it would show up on television eventually. Or maybe not. There was no video release to look forward to a few months down the line. There were no videos.

    In college towns like Madison, film societies helped fill the gap. People with a passion for cinema would band together, scrounge some equipment, rent a hall, and show the kinds of movies that never played anywhere else. Silents. Movies with subtitles. Pornography. Flash Gordon serials from the 1930s. And Charlie Chaplin. That's how I wound up in the Stiftskeller that night.

    But that was then. Our access to films and our options for viewing them keep changing, and they'll change some more, in ways we can't even guess at. Today you could theoretically watch movies 24/7 for years on end and never see the same film twice. (Why you would want to is another question.) I've got my own copy of "The Great Dictator" now. I can watch it any time I like. But it's on VHS, already an antiquated technology.

    Last year for the first time, I watched a feature-length movie from beginning to end on my computer. My old friend Sporgersi sent me the link, and with a few clicks of the mouse, there I was, sitting at my desk, watching "The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage To the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent" (an awesome title if there ever was one, but hard to fit on a marquee). It wasn't quite the same as seeing "The Great Dictator" in the Stiftskeller. There's something about watching a movie in a cramped, stuffy, smoky room with a hundred other cinema junkies that can't be duplicated on a computer screen on a quiet night at home. The Viking Women weren't much of a match for Charlie Chaplin, either. But at least I didn't have to watch the movie standing up.

The Great Dictator (1940)

THE GREAT DICTATOR  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Charles Chaplin

    Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie,

    Henry Daniell, Reginald Gardiner, Chester Conklin

Chaplin's controversial spoof on Hitler, released at a time when a lot of people no longer considered Hitler all that funny. The story revolves around a double-edged joke - the fictitious resemblance between a maniacal dictator and a shell-shocked Jewish barber, and the ironic real-life resemblance between Chaplin's screen character and Hitler. Romantic, sentimental, and at times extremely naive. (Chaplin wrote later that if he had known what was going on in the concentration camps, he never could have made the picture.) But it's vintage Chaplin. Some highlights: Chaplin as the dictator, toying with a giant globe. Chaplin as the barber, shaving a customer to classical music. And the performances of Henry Daniell and Jack Oakie as thinly disguised stand-ins for Goebbels and Mussolini. Chaplin's first all-sound film, and the last time he played a character resembling the Little Tramp. Seventy years later, it still has the power to amuse and provoke.

The Runaways (2010)

THE RUNAWAYS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Floria Sigismondi

    Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon,

    Stella Maeve, Alia Shawkat, Riley Keough,

    Scout Taylor-Compton, Tatum O'Neal

In "The Runaways", Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett announces her presence unequivocally the moment she appears. It's 1975, and Joan's a 15-year-old, punked out in jeans and a T-shirt, surreptitiously browsing among the men's items in a small clothing store. The clerk behind the counter is talking to a guy decked out from head to foot in black leather. The clerk tells Joan the women's clothes are on the other side of the store. Joan pauses for a second or two and then walks up to the counter, stands next to the leather guy, dumps out a sackful of change, and says matter-of-factly, "I want what he's wearing." The movie tells how Joan and her fellow Runaways - Cherie Currie, Sandy West, Lita Ford and Jackie Fox - challenged the musical establishment and its prevailing wisdom as an all-girl band playing kick-ass rock & roll. It's based on a memoir by Currie, but its most intriguing character (and the band's most charismatic member) is the combative, androgynous Jett, and the intensity level goes up noticeably whenever Kristen as Joan is on screen. Anybody who's watched the real Joan Jett kick and strut and snarl her way through a live show will appreciate just how good at playing her Kristen Stewart is.

Cookie's Fortune (1999)

COOKIE'S FORTUNE  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Altman

    Charles S. Dutton, Liv Tyler, Glenn Close,

    Julianne Moore, Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty,

    Chris O'Donnell, Lyle Lovett, Donald Moffat

Family ties, old guns, Easter eggs, suicide, Wild Turkey, sex, lies and catfish enchiladas. Robert Altman's laid-back ensemble piece about life in a small Mississippi town and the community of mostly good-natured eccentrics who hang out there. Glenn Close takes her role as a vindictive old maid a few miles over the top, but most of the actors slip into their roles about as comfortably as you'd put on a pair of well-worn overalls. Patricia Neal plays the pipe-smoking title character, and Lyle Lovett does an oddball turn as a fishmonger who lusts after Liv Tyler.

Patricia Neal

(1926-2010)

Friday the 13th (2009)

FRIDAY THE 13TH  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Marcus Nispel

    Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti,

    Travis Van Winkle, Aaron Yoo, Derek Mears,

    Jonathan Sadowski, Julianna Guill, Willa Ford

The bogeyman is back. Thirty years have gone by since Sean S. Cunningham launched the "Friday the 13th" franchise and the first series of grisly murders took place in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake. And wouldn'tcha know it, party-loving 20-somethings are still going out to the old camp to screw and smoke weed and get drunk and be killed in various horrible ways. Yes, Jason's still out there, the misunderstood kid who grew up to be every camper's worst waking nightmare, with his machete and his hockey mask. He's unkillable, too. By my unofficial count, in this movie alone, he gets clubbed with a stick, stabbed with a sickle, jabbed with a poker, hanged, burned, drowned and dragged head-first into a wood-chipper. It barely slows him down. Think he'll be back to terrorize another gang of campers in a year or two? You can bet on it. There's no end to this hell. There's just more hell.

