Cornered (1945)

CORNERED  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edward Dmytryk
    Dick Powell, Walter Slezak, Micheline Cheirel,
    Nina Vale, Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler
Powell plays a Canadian Air Force pilot out to track down the fascist responsible for the murder of his French wife during World War Two. A good, tense thriller in which nobody can be trusted. Tough, hard-edged performance by Powell.

CBGB (2013)

CBGB  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Randall Miller
    Alan Rickman, Ashley Greene, Estelle Harris,
    Stana Katic, Malin Ackerman, Mickey Sumner
In 1973, a chronically cash-strapped hustler named Hilly Krystal opened a club in a rat-hole space in the Bowery, with the unlikely ambition of bringing country music to New York City. Country didn't flourish there, but something else did: punk. In fact, what Bill Graham's Fillmore ballrooms had been for the freaks a few years before, Krystal's dank, dingy bar, which he called CBGB, would become for the punks: a symbolic Mecca, a musical and spiritual home. Alan Rickman, looking dumpy and disheveled, plays Krystal in this amiably loose and affectionate character sketch. Young look-alike actors fill in for the Ramones, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, lip-synching the tunes those groups were playing at the time. You don't have to be a big fan of the punk scene to enjoy this one, but it probably wouldn't hurt. Just don't go into the bathroom unless you absolutely have to. And watch out for the dog shit on the floor. 

Screen Test / Take 6

Match the following actors with the movies in which they played opposite Audrey Hepburn:

                           1. Sean Connery
                           2. Humphrey Bogart
                           3. Fred Astaire
                           4. Burt Lancaster
                           5. Albert Finney
                           6. Gregory Peck
                           7. Henry Fonda
                           8. Cary Grant
                           9. Gary Cooper
                         10. Peter O'Toole

                          a. "Two For the Road"
                          b. "How To Steal a Million"
                          c. "War and Peace"
                          d. "Funny Face"
                          e. "The Unforgiven"
                          f. "Charade"
                          g. "Sabrina
                          h. "Robin and Marian"
                          i. "Roman Holiday"
                          j. "Love In the Afternoon"

  Answers:

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

The Big Parade (1925)

THE BIG PARADE  (1925)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: King Vidor
    John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Tom O'Brien,
    Karl Dane, Claire Adams, Hobart Bosworth
John Gilbert in what's widely considered to be his best role, as the pampered son of a wealthy family who goes off to fight in World War One. Claire Adams plays the girl he leaves behind, and Renée Adorée plays the girl he finds in France. The middle third is mostly comedy, some of it surprisingly silly, but then the call to battle comes and the war becomes hell, the Yanks in a line marching forward through the gas and smoke, the machine guns mowing them down, till finally Gilbert finds himself sharing a foxhole and a cigarette with a dying German. By the time he gets home, he's lost a leg and most of his sanity. He's survived the war, but the war won't leave his head, and you wonder whether a reunion with the girl in France will be enough to provide a durable cure. It's the same now as it was then. Even some of the guys who make it back don't make it back.

Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem (2014)

THEODORE BIKEL: IN THE SHOES OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Lollos
This movie is like a diptych, a dual portrait of the author and playwright Sholem Aleichem, who died in 1916, and Theodore Bikel, the actor and folk singer who carried Sholem Aleichem's words and message forward into the 21st century. A lot of the movie is just Theo on a stage, often alone, performing selections from Sholem Aleichem's work, or commenting on the writer's life and career, or his own. He was close to 90 at the time, and seriously ill, but you'd never know that from his performance, which is energized and full of life. Alan Alda narrates, and Bel Kaufman, Gilbert Gottfried, David Krakauer and others weigh in on the crucial role both men played in preserving traditional Jewish culture. An unanswered question hangs over the piece and remains. If Sholem Aleichem carried the instinct for survival and creative expression from the shtetls of Eastern Europe into the early 20th century, and Theo carried those same traditions into the age of computers and smartphones, who will carry them on from here? Somebody always has and somebody always does, but who will follow in the shoes of Theodore Bikel?

Theodore Bikel

(1924-2015)

Kiss Them For Me (1957)

KISS THEM FOR ME  (1957)  ¢ ¢
    D: Stanley Donen
    Cary Grant, Suzy Parker, Jayne Mansfield,
    Ray Walston, Larry Blyden, Leif Ericson
A frantic service comedy and minor Cary Grant vehicle about three Navy pilots trying to enjoy a booze-filled shore leave in San Francisco. This might be the only role Grant ever played for which Tony Curtis would've been better cast. The story's set in 1944, but the look is straight out of the 1950s, and that definitely includes Mariska Hargitay's mother, Jayne Mansfield, a platinum bombshell whose epic curves are her best and only asset. 

Amy (2015)

AMY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Asif Kapadia
The short, messed-up life of Amy Winehouse, a lively, fun-loving girl from North London, whose career trajectory in the early 2000s took her from jazz artist to pop superstar to junkie to corpse, most of it recorded on camera. There's a sense of inevitability about this, partly because you know how the story ends, and partly because it's not clear anybody or anything could've changed the outcome, anyway. Winehouse had demons and a capacity to self-destruct, no doubt. Throw in her apparent exploitation at the hands of her crackhead husband and her suspiciously self-serving dad, together with the crass nature of 21st-century celebrity, and you wonder if she ever even had a chance. "I don't think I'm going to be at all famous," Winehouse says early on. "I don't think I could handle it." She was right, but it came to her anyway, and a witness remembers her talking close to the end about how she'd trade everything just to be able to walk down the street without being hassled. In between, there's the girl with the dynamite voice, playing dress-up in her trademark beehive and mascara, alternately bright and creative or woozy and strung-out, a kid who never got to grow up. She was a tabloid joke in the end, the world's most ruthlessly publicized waste case, and everybody wanted a piece of her. There was no escape. She died in London, July 23, 2011, from the combined effects of bulimia and alcohol. She was 27, the magic number for music legends clocking out young. Amy Winehouse had left the building and joined the club.