The Last Movie (1971)

 

THE LAST MOVIE  (1971)  ¢ ¢

    D: Dennis Hopper

    Dennis Hopper, Julie Adams, Stella Garcia,

    Don Gordon, Tomas Milian, Donna Baccala,

    Roy Engel, Samuel Fuller, Severn Darden,

    Toni Basil, Kris Kristofferson, Sylvia Miles,

    Rod Cameron, Peter Fonda, Warren Finnerty,

    Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn,

    John Phillip Law, Jim Mitchum, Henry Jaglom

Dennis Hopper's deranged followup to "Easy Rider", about a Hollywood stuntman who hangs around a Peruvian location after the shooting wraps and everybody else goes home. Hopper called it the cinematic equivalent of abstract expressionism - a film about film as film - but it's also self-indulgent, incoherent and most of the time, just plain boring. There's some impressive stuntwork , the cinematography's by László Kovacs, and Sam Fuller plays himself directing the movie within the movie, but if this is what the world looks like from inside Dennis Hopper's head, it's not a place you'd ever want to be. One way to make watching it more interesting might be to try to guess what chemicals the cast and crew were dabbling in, and how much.

Kill Your Darlings (2013)

 

KILL YOUR DARLINGS  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Krokidas

    Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C. Hall,

    Ben Foster, Jack Huston, David Cross, John Cullum,

    Jennifer Jason Leigh, Elizabeth Olsen, Erin Drake

The birth of the Beats. How Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr came together at Columbia University in the 1940s and started what would become a literary revolution. Allen's the new kid, a freshman just arrived from Paterson, New Jersey. Lucien's the brilliant, arrogant instigator who introduces hm to the jazz scene and the gay haunts on Christopher Street. Burroughs is experimenting with whatever drugs he can get his hands on, and Kerouac, the ex-football hero and sometime merchant seaman, has already written a million words. And there's the matter of David Kammerer, whose obsession with Lucien would have consequences for all of them. "Beat", a movie from 2000 with Courtney Love and Kiefer Sutherland, covered some of the same territory, but this one does it better, going deeper into the energy, camaraderie, intellectual daring and freewheeling, borderline madness that drove the Beats. You can almost taste the booze and smell the cigarette smoke. 

Movie Star Moment: Christopher Lee

 

Christopher Lee as Monsieur Labisse

in "Hugo" (2011)

    Christopher Lee was in his late 80s when he appeared in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" as the old bookseller Monsieur Labisse. It was one of Lee's last screen roles. 

    Monsieur Labisse presides over a bookshop in the Paris train station where much of the movie takes place. Thanks to Dante Ferretti's set design, the shop is more vertical than horizontal, with ladders and staircases and books piled up everywhere. Monsieur Labisse looks down on everything from a tall desk in the middle of the room. 

    The first time Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle takes Hugo into the shop and introduces him to Monsieur Labisse, the old man gives him a look that freezes Hugo in his tracks. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a boy who lives in the walls of the train station and survives at least partly by stealing. Whether Monsieur Labisse suspects that or not is unclear, but the look he gives Hugo conveys the unmistakable messsage that walking off with anything from the bookshop would be less than a good idea. 

    What makes the look even more intimidating is that it's coming not just from the old bookseller, but the actor playing him, and for viewers who know anything about Lee's career, that means one thing: Dracula. It's an extra dimension of dread. 

    Monsieur Labisse turns out to be much less forbidding than he first appears, but in the bookshop, at least, Hugo won't be taking any chances. Heck, if you were a 12-year-old kid getting the evil eye from Christopher Lee, you'd be intimidated, too.

God's Gift To Women (1931)

 

GOD'S GIFT TO WOMEN  (1931)  ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Curtiz

    Frank Fay, Laura La Plante, Joan Blondell,

    Yola D'Avril, Louise Brooks, Charles Winninger,

    Alan Mobray, Margaret Livingston, Tyrell Davis

A frantic and somewhat desperate pre-Code farce about a notorious womanizer who finally meets the girl of his dreams and can't convince anybody that this time he's serious. Frank Fay is a curious choice to play the alleged Don Juan: part Robin Williams, part Danny Kaye, part Edward Everett Horton and part Liberace, if you can imagine something like that. Louise Brooks does a nice bit as (what else?) a party girl, but the fact that she's billed tenth tells you something about the status of her career at the time. She gets one great closeup, though. It's almost worth watching the movie for that.

The File On Thelma Jordan (1949)

 

THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Siodmak

    Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Paul Kelly,

    Joan Tetzel, Stanley Ridges, Richard Rober,

    Minor Watson, Barry Kelley, Kasey Rogers

An assistant D.A. and a woman who fears her house might be burglarized slip into an adulterous affair. Then the woman's house is burglarized, the woman's indicted for murder, and the assistant D.A. gets assigned to prosecute the case. So it's complicated, and more than a little implausible, and like "The Furies", released the following year, we're expected to believe that Barbara Stanwyck would fall head-over-heels for Wendell Corey, who's a good actor but the world's least charismatic leading man. It's noir, so it does not end well, but nobody ever came out of a fiery car wreck to die more beautifully than Barbara Stanwyck. 

