The Mystery of Henri Pick (2010)

 

THE MYSTERY OF HENRI PICK  2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Rémi Bezançon

    Fabrice Luchini, Camille Cottin, Alice Isaaz,

    Bastien Bouillon, Josiane Stoléru, Hanna Schygulla

In a dimly lit room in a small-town library, a book editor comes across an unpublished manuscript which she manages to get into print. The book becomes a runaway bestseller, but a famous critic doesn't believe the author, a local pizza chef who's been dead for two years, could be the one who wrote it. He decides to find out who did. A whodunit that's really more of a who-wrote-it, in which the dead man's defenders, with whom you're inclined to sympathize, could be motivated by something more than literary authenticity, while the critic, who's the personification of smug condescension, isn't necessarily wrong. Other than wanting to ban them, when was the last time anybody in the real world paid this much attention to books?

Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954)

MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR  (1954)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Wyott Ordung 

    Anne Kimbell, Stuart Wade, Dick Pinner,

    Wyatt Ordung, Inez Palange, Jonathan Haze

Well, why not? They've come from everywhere else.

Movie Madness (1982)

 

MOVIE MADNESS  (1982)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Scott Giraldi, Henry Jaglom

    Peter Riegert, Diane Lane, Candy Clark,

    Ann Dusenberry, Robert Culp, Fred Willard,

    Olympia Dukakis, Mary Woronov, Dick Miller,

    Robby Benson, Richard Widmark, Julie Kavner,

    Christopher Lloyd, Henry Youngman, Elisha Cook Jr.

A trilogy of comedy sketches from National Lampoon, which is all you need to know if you're familiar with National Lampoon.The first segment is a crazed Woody Allen knockoff starring Peter Riegert and a Diane Keatonish Candy Clark. The second stars Ann Dusenberry as a stripper who sleeps her way to the top of the margarine industry. The third has Richard Widmark as a veteran cop paired with a wide-eyed rookie partner played by Robby Benson. The gags are uneven, but the movie gets by on sheer silliness, absurdity (sometimes) winning out over questionable taste.

Living (2022)

LIVING  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Oliver Hermanus 

    Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp,

    Hubert Burton, Adrian Rawlins, Oliver Chris

Bill Nighy has been stealing movies and scenes in movies for years now, and in "Living" he gets the kind of part most older actors would sell a chunk of their soul for: a starring role in a movie with a good script about a man who's dying. Nighy's character, Mr. Williams, is a career civil servant working in a government office whose primary function seems to be moving documents around and making sure nothing gets done. When he learns he has terminal cancer, he starts to think about what he might do with the time he has left, and it's not what he's been doing for the last 40 years. Some of this plays like straight-laced Monty Python - the men with their bowler hats and business suits and umbrellas on their way to their bureaucratic jobs - and you think, shouldn't John Cleese be in there somewhere? But it's an affecting character study, and it all hinges on Nighy, playing a man who's self-effacing to the point of being invisible, a chronic conformist facing one last chance to color outside the lines (and maybe do something useful) before it's too late. Without giving too much away, let's just say he doesn't waste the chance, and neither does the actor playing him.

Screen Test / Take 20

 

Name the movies the following actors appeared in together:

1. Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Margaret Hamilton,

Bert Lahr (1939)

2. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Sydney Greenstreet, 

Peter Lorre (1942)

3. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Harry Morgan, 

Lon Chaney Jr. (1952)

4. Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, 

Montgomery Clift (1961)

5. William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien,

Warren Oates (1969)

6. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Sterling Hayden, 

Robert Duvall (1972)

7. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto,

Harry Dean Stanton (1979)

8. Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin, Andre the Giant,

Robin Wright (1986)

9. Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, 

Christopher Walken (1994)

10. Ralph Fiennes, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, 

Jude Law (2014)

                                    ANSWERS:

                          1. "The Wizard of Oz"

                         2. "Casablanca"

                         3. "High Noon"

