Alice's Restaurant (1969)

ALICE'S RESTAURANT  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arthur Penn

    Arlo Guthrie, Pat Quinn, James Broderick,

    Michael McClanathan, Geoff Outlaw, Tina Chen,

    M. Emmett Walsh, Pete Seeger, Shelley Plimpton

A late-'60s time capsule based on Arlo Guthrie's extended talking song about Alice and Ray and their restaurant in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and hippies and cops and the draft and a red Volkswagen microbus and two tons of garbage. There's almost no story, really, just a bunch of stuff that happens along the way, and not everybody who watches the movie will be able to relate to that, but Penn's hang-loose approach nicely captures an era and an attitude whose impact on the culture transcended its relatively short shelf life. Pete Seeger turns up to serenade a dying Woody Guthrie, and Shelley Plimpton sniffles her way through a brief but fetching cameo as a groupie with a head cold.

Arthur Penn

(1922-2010)

The Memory of a Killer (2003)

THE MEMORY OF A KILLER  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Erik Van Looy

    Jan Decleir, Koen De Buow, Werner De Smedt,

    Jo De Meyere, Deborah Ostrega, Patrick Descamps

An aging hit man in the early stages of Alzheimer's travels to Antwerp from Marseilles to do a job. When he learns that one of his targets is a 12-year-old girl, he refuses to carry out the assignment and instead starts tracking down his employers, working his way up the food chain and leaving behind a trail of corpses while playing cat-and-mouse with the cops. A good, tight, well-played thriller with an indelible lead performance by Jan Decleir as a man with no future and therefore nothing to lose, a brutally efficient thug-turned-death's angel, desperately clinging to what remains of his memory as he blasts his way into the twilight. Like Johnny Hallyday's bank robber in "Man On the Train", this is a guy you wouldn't necessarily want to meet up with, ever. But you don't want to see the lights go out on him, either, at least not till his last, bloody mission is accomplished.

The Old Dark House (1932)

THE OLD DARK HOUSE  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James Whale

    Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart,

    Melvyn Douglas, Ernest Thesiger, Lilian Bond,

    Raymond Massey, Eva Moore, Elspeth Dudgeon

A macabre drawing-room comedy - more accurately a dining-room comedy - about some young travelers who take shelter in an old Welsh mansion on a dark and stormy night. A little creaky but still fun, with a literate script and a good cast, directed in the spirit of a Halloween prank by James ("Frankenstein") Whale. The Gloria Stuart who appears here is the same Gloria Stuart who turned up 65 years later as the elderly Rose in "Titanic".

Gloria Stuart

(1910-2010)

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID  
    D: Philip Kaufman                                  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    Cliff Robertson, Robert Duvall, Luke Askew,

    R.G. Armstrong, Donald Moffat, Dana Elcar,

    Matt Clark, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr.

Shrugging off a shot at amnesty from the Missouri state legislature, the James Gang rides north to rob a bank in Minnesota, with a railroad car full of hired guns riding after them. This covers roughly the same territory as Walter Hill's "The Long Riders", and while Jesse James is the outlaw in all the history books, the character who makes both films fun to watch is Cole Younger (David Carradine in "The Long Riders", Cliff Robertson here). Robertson's Cole is fascinated with modern technology. His favorite word, whenever he spies a new piece of machinery, is "wonderment," and a calliope, a steam-driven tractor, and a long-distance talking device just introduced by A.G. Bell all qualify as wonderments. (He's less impressed with an evolving new sport called baseball.) If Cole's got an eye on the future, Jesse's all about the past. As played by Robert Duvall, Jesse's a fanatic, still fighting the Civil War in 1876, on a mission not so much to rob banks as to kill Yankees. Cole will kill when it's called for. Jesse kills because he can. As much as an outlaw western, this is a portrait of America in the year of its centennial, specifically the rough but increasingly civilized Midwestern frontier. During an extended old-time baseball sequence that's as violent and unruly as it is extraneous to the plot, somebody tells Cole that baseball's now the country's favorite sport. Cole argues that America's favorite sport will always be shooting. Then he levels his rifle, draws a bead on a high pop-up, and blasts the ball out of the sky. The ball's ruined, and that's the end of the baseball game. Shooting wins.

King Arthur (2004)

KING ARTHUR  (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Antoine Fuqua

    Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Ioan Gruffud,

    Ray Winstone, Stellan Starsgard, Til Schweiger,

    Stephen Dillane, Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen

It's the Dark Ages, and King Arthur and his knights are little more than a well-tailored band of mercenaries, conscripted by the Romans to fight the Woads, a fierce, dirty, long-haired race of barbarians in a desolate, godforsaken backwater called Britain. After 15 years of more or less nonstop killing, the guys are looking forward to retirement and safe passage back to their own pagan lands, when, wouldn't you know it, they're dispatched on a last suicidal mission north of Hadrian's Wall. This leads to a lot more killing and some of the knights don't make it, but Arthur (Clive Owen) does get it on with Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who teaches him that not all Woads lead to Wome. It's transparent storybook moviemaking, as enjoyable as it is disposable, complete with castles and catapults, broadswords and battle axes, flaming arrows fired from longbows, and nasty-looking men with knives clenched in their teeth. Highlights: Stellan Skarsgard as the Saxon chief, a tense standoff on a frozen lake, and the sporty leather harness Guinevere wears into the final battle. A guilty pleasure.

Piranha (1978)

PIRANHA  (1978)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joe Dante

    Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy,

    Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele, Dick Miller,

    Belinda Belaski, Bruce Gordon, Paul Bartel

"Lost River Lake. Terror. Horror. Death. Film at eleven." A tongue-in-gill monster movie in which ravenous aquatic creatures with sharp pointed teeth are released from a secret Army research station and head downstream to the sea, chewing up campers, fishermen, water-skiers, beach bunnies and anybody else unlucky enough to get in their way. Think "Jaws" with a B-movie budget and much smaller fish. Roger Corman produced. John Sayles wrote the script and plays a small role as the sentry who gets flashed by Heather Menzies.

Kevin McCarthy

(1914-2010)

The Girl Cut In Two (2007)

THE GIRL CUT IN TWO  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Claude Chabrol

    Ludivine Sagnier, Benoit Magimel,

    Francois Berleand, Mathilda May

French psychothriller about a TV weather girl who gets involved with a kinky older novelist and an emotionally unbalanced playboy, with mostly unhappy results. Maybe she has horrible taste in men, or maybe she just makes real bad choices. Maybe shit happens, or maybe these characters just get what they deserve. Chabrol isn't being judgmental. The moral equation is up for grabs.

Claude Chabrol

(1930-2010)