A Dandy In Aspic (1968)

 

A DANDY IN ASPIC  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Anthony Mann, Laurence Harvey

    Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtenay, 

    Per Oscarsson, Harry Andrews, Lionel Stander,

    Peter Cook, Calvin Lockhart, Michael Trubshawe

Bond-era spy stuff starring Laurence Harvey as a double agent assigned to carry out a hit in Berlin. Mia Farrow plays a globe-trotting photographer who seems to show up everywhere he does. Could she be an agent? Everybody else is. There's a tension and remoteness about Harvey's performance that fits a guy who's been in the trade, on both sides, since his teens, and knows he can't trust anybody. Farrow's party-girl act is all surface and no depth. (She doesn't get much to work with.) Tom Courtenay seems miscast as an arrogant prick assigned to keep an eye on Harvey and help out if needed. Lionel Stander chews it up as an old-school Soviet spy. Harry Andrews plays the head of British intelligence. It's a decently done genre piece with a Quincy Jones score that owes something to Maurice Jarre, and some amusing sexual innuendo. (Watch the way Courtenay brandishes his walking stick in a confrontation with Harvey, and Farrow, in a boyishly mod cap and trousers, straddling a tree branch.) Harvey took over the direction when Mann died during the shoot. Farrow gave birth to "Rosemary's Baby" the same year.

Empire Records (1995)

 

EMPIRE RECORDS  (1995)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Allan Moyle

    Anthony LaPaglia, Rory Cochrane, Robin Tunney,

    Liv Tyler, Renée Zellweger, Johnny Whitworth,

    Ethan Embry, Coyote Shivers, Maxwell Caulfield,

    James "Kimo" Wills, Ben Bode, Brendan Sexton III

Here's a movie for anybody who's old enough or young enough to remember record stores. The storytelling's minimal - the kids who work in a record store hang out all day and stuff happens - but the energy's infectious. It's where "Clerks" meets "Dazed and Confused", a throwback to a time before streaming and Spotify, and a giddy valentine to the reckless passion of adolescence and the transformative power of rock & roll. An underrated gem, nicely played by a good, young cast. 

Filibus (1915)

 

FILIBUS  (1915)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Mario Roncoroni

    Valeria Creti, Giovanni Spano, Cristina Ruspoli,

    Mario Mariani, Filippo Vallino

A baroness with her own airship and a gift for disguise competes with a famous detective to unmask a notorious burglar named Filibus, the catch being that the burglar is the baroness herself. A title in the trailer from 2019 calls this "the 1915 Italian Feminist Steampunk Jewel Thief Cross-Dressing Aviatrix Thriller of the Year!" and that describes it pretty well. A lively, outlandish fantasy adventure with a playfully androgynous performance by Valeria Creti in the title role. With a nod to science fiction and a female protagonist who's bold, independent, resourceful and flexible in the area of gender roles, the film was years ahead of its time. 

The 15:17 To Paris (2018)

 

THE 15:17 TO PARIS  (2018)  ¢ ¢

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alex Skarlatos,

    Ray Corasani, Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer

Clint Eastwood's leisurely topical thriller breaks down into three distinct parts. In the first act, three young boys who like to play war games and spend most of their time at school in the principal's office remain friends as they grow older, and two of them join the military. In act two, the boys, now in their 20s, meet up in Europe and see the sights. Act three finds them on a train bound for Paris from Amsterdam when a terrorist incident occurs and they become heroes. The movie is part propaganda piece, part travelogue, and (too briefly) part suspense drama. It's a recreation of actual events, and Eastwood took a risk by getting the main participants to play themselves. (His relaxed, less-is-more approach to filmmaking works in their favor.) But the script is pretty slack, especially that long stretch in the middle where you're really just watching other people having fun playing tourist. And there's a fourth hero on the train, a middle-aged man who helps out with a passenger who's been shot, but you never learn anything about him. He gets the Lègion d'Honneur at the end, too, but I'm not sure you even learn his name.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

 

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS  (2024)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ethan Coen

    Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, 

    Beanie Feldstein, Bill Camp, Colman Domingo,

    Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson, Matt Damon

The first movie Joel Coen made without his brother Ethan was an Oscar-nominated adaptation of "Macbeth". The first movie Ethan Coen made without his brother Joel was . . . this. It's a lesbian road movie about two women (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) who take off in a drive-away Dodge going from Philadelphia to Talahassee, with detours and stops along the way. There's a metal suitcase in the trunk of the car, and they don't know what's in it at first, and then they find out. There's some good, funny writing in the exchanges between the two women, and in the parts involving Bill Camp as the guy at the drive-away place, but it's a sloppy movie - in contrast to everything else the Coens have done - and it looks like something some teenager shot on Super 8. Qualley takes a rapid-fire delivery and a biscuits-and-gravy accent and dials them up to eleven. She's balls-out from start to finish, and Viswanathan's cautious, composed demeanor is the counterpoint to that. Yin and yang, I guess. Matt Damon has a cameo as a Florida senator with a particular interest in the contents of that suitcase, and you can't help thinking that maybe he made a bet with his pal Ben Affleck and the loser had to be in this movie. Bad luck, Matt.

Dirty Harry (1971)

DIRTY HARRY  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Don Siegel 

    Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Andy Robinson,

    John Vernon, Reni Santoni, John Mitchum, John Larch

"Uh uh. I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell ya the truth, in all this excitement, I've kind of forgotten myself. But being that this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you gotta ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" A crazed serial killer is on the loose, and the man out to stop him is the San Francisco police officer least likely ever to lead a sensitivity seminar. The first and best of the "Dirty Harry" movies, funny, fast-paced and brutal, directed with vicious efficiency by Don Siegel. Condemned as a tribute to law-and-order fascism by critics who probably took the movie more seriously than it takes itself, and defended by others as a dramatic argument for victims' rights. It doesn't really make it on either count, unless you buy the notion that a victim's rights begin when a defendant's rights are eliminated. What's interesting is how effectively Eastwood and Siegel stack the deck, helped by Lalo Schiffrin's pulsing, vertiginous musical score and Andy Robinson's scary, psychotic performance as the killer. This guy isn't just a madman who shoots people, he's total, unchecked evil, and by the time he hijacks a school bus to set up the movie's climax, you want nothing more than to watch Harry blow him away. 

Lalo Schiffrin

(1932-2025)