Bill Frisell: A Portrait (2017)

BILL FRISELL: A PORTRAIT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Emma Franz
Early on in this documentary, a fellow musician expresses the opinion that there simply isn't anybody who doesn't love Bill Frisell. After spending a couple of hours hanging out with Frisell and listening to him play, you'll know why that's true. He's the most unassuming guy you'd ever want to meet. Talking about his music, he's barely articulate. Playing it, he's the best there is. The film is practically wall-to-wall music: Frisell playing with various combinations of musicians in just about every genre imaginable. He's as prolific as he is versatile (he's played on virtually hundreds of albums), and the more you listen, the more you wonder if he's ever played a note on any of his many guitars that didn't sound good. Even his goofs sound good. If you're a fan, you won't want to miss this. If you're not, the movie could make you one.

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

FRIENDLY PERSUASION  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: William Wyler
    Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins,
    Marjorie Main, Robert Middleton, Phyllis Love,
    Mark Richman, Walter Catlett, John Smith
A Quaker family in southern Indiana has to decide whether to take up arms in the Civil War. Homespun Americana in widescreen and color by De Luxe, idealized to the point where you wonder when the Rogers-and-Hammerstein songs are going to kick in. Cooper's the patriarch. McGuire's his wife and the movie's rock-ribbed pacifist conscience. Perkins plays their oldest son, and a pivotal supporting role is played by a goose. A great many "thee"s punctuate the script. Michael Wilson, who wrote it from Jessamyn West's novel, got an Oscar nomination, but no screen credit because of the blacklist.

Loving Vincent (2017)

LOVING VINCENT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dorota Korbiela, Hugh Welchman
    Douglas Booth, Chris O'Dowd, Eleanor Tomlinson,
    Aidan Turner, Saoirse Ronan, Jerome Flynn,
    Robert Gulaczyk, Robin Hodges, John Sessions
An animated mystery about a postmaster's son dispatched to deliver Vincent Van Gogh's last letter to his brother Theo, sometime after Vincent's death. Finding that Theo himself has died, the messenger ends up hanging around Auvers, talking to those who knew Vincent - all of them subjects in his paintings - and trying to piece together what happened in the last few weeks of the artist's life. What's revealed is a maze of conflicting stories, like "Rashomon" in oil on canvas, and visually that's exactly what the movie achieves. It was shot using real actors and then painted frame by frame in the style of Van Gogh. That required the work of more than 100 artists, making it the most labor-intensive case of rotoscoping ever, and the most literal example yet of images in paint coming to life. It's a magnificent eyeshow, especially on a big screen. Crows and wheat fields and sunflowers never looked so good.

Two Way Stretch (1960)

TWO WAY STRETCH  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Day
    Peter Sellers, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Lionel Jeffries,
    Liz Fraser, Maurice Denham, Bernard Cribbens
Three cons closing in on their release dates sign on for a diamond heist for which they'll have the perfect alibi: They'll escape, pull off the job, and sneak back into prison before anybody knows they were gone. A pleasantly barmy British comedy in the combined spirit of Ealing, the "Carry On" films and Monty Python. Authority figures are more or less doomed in a movie like this. The more seriously they take themselves, the worse it's going to be for them. Lionel Jeffries, as a tyrannical prison guard, doesn't stand a chance.

Quote File/Take 12

Some lines from the screenplays of William Goldman:

"The future's all yours, ya lousy bicycles!"
  Paul Newman 
  in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

"I thought everyone knew that God was a 
  Scotsman."
  Sean Connery
  in "A Bridge Too Far"

"What I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."
  Cary Elwes
  in "The Princess Bride"

"Do you want my signed confession now, 
  or after coffee?"
  Clint Eastwood to Ed Harris
  in "Absolute Power"

"Nothing much surprises me anymore, except 
  what people do to each other."
  Burt Reynolds
  in "Heat"

"If you want to understand me, watch my movies."
  Robert Downey Jr.
  in "Chaplin"

William Goldman

(1931-2018)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Luc Besson
    Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna,
    Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Rutger Hauer
"Star Wars" meets "Avatar", more or less, in a sci-fi adventure about a couple of young space commandos whose mission is to, well, it's not entirely clear what their mission is, except to get into one scrape after another and look good doing it. So there are these creatures that look like an overfed Jar Jar Binks, and an even more grossly obese thing that could be the brother of Jabba the Hutt, and a race of skinny, peaceful, supersmart aliens, and a commander (called "The Commander") played by Clive Owen, who blew the aliens' planet to smithereens a while back, and now wants to kill the remaining aliens, who just want their planet back. Oh, and there's this little iguana-like creature that shits pearls, which comes in handy if, you know, you're running low on pearls. The visuals are cool. The storytelling's juvenile. The leads are attractive but bland. Rihanna does an eye-catching number as a shape-shifting pole dancer in a scene that makes you wonder whether maybe Besson didn't wish he was working with an R rating instead of a PG-13. Ethan Hawke appears briefly as Rihanna's pimp and gives the movie's most enjoyably crazed performance. 

Brief Moment (1933)

BRIEF MOMENT  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Burton
    Carole Lombard, Gene Raymond, Monroe Owsley,
    Donald Cook, Reginald Mason, Irene Ware
A nightclub singer marries a playboy, but his no-work-and-all-party lifestyle has an adverse effect on their relationship. There's a guy who runs a speakeasy who's crazy about her, but she's in love with the playboy, which is too bad, because she'd be better off with the speakeasy guy. Some women just fall for the wrong men, you know?