Stardust Memories (1980)

STARDUST MEMORIES  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Woody Allen
    Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Jessica Harper,
    Marie-Christine Barrault, Tony Roberts, Daniel Stern,
    Laraine Newman, Louise Lasser, Amy Wright
Woody Allen's off-kilter take on fame, art, mortality, love, comedy, film festivals, UFOs and the pursuit of smart, beautiful women. This is the movie where fans (including a space alien) keep telling Woody how much they like his movies, "especially the early, funny ones." Somewhat contrary to its reputation, this is a funny one, too - a crazy, revealing, dreamlike reflection on the culture of celebrity. It's one of Woody's best movies, required viewing for anybody who admires the guy's work. As an added bonus, there's Charlotte Rampling, whose skeletal beauty has never been captured more strikingly than it is here. The camera loves her, as the saying goes, and it appears from the visual evidence that Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis do, too.

Gordon Willis

(1931-2014)

We Are the Best! (2013)

WE ARE THE BEST!  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lukas Moodysson
    Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv Lemoyne
Three Swedish schoolgirls form a band to celebrate their status as social outcasts and show that punk's not dead. Two of them are musically ignorant, but they're all smart, alienated, impulsive, and cranked on the raw energy and instinct for rebellion that go with early adolescence. Who's going to stop them, anyway? The storytelling's loose and the ending's anticlimactic, but Moodysson gets winning performances from all three girls, who play their roles as if they were living them. Their sound is ear-splitting, and the odds of them ever landing a recording contract, or a club gig, or even a few seconds of radio airplay are beyond remote, but that's not what matters here. They're friends and they're a band and they're making noise and they've got each other, and when you're 13, it just doesn't get any better than that. They're the best.

Screen Test / Take 5

Match the following actors with the television shows they starred in:

                          1. Steve McQueen
                          2. Bill Murray
                          3. Lee Marvin
                          4. George Clooney
                          5. Clint Eastwood
                          6. David Carradine
                          7. Henry Fonda
                          8. Charles Bronson
                          9. Dan Duryea
                        10. Bruce Willis

                          a. "M Squad"
                          b. "Man With a Camera"
                          c. "The Deputy"
                          d. "Moonlighting"
                          e. "Kung Fu"
                          f.  "Rawhide"
                          g. "China Smith"
                          h. "Saturday Night Live"
                          i.  "E.R."
                          j.  "Wanted Dead or Alive"

Answers:

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

Mister 880 (1950)

MISTER 880  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edmund Goulding
    Burt Lancaster, Dorothy Maguire,
    Edmund Gwenn, Millard Mitchell
For a long time, all I really knew about this movie was its title, and I thought maybe it was about a track-and-field athlete or something. Turns out it's about a dogged Treasury agent (Burt Lancaster) on the trail of a kindly old counterfeiter who's running off $1 bills on a small press he calls "Cousin Henry". Burt's a straight arrow when it comes to queer money, and wants the old man to get the maximum sentence no matter what, but foxy U.N. translator Dorothy Maguire thinks that's kind of unfair, and it all works out more or less happily for everybody in a pseudo-Frank-Capra kind of way, with "Auld Lang Syne" playing in the background. When was the last time anybody bothered to counterfeit a $1 bill?

Hollywoodland (2006)

HOLLYWOODLAND  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Allen Coulter
    Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck,
    Bob Hoskins, Molly Parker, Lois Smith,
    Robin Tunney, Joe Spano, Larry Cedar
The life and death of Superman: a murder mystery about what might've happened to George Reeves, TV's original Man of Steel, who turned up dead from a gunshot wound to the head during a Hollywood party in 1959. The story plays out along two narrative tracks. In flashbacks, Ben Affleck plays Reeves, a serious actor of moderate talent, affably trying to hustle his way to a level of professional respectability that's beyond his reach. In a later time frame, Adrien Brody plays Louis Simo, a low-rent private eye who becomes obsessed with the people and events surrounding Reeves' death. It's an interesting matchup. Both men are dream chasers, and both are tenacious enough to believe they can make the big time. Both are in over their heads. Brody, who' a very good actor but an unlikely tough guy, seems miscast. Affleck, whose range is more limited, makes Reeves so transparently vain and shallow, you wonder where the performance ends and the actor behind it begins. You could argue that the flashback segments, at least, should be in black and white, but the use of washed-out color works well, too. There's a bit of "Citizen Kane" in "Hollywoodland" (but no "Rosebud"), a little "Lone Star", a hint of "Ed Wood" and more than a touch of "L.A. Confidential". And you know what? If he'd come along 50 years earlier, Ben Affleck would've made a pretty good TV Superman.

Bob Hoskins

(1942-2014)

Alien (1979)

ALIEN  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ridley Scott
    Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt,
    Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright
While investigating a mysterious radio signal in another solar system, the crew of a space freighter takes on an unwelcome stowaway - a hideous alien organism that hides out in the ship's ventilation system. Infinitely resilient and virtually unkillable, it begins to pick off its fellow passengers one by one. This is the landmark science fiction/horror movie that introduced both H.R. Giger's otherworldly alien designs and Sigourney Weaver's gutsy, space-age heroine, Ripley. It's about as scary as monster movies get, even if you can't always figure out why otherwise sensible characters keep risking their lives to go off alone after the ship's pet cat. 

H.R. Giger

(1940-2014)

On the Road (2013)

ON THE ROAD  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Walter Salles
    Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart,
    Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams,
    Alice Braga, Tom Sturridge, Elisabeth Moss,
    Danny Morgan, Steve Buscemi, Terrence Howard
According to most of the people who knew him, Neal Cassady was the 20th century's most accomplished car thief, driver, womanizer and speed freak, as well as one of the most charming and irresponsible human beings who ever lived. Though he wasn't much of a writer, he was an undeniable force of nature, the blast of restless, reckless energy the Beat movement might not have existed without. "On the Road", Jack Kerouac's all but unfilmable novel, is a barely fictionalized account of what it was like to drive cross-country with Cassady in the late 1940s, and this movie version, not surprisingly, doesn't come close to capturing the book. There are a couple of times when it almost gets there, once during a hallucinatory fever dream the Kerouac character has in Mexico, and the other when he finally sits down at his Underwood to turn his  scribbled notes into "On the Road". Otherwise, it's a disjointed, episodic road movie with actors who try real hard but lack the charisma and authenticity of their real-life counterparts. What it does capture fairly well is the grimy, wired, strung-out energy that goes with spending days on end on the highway in a car. Viggo Mortensen has a good time playing William S. Burroughs - he has the famous drawl down cold - and Kristen Stewart does a nice job as the Cassady character's underaged wife/ex-wife/lover/girlfriend. In fact, she's all of those, but this is Neal Cassady, so who's keeping score?

Seven Doors To Death (1944)

SEVEN DOORS TO DEATH  (1944)  ¢ ¢
    D: Elmer Clifton
    Chick Chandler, June Clyde, George Meeker
A safe is robbed and a man is murdered. The suspects are seven shopkeepers, each with a door that opens into a central courtyard. A B-movie mystery in which a lot of stuff happens at night, sometimes in a basement at night, and nobody has a decent working flashlight. Whodunit? My money's on the dame with the legs. Of course, I could be wrong.

Mental (2012)

MENTAL  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: P.J. Hogan
    Toni Collette, Anthony LaPaglia, Liev Schreiber,
    Rebecca Gibney, Kerry Fox, Lily Sullivan,
    Sam Clark, Bethany Whitmore, Holly Buchanan
Nobody does mental like Toni Collette.