First Man (2018)

FIRST MAN  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Damien Chazelle
    Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke,
    Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit,
    Ciarán Hinds, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas
Neil Armstrong's moonwalk on July 20, 1969, was one of those historic moments that anybody who was around back then can remember. This movie tells Armstrong's story, from his time as a test pilot flying X-15s to the voyage of Apollo 11. The space stuff is suspenseful, even if you know the history in advance, and Ryan Gosling is ideally cast as Armstrong, a technocrat whose calm, analytical approach to a tense, demanding job makes him the perfect candidate to lead a mission to the moon. It's not that he lacks emotions, it's that he doesn't show them very much, and that's become a strain on his relationship with his wife Janet, played by Claire Foy. Foy's very good, too, but her role gives her less to grab onto, and for all the screen time devoted to it, the melodrama surrounding the Armstrongs' marriage is essentially a subplot. Neil and Janet would eventually split up, and their silent encounter through a pane of glass at the end of the film contains a revealing visual clue that something between them doesn't quite connect. 

House of Wax (1953)

HOUSE OF WAX  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andre de Toth
    Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk,
    Carolyn Jones, Paul Picerni, Roy Roberts,
    Paul Cavanagh, Dabbs Greer, Charles Buchinsky
Vincent Price plays an artist who specializes in wax sculptures. When a fire destroys his entire collection of historical figures, Vincent's work takes a turn toward the macabre. This was one of the first features shot in 3-D, but even without the gimmick, it's a pretty good horror movie, the one that established Price as a specialist in the genre for the rest of his career. Granite-faced Charles Buchinsky (aka Charles Bronson) makes his presence known in an early role as Igor, Price's mute assistant. 

Don't Let Me Die On a Sunday (1998)

DON'T LET ME DIE ON A SUNDAY  (1998)  ¢ ¢
    D: Didier Le Pêcheur
    Elodie Bouchez, Jean-Marc Barr, Martin Petit-Guