The Statement (2003)

THE STATEMENT  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Norman Jewison

    Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam,

    Noam Jenkins, Charlotte Rampling, Matt Craven,

    Alan Bates, John Neville, Ciaran Hinds,

    David De Keyser, Frank Finlay, Edward Petherbridge

Michael Caine plays an old Frenchman on the run from his past and the evil shit he did as a collaborator during World War Two. Tilda Swinton plays the investigating judge who's determined to track him down, if a heart attack or some hired assassin doesn't kill him first. What makes this interesting, beyond the cat-and-mouse game, is that while the characters are French, the actors playing them are British. That won't please hard-core Francophiles, or fans of suspended disbelief, but it's a fine cast, and the locations, all over France, make a real nice backdrop for the chase.

John Neville

(1925-2011)

David and Bathsheba (1951)

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA  (1951)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Henry King

    Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Raymond Massey,

    Kieron Moore, James Robertson Justice, Jayne Meadows

A former shepherd, now the king of Israel, fiddles around with the wife of an army commander and learns what a harsh, unforgiving bastard that Old Testament God can be. A slow, stately biblical romance from the time before CinemaScope, which didn't stop the marketing department at 20th Century Fox from calling it "A Goliath of a Motion Picture!" Slog your way through it if you want to, or to save time, just read the Second Book of Samuel.

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

LINDA LINDA LINDA  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nobuhiro Yamashita

    Doona Bae, Yu Kashii,

    Aki Maeda, Shiori Sekine

A captivating little sleeper from Japan, about an all-girl high-school rock-&-roll band looking for a new lead vocalist and finding her in a Korean exchange student who's not exactly fluent in Japanese. A movie that, without seeming to do anything special, or even much of anything at all, totally gets what it's like to be a teenager. Winning performances by all four bandmates, and if you're not humming the title tune by the time it's over, you're either deaf or dead.

Age of Consent (1969)

AGE OF CONSENT  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Michael Powell

    James Mason, Helen Mirren, Jack MacGowran,

    Neva Carr-Glyn, Michael Boddy, Frank Thring

Powell and Mason teamed up to produce this idyll, set on an island off the Great Barrier Reef, and starring Mason as a painter happily on leave from the city and a young, naked Helen Mirren as the local girl who becomes his model and muse. Whether the scenery on view is Dame Helen or Dunk Island, it sure is nice to look at. Mirren's first movie, and Powell's last.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog introduces you to the world's oldest discovered art - cave paintings found in France in the 1990s, dating back some 30,000 years. The paintings are so accomplished, and so well-preserved, you wonder how they could possibly be authentic. With their realistic shadings and sense of proportion, and the contours of the cave walls providing an extra dimension and sometimes even the illusion of movement, they don't seem primitive at all. Herzog, viewing them with a filmmaker's eye and shooting them with a 3-D camera, even suggests that one eight-legged beast could be an example of "proto-cinema." The movie leaves you with a sense of amazement and a lot of unanswered questions. Like, how did the artists who painted the lions and leopards and rhinos and mammoths get close enough, while the animals were presumably still breathing, to get the look just right? The miracle's not just that the paintings survived into the current millennium. It's that the Stone-Age Gauguins and Picassos who created them survived their own research.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

THE JAZZ SINGER  (1927)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alan Crosland

    Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland,

    Eugenie Besserer, William Demarest, Roscoe Karns

Though he appeared in other pictures over the years, Al Jolson made a singular mark on movies with just one film - this one. He plays a cantor's son torn between his inflexible father's demand that he sing in the synagogue and his own unquenchable passion for jazz. (To what extent Jolson's music could be considered jazz is a matter for musicologists.) It's an odd thing to watch, shifting between silent melodrama and primitive sound, showcasing Jolson's arm-waving exuberance, and closing with the star singing "Mammy" in blackface. But it marks the pivotal moment in the transition from silents to sound, and its impact was immediate and irreversible. Within two or three years, every studio in Hollywood had converted to sound, and movies would never be the same.

The Illusionist (2010)

THE ILLUSIONIST  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Sylvain Chomet

A French animated feature based on an unfilmed screenplay by Jacques Tati, about an aging music hall magician who ends up in Scotland, where there's barely enough work to get by on, let alone provide for the servant girl who's moved into his life. True to Tati, it's done in pantomime, with music and sound effects and a few incidental words in a variety of languages. It's whimsical in a way only animated movies (0r Jacques Tati movies) can be, but it's not your typical cartoon for children. Its themes are more in line with real life. Sometimes, matter-of-factly, bad things happen, and a happy ending is not guaranteed. It's funny and it looks great and it's emotionally honest and it captures a time in the late 1950s, when the music halls were closing, television and rock & roll were taking over, and the old clowns and ventriloquists and rabbit-in-the-hat magic acts were running out of time. Highlight: when the magician walks into a cinema where Tati's "Mon Oncle" is playing, comes face-to-face with his live-action doppelgänger, watches for a moment, and walks back outside.

Quicksand (1950)

QUICKSAND  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Irving Pichel

    Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre,

    Barbara Bates, Taylor Holmes, Minerva Urecal

Mickey Rooney plays a garage mechanic who borrows $20 from the till to finance a hot date. Nothing goes right from then on, not that you expect it to. This is film noir, after all. And there's a reason it's called "Quicksand".

V For Vendetta (2006)

V FOR VENDETTA  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James McTeigue

    Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea,

    John Hurt, Stephen Fry, Rupert Graves,

    Sinead Cusack, Tim Pigott-Smith, Eddie Marsan

Sympathy for the devil, or at least for the terrorist in the Guy Fawkes mask. A subversive, futuristic thriller set in a totalitarian society where an acquiescent population has traded freedom for the illusion of security, the government rules through secrecy and fear, and owning a copy of the Koran is punishable by death. Based on Alan Moore's graphic novel, it's a lot less concerned with blowing stuff up than with making you think. It blows stuff up, too, of course, at the beginning and the end, while daring to suggest that there might be more to terrorism than mindless evil, and that certain governments may, in fact, have it coming to them. Hugo Weaving plays V, the man behind the mask. Natalie Portman plays a television production assistant who becomes his protégée, protector, soulmate and confidante. Stephen Rea plays the police inspector who uncovers more than the government wants him to know as he tries to track V down. John Hurt, in a stark reversal from his role in "1984", plays Big Brother. The music threatens to overpower the dialogue at times, but the message comes through loud and clear. A great movie to keep on hand for those times when you feel like blowing up a building yourself. Watch for the references to "A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Grapes of Wrath". Penny for the Guy?

Screen Test / Take 2

Match the following actors with their real names:

  1. Boris Karloff

  2. Kirk Douglas

  3. Peter Lorre

  4. Tony Curtis

  5. John Wayne

  6. Robert Taylor

  7. Cary Grant

  8. Michael Caine

  9. Roy Rogers

10. Ray Milland

a. Archibald Leach

b. Marion Morrison

c. Reginald Truscott-Jones

d. Maurice Mickelwhite

e. Issur Danielovitch

f. William Henry Pratt

g. Leonard Slye

h. Bernard Schwartz

i. Laszlo Löwenstein

j. Spangler Arlington Brugh

Answers:

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