Zeta One (1969)

ZETA ONE  (1969)  ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Cort

    Robin Hawdon, Dawn Addams, Anna Gaël,

    Charles Hawtrey, James Robertson Justice,

    Brigitte Skay, Yutte Stensgaard, Rita Webb

Secret agent James Word, whose Bond is his Word, I guess, goes undercover to track down the Angvians, a race of amazons with great curves, variable accents and supernatural powers. A low-budget nudie spoof from swingin'-'60s Britain: 86 disposable minutes of flat acting, bad continuity, leering camerawork and cheesy-looking psychedelic effects. The Angvian warriors in their uniform pasties and purple bikini bottoms should appeal to those with an eye for geometry and color-coded costume design. Alternate title: "The Love Factor".

Sin City (2005)

SIN CITY  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

    Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke,

    Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba,

    Carla Gugino, Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood,

    Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, Rutger Hauer

Robert Rodriguez and graphic novelist Frank Miller collaborated on this sadistic, groundbreaking film noir, with an assist somewhere along the line from Quentin Tarantino. The narrative traces three vaguely connected stories set in and around a hyperviolent hellscape called Basin City. (The title comes from a sign at the city limits, where the first two letters in "Basin" are shot full of holes.) The stories all feature tough-guy heroes who absorb and dispense insane amounts of punishment, and invariably see themselves as knights, protecting the city's female population from the myriad forces of evil who want to do them harm. The women are all strippers or hookers who favor revealing, form-fitting outfits with an accent on leather, stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and thongs. It's testosterone run amok, with a snarky twist: Most of the women these guys are trying to save don't need saving. They're as lethal as the men are, and they mainly get into trouble when the men who believe they're riding to the rescue get involved. Visually, the picture's stunning, the live-action players blending into a computerized environment that looks like the real thing - "real" being an entirely relative term in a movie like this. It's all in black and white, with an occasional splash of color - a woman's red dress or lips, a pair of blue eyes, a murder victim's yellow blood. The writing is terse and hard-boiled. The actors are strikingly cast. And it's funny, besides. As cool as it is to watch, the movie risks going on a little too long. By the time it circles back to the original episode, starring Bruce Willis as an old cop with a bad heart, you're starting to realize that there's a sameness to all the story lines and not much depth to the characters. But even then, it's hard not to be blown away by what Miller and Rodriguez have put on the screen. Psych students looking for a term-paper topic might want to consider how these guys became so fixated on unflushed toilets and severed limbs.

Major League (1989)

MAJOR LEAGUE  (1989)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David S. Ward

    Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen,

    Margaret Whitton, James Gammon, Rene Russo,

    Wesley Snipes, Dennis Haysbert, Bob Uecker

An ex-showgirl inherits the Cleveland Indians and plots to move the team to Florida by hiring a bunch of misfit players who can only finish dead last. A good, foul-mouthed comedy, reminiscent of the Paul Newman hockey movie "Slap Shot". It's not after anything profound, like "Eight Men Out", or mythical, like "The Natural", or magical, like "Field of Dreams". It's more like a day at the ballpark, where you just go out and sit in the bleachers and drink a couple of beers and have a good time. Baseball fans, and fans of baseball movies, should appreciate that.

James Gammon

(1940-2010)

Listomania

Some actors who played the same character in the same film:

Clark Gable and Mickey Rooney

    in "Manhattan Melodrama"

Gary Cooper and Donald O'Connor

    in "Beau Geste"

Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell

    in "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"

Lillian Gish and Mary Steenburgen

    in "The Whales of August"

Harrison Ford and River Phoenix

    in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

Saoirse Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave and Romola Garai

    in "Atonement"

Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney

    in "Big Fish"

Kate Winslet and Judi Dench

    in "Iris"

Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart

    in "Titanic"

Bela Lugosi and Ed Wood's wife's chiropractor

    in "Plan 9 From Outer Space"

The Ghost Writer (2010)

THE GHOST WRITER  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Roman Polanski

    Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams,

    Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton,

    James Belushi, Jon Bernthal, Eli Wallach

Ewan McGregor plays a character identified in the credits as "The Ghost". He's the ghost writer, hired for reasons he can't quite fathom to polish up the memoirs of a retired British prime minister (a testy, combative Pierce Brosnan), who's about to face war-crimes charges at the International Criminal Court. Protecting the P.M. and competing for influence are his shrewd, long-suffering wife (Olivia Williams) and his coldly efficient aide and apparent mistress (Kim Cattrall). None of these people can be trusted, and when the ghost finds out his predecessor might have been murdered, he starts to do a little investigative work on his own. It all plays out like a deliberately paced Hitchcock movie, and if there are few big surprises, you can still appreciate the skill with which it's done. And there's the odd sense of displacement that goes with a story that's set mostly in the Northeastern United States, but couldn't be filmed there because of Polanski's persistent travel restrictions. 93-year-old Eli Wallach does a feisty bit as a local who knows the tides and wonders why the body of the previous ghost washed up where it did on the beach.

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph Green

    Herb Evers, Virginia Leith, Adele Lamont

A doctor and his fiancee are driving out to his laboratory in the country, when, wouldn't you know it, they crash the car and the woman ends up decapitated. Grabbing her head like a football with the game on the line, the doc races to the lab, where he puts the head in suspended animation. Now he's got 48 hours to find the head a new body, so he goes shopping. Who will the unwary donor be? A stripper? A hooker? A contestant in a swimsuit pageant? A photographer's model? Or just an old girlfriend walking down the street? A low-budget horror movie with a distinct undercurrent of tabloid sleaze. The gory highlight comes when the doctor's lab assistant loses his arm at the shoulder and bleeds all over the wall. Nice performance by Virginia Leith as the severed head.

I'm Not There (2007)

I'M NOT THERE  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Todd Haynes

    Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger,

    Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw,

    Bruce Greenwood, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore

Some of the many sides of Bob Dylan, a fractured, impressionistic portrait with six different actors playing various Dylan personas, real or imagined. There's Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, a surly folk singer who can't handle the demands of fame. Heath Ledger as a boorish actor playing Rollins in an early-'60s film. Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud. Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody Guthrie. Richard Gere as an aging Billy the Kid. The most literal, and the most compulsively watchable, is Cate Blanchett as Dylan circa 1965, fingernails, frizzed hair, shades and all, chain smoking, flying on amphetamines, impish, jittery, egocentric and a near-total asshole. How much of Bob Dylan any of it captures is open to debate, and I'm not sure it matters. A hundred different filmmakers could make a hundred different Dylan movies, and all of them would get at some part of the truth (or none at all), while the shape shifter himself slips away on the next available boxcar. That's kind of what "I'm Not There" is getting at. The real Bob Dylan wouldn't want it any other way.