Moneyball (2011)

MONEYBALL  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bennett Miller
    Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman,
    Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop
This is like baseball's version of "The Social Network", about how a failed ballplayer named Billy Beane changed the game, or tried to, as general manager of the Oakland Athletics. It's not about the game played on the diamond as much as the game played away from it, in offices and on computers and over the phone. The A's were (and are) a small-market team, and what Beane did to make them competitive was to use statistical analysis to evaluate players and calculate their value on the field and in trades. Brad Pitt plays Beane with movie-star ease and an ever-ready spit cup. (Beane chews.) Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the A's crotchety, old-school manager, Art Howe. Jonah Hill plays the fresh-faced econ grad who runs the spread sheets and crunches the numbers. It can be weird to find yourself sympathizing with the guys who get paid to reduce men to their on-base percentages and walk-to-strikeout ratios. But that's the way the game is played these days, and Billy Beane, who still hasn't won a World Series with the A's, had a lot to do with that.

Deep Throat (1972)

DEEP THROAT  (1972)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Gerard Damiano
    Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems,
    Carol Conners, Dolly Sharp
The legendary porno flick, about a frustrated young woman who has a clitoris where her tonsils ought to be, launched a tidal wave of hardcore features in the 1970s and made Linda Lovelace a household name. It's a long way from great art (or even a good movie), but at least the picture tries to tell a story, and there's some humorous foreplay in the scenes between Linda and Harry Reems as Dr. Young, the conveniently horny physician who identifies and treats her affliction. In a memoir years later, Lovelace claimed she was drugged and coerced into making the film, a disturbing allegation that can't be substantiated by her performance.

Harry Reems

(1947-2013)

Howl (2010)

HOWL   (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
    James Franco, David Strathairn, Jon Hamm,
    Mary Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, Bob Balaban,
    Alessandro Nivola, Treat Williams, Aaron Tveit
James Franco plays Allen Ginsberg, writing and reflecting on his famous (and once infamous) poem. It's hard to imagine now how poetry could cause such a stir, but the obscenity trial that followed the publication of "Howl" in 1955 was a significant chapter in the ongoing battle between censorship and the arts. Epstein and Friedman are documentarians, and the movie plays out on at least four tracks: the trial, Ginsberg chain-smoking and composing at his typewriter, Ginsberg in a taped interview expounding on his life and work, and animated sequences that take off from and play around with the images in the poem. Movies haven't done a great job of capturing the Beats, who shared a collective disregard for conventional narrative. "Howl", which doesn't follow a conventional narrative, either, might be the best Beat movie yet: outside the lines and outside the box, the film and its subject both at odds with the rules.

Carry On Jack (1963)

CARRY ON JACK  (1963)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gerald Thomas
    Bernard Cribbins, Kenneth Williams, Juliet Mills,
    Charles Hawtrey, Donald Houston, Percy Herbert,
    Jim Dale, Patrick Cargill, Peter Gilmore
The "Carry On" gang gets pressed into service to fight the Napoleonic Wars, and the French and Spanish don't stand a chance. Then again, neither does the Royal Navy. It's like "Captain Horatio Hornblower" and "Damn the Defiant!" and "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." Only, you know, a lot sillier.

Haywire (2012)

HAYWIRE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Stephen Soderbergh
    Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum,
    Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas
"You're out of your element, aren't you?" Michael Fassbender asks Gina Carano at one point in "Haywire". She is, in more ways than one. They're at a swank party, and neither Carano nor the character she plays looks like somebody who feels at home in a slinky black dress. Fortunately, Carano's character, an assassin named Mallory, spends a lot less time posing at parties than she does wasting bad guys. It's a formula B-movie thriller (with an A-movie budget and cast), but Soderbergh has enough skill and respect for the genre to get it right. Going against the trend toward action scenes that favor speed over coherence, he dares to slow the chases down with longer takes that let you know where the characters are and what's going on. The locations are Dublin and Barcelona. Ewan McGregor sports the ugliest haircut he's had since "Trainspotting". Fassbender does an acceptable pseudo-James Bond. And Carano, a mixed martial-arts champion, kicks ass with more authority than most of her spindly, action-star counterparts. Angelina Jolie? Seriously, this girl would kill her.

White Fawn's Devotion (1910)

WHITE FAWN'S DEVOTION  (1910)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: James Young Deer
    Princess Red Wing
An English trapper living in a log cabin with his Indian wife and their young daughter learns that he's come into a fortune, but he has to go away to get it. The Mrs. doesn't like that idea, and when he insists on going anyway, she stabs herself. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the trapper killed her, and the other Indians are about to kill him, when the wife shows up in the nick of time to save the day (or at least the trapper), because she wasn't dead, after all. That's the story and that's the film, which is thought to be the oldest existing movie directed by a Native American. According to the notes in the DVD package, James Young Deer made more than 100 pictures for Pathé between 1910 and 1913, but he was never credited on screen for them and most of his films from the period are lost. A forgotten pioneer. I'm not sure what it says about the movie's authenticity, but it looks like the actor playing the Indian chief is wearing a union suit. Complete title: "White Fawn's Devotion: A Play Acted By a Tribe of Red Indians In America".

Room In Rome (2010)

ROOM IN ROME  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Julio Medem
    Elena Anaya, Natasha Yarovenko, Enrico Lo Verso
Sex, lies and room service. A lesbian romance about two women who spend a night together in a hotel room in Rome, where they talk and make out and talk and make out and talk and make out and talk. For about 90 percent of the movie they're naked, and both actresses are hot. In fact, it's hard to imagine anybody with a pulse not being turned on by this. It's a good movie, too. At least that's my opinion. It's possible I was distracted by something. Watch it and see what you think.