Marshall (2017)

 

MARSHALL  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Reginald Hudlin

    Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson,

    James Cromwell, Sterling K. Brown, Dan Stevens

A good-looking biopic that covers what would probably be just a page or two in the long, eventful life of Thurgood Marshall. The year is 1941, and Marshall, as the NAACP's only lawyer, is traveling the country nonstop, specifically to defend African Americans who are wrongly accused and couldn't get a fair trial otherwise. That brings him to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a black chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) stands accused of raping a white woman (Kate Hudson), a crime he's confessed to but claims he didn't commit. The case is more complicated than that, and Marshall's mission is made even tougher because he lacks a license to practice in the state and the crusty, no-nonsense judge (James Cromwell) won't let him speak in court. To help out, Marshall recruits a reluctant local attorney (Josh Gad) with zero experience in criminal law. It's one of those period pieces where all the cars are new and shiny, all the suits are impeccably tailored, and all the city streets are clean. In other words, it risks looking a little too good. But it tells a compelling story, and the late Chadwick Boseman effectively captures the jokey persuasiveness and uncompromising sense of justice that would eventually carry Marshall to a seat on the Supreme Court. As for the other 498 pages of Marshall's life, it'd take a Ken Burns miniseries to accommodate that. 

Sing and Like It (1934)

 

SING AND LIKE IT  (1934)  ¢ ¢

    D: William A. Seiter

    Zasu Pitts, Edward Everett Horton, Nat Pendleton,

    Pert Kelton, John Qualen, Ned Sparks

When a gangster overhears Zasu Pitts sing a heartfelt but tone-deaf rendition of the sentimental tune "Your Mother", he's overcome with emotion and decides to make her a star on Broadway. Acting and dialogue as stilted and stiff as this can't be an accident, especially in a comedy, which makes you wonder: Is this a bad movie, or a spoof of a bad movie, or just a bad spoof? It's kind of hard to say, but Pitts and Horton are good in it, and it's got a few laughs. 

Thelma (2017)

 

THELMA  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joachim Trier

    Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen,

    Ellen Dorrit Peterson, Marie Magnusdotter Solem

"Thelma" is where "Carrie" meets "Let the Right One In", a Norwegian thriller about a girl who goes off to college, where she starts having seizures that appear to trigger supernatural events. Is the cause her strict Christian upbringing? Her controlling, manipulative parents? Stress from school? Or the anxiety that goes with falling in love? And what's the connection with her infant kid brother, who died under mysterious circumstances when the girl was six? It's all very quiet and creepy, with a restrained, sympathetic performance by Eili Harboe, who has the self-contained stillness of a young Isabelle Huppert. There's a much happier ending for Thelma here than there was for Carrie. At least there seems to be. It depends on how much is real and how much is playing out in Thelma's head. But if she isn't dead or dreaming that idyllic final encounter, good for her. 

Black Magic (1949)

 

BLACK MAGIC  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gregory Ratoff

    Orson Welles, Nancy Guild, Akim Tamiroff,

    Frank Latimore, Valentina Cortese, Raymond Burr

Orson Welles hams it up as a gypsy magician who cons his way to the court of the French king by hypnotizing a young woman who's a dead ringer for Marie Antoinette. He's too ambitious, though, and that's his undoing. Read this as a metaphor for Welles' own career and it becomes kind of interesting. Apparently Orson co-directed it (without getting a screen credit), and it's not hard to see why he'd be attracted to the role and the material.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

 

PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Angela Robinson

    Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote,

    Connie Britton, Monica Giordano, Oliver Platt

In some dramatic ways, the real story of the origin of Wonder Woman could rival anything in a comic book. The center of it all was a Harvard psychologist and shameless self-promoter named William Moulton Marston, who in addition to creating the world's most widely recognized female superhero, developed an early prototype of the lie detector. Every bit as crucial were the two women in Marston's life: his wife Elizabeth and their live-in friend and mutual love interest, Olive Byrne. This movie follows their unconventional three-way relationship from the late 1920s to Marston's death in 1947, which means that Wonder Woman herself appears relatively late in the story. (She didn't make her first comic-book appearance till 1941.) You can see Wonder Woman's silver bracelets (Olive wore them), the preoccupation with bondage (Marston had an interest in that), and Wonder Woman's "Lasso of Truth" (a de facto lie detector) long before they became fixtures in ink on paper. You don't learn much about who drew the comic - Marston was the writer, not the illustrator - and while acknowledging that Byrne was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the film mostly sidesteps the influence of early feminism on some pf the imagery. It's probably not a movie for fans who just want to watch Gal Gadot soar through the air and slash away at the bad guys. It's more like a movie for grownups who aren't put off by a little discreetly staged kinky sex. Finally, there's Rebecca Hall as Elizabeth, smart, strong and lethally cynical, at war with how much she's willing to risk (a lot) and when to back off and play it safe. The real Elizabeth Marston lived to be 100, and watching Hall's performance, you can see why. Any time she's on screen, you'd better be paying attention. 

For a more comprehensive look at this subject, the Movie Buzzard recommends "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

 

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Rex Ingram

    Rudolph Valentino, Josef Swickard, Alice Terry,

    Alan Hale, Bridgetta Clark, Virginia Warwick

A silent anti-war epic and the movie that made Valentino a star, about a family from Argentina who relocate to France where they're eventually caught up in the war to end all wars. Rudy dances the tango. Several million women take notice. 

