Shopworn (1932)

 

SHOPWORN  (1932)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nick Grinde

    Barbara Stanwyck, Regis Toomey, Zasu Pittiș,

    Lucien Littlefield, Clara Blandick, Oscar Apfel

Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman whose old man gets killed in a dynamite accident but before he goes he tells her she's on her own now and she's got to be tough so she moves to the city and starts waitressing in a hash joint where she meets a young med student and they hit it off and decide to get married but his domineering mother tricks them and arranges to have her sent to a reformatory where she does her time scrubbing floors and when she gets out she becomes a chorus girl and then a famous actress and she meets up with the med student again and he's a surgeon now but she gives him the brush because she thinks he dumped her when it was really his evil old lady who's still around telling him what to do and then some stuff happens involving a gun and the battle-ax has a change of heart and true love and real romance triumph after all fade out the end. Barbara Stanwyck. What a dame. 

Merrill's Marauders (1962)

MERRILL'S MARAUDERS  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Jeff Chandler, Ty Hardin, Peter Brown,

    Will Hutchins, Andrew Duggan, Claude Akins,

    John Hoyt, Charles Briggs, Pancho Magalona

An old-fashioned, World-War-Two combat movie about an American volunteer force slugging its way through the mountains and jungles of Burma to take on the Japanese. Sam Fuller knew something about combat, but he also knew that a movie was a movie, and one thing you notice in this is that when guys die (and a lot of them do), they do it in the same graceful, dramatic, stylized way that we did as kids playing soldier in the back yard. I could swear there's even one guy who goes into his death spiral before the grenade that kills him goes off. Not many of the actual Marauders survived the Burma campaign, but they did stop the Japanese from getting to India. There's a whole other movie waiting to be made about whether the death toll - on both sides - was worth it. 

Piaffe (2022)

 

PIAFFE  (2022)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ann Oren

    Simone Bucio, Sebastian Rudolph, Lea Draeger,

    Simon Jaikiriuma Paetau, Josef Ostendorf

An elegant erotic fantasy about a woman who's doing sound design for a commercial that features a horse, and finds herself transforming in a most unusual way. It risks being silly, but Simone Bucio's daring performance transcends that, bringing a whole new dimension to the concept of being trans. And she has a nice tail.

The Outrun (2024)

 

THE OUTRUN  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Nora Fingscheidt

    Saoirse Ronan, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves

Saoirse Ronan singlehandedly holds this one together as a reckless young woman named Rona who leaves London for the Orkney Islands to try to get sober. The tales, legends and desolate, windswept landscapes of the islands help tell the story, and Ronan goes places she hasn't explored before as a smart, troubled girl whose giddy energy lights up the party till the moment her demon takes over and you can't get away from her fast enough. Anybody who's struggled with recovery, or knows somebody who has, will be able to relate. 

The Seventh Coin (1993)

 

THE SEVENTH COIN  (1993)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Dror Soref

    Peter O'Toole, Alexandra Powers, Navin Chowdhry,

    John Rhys-Davies, Ally Walker, Jill Novick, Gilat Ankori

An Arab boy and a Jewish-American girl get caught up in an adventure that takes them all over Jerusalem, when they come into the possession of a rare coin that dates back to the time of King Herod. It seems there are seven coins all together, dug up in the ruins at Masada, and a murderous criminal played by Peter O'Toole will stop at nothing to have them all in his collection. It's formula stuff, with some nice location work and appealing performances by the juvenile leads. O'Toole looks weary, but with a wide selection of elegant wardrobe options, you can't say he's not well-dressed. 

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

 

RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL  (2020)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Woody Allen

    Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Elena Anaya,

    Louis Garrel, Douglas McGrath, Steve Guttenberg,

    Sergi Lopez, Tammy Blanchard, Christoph Waltz

This is not the worst late-career Woody Allen movie to come along, which is faint praise maybe, but there it is. Wallace Shawn plays a film critic and would-be novelist, tagging along with his wife (Gina Gershon), who's working publicity at the San Sebastian Film Festival. While she spends most of her time with a hot young director (Louis Garrel), he starts to fall for an attractive doctor (Elena Anaya), so here's yet another Woody Allen movie dealing with love, infatuation and infidelity among people who are too smart for their own good. (At least this time, one of the protagonists is not a 20-year-old girl.) The best parts are the dream sequences. (Shawn's character always dreams scenes from classic movies, in black and white.) Welles, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Godard and Bunuel are all represented, so there's at least a faint echo of "Stardust Memories going on, and if you stay till the end, you get a riff on "The Seventh Seal" with Christoph Waltz as Death.

