All Is Lost (2013)

ALL IS LOST  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: J.C. Chandor
    Robert Redford
In "All Is Lost", Robert Redford plays a character without a name. In the credits, he's identified simply as "Our Man". Which makes sense, when you think about it. Redford's been our man, or some projection of who we'd like to think we can be, for close to 50 years. So here he is, looking weathered but fit in his 70s, playing a guy trying to survive all by himself when his sailboat goes down in the Indian Ocean. There's next to no dialogue and Redford's the only actor in the film. He's sleeping below deck when a freight container full of shoes rams the boat, ripping a gash in the hull. From that point on, it's our man against the sea, an adventure every bit as tense and exciting (and solitary) as Sandra Bullock's space odyssey in "Gravity", another film where the stakes are high, the odds are extreme, and heroism and ingenuity might not be enough. Take it as a metaphor for humanity in general and our collective struggle to survive in the 21st century, and the feeling is even more ominous. If all is lost for our man Redford, the outlook can't be too good for the rest of us.

A-Plumbing We Will Go (1940)

A-PLUMBING WE WILL GO  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Del Lord
    The Three Stooges, Symona Boniface, Bud Jamison,
    Bess Flowers, Eddie Laughton, Dudley Dickerson
Moe, Larry and Curly are acquitted of robbing a chicken coop, do a little fishing out on the sidewalk, hide out in a magician's box, and finally end up posing as plumbers to escape the cop who's out to bring them in. Chaos takes over completely, once they start trying to fix the pipes. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Centurion (2010)

CENTURION  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neil Marshall
    Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko,
    Liam Cunningham, Imogen Poots, Noel Clarke
"Braveheart" meets "300" in a battle epic set in 2nd-century Britain, about a desperate band of Roman legionnaires being chased all over the moors by an equally warlike band of Picts. There's not much glory or grandeur here, and not even very much color, just a lot of running and fighting and skulls being split open and blood flying across the screen. It's about what happens when an empire tries to expand beyond its tactical reach, or as one Roman succinctly puts it, "We're fucked." The Romans speak English with British accents, while the Picts, who are native to Britain (Scotland, to be exact), don't speak English at all. They always were stubborn, those Scots.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT  (1965)  ¢ ¢
    D: Wojciech Has
    Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, 
    Elzbieta Czyzewska, Gustaw Holoubek, 
    Bogumil Kobiela, Zdzislaw Makiakewicz
During the Napoleonic Wars, a Spanish nobleman, who vaguely resembles Bob Hope, has a series of adventures involving ghosts, demons, gypsies, an old hermit, two Moorish princesses, the Inquisition and more. There are flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, and everybody, it seems, has a story to tell. The stories all eventually connect somehow, or maybe not, they're hard to track after a while, but either way, the movie just goes on and on and on for what seems like forever. It's in black and white. It's in Polish. It's outlandish. It's got a weird sense of humor. It probably won't keep you awake if you watch it late at night. A cult item, definitely, and a particular favorite of Jerry Garcia, which makes you wonder what Jerry was smoking at the time.

Naked Edge / Take 4

Hedy Lamarr in "Ecstasy"
Carey Mulligan in "Shame"
Sigourney Weaver in "Half Moon Street"
Shelley Duvall in "Thieves Like Us"
Geraldine Chaplin in "Welcome To L.A."
Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"
Vanessa Redgrave in "Isadora"
Helen Hunt in "The Sessions"
Ursula Andress in "Slave of the Cannibal God"
Josephine McKim 
(Maureen O'Sullivan's underwater double)
in "Tarzan and His Mate"

The Naked Monster (2005)

THE NAKED MONSTER  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Wayne Berwick, Ted Newsom
    Kenneth Tobey, Brinke Stevens, R.G. Wilson,
    John Goodwin, John Agar, Linnea Quigley,
    Robert Clarke, Michelle Bauer, Robert Cornthwaite,
    Lori Nelson, Paul Marco, Forrest J Ackerman
A federal agent, a paleontologist, a county sheriff and a long-retired Army colonel take on a giant three-eyed reptile in a goofy, "Airplane!"-style spoof of '50s monster movies. The production values are way beneath the standards of even most monster movies, with lots of footage lifted from other films, lots of old monster-movie stars in cameo roles, and lots and lots of really bad puns. Just about every aging B-movie actor who still had a pulse when the picture was shot turns up in it somewhere. (Production spanned a couple of decades, and by the time the project was completed, some of its older stars were gone.) Veteran scream queen Brinke Stevens gets the obligatory nude shower scene, and while veteran monster fighter Kenneth Tobey gets top billing, he's not moving around much, and it's Stevens, as much as anybody, who carries the film. As a mark of her status, the company name on an armored truck the monster crushes is conspicuously spelled "Brinkes".

None But the Brave (1965)

NONE BUT THE BRAVE  (1965)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Frank Sinatra
    Frank Sinatra, Clint Walker, Tommy Sands,
    Tatsuya Mihashi, Brad Dexter, Tony Bill
The only movie Frank Sinatra directed is about a small band of U.S. Marines and their Japanese counterparts, fighting it out and tenuously coexisting on an island in the Pacific during World War Two. Not a bad idea, but the script comes down a little heavy, and Tommy Sands' rabid performance as a green but gung-ho lieutenant belongs in a cartoon. The Japanese soldiers speak Japanese without subtitles. When the Japanese commander switches to English, the letter "L" takes a real beating. John Boorman covered much of the same ground more efficiently with just two antagonists in "Hell In the Pacific" (1968).