Sausage Party (2016)

 

SAUSAGE PARTY  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon

This is the kind of animated movie a bunch of drunk, stoned, brain-damaged frat boys might've dreamed up between tequila shots and bong hits. It's about what happens when the products in a supermarket - hot dogs, buns, jars of mustard, potatoes, bagels and everything else - learn that the giant creatures taking them out of the store aren't gods, and their destination is not the promised land but the food equivalent of hell. It's as funny as it is gross, and it's plenty gross: political and cultural incorrectness trashing its way to a satirical point. So the potatoes are Irish (naturally), and Salma Hayek does the voice of a lesbian taco, and a Jewish bagel and some Arab flatbread feud over shelf space, and a bun and a hot dog trade sexually unambiguous notions about what they'd like to do when they finally get together, and it ends with a food orgy that rivals anything on "South Park". I had no interest in watching this till a friend recommended it, and darned if I didn't find myself laughing. Out loud. A lot. An unexpected guilty pleasure. 

The Fatal Hour (1940)

 

THE FATAL HOUR  (1940)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Nigh

    Boris Karloff, Marjorie Reynolds, Grant Withers,

    Frank Puglia, Charles Trowbridge, Jason Robards 

Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff) takes on the case of a murdered police detective and a smuggling ring. An undistinguished Monogram whodunit, notable mostly for Karloff's understated presence and the supporting work of Frank Puglia as a gangster with a string of convenient alibis and Marjorie Reynolds as a feisty newspaper reporter. Karloff's in the background much of the time, which almost makes Mr. Wong a secondary character in his own movie. The Jason Robards listed in the credits is not the actor who played Ben Bradlee in "All the President's Men", but his father. 

Hidden Figures (2016)

 

HIDDEN FIGURES  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Theodore Melfi

    Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae,

    Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons

Most of us probably don't think much about the civil-rights movement and the space race being integral to each other, but they did share a timeline through the '50s and '60s, a period when, as the saying goes, shit happened. This movie tells the story of three black women, mathematicians working for NASA around the time of the first manned space flights. It's a movie that gets the period right, from the NASA techs in their uniform white shirts and narrow ties to the rabbit ears on the television sets to Kevin Costner's government-issue eyeglasses. More significant is the way it captures the inherent racism of the time, when overt segregation was still pervasive (though not necessarily legal) and even NASA had separate restroom facilities for its colored workers. All three women run into that wall. For Dorothy (Octavia Spencer), it's being passed over for a job she's already doing. For Mary (Janelle Monae), it's a night class she needs to take at a high school that still bars blacks. For Katherine (Taraji P.Henson), it's not being able to put her own name on the papers she's initiating, researching and writing. It helps that they're all brilliant, but if they weren't also to varying degrees persistent and assertive, they'd never get anywhere in a system designed to limit and contain them. That they were successful is a tribute to their heroism and tenacity in the face of prohibitive odds. A mind, to recycle another old saying, is a terrible thing to waste. 

The Boy Friend (1971)

 

THE BOY FRIEND  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ken Russell

    Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Moyra Fraser, 

    Max Adrian, Vladek Sheybal, Georgina Hale, 

    Murray Melvin, Glenda Jackson, Tommy Tune

Ken Russell's razzle-dazzle tribute to the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, a giddy, backstage/onstage artifice starring Twiggy as the understudy who goes on when the star actress (Glenda Jackson) breaks a leg. It's gaudy, superficial and transparently theatrical, way too much of everything, really, but it wouldn't be a Ken Russell movie otherwise. The Busby Berkeley-style production numbers are the highlight. When you're knocking off a Busby Berkeley routine, too much is barely enough. 

Score: A Film Music Documentary (2016)

 

SCORE: A FILM MUSIC DOCUMENTARY 

    D: Matt Schrader                     (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

A documentary in which some of the world's most accomplished composers of movie music talk about their work, while film clips illuminate what they're talking about. Hans Zimmer, Marco Beltrami, Danny Elfman, Alexandre Desplat and Mark Mothersbaugh are among those checking in, and respects are paid to the old masters: Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and John Barry. A couple of things you take away from this: The best movie music is great music, and the people who create it are passionate about what they do. If you're up for a double feature, see if you can find "Visions of Light", a 1993 documentary that took a similar approach to the art of cinematography. 

Blithe Spirit (1945)

BLITHE SPIRIT  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David Lean

    Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond,

    Margaret Rutherford, Hugh Wakefield, Joyce Carey

A crackpot medium conjures up the spirit of a man's dead wife, much to the displeasure of his current (still living) one. Noel Coward's spectral comedy has a bitchy edge, but the dialogue really flies by, and it could take American ears a while to catch up. Rutherford's a hoot as the medium.

Among Wolves (2016)

 

AMONG WOLVES  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Shawn Convey

A leisurely, low-key documentary about a Bosnian motorcycle gang called the Wolves, whose members have taken on the care of a herd of wild horses. They also give blood and help out at schools and hospitals. The club's older members are veterans of the Balkan War, and the town they live in is dying. There are no jobs there, and really no future. The men and the horses are effectively metaphors for each other. The pace is slow, the shots are drawn out, the film almost meditative, with a dreamlike musical score. Unusual for a movie about a motorcycle gang. 

Quote File / Take 18

 

Some lines from the movies of Sean Connery:

"My name is Bond, James Bond. May I offer you a 

  drink?"

  Connery in "Never Say Never Again"

"I've got lunatics laughing at me from the woods."

  Connery in "A Bridge Too Far"

"Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a 

  whorehouse at low tide."

  Connery in "The Untouchables"

"I've never kissed a member of the clergy before. 

  Would it be a sin?"

  Connery to Audrey Hepburn in "Robin and Marian"

"It's been a bad year. Next one will probably be 

  worse."

  Connery in "The Wind and the Lion"

"But what is so alarming about laughter?"

  Connery in "The Name of the Rose"

(1930-2020)