Phantom Ship (1935)

PHANTOM SHIP  (1935)  ¢ ¢

    D: Denison Clift 

    Bela Lugosi, Shirley Grey, Arthur Margetson,

    Edmund Willard, Dennis Hoey, George Mozart

In 1872, a merchant vessel sets sail for Genoa, carrying a cargo of liquor, a crew of 13, a woman, a black cat and Bela Lugosi. This is not going to end well, is what I'm thinking, and when the ship turns up adrift in the Atlantic later on, there's not a trace of anybody on board. A speculation based on an actual incident, one of the unsolved mysteries of the sea. The movie's not much, but Lugosi's good.

Flashback: A Few Nights At the Movies

    I once watched "The Maltese Falcon" in a tiny, storefront theater on Cannery Row. It was 1975, and I was in my Jack Kerouac phase, bumming around the country in a well-traveled Ford Mustang with money I'd saved in the Air Force. What was distinctive about Monterey's 812 Cinema, apart from its hole-in-the-wall size, was that there were no seats, just pillows and cushions on the floor, so you more or less reclined while you watched the movie. Which could be a problem if you were real tired. I think I fell asleep. 

    I once watched Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" in the Stiftskeller in the Memorial Union  at the University of Wisconsin. The Stiftskeller was a small room just off the Rathskeller (a much larger room), and the screening was probably put on by one of the campus film societies. The place was packed, standing rom only, so I stood. Through the whole movie. This was the late '60s, before VHS, DVD and TCM. Before cable. Before video stores. Before streaming. Back then, if something like "The Great Dictator" turned up and you wanted to see it, you went. There was no guarantee you'd get another chance. Also, there weren't a lot of indoor smoking regulations and a lot of people smoked, which added to the ambience, I suppose. The Stiftskeller was definitely smoky.

    I once watched "Night of the Living Dead" at the Badger Drive-In in Madison. This was in the late '70s, and it was one of the films on a dusk-to-dawn quintuple feature, along with "Toolbox Murders", "Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre", "Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon" and "Mansion of the Doomed". I don't remember whether it was my brother Bill or me who saw the ad in the paper, but the moment it crossed our radar, we knew we had to go. We weren't the only ones who did, but we might've been the only ones who stayed awake through all five movies. As a public service, the concession stand provided free coffee and donuts to the survivors around 3:30 in the morning.

    I once watched "Tony Rome" and "The Green Berets" on a double bill at another Wisconsin drive-in. I don't remember what town it was, but the year would've been 1968. I had a summer job on a traffic survey crew with the state highway department, and we always stayed in cheap motels when we were on the road away from Madison. On this occasion, our motel was about a mile down the road from a drive-in theater, so as evening approached, I hiked down there, walked in the exit, found a place to sit under an available speaker, turned up the volume and watched both movies. I haven't seen "The Green Berets" since. 

    After 70 years or more watching flickering images flash across various screens, some experiences are bound to stand out, and the more offbeat they are, the more likely they are to stick in your memory. For me, the best was this:

    About 25 years ago, there was a screening of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in Seattle's Gas Works Park. It was summer, so it was warm, and people brought food and blankets and found places to sit on the hill facing the iron wreckage that was once the city's gas works. Lang's vision of a dystopian future played out with all that industrial junk in the background, under a full moon, while a live orchestra played an original score timed to sync with the film. As a moviegoing event, it was magical, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. 

    Sometimes the stars line up and the cinema gods look your way and something comes along that's just too good (or crazy, or comical, or weird) to pass up. You can't anticipate an experience like that. When it happens, you've just got to go. 

The Moderns (1988)

 

THE MODERNS  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alan Rudolph

    Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino, Genevieve Bujold,

    Geraldine Chaplin, John Lone, Wallace Shawn, 

    Kevin J. O'Connor, Elsa Raven, Isabel Serra, Ali Giron

Alan Rudolph's whimsical reflection  on art and deception takes place in Paris in 1926. (Montreal plays Paris.) Keith Carradine plays Nicky Hart, a painter whose copies of Cezanne and Modigliani are so good, you can't tell them from the real thing. He's got an agent, a gallery owner played by Genevieve Bujold, but his work hasn't sold, so he keeps himself in oils and cognac by drawing newspaper cartoons. This is the Lost Generation, so Hemingway's around, played by Kevin J. O'Connor, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and a few unidentified others. There's a rubber baron (John Lone), a vulgar industrialist who views the world and everything in it through the prism of money, and his wife (Linda Fiorentino), who's secretly still married to Hart. A wealthy collector (Geraldine Chaplin), who tries to entice Hart into doing a little forgery. A newspaper columnist (Wallace Shawn), who can't stop talking about suicide. And that covers most of the key players. It's Rudolph in total command of his craft, working with a cast that's perfectly in tune with what he's up to, and it's a sometimes surreal comedy ending with a series of devious jokes about the pretensions of the art world and the people in it. If that's something that interests you, or you just want to spend a couple of hours hanging out in Hemingway's Paris, check it out.