                         4. "Judgment at Nuremberg"

                         5. "The Wild Bunch"

                         6. "The Godfather"

                         7. "Alien"

                         8. "The Princess Bride"

                         9. "Pulp Fiction"

                       10. "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

Kiss Me (2011)

KISS ME  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alexandra Therese Keining

    Ruth Vega Fernandez, Liv Mjönes, Krister Henriksen,

    Lena Endre, Joakim Nätterqvist, Josefine Tengblad

Two beautiful young women, hanging out in beautiful surroundings, fall in love, beautifully, but one of them is engaged to be married, so it's complicated. Fortunately, they're in the sort of romantic melodrama where women are sensitive and men are obtuse, so the odds are in their favor. Also, they're Swedish, which helps, and it doesn't hurt to be beautiful.

Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)

MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jerzy Kawalerowicz 

    Mieczyslaw Voit, Lucyna Winnicka, Anna Ciepielewska, 

    Maria Chwalibóg, Stanislaw Jasiukiewicz, Jerzy Kazmarek

This one's in Latin and Polish and I watched it late at night without subtitles, so I couldn't tell you everything that's going on. There's an itinerant priest who turns up in a remote rural community somewhere in, like, the 17th century. He looks unhappy, and the first thing he does after saying his prayers is, he hangs his whip on the wall, but only after kissing it first, so he can flog himself later. Like I said, he looks like an unhappy man. There's also a cloister of nuns close-by, and the nuns appear to be demonically possessed. And a tavern where the local peasants hang out and drink. And that's the setup, pretty much. It's strikingly filmed in black and white, with lots of point-of-view shots where characters look directly into the camera. And there's a scene where the priest and a rabbi confront each other face-to-face, and the rabbi's played by the same actor who plays the priest. And the nuns' choreography, in those flowing white habits, is really nice. It's based on some of the same events that inspired Ken Russell's "The Devils" and Aldous Huxley's book "The Devils of Loudon", and it reminded me a little of Peter Brook's "Marat/Sade", with all that weird craziness going on. Maybe the next time I watch it, it'll have subtitles. Or maybe I'll just watch it with the sound off and play some Gregorian chant.

The Poetry Deal: A Film with Diane di Prima (2011)

 

THE POETRY DEAL: A FILM WITH DIANE 

DI PRIMA                                           (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Melanie La Rosa 

"A poem can be anything," Diane di Prima says at about the midpoint of this 27-minute documentary. "You have a blank piece of paper. You can do anything. You can make anything happen." Di Prima spent a lifetime doing that, as one of the few women to crack the mostly boys' club that was the Beat Generation. She was passionate about her work and tenacious in her pursuit of it, because she didn't know any other way to be. "Remember, you can have what you ask for," she says at the end. "Ask for everything."

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (1993)

 

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALLEN GINSBERG  

    D: Jerry Aronson                                      (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢

These days, it's hard to imagine a poet reaching the level of acclaim and notoriety that Allen Ginsberg attained in the second half of the 20th century. As a primal figure in the Beat movement of the '40s and '50s, a queer, a Jew, a champion of psychedelics, an activist against the Vietnam War, a student of Eastern mysticism and a cohort of everybody from Jack Kerouac to Timothy Leary to Patti Smith, Ginsberg both defined and symbolized the counterculture for 50 years. This documentary digs into some of that, with William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez and Ken Kesey all lining up as witnesses, and Ginsberg himself talking about his life and reading from "Howl", "Kaddish" and other works. Required viewing for fans of the Beats, and highly recommended for anybody trying to figure out how a poet could ever command that kind of public attention.

