Funeral In Berlin (1966)

FUNERAL IN BERLIN  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Guy Hamilton
    Michael Caine, Eva Renzi, Paul Hubschmid,
    Oscar Homolka, Guy Doleman, Hugh Burden
The second entry in the Michael Caine/Harry Palmer trilogy starts out with Harry being dispatched to Berlin to help a Russian army commander defect to the West. Following two years after "The Ipcress File", the movie again works the territory where Ian Fleming and John LeCarré intersect, or at least knock elbows a little. Palmer retains a working-class insolence and a working-class grudge, and the story's concerned mainly with the dirty business of spy work. Nazis, corrupt double agents, smugglers, forgers, safe crackers and Israeli intelligence all end up with a hand in the plot. There's a running gag in which Palmer, who gets around mostly in taxicabs, tries to talk his boss (Guy Doleman) into an £800 car loan. James Bond never had to do that, and £800 wouldn't even cover his budget for martinis and cigarettes.

La La Land (2016)

LA LA LAND  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Damien Chazelle 
    Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt,
    John Legend, Callie Hernandez, Jessica Rothe, 
    Sonoya Mizuno, Terry Walters, J.K. Simmons
In my whole life, I've never spent more than a few days in Los Angeles. It was a long time ago, and what I mostly remember is that the air was unbreathable and just about everybody I met there seemed phony. I know that's an absurdly small sample to go by, and a terribly unfair way to judge a city and its people, but the fact remains that I'm not a big fan of Los Angeles. Artifice is part of the deal there, of course. It's where movies get made, and movies are the art of getting people to believe, or at least imagine, stuff that's completely unreal. "La La Land" is a movie that, starting with its title and its opening production number, doesn't even make a pretense of hiding that artifice. It stars Ryan Gosling as a struggling jazz pianist and Emma Stone as an aspiring actress who meet, fall in love, break into song when the moment suggests it, and dance on the stars. It's a romantic fantasy about two intensely creative people chasing their dreams, struggling to get by and trying to make a relationship work, and, finally, it's about the transcendence of art. The key scene comes toward the end. He's on stage at the piano in a club and she's in the audience, listening. He plunks out a simple melody, something he wrote, and it's their song, the song that connects them, and for the first time she sees, and we see, everything his music exists to express. It's a throwback to the extended ballet sequences at the end of a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly movie, and a magical moment all its own. If none of this is especially deep, well, neither were those Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies, and anyway, it's Los Angeles, and L.A. on screen has never looked more appealing. I'd still never want to move there, but I was fine, for a couple of hours, living in this movie.

Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)

LOVE FINDS ANDY HARDY  (1938)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: George B. Seitz
    Mickey Rooney, Lewis Stone, Judy Garland,
    Cecilia Parker, Fay Holden, Ann Rutherford,
    Betsy Ross Clark, Lana Turner, Gene Reynolds
The fourth entry in the long-running Andy Hardy series finds our juvenile hero juggling two girls, with the big Christmas Eve dance just days away. He also needs eight dollars to seal the deal on a twenty-dollar car. (That's not to fill it with gas. It's to buy the car. Prices were different then.) This is considered one of the better Andy Hardy movies, but Rooney's incessant manic energy wears thin after a while, and you keep wanting to see less of him and more of Judy Garland, playing the new kid next door. Judy's musical numbers are the highlight. 

Checks and Balances (2015)

CHECKS AND BALANCES  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Malik Bensmaïl
A fly-on-the-wall documentary about how news gets made, or at least how it gets made at El Watan, a feisty, French-language newspaper published in Algiers. There's almost no context here. Bensmaïl simply takes his camera into El Watan's editorial offices, and sometimes even the pressroom, and watches as reporters, editors, cartoonists and the guys who get ink on their hands labor over the latest edition. There's an election campaign going on - that's the big story - and the arguments and discussions you're eavesdropping on probably aren't much different from what you'd hear in any newsroom in the States. Two of the journalists especially go at it tooth and nail. One's a Marxist. The other most definitely is not. Both are extremely vocal, and neither will give an inch. What they have in common is a goal, call it an obsession, to put out the best newspaper on the planet, or at least in Algeria. That's what unites them, drives them, defines them: the adrenalin, the quest for truth (against a dodgy government), the race against time, and the knowledge that somewhere in a cavernous room where the roar of machinery is deafening and the air reeks with chemical fumes, they're rolling out the newsprint and inking up the press. 

The Virginian (1946)

THE VIRGINIAN  (1946)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Stuart Gilmore
    Joel McCrae, Brian Donlevy, Sonny Tufts,
    Barbara Britton, Fay Bainter, William Frawley
A cowboy from Virginia and a schoolteacher from Vermont meet up in Wyoming, where rustlers are a big problem and a man who wants to hold his head up has to be good with a gun. That man would be Joel McCrae, in a role played back in 1929 by Gary Cooper. Brian Donlevy plays a devious, smooth-talking hombre with an all-black wardrobe. I guess he'd be the bad guy, huh?

Eddie the Eagle (2016)

EDDIE THE EAGLE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dexter Fletcher
    Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, Jo Hartley,
    Keith Allen, Tim McInnerney, Edvin Endre,
    Jim Broadbent, Matt Rippy, Christopher Walken
An all-out feel-good movie based on the story of Eddie Edwards ("Eddie the Eagle"), a working-class bloke who crashed the Olympic ski-jumping competition in 1988, despite a glaring lack of Olympic-caliber skills, because he was crazy and determined and because nobody else was representing Britain in the sport. So Eddie (Taron Egerton) overcomes ridiculously long odds to reach Calgary, and his boozy coach (Hugh Jackman) gets a shot at redemption, while Eddie's devoted mum and skeptical dad watch nervously on the telly back home. There's not a sports cliche that doesn't get turned over in this, but, hey, you know what? Who cares? Most of us have a lot more in common with Eddie the Eagle than with the elite jocks who end up on the medal stands, and if somebody out there wants to make a shameless crowd-pleaser celebrating the elation that goes with competing and not just winning, I'm okay with that. Go, Eddie.

Die Hard (1988)

DIE HARD  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John McTiernan
    Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia,
    Alexander Godunov, James Shigeta, Robert Davi
The movie that kicked off the franchise, starring Bruce Willis as John McClane, who's like the blue-collar junkyard dog of action heroes. McClane's a New York cop who flies into L.A. in time for Christmas and a hoped-for reunion with his estranged wife and family. What happens instead is that he gets dropped off at the luxury office skyscraper where the Mrs. now works, some terrorists move in and take over the building, and McClane turns into this barefoot one-man army who's equally handy with a punchline or a machine gun, and a guy who knows the difference between Gary Cooper and John Wayne, which the kingpin terrorist (Alan Rickman) does not. The whole time I was watching Bruce Willis in this, I kept imagining Mel Gibson. Bruce can do the indestructible wise guy routine as well as anybody, but Mel's got a crazier edge. He'd be good, too. Fans of classical music might want to listen for how many ways Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" turns up on the soundtrack.