The Death of Stalin (2017)

THE DEATH OF STALIN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Armando Iannucci
    Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor,
    Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Adrian McLoughlin,
    Paddy Considine, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi
A dark, crazy, fascist farce about what happens in the upper echelons of the Kremlin when Josef Stalin has a massive stroke and all the minions who have climbed through the ranks (and stayed alive) by toadying up to the old man start maneuvering to see who will succeed him. Anybody who was tracking the news during the 1950s will recognize the names: Molotov, Bulganin, Mikoyan and others. Stalin's immediate replacement, Georgy Malenkov, is a ditherer, and the battle for the top job becomes a duel between the much-feared security chief Lavrenti Beria and the jocular Moscow Party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Beria (Simon Russell Beale) has the edge starting out. He's cagey, ruthless, ambitious, and as Stalin's enforcer, he knows where the bodies are buried. He should. He buried them. Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) comes off as a sort of buffoon, which masks a fine-tuned sense of the ever-shifting game and a shrewd, calculating instinct for survival. An exchange at the end between Khrushchev and Stalin's daughter Svetlana is pivotal. Throughout the film Khrushchev has deferred to Svetlana, accommodating her whims and wishes any way he can. Now, after engineering the execution of his main rival, he tells her the way things are going to be, and you realize that a shift has occurred, and so does she. The Politburo's class clown has effectively seized control. It's all played for laughs, but the reality behind the comedy wasn't all that funny. Beria, especially, was a monster, and real Russians were tortured, gunned down and shipped off to the gulag, not just under Stalin, but later, too. Sometimes you just have to laugh, I guess. But you feel a little uneasy, just the same. 

Steamboat Willie (1928)

STEAMBOAT WILLIE  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
Disney's become such a vast spinoff empire over the last 90 years, that it's easy to forget that what it all spun off from is this early sound cartoon featuring the first screen appearance of Mickey Mouse. Watch it with "Fantasia" (1940) for a sense of how radically movie animation would evolve in the decade that followed. 

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (1930)

COME TAKE A TRIP IN MY AIRSHIP  (1930)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
A remake of the Fleischer brothers' 1924 cartoon and apparently the movie that introduced the follow-the-bouncing-ball audience sing-along device. It's not a hard tune to sing along to, if you feel like doing that. 

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (1924)

COME TAKE A TRIP IN MY AIRSHIP  (1924)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
Four years before Disney's "Steamboat Willie", Dave and Max Fleischer produced this sound cartoon in which various animated animals get into a spaceship and sail off to the moon. The song, with music by George Evans and lyrics by Ben Shields, dates to 1904.

Certified Copy (2010)

CERTIFIED COPY  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Abbas Kiarostami
    Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, Jean-Claude Carrière,
    Agatha Natanson, Gianna Giachetti, Adrian Moore
A middle-aged man and woman spend a Sunday walking around a small town in Tuscany, talking about life and art, and playing a mind game that blurs the lines between pretense and identity and becomes more intense and unsettling the longer it goes on. At first, they barely seem to know each other. Then they seem to slip into pretending they're married. Then they seem to be married, as if they were only pretending to be strangers in the first place. They're pretentious, anyway, and not real likeable, and you kind of get tired of them after a while, which is too bad, because Binoche and Simell are both very good playing them. The Tuscan scenery is beautiful, and the setup feels a little like of one of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight" movies, only way more disturbed and dysfunctional.

The Defector (1966)

THE DEFECTOR  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Raoul Levy
    Montgomery Clift, Hardy Krüger, Macha Méril,
    David Opatoshu, Hannes Messemer, Roddy McDowall 
In his last movie, Montgomery Clift plays an American scientist who's recruited/blackmailed by the CIA to go behind the Iron Curtain and get some information from a Soviet colleague. It's decent Cold War cloak-and-dagger stuff, not great, but better than its reputation and the collective opinion of Clift's biographers would suggest. Clift was a wreck at that point. He hadn't worked in four years, and took the project to prove he could still act, while being considered for the lead in "Reflections In a Golden Eye". He holds it together, pretty much, but he seems distracted, not quite there. The film was shot on location, sometimes in the snow, and Clift insisted on doing his own stunts, even when that meant going in and out of a freezing river. It took a toll. He died before the movie's release, and Brando replaced him in "Reflections In a Golden Eye".

Bio Picks / Take 3

More memorable performances by actors 
playing people who actually lived:

                  Sean Penn as Harvey Milk 
                      in "Milk"

                  Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking 
                      in "The Theory of Everything"

                  Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin 
                      in "Wolf At the Door"

                  Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway 
                      in "Midnight In Paris"

                  Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck 
                      in "Shadow of the Vampire"

                  Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf 
                      in "La Vie en Rose"

                  Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain 
                      in "Gettysburg"

                  Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page 
                      in "The Notorious Bettie Page"

                  James Franco as Allen Ginsberg 
                      in "Howl"

                  David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow 
                      in "Good Night, and Good Luck"