Call Her Savage (1932)

CALL HER SAVAGE  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Francis Dillon
    Clara Bow, Gilbert Roland, Thelma Todd,
    Monroe Owsley, Estelle Taylor, Russell Simpson

Spoiler Alert: This review contains spoilers, but they won't spoil much.

In her next-to-last movie, Clara Bow plays a wild thing who whips a rattlesnake and then whips Gilbert Roland and then smashes a guitar over a musician's head and then wrestles an enormous dog and gets into a catfight. Then she marries a guy who's rich but no good and he gets drunk and cheats on her on their wedding night and she has a baby and does some hooking and the baby dies and then she falls for another rich guy, but that doesn't work out, either, and eventually she's back in Texas where her mom's about to croak, and that's when she learns her real dad was an Indian, which means she's a half-breed just like Gilbert Roland, which she figures explains her wildness, and at the fadeout it looks like she and Gilbert Roland are going to live happily ever after, or at least till she loses her temper and does something crazy again, which she probably will. The End.

Paterson (2016)

PATERSON  (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jim Jarmusch
    Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Rizwan Manji,
    Barry Shabaka Henley, William Jackson Harper
A week in the life of a bus driver, starring Adam Driver as a guy named Paterson, who navigates the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, picking up and dropping off , and writing poetry in a notebook he always carries on the side. A lot of the movie is just his day-to-day routine - really a series of rituals - from the time he wakes up (always between 6:11 and 6:28) to his morning bowl of Cheerios, the small talk with his supervisor at the start of his shift, the conversations he overhears from behind the wheel, the exchanges at home with his wife (a self-styled artist who he loves to the point of martyrdom), and finally a nightly walk with the dog and a nightly beer at the neighborhood bar. Get up the next day and repeat. Still, a lot can happen in a week, nothing to alter the course of world events, maybe, but crucial in the life of a Paterson, New Jersey, bus driver, and the movie's about that stuff, too. Jim Jarmusch might not be the only filmmaker who would dream up a movie like this, but he is the only one who would make this movie. He's the deadpan master of the silent pause, the quiet spaces in conversations, or between conversations, where nothing's being said. Any other director would cut away from those spaces. Jarmusch wants to see what's going on there, even if it's nothing, so he sticks around. He's been doing this for over 30 years, and while the style's not much different from what he's done before, the effect here seems more personal and intimate, not just showing you what a Jim Jarmusch movie typically looks like, but suggesting what it might feel like to live in one. Keep an eye out for the twins.

The 2017 Scobie Awards

Picture: "Wonderstruck"
Actress: Sally Hawkins, "Maudie" and "The Shape of Water"
Actor: Harry Dean Stanton, "Lucky"
Supporting Actress: Laurie Metcalf, "Lady Bird"
Supporting Actor: Jon Hamm, "Baby Driver"
Ensemble: "Murder On the Orient Express"
Couple: Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani, "Paterson"
Cameo: Patti Smith, "Song To Song"
Director: Guillermo del Toro, "The Shape of Water"
Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto, "Silence"
Musical Score: Sqürl, "Paterson"
Editing: Lee Smith, "Dunkirk"
Animated Movie: "Loving Vincent"
Foreign Language Film: "The Other Side of Hope"
B Movie: "The Assignment"
Short Film: "5 Films About Technology"
Documentary: "Dawson City: Frozen Time"
Revival: "Mulholland Dr."
Title Sequence: "Loving Vincent"
Trailer: "Mother!"
Print Ad: "The Breadwinner"
Career Achievement Award: Leslie Caron

Along Came Jones (1945)

ALONG CAME JONES  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Stuart Heisler
    Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, Dan Duryea,
    William Demarest, Frank Sully, Russell Simpson
An amiably laid-back western with Cooper spoofing his own image as a slow-talking cowpoke who gets between Loretta Young and her desperado boyfriend (psycho Dan Duryea). It's the only movie Cooper produced, which makes you wish the back-projected landscapes didn't look quite so obvious. 

Baise Moi (2000)

BAISE MOI  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Virginie Despentes, Coralie Tinh Thi
    Rafaëlla Anderson, Karen Lancaume, Delphine McCarty
A prostitute and a porno actress each commit a murder, then team up and head out into the French countryside on a vicious fucking and killing spree. Part hardcore feature and part "Thelma & Louise Meet Natural Born Killers", it was actually banned in France for the graphic nature of its sex and murder scenes. It's not the kind of thing that'll ever turn up at the multiplex in the mall. (Its title, translated literally, wouldn't even make the marquee.) But it's a shocking, uncompromising movie, a brutal, nihilistic portrait of two angry young women, who with some justification see the world as a sewer, and know they've got nowhere to go in it but down. 

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

CAST A DEADLY SPELL  (1991)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Martin Campbell
    Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, David Warner,
    Clancy Brown, Alexandra Powers, Charles Hallahan 
This is interesting: a comic film noir that imagines H.P. "Phil" Lovecraft as a private eye in 1940s Los Angeles. There's a missing copy of the Necronomicon, a hulking zombie, a virgin unicorn hunter, some gremlins and demons, and an alignment of the planets that only occurs once every 666 years. Fred Ward plays the world-weary gumshoe. (This guy was born knowing how to light a cigarette.) Julianne Moore plays the femme fatale. The dialogue's hard-boiled and Curt Sobel's musical score plays like a tribute to (or theft from) Jerry Goldsmith. The zombie construction crew and the fat guy who bleeds to death from a thousand paper cuts are high points. Made for cable television. 

Deadpool (2016)

DEADPOOL  (2016)  ¢ ¢
    D: Tim Miller
    Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein,
    Brianna Hildebrand, Karan Soni, Gina Carano
Another live-action superhero movie from Marvel about another mutant wise guy with extraordinary powers. The wise guy in question is Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), a lowlife thug who's radiated till his face takes on the texture and appearance of a sausage-and-mushroom pizza and he can be shot, stomped, stabbed and mutilated without appreciably limiting his ability to kick ass. He's also emphatically R-rated, which means he can say and do shit that Thor and Hulk and Iron Man - so far, at least - cannot. It's a 10-minute idea driving a 100-minute movie - amusing for a reel or two, after which you're watching variations on the same joke playing out over and over. (Breaking down the fourth wall loses its novelty pretty fast when it becomes a running gag.) "Guardians of the Galaxy" took a goofball approach to its superheroes, too, but that movie had more affection for the conventions it was goofing on, and it had more wit. "Deadpool" aims a lot lower, without being nearly as much fun.