All Is Lost (2013)

ALL IS LOST  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: J.C. Chandor
    Robert Redford
In "All Is Lost", Robert Redford plays a character without a name. In the credits, he's identified simply as "Our Man". Which makes sense, when you think about it. Redford's been our man, or some projection of who we'd like to think we can be, for close to 50 years. So here he is, looking weathered but fit in his 70s, playing a guy trying to survive all by himself when his sailboat goes down in the Indian Ocean. There's next to no dialogue and Redford's the only actor in the film. He's sleeping below deck when a freight container full of shoes rams the boat, ripping a gash in the hull. From that point on, it's our man against the sea, an adventure every bit as tense and exciting (and solitary) as Sandra Bullock's space odyssey in "Gravity", another film where the stakes are high, the odds are extreme, and heroism and ingenuity might not be enough. Take it as a metaphor for humanity in general and our collective struggle to survive in the 21st century, and the feeling is even more ominous. If all is lost for our man Redford, the outlook can't be too good for the rest of us.

A-Plumbing We Will Go (1940)

A-PLUMBING WE WILL GO  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Del Lord
    The Three Stooges, Symona Boniface, Bud Jamison,
    Bess Flowers, Eddie Laughton, Dudley Dickerson
Moe, Larry and Curly are acquitted of robbing a chicken coop, do a little fishing out on the sidewalk, hide out in a magician's box, and finally end up posing as plumbers to escape the cop who's out to bring them in. Chaos takes over completely, once they start trying to fix the pipes. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Centurion (2010)

CENTURION  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neil Marshall
    Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko,
    Liam Cunningham, Imogen Poots, Noel Clarke
"Braveheart" meets "300" in a battle epic set in 2nd-century Britain, about a desperate band of Roman legionnaires being chased all over the moors by an equally warlike band of Picts. There's not much glory or grandeur here, and not even very much color, just a lot of running and fighting and skulls being split open and blood flying across the screen. It's about what happens when an empire tries to expand beyond its tactical reach, or as one Roman succinctly puts it, "We're fucked." The Romans speak English with British accents, while the Picts, who are native to Britain (Scotland, to be exact), don't speak English at all. They always were stubborn, those Scots.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT  (1965)  ¢ ¢
    D: Wojciech Has
    Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, 
    Elzbieta Czyzewska, Gustaw Holoubek, 
    Bogumil Kobiela, Zdzislaw Makiakewicz
During the Napoleonic Wars, a Spanish nobleman, who vaguely resembles Bob Hope, has a series of adventures involving ghosts, demons, gypsies, an old hermit, two Moorish princesses, the Inquisition and more. There are flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, and everybody, it seems, has a story to tell. The stories all eventually connect somehow, or maybe not, they're hard to track after a while, but either way, the movie just goes on and on and on for what seems like forever. It's in black and white. It's in Polish. It's outlandish. It's got a weird sense of humor. It probably won't keep you awake if you watch it late at night. A cult item, definitely, and a particular favorite of Jerry Garcia, which makes you wonder what Jerry was smoking at the time.

Naked Edge / Take 4

Hedy Lamarr in "Ecstasy"
Carey Mulligan in "Shame"
Sigourney Weaver in "Half Moon Street"
Shelley Duvall in "Thieves Like Us"
Geraldine Chaplin in "Welcome To L.A."
Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"
Vanessa Redgrave in "Isadora"
Helen Hunt in "The Sessions"
Ursula Andress in "Slave of the Cannibal God"
Josephine McKim 
(Maureen O'Sullivan's underwater double)
in "Tarzan and His Mate"

The Naked Monster (2005)

THE NAKED MONSTER  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Wayne Berwick, Ted Newsom
    Kenneth Tobey, Brinke Stevens, R.G. Wilson,
    John Goodwin, John Agar, Linnea Quigley,
    Robert Clarke, Michelle Bauer, Robert Cornthwaite,
    Lori Nelson, Paul Marco, Forrest J Ackerman
A federal agent, a paleontologist, a county sheriff and a long-retired Army colonel take on a giant three-eyed reptile in a goofy, "Airplane!"-style spoof of '50s monster movies. The production values are way beneath the standards of even most monster movies, with lots of footage lifted from other films, lots of old monster-movie stars in cameo roles, and lots and lots of really bad puns. Just about every aging B-movie actor who still had a pulse when the picture was shot turns up in it somewhere. (Production spanned a couple of decades, and by the time the project was completed, some of its older stars were gone.) Veteran scream queen Brinke Stevens gets the obligatory nude shower scene, and while veteran monster fighter Kenneth Tobey gets top billing, he's not moving around much, and it's Stevens, as much as anybody, who carries the film. As a mark of her status, the company name on an armored truck the monster crushes is conspicuously spelled "Brinkes".

None But the Brave (1965)

NONE BUT THE BRAVE  (1965)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Frank Sinatra
    Frank Sinatra, Clint Walker, Tommy Sands,
    Tatsuya Mihashi, Brad Dexter, Tony Bill
The only movie Frank Sinatra directed is about a small band of U.S. Marines and their Japanese counterparts, fighting it out and tenuously coexisting on an island in the Pacific during World War Two. Not a bad idea, but the script comes down a little heavy, and Tommy Sands' rabid performance as a green but gung-ho lieutenant belongs in a cartoon. The Japanese soldiers speak Japanese without subtitles. When the Japanese commander switches to English, the letter "L" takes a real beating. John Boorman covered much of the same ground more efficiently with just two antagonists in "Hell In the Pacific" (1968).