The Lost King (2022)

THE LOST KING  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Stephen Frears 

    Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, Harry Lloyd,

    Mark Addy, James Fleet, Julian Firth

An unlikely crowd-pleaser based 0n a true story about an unlikely archeological dig, starring Sally Hawkins as a mad Englishwoman on a personal quest to locate and recover the remains of Richard III. The surprise comes when she finds what she's looking for, under a car park in Leicester. It's a David-vs.-Goliath story, the plucky amateur up against the unscrupulous academics who scoff at her request for funding and then try to horn in on her work. (The bureaucrats and professors do not come off looking too good.) Hawkins gets some great closeups, and how can you not root for Sally Hawkins in a movie like this? Steve Coogan, who plays her estranged husband, produced and cowrote the script. 

La Poison (1951)

 

LA POISON  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sacha Guitry

    Michel Simon, Jean Debucourt, Germaine Reuver,

    Jacques Varennes, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Pauline Carton

A crackup black comedy from France, about a guy who kills his wife to prevent her from killing him. There's a bit of Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" in this, but Guitry's approach feels looser, and why there was never an American remake by somebody like Hitchcock or Wilder or Woody Allen is hard to say. My favorite part was when a bunch of kids, hearing stories about the murder trial from a neighbor, build their own backyard guillotine.

Saltburn (2023)

SALTBURN  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Emerald Fennell

    Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe

    Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver,

    Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Reece Shearsmith

A devious dark comedy about an impoverished scholarship student who's invited to spend the summer holiday at the posh estate of a much-admired classmate. There are three or four turns in this that not only don't go where you expect them to, they go places you maybe haven't seen before. Barry Keoghan's at the center of it all, proving without a doubt that his Oscar-nominated performance in "The Banshees of Inisherin" was no fluke. Starting out, his character, Oliver, is a socially awkward, fish-out-of-water new kid facing his first term at Oxford. But he's smart and clever and he catches on quick, and his eyes don't miss a thing. He'd be easy too underestimate, and as it turns out, that would be a big mistake. The upper-crust family who take him in - Sir James (Richard E. Grant), wife Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver) - cover the spectrum from merely eccentric to barking mad, and that doesn't even take in houseguest "Poor Dear Pamela" (Carey Mulligan, who doesn't get nearly enough screen time). From the absurdly ornate opening titles on, Emerald Fennell's direction is both delicate and in-your-face, a high-wire act you've got to be bold to attempt and skilled to pull off. But it all comes back to Keoghan and those knowing, inscrutable eyes. If there was any chance you'd forget him in this, what he does at the end should take care of that. 

It Pays To Advertise (1931)

 

IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE  (1931)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Frank Tuttle

    Norman Foster, Carole Lombard, Eugene Pallette, 

    Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Lucien Littlefield,

    Judith Wood, Louise Brooks, Morgan Wallace

A laugh-free comedy about a couple of guys trying to scam their way to the top of the soap business. Louise Brooks, billed seventh, has a small role as a dancer, but you never 

see her dance and she quickly disappears.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Chad Stahelski 

    Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ian McShane,

    Ruby Rose, Common, Claudia Gerini, Lance Reddick

    Laurence Fishburne, Franco Nero, John Leguizamo

The Boogeyman is back, and the bullets are flying and the bodies are piling up, with two more chapters (at least) yet to go. Somebody calculated the number of people John Wick kills in this and came up with 128. That seems a little low. 

Kiki (1931)

KIKI  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sam Taylor

    Mary Pickford, Reginald Denny, Margaret Livingston,

    Joseph Cawthorn, Phil Tead, Fred Walton, Edwin Maxwell

Pre-Code Pickford, with Mary as a French chorus girl in love with a producer played by Reginald Denny. Pickford was in her mid-30s by the time sound came in, too old for the little-girl characters that had made her the screen's first female superstar. She made a few talkies (this was her next-to-last), but her transition to more adult roles didn't click with audiences and she retired in 1933. Not surprisingly, the best stuff in "Kiki" is visual, most  notably a musical number choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with the star in tails and a top hat gradually losing her pants. Pickford could do that sort of thing as well as anybody, including Chaplin, but movies were evolving and moving on, and they were about to move on without Mary Pickford.