Prozac Nation (2001)

PROZAC NATION  (2001)  ¢ ¢

    D: Erik Skjoldbjaerg

    Christina Ricci, Jason Biggs, Jessica Lange,

    Anne Heche, Michelle Williams, Jonathan Rhys-Myers

Christina Ricci plays an emotionally troubled teenager who goes off to Harvard, where she starts playing with drugs, writing music reviews for Rolling Stone, and making life miserable for herself and everybody around her. The actors work real hard, but there's something one-dimensional about the main character, who barely seems to exist outside her own neuroses. No wonder she ends up without any friends.

The Horn Blows At Midnight (1945)

THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Raoul Walsh

    Jack Benny, Alexis Smith, Dolores Moran,

    Allyn Joslyn, Reginald Gardiner, Margaret Dumont,

    John Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Franklin Pangborn

A comic fantasy starring Jack Benny as an angel named Athaniel, dispatched to earth to blow four notes on a trumpet and touch off the end of the world. This was Benny's last major movie role. In later years, it became one of his long-running jokes, the joke being that his movie career would've lasted a lot longer if he'd never made "The Horn Blows At Midnight". The movie's not that bad. Really.

Kick-Ass (2010)

KICK-ASS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Matthew Vaughn

    Aaron Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Nicolas Cage

Tired of being robbed and bullied by the neighborhood toughs, a comic-book geek named Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) reinvents himself as a costumed superhero called "Kick-Ass". The trouble is, he has no real superpowers or fighting skills, so when he swings into action as a crusader for justice, the bad guys beat the crap out of him. Fortunately, help is on the way in the form of two really lethal crime fighters: Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy, a cartoon-drawing ex-cop with an arsenal that could level a city, and Chloe Moretz as Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old with a fantastic capacity for mayhem and a vocabulary that would shock a sailor. Of course, Dave still looks like a dork in his green mail-order wet suit, and the girl he adores at school still thinks he's gay, but, hey, he's Kick-Ass! This is a long way from being a great movie, but it has a nice way of skewering superhero conventions, and the scenes in which Big Daddy and Hit-Girl compare notes on tactics and weaponry are wickedly funny. The conclusion leaves the chance for a sequel wide open, and apparently there's one in the works, but if the producers are going to do that, they'd better do it quick. The real kick-ass superhero in "Kick-Ass" is Hit-Girl, and Moretz won't be able to play an 11-year-old forever.

Rider On the Rain (1970)

RIDER ON THE RAIN  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: René Clement

    Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert,

    Jill Ireland, Annie Cordy

The first thing you see in this, before the movie really begins, is a quote from "Alice In Wonderland". Later on, a character borrows a line from "Alice" to remark on how things keep getting curiouser and curiouser, and somebody else says something about Charles Bronson's Cheshire-Cat grin. Then, toward the end, you get Bronson saying, "It's all a mistake. I dreamed up the whole thing," and by that point, you're thinking maybe he did. It starts out with a bus pulling up to a seaside bowling alley in a rainstorm. The bus is empty, but when it pulls away, there's a man standing there next to the road: the "rider" of the title. The man walks on into town, in the rain, spies on a woman changing clothes in a dress shop, and follows her home. He rapes her and she kills him. Then, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, she dumps the body in the sea. Enter Bronson, a mysterious stranger who has lots of questions and knows way more than he should. Who is he? Who was the man in the rain? What's in the red airline bag the man was carrying? And what does the woman know that she's not telling? A good, offbeat mystery, and an interesting showcase for Bronson, who was then in his late 40s and finally starting to play leads, but only in movies made in Europe. His signature role would come a few years later in "Death Wish", but you can see the basic elements of his persona coalescing here: the smile, the squint, the droopy moustache, the winking insolence, the bemused cruelty and the suggestion of invulnerability that would define him on screen for the next 20 years. Watch it with "Once Upon a Time In the West" and maybe "The Dirty Dozen", and the transition comes into focus: an actor who has paid his dues forever, in the process of becoming a star.

Bartleby (2002)

BARTLEBY  (2002)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jonathan Parker

    Crispin Glover, David Paymer, Glenne Headly,

    Joe Piscopo, Maury Chaykin, Seymour Cassel,

    Dick Martin, Carrie Snodgress

Crispin Glover and his trademark weirdness take on the title role in this oddball update of a story by Herman Melville. A funereal presence in a stiff black suit, Bartleby's the latest drone hired to file records in a nondescript office that's all but hermetically sealed from the outside world. His coworkers are a loud-mouthed womanizer (Joe Piscopo), an obnoxious nut case (Maury Chaykin), their exasperated boss (David Paymer), and a deadpan receptionist (Glenne Headly) with a thing for tight skirts and alliteration. They've all mastered the art of looking busy while not doing very much, and you can see where working desk-to-desk with any of them could be a challenge. Stuck together in a confined space, they create something close to workplace hell. Bartleby's problem isn't that he doesn't do very much. It's that he doesn't pretend. Asked to perform any task at all, he responds with a robotic "I would prefer not to," and goes back to staring at the air vent in the ceiling. It's hard to feel much sympathy for the guy. It's easier to sympathize with the boss who's trying to fire him. But if you've ever worked at a miserable office job, and like your comedy strange and dark, this could be worth checking out. Or would you prefer not to?

Maury Chaykin

(1949-2010)