The Limits of Control (2009)

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jim Jarmusch
    Isaach de Bankolé, Tilda Swinton, Paz de la Huerta,
    John Hurt, Bill Murray, Gael Garcia Bernal, Hiam Abbass
The Jim Jarmusch tour of Spain, starring Isaach de Bankolé as a stone-faced mystery man moving diamonds around, meeting his contacts in cafes and hotels and train cars, and passing the goods and receiving his coded instructions in match boxes. The orders for his first assignment are cryptic. Go to the towers. Go to the cafe. Watch for the violin. And this: Reality is arbitrary. Is it ever. We're in Jim Jarmusch territory for sure, a meditative reflection on art, life, stillness, espresso, and what it means to be a bohemian. Where a major plot development is when de Bankolé's shiny blue suit changes to a brown one or a gray one. Where the flight he catches to Madrid is on Air Lumière, and the pickup truck he gets a ride in later on has a sign painted on the back in big white letters: LA VIDA NO VALE NADA. "I honestly have no idea whether this image came from a dream, or a film," Tilda Swinton tells de Bankolé at one point, and that's the way it is with the movie itself: trancelike, repetitive, like a dream you keep having, with endless variations, over and over again.

Ever After (1998)

EVER AFTER  (1998)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andy Tennant
    Drew Barrymore, Anjelica Huston, Dougray Scott,
    Melanie Lynskey, Jeroen Krabbé, Jeanne Moreau
Jeanne Moreau sits down with the Brothers Grimm and sets the record straight on Cinderella. In her version, Cinderella doesn't just inherit her father's love of books, but his skill with a sword and dagger. Her keen sense of justice and strong-willed gift for diplomacy help her win the heart of the prince. One of her stepsisters turns out not to be so bad after all. And the fairy godmother role is taken over by Leonardo da Vinci , who uses Cinderella as the model for one of his most famous paintings. (It's not the Mona Lisa, though she turns up here, too.) Tennant and his co-writers might've taken a few liberties with the fairy tale, but they've created what's probably the best, and undoubtedly the most literate, live-action Cinderella movie yet. Barrymore plays the lead with spirit and intelligence and not a trace of irony. She's an appealingly down-to-earth Cinderella, just the kind of girl a prince could fall for. Jeroen Krabbé as her father and Dougray Scott as the prince resemble each other just enough to make Cinderella's attraction to the prince interesting. And Anjelica Huston plays the wicked stepmother with all the warmth and charm of a coiled rattlesnake. Be ready to hiss loudly whenever she appears. 

Americano (2011)

AMERICANO  (2011)  ¢ ¢
    D: Mathieu Demy
    Mathieu Demy, Salma Hayek, Geraldine Chaplin,
    Chiara Mastroianni, Carlos Bardem, André Wilms
This movie starts out gloomy and gets more gloomy as it goes. At first there's just a black screen and the sound of fucking. Then you see the two people doing the fucking, and they don't look like they're enjoying themselves at all. They just look sad. Then you see the same two people in bed together, sleeping, and they don't look any happier than they did before, but at least they're asleep now, so you hope for the best. Then the phone rings and the guy gets up and answers it and learns that his mother has died. Somebody's just punched his ticket to hell, by way of Paris, L.A. and Tijuana. It doesn't matter, really. You can tell he's not going to have a good time, no matter where he goes. And as long as you're watching "Americano", neither will you. Well, okay, you do get to watch Salma Hayek strip down to a fishnet bodysuit in a sleazy Tijuana bar. It's arguably the high point of the film. And even that's depressing.

The Crowd (1928)

THE CROWD  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: King Vidor
    Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach,
    Daniel G. Tomlinson, Dell Henderson, Lucy Beaumont
King Vidor's silent melodrama about an ambitious young man who moves to the city, hoping to grab a piece of the American Dream. Some of this is a bit overdone, but Eleanor Boardman (aka Mrs. Vidor) does a nice job as the protagonist's sympathetic wife, and the camerawork still looks spectacular. James Murray, who plays the lead, was unknown at the time and he got some decent reviews, but his career never really took off. He became an alcoholic, reduced to panhandling in the street, and drowned in the Hudson River, a possible suicide, in 1936.

11:14 (2003)

11:14  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Greg Marcks
    Henry Thomas, Rachel Leigh Cook, Shawn Hatosy,
    Hilary Swank, Patrick Swayze, Barbara Hershey,
    Colin Hanks, Ben Foster, Stark Sands, Clark Gregg
The fates collide at 11:14 at night in a place where only people with real bad luck are out driving. The bad luck involves doughnuts, car keys, a bowling ball, a handgun, a dog, a dead body, some jumper cables, a gravestone and a missing penis. Really. This is like a poor man's "Crash", an ensemble piece in which everything's connected, in a story that continually doubles back on itself. No high-stakes moralizing, just a bunch of stuff that happens, resulting in all that bad luck. Ben Foster plays the unlucky joyrider whose member goes missing. Ouch.

Crash (2005)

CRASH  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Paul Haggis
    Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard,
    Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Thandie Newton,
    Ryan Phillippe, William Fichtner, Shaun Toub
An Oscar-winning ensemble piece set in Los Angeles, about a bunch of people who don't much like each other, but keep having to deal with each other anyway. A television director. A hard-assed cop. A locksmith. A thief. A shopkeeper. A detective. The district attorney. And some others. All living in a virtual war zone, an ethnic melting pot they view (justifiably) with fear and antipathy. They're all more complex than they first appear, and somewhere beneath (or within) the moral compromises they make, there's a glimmer of shared humanity. The coincidences pile up in a way that's almost surreal, but the acting is powerful, and in its best moments, so is the film. "Can't we all just get along?" Rodney King might ask. Hmmm. Maybe. But according to "Crash", probably not.