Silver River (1948)

 

SILVER RIVER  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Raoul Walsh

    Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Thomas Mitchell,

    Bruce Bennett, Monte Blue, Barton MacLane

Errol Flynn plays a Union Army captain who's drummed out of the service for a decision he makes during the Battle of Gettysburg: He burns a payroll wagon rather than let a million dollars fall into enemy hands. From then on, he's determined to act only in his own self-interest, and he does. He makes a fortune in gambling, mining, banking, and eventually owning a big chunk of the western United States. There's a downside, of course. He's screwed over practically everybody, and those people are broke, miserable and extremely pissed off. Flynn was showing some wear and tear by this time. His drinking was an issue during the shoot, and Raoul Walsh, with whom he made seven pictures, never worked with him again. The movie's not great, but there's something uniquely American about a story that's all about money and ends with a street brawl between two gangs of vigilantes, suggesting that if there's one thing our culture reveres more than scorched-earth capitalism, it's a lynch mob.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

 

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE  (1972)  ¢ ¢

    D: Ronald Neame

    Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons,

    Carol Lynley, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, 

    Jack Albertson, Pamela Sue Martin, Arthur O'Connell

Just moments after midnight on New Year's Eve, the mother of all tsunamis smashes into an ocean liner and turns it upside down. Ignoring the advice of the crew, a daring band of passengers try to make their way up through the bowels of the ship to the hull, where they hope somebody will rescue them. A really terrible movie that's fun in a junky kind of way. It made a ton of money and helped launch a decade's worth of big-budget, all-star disaster films. The producer, inevitably, was Irwin Allen, and the picture won Oscars for best song and special effects. An early stage in the unlikely route to survival involves scaling a tall artificial Christmas tree, which requires both the retired prostitute (Stella Stevens) and the teenage hottie (Pamela Sue Martin) to discard their skirts, something the solidly built Jewish matron (Shelley Winters) is not asked to do. Carol Lynley, sporting a sporty pair of shorts, gets by without a wardrobe adjustment.

Screen Test / Take 14

 

Match the following movies with the actors who appeared in them:

                     1. "Harry and Tonto"

                     2. "Harry and the Hendersons"

                     3. "The Trouble With Harry"

                     4. "Harry Brown"

                     5. "Harry &  Son"

                     6. "Give 'Em Hell, Harry"

                     7. "Harry Black and the Tiger"

                     8. "Harry In Your Pocket"

                     9. "Dirty Harry"

                   10. "Harry and Walter Go To New York"

                                 a. James Coburn

                                 b. John Lithgow

                                 c. Stewart Granger

                                 d. Clint Eastwood

                                 e. James Whitmore

                                 f. Michael Caine

                                 g. Art Carney

                                 h. Paul Newman

                                  i. Shirley MacLaine

1-g / 2-b / 3-i / 4-f / 5-h / 6-e / 7-c / 8-a / 9-d / 10-f

Yoga Hosers (2016)

YOGA HOSERS  (2016)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Kevin Smith 

    Lily Rose Depp, Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp,

    Austin Butler, Tyler Posey, Adam Brody,

    Justin Long, Tony Hale, Natasha Lyonne,

    Genesis Rodriguez, Vanessa Paradis, Haley Joel Osment,

    Ralph Garman, Sasheer Zamata, Jason Mewes, Stan Lee

Kevin Smith goes to the well once more, with another comedy centered around a convenience store. This time the store's in Manitoba and the clerks are a couple of high-school sophomores played by Smith's daughter Harley Quinn and Lily Rose Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp. It starts out with the girls being hit on by two senior boys who turn out to be Satanists, and ends with them fighting a monster whose moves are choreographed by an army of Nazi sausages. Weird? Yeah. But not funny weird. More like weird and what's the point. Johnny Depp, disguised beyond recognition, plays a crackpot author, and Jason Mewes appears just long enough to remind you that Smith used to make movies ruder, cruder, smarter and more inspired than this.

Pickup On South Street (1953)

 

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter

    Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Milburn Stone

A pickpocket working the New York subway lifts the wallet out of a woman's purse, not knowing that it contains a strip of film the commies and the FBI both want real bad. This is set in a backstreet world Fuller knew well from his early career as a crime reporter, and the movie got some McCarthy-era flack for being un-American, with a protagonist whose beliefs and motives were thought to be dangerously apolitical. That the movie has no use for communists, either, is the flip side of the equation. Fuller was an equal-opportunity provocateur. Widmark's perfectly cast as the shifty, smart-talking pickpocket. Jean Peters plays the hard-luck dame who's trapped between the feds, the reds, the thief and the cops, and desperately wants to get the film back. Murvyn Vye's a cop named Tiger and Richard Kiley's a communist agent, but the scene stealer is Thelma Ritter as a tired old woman named Moe, who knows every grifter in town, and just wants to make enough money peddling ties and information to buy herself a decent burial.

Invasion of the Neptune Men (1961)

 

INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN  (1961)  ¢ ¢

    D: Koji Ota

    Sonny Chiba, Ryûko Minikami, Mitsue Komiya,

    Kappei Matsumoto, Takashi Kanda, Junji Masuda

Schoolboy astronomers help scientists fight off an attack from the planet Neptune. Good thing a caped superhero called Space Chief is on their side. Japanese sci-fi in the style of Flash Gordon, apparently conceived for seven-year-olds of all ages. The Neptune Men look like a metallic variation on Saturday Night Live's Coneheads, but they don't say much, and they don't even pretend to be from France.

The Bamboo Saucer (1968)

 

THE BAMBOO SAUCER  (1968)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Frank Telford

    Dan Duryea, John Ericson, Lois Nettleton,

    Bob Hastings, Vincent Beck, Bernard Fox,

    Rico Cattani, Nick Katurich, James Hong

A team of Americans and a team of Russians join forces when a UFO touches down in China. Cold-War sci-fi with an incidental lesson in space-age dentistry: A flying saucer that runs on magnetic energy can be hell on steel fillings. Dan Duryea's last movie.