FANDANGO (1985) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Kevin Reynolds
Kevin Costner, Judd Nelson, Sam Robards,
Chuck Bush, Suzy Amis, Glenne Headly
A wild-assed, bittersweet road movie about five college buddies who duck out of their graduation party to take a final revealing journey together before the adult world catches up to them. The year is 1971. Vietnam looms over everything. One of the characters is an ROTC cadet about to go on active duty. Two others have just gotten their draft notices. One's a divinity student, and one's about to get married. This is their last waltz and they know it, two days of reckless whims, desperate joy and marathon beer drinking before they move on, their time together probably more or less over. It's a rambunctious celebration of youth, with a wistful underlying sense of its transitory nature, and an impressive early collaboration between Costner and Reynolds, who would team up later (with bigger budgets but not always better results) on "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and "Waterworld". Glenne Headly does an amusing bit as a woman who has an unusual problem getting her laundry done.
Glenne Headly
(1955-2017)
A MAN CALLED OVE (2015) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Hannes Holm
Rolf Lassgård, Bahar Pars, Ida Engvall, Filip Berg
Tobias Almborg, Fredrik Evers, Simon Edenroth
This is like a Swedish variation on the Bill Murray movie "St. Vincent", about a crotchety old man, the self-appointed enforcer of all the rules and regulations in his apartment complex. Despondent after the death of his wife, he tries repeatedly to commit suicide, and he's such a grumpy bastard, you kind of wish he'd succeed. He doesn't, or as one of his neighbors puts it, he's crap when it comes to dying. Something always gets in the way. He's also more complicated than he first appears, and the movie very gradually lets you in on that. Done wrong, this could be way too sweet. It's a crowd pleaser, complete with a couple of cute kids and a stray cat and eventually a baby, but neither the film nor Rolf Lassgård's grudging performance gives anything away. There's a deadpan stoicism to the humor that's distinctly Scandinavian, and where else but in a Swedish movie would two neighbors engage in a bitter dispute that prevents them from speaking for years, over the relative merits of a Volvo and a SAAB?
HABEAS CORPUS (1928) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: James Parrott, Leo McCarey
Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Richard Carle, Charlie Rogers
Laurel and Hardy play grave robbers. Bwa-ha-ha.
DOUBLE WHOOPEE (1929) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Lewis R. Foster
Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jean Harlow,
Hans Joby, Charley Rogers, Charlie Hall
Stan and Ollie hire on as doormen at a posh hotel. The guests include a prince modeled on Erich von Stroheim and a hot blonde played by 18-year-old Jean Harlow. See if you can guess what happens when some ink gets into a woman's makeup kit, or Jean's skirt gets caught in a car door, or the prince gets too close to an elevator shaft.
DO DETECTIVES THINK? (1927) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Fred Guiol
Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson,
Viola Richard, Noah Young, Frank Brownlee
Not when they're played by Laurel and Hardy.
PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE (2010)
D: Kenneth Bowser ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
A documentary about '60s protest singer Phil Ochs, whose catchy, satirical tunes were more pointedly political than Bob Dylan's, and just about as good. Ochs idolized Dylan, who (according to the movie) treated him badly. Ochs himself was funny, ambitious, egotistical, and as time went on, subject to escalating bouts of manic depression. He wrote and recorded some of the best topical music of his time, songs that became anthems in the struggle to end the Vietnam War, but the mass acclaim that Dylan achieved, and Ochs desperately craved, eluded him. In 1976, at age 35, he hanged himself. What Ochs might've done with another 35 years is hard to say. He was an adventurous and uncompromising artist, and musically his potential was unlimited. At the same time, there's a sense that by the time he checked out, his work was done. Toward the end, he was increasingly lost and out of control. The songs had stopped coming. Booze and the demons had won. And anyway, by then the war was over.
A WEDDING (1978) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Robert Altman
Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Geraldine Chaplin,
Mia Farrow, Amy Stryker, Desi Arnaz Jr.,
Dina Merrill, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton,
John Considine, Lillian Gish, John Cromwell,
Pat McCormick, Howard Duff, Pam Dawber,
Nina Van Pallandt, Dennis Christopher, Viveca Lindfors,
Peggy Ann Garner, Bert Remsen, Dennis Franz
This isn't Robert Altman's best movie, but it might be his most stereotypical: a comic ensemble piece in which 48 characters mill about and bump into each other at an upscale wedding reception. That's a few more characters than even an Altman movie can reasonably accommodate, so what you get is mostly a collection of cameos. Some of these are eccentric, and sometimes there's not much there. Carol Burnett and Paul Dooley are the bride's parents. Nina Van Pallandt and Vittorio Gassman are the parents of the groom. Mia Farrow's the bride's weird sister (and, boy, is she weird). Geraldine Chaplin's the compulsively organized wedding planner. John Cromwell plays a doddering bishop. Lillian Gish is the family matriarch, who expires just as the party's getting started and spends the rest of the film as a corpse. Nobody's entirely likeable, and the whole enterprise plays out on the principle that weddings, as the most emotionally charged and rigorously stage-managed social events on earth, are disasters waiting to happen. The effect, watching it, is like being a bystander at a big formal family bash, where you don't really know anybody and don't really want to, but the booze is free and the food is good and maybe somebody's sharing a joint somewhere, so you hang around just to see what funny little humiliating incident you'll be spying on next. Did I mention that this is Altman at his most cynical? That, too.
Dina Merrill
(1923-2017)