Samba (2014)

SAMBA  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Oliver Nakache, Éric Toledano

    Omar Sy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Tahar Rahim,

    Youngar Fall, Issakla Sawadogo, Izïa Higelin

A French movie about the tentative relationship between an undocumented immigrant from Senegal, scuffling to survive and escape deportation, and a burned-out caseworker who has issues of her own. Life in the shadows. Love on the edge. Nicely acted by Sy and Gainsbourg. 

Marlowe (2022)

 

MARLOWE  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Neil Jordan

    Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange,

    Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Ian Hart,

    Colm Meaney, Adele Akinnouye-Agbaje,

    Seána Kerslake, François Arnaud, Patrick Muldoon

Liam Neeson adds his name to the long list of actors who have played Philip Marlowe in a twisty noir mystery set in 1939 Los Angeles. The story's a puzzle involving the corpse of a guy who may not be dead and certain items being smuggled from Mexico, and there's more than a hint of "Chinatown", with a lot of corruption, a troubled mother and daughter (Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger, who look enough alike to be convincing), and Danny Huston as a character who conspicuously resembles the monster his father played in the earlier film. It's a movie whose parts don't always match up. The music's anachronistic, the cinematography (which director Neil Jordan admits was influenced by "Blade Runner") looks a little too crisp and clean, and some of the turns the plot takes are implausibly convenient. Plus, Neeson at 70 seems a little mature to be playing Marlowe. It's enhanced by an odd sense of dislocation - it was shot in Spain and Ireland - and a script that never stops throwing you curveballs. Sometimes there are movies you like without knowing quite why, and sometimes that's part of the puzzle. I guess for me, one of those movies is "Marlowe".

Salambo (1911)

 

SALAMBO  (1911)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arturo Ambrosio

    Gigetta Morano, Giovanni Coppo, Oreste Grandi,

    Alberto Capozzi, Ercole Vaser, Maria Bay

Some mercenaries help the Carthaginians fight off the invading Romans, but then the Carthaginians try to cheat the mercenaries out of their payment in gold, which turns out to be a bad idea. Italian filmmakers were the first to realize there was money to be made (and spent) on grandiose historical epics. This one has hundreds of extras, opulent sets and costumes, horses, camels and a lion. You can bet Cecil B. DeMille was watching and taking notes. 

Maxxxine (2024)

 

MAXXXINE  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ti West

    Mia Goth, Simon Prast, Kevin Bacon, Deborah Geffner,

    Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Halsey, Lily Collins,

    Chloe Farnworth, Giancarlo Esposito, Zachary Mooren,

    Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Sophie Thatcher

The third entry in the Ti West/Mia Goth horror trilogy finds Maxine Minx, the sole survivor of the massacre in "X", in Hollywood, still working in the skin trade, but determined to make it big in mainstream films. Also, there's a serial killer on the loose, the "night stalker," whose victims all appear to be connected to Maxine. West is at least as interested in the workings of the movie industry as he is in the maniac-on-the-loose storyline, and it's another picture that makes you thankful to be living anywhere except Hollywood. It's set in 1985, and it has the look of a low-budget thriller viewed on an old VHS tape. (Be kind. Rewind.) The synth-driven musical score fits the period, too, along with Kevin Bacon, chewing everything except the Hollywood sign as  an obnoxious private eye. It's Mia Goth's movie, though. With an on-screen producer's credit and her name above the title, there's no doubt she's the star, and she plays her role with a naked yearning for the attention her character believes she deserves. Maxine herself wouldn't have it any other way.

Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Stephen Frears

    Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Christopher Guest, Will Young,

    Kelly Reilly, Thelma Barlow, Natalia Tena, Toby Jones,

    Anna Brewster, Rosalind Halstead, Sarah Solemani

Judi Dench plays a wealthy widow who finds a productive use for her time and money when she buys a derelict London theater and hires Bob Hoskins to run the place. The vaudeville-style revues they put on are a hit at first, but when copycat competition causes attendance to decline, she comes up with a daring idea: naked girls. The time is the 1930s and stodgy old England has never seen anything like it, and as the country heads into World War Two, the theater, running continuously, even during the Blitz, becomes a symbol of steadfastness - and a sense of fun - in the face of peril. It's an affectionate look at a time gone by, and a compelling testament to the notion that a few boobs and backsides, artfully exhibited, aren't necessarily a bad thing.