Mad Cowgirl (2006)

MAD COWGIRL  (2006)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gregory Hatanaka

    Sarah Lassez, James Duval, Linton Semage,

    Walter Koenig, Devon Odessa, Vic Chao

Sarah Lassez, who looks enough like Julia Roberts to be her sister, plays a meat inspector named Therese, whose voracious appetite for the stuff she inspects could be leading to symptoms of mad cow disease. A chaotic social satire in multiple languages that gets by for an hour or so by taking random potshots at televangelists, Hong Kong action movies, self-serving political hacks (on C-Span, playing themselves) and, most damningly, the beef industry. (The odds that you'll want to go out for a steak after watching it are minimal.) Eventually, the lack of anything close to a coherent story takes its toll, and the movie concludes with a spoof of "Kill Bill" that might seem more inspired, or less redundant, if "Kill Bill" wasn't already a spoof of itself. To the extent that the film holds together at all, it's because of Lassez, who tears into her role the way Therese might tear into a prime fillet. No Julia Roberts movie ever left its heroine covered in this much blood.

Movie Star Moment: John Wayne

    I don't even remember what movie this was in. It was something I saw in an Army/Air Force theater around 1970 with my buddy Dave, a fellow airman and a big John Wayne fan. It's a real short scene, really just a shot, of John Wayne walking into a saloon. That's all. Just the Duke walking in through the swinging doors. The thing was, John Wayne had a way of walking that wasn't like anybody else. He had a barrel chest and no hips and a midsection that expanded some as he got older. And he had this distinct way of walking, where his arms would swing from side to side across his body as he moved. So when he walked into the saloon swinging his arms like that, Dave and I broke out laughing. Nobody else did. Except for the movie's soundtrack and the faint whir of the projector, you could've heard a pin drop. And then we remembered where we were: in an armed forces theater, with the Vietnam War going on a few thousand miles away, surrounded by people who probably didn't care much for these two low-ranking goofballs laughing at the Duke. We were both real quiet after that, and while I've pretty much forgotten the rest of the picture, I still remember that shot of John Wayne walking into the saloon. We weren't laughing at the Duke. We were laughing because it was perfect. It was pure John Wayne.

Rio Grande (1950)

RIO GRANDE  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Ford

    John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson,

    Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen, Claude Jarman Jr.,

    J. Carrol Naish, Chill Wills, Grant Withers

The final entry in John Ford's cavalry trilogy, with the Duke as an Army colonel fighting Indians along the Mexican border and haunted by a Civil War incident that cost him his family. The story ultimately has less to do with the Indian war than the conflict within Wayne's character. Like Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers", Kirby York is a man whose pathological sense of duty - in this case to the Army - is integral to his heroism, even as it cuts him off from those he most wants to protect. The resolution might be less unforgiving here, but the underlying elements are pure John Ford: the suggestion of something unfathomably dark in a movie that's almost meditative in its sentimentality.

Directed By John Ford (1971/2006)

DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD  (1971/2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Peter Bogdanovich

When he made the original version of this, Peter Bogdanovich managed to coax John Ford out to Monument Valley, got him to sit in front of a camera for a while, and asked him a bunch of questions about his long life as a director of Hollywood movies. Even more remarkably, Ford actually answered some of the questions. (A typical Ford response, when asked how he filmed a particular scene: "With a camera.") Bogdanovich also sat down with Henry Fonda, James Stewart and John Wayne to get their Ford stories, and hired Orson Welles to do the narration. That was in 1971. In 2006, Bogdanovich recut the picture, integrating new interview footage (Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Walter Hill) with what he'd done before. The result is one of the best movies ever made about the movies, and maybe the truest picture we'll ever get of the irascible, contradictory Ford. Ford's reputation for meanness is well documented, and just about everybody who worked for him became a target of his legendary cruelty sooner or later. At the same time, they all seem to be glad for the experience, and there's real insight in what they have to say. All of it's illuminated with film clips - lots of them - corresponding to whatever aspect of Ford's career is being discussed. The riverbank scene in "Two Rode Together" is a highlight, but the most revealing moment is a startlingly personal one captured by accident. It's a conversation between the dying Ford and Katharine Hepburn, recorded on an audio machine neither of them knew was running. "I love you," Ford says at one point. "It's mutual," Hepburn replies. Nothing fancy. No fuss. Straight to the point. A simple exchange between two old friends (and ex-lovers), one of them close to the end. Just the kind of thing you could put in a John Ford movie.

Chocolate (2008)

CHOCOLATE  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Prachya Pinkaew

    JeeJa Yanin, Pongpat Wachirabunjong,

    Hiroshi Abe, Taphon Phopwandee

This was made in Thailand and I watched it without subtitles, so I couldn't tell you everything that's going on. The main character's a young deaf girl whose singular preoccupations are kick boxing and the Thai equivalent of M&Ms. By the time the movie's over, she's wiped the floor with about 300 guys, just like Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill", but without the bright yellow jumpsuit. The kid's good, and as long as she's beating the shit out of people, you really don't need the subtitles. The footage that plays with the end credits suggests that the first-aid unit got plenty of work during the shoot.

Too Late the Hero (1970)

TOO LATE THE HERO  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Aldrich

    Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Denholm Elliott,

    Ian Bannen, Percy Herbert, Harry Andrews,

    Ronald Fraser, Henry Fonda, Lance Percival

A reluctant American officer, assigned to a British combat unit in the New Hebrides, heads out into the jungle with a bunch of misfit commandos to take out a Japanese radio transmitter in advance of a planned U.S. attack. To some extent, this parallels "The Dirty Dozen" (another Aldrich movie), but the mood is more somber and there's a grim edge to the violence. Robertson's good as the cynical Yank, but it's Caine's insolent self-assurance as a Cockney medic that keeps you hooked. When Caine sticks a rifle in Ronald Fraser's face, and fixes him with those unblinking eyes, and tells him matter-of-factly that he'd just as soon shoot him as the Japanese, you believe it, and Fraser does, too. The attitudes reflect the time the movie was made more than the time it's about. The war might be World War Two, but the sensibility is unmistakably Vietnam.

Cliff Robertson

(1923-2011)

Goya's Ghosts (2007)

GOYA'S GHOSTS  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Milos Forman

    Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman,

    Randy Quaid, Michael Lonsdale, Blanca Portillo

It's clear from the opening frames of this that Milos Forman has spent a lot of time looking at the work of Francisco Goya. Enough to wonder what stories might be behind the artist's startling images. Enough to write a script and make a movie about them. Stellan Skarsgård plays Goya, working incessantly, turning out paintings, sketches and prints, and eluding the Inquisition at least partly because he's the official portrait painter to the Spanish king. Not so lucky is his model and muse (Natalie Portman), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who's arrested, imprisoned, tortured and forced to confess to an offense she knows nothing about. Also unlucky in the long run is her inquisitor (Javier Bardem), whose intelligence and ruthlessness can't save him from the shifting currents of history. It plays like one of those 19th-century novels where characters keep turning up and finding each other again and again over years and years, no matter the odds against them. Portman, who you'd think would've suffered enough in "V For Vendetta", emerges from 15 years of captivity in ruins, her beauty gone, her spirit, her mind and apparently her jaw shattered beyond repair. A ghost, for sure. It's not a great movie, but it's a good one, and its best moments are the ones that show Goya at work, scratching with charcoal or dabbing with paint, an eyewitness to a terrible time, who had the skill and the luck and the passion to record what he saw for the rest of us.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

SLEEPAWAY CAMP  (1983)  ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Hiltzik

    Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten,

    Mike Kellin, Desiree Gould

Gender-bent horror thriller about a serial killer terrorizing a summer camp. Slasher movie rule #18: If you're hanging out at a summer camp where your fellow campers and counselors keep getting bumped off in horrible ways, it's probably not a good idea to make fun of that weird, quiet girl who watched her dad and brother die in a grisly boating accident out on the lake eight years before. Something bad is bound to happen if you do.

Midnight In Paris (2011)

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Woody Allen

    Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams,

    Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen,

    Nina Ariadna, Léa Seydoux, Carla Bruni,

    Adrien Brody, Corey Stoll, Kathy Bates,

    Alison Pill, Tom Hiddleston, Adrien de Van,

    Marcial Di Fonzo, Yves Heck, David Lowe

Woody Allen's valentine to Paris starts out with a series of idealized, picture-postcard shots of the city. The story has to do with an American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) and his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) who have checked into the kind of luxury hotel the rest of us will never be able to afford, to spend a few days playing tourist, sometimes in the company of the fiancée's parents. Wilson loves the city and has a passion for its cultural past, specifically the 1920s. He'd like to stay and work on a novel. The others just want to do some shopping, see a few sights, and as quickly as possible get back to California. Then one night, Wilson's out walking the streets alone when, at the stroke of midnight, a vintage limo pulls up and a well-dressed gent offers him a lift. The next thing he knows, he's at a swank party with all authentic-looking '20s decor, and he could swear that's really Cole Porter playing the piano, and then Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald introduce themselves and offer to show him the town. He's still in Paris, but he's not in the 21st century anymore. For what it's worth (a lot, if you're a fan), this is Woody Allen's most purely enjoyable movie in years, in which he lovingly recreates an imagined "golden age," and then questions whether, given the chance, you'd actually want to go back and live there. All the key players from the Lost Generation turn up. Corey Stoll plays Hemingway, who can't speak except in sentences that sound like bad Hemingway. Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and T.S. Eliot come and go, and Djuna Barnes, Alice B. Toklas and Josephine Baker make cameo appearances. The actor who appears to be having the most fun is Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, and there's an amusing bit where Wilson corners Luis Buñuel and pitches an idea for a film, which Buñuel finds incomprehensible, and which, of course, Buñuel will turn into an actual movie a few decades down the line. In contrast to the '20s scenes, the contemporary ones and the characters in them are so annoying, you can see why Wilson would want to escape to another time. (You'd like to escape from them yourself.) What you don't see is what Wilson and McAdams have in common as people that would make them want to hook up in the first place. It's not just a lack of chemistry. They don't seem connected at all. But that's a small complaint in a movie that suggests Allen might be moving on at last from his preoccupation with guilt and murder. To say it's a welcome return is to understate the obvious.

Quo Vadis (1951)

QUO VADIS  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mervyn LeRoy

    Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov,

    Leo Genn, Patricia Laffan, Finlay Currie

In the year 64, General Marcus Vicinius returns to a hero's welcome after the conquest of Britain, but finds that his adventures are just beginning when he falls head-over-heels for a devout Christian girl. Meanwhile, the cruel, petulant Emperor Nero is making his own plans to torch Rome and then rebuild it. So Rome burns. And there's a high-speed chariot race along the Appian Way, as Robert Taylor dashes back to the burning city to rescue Deborah Kerr. And a lot of sanitized carnage in the Colosseum, when the Christians are tossed to the lions. It's the old DeMille formula: a calculated measure of Sunday-school piety to counter (and justify) the violence, decadence, mammoth sets and proverbial cast of thousands. Peter Ustinov chews up the imperial palace as Nero, but it's Leo Genn as Petronius, Nero's cynical adviser and confidant, who gets most of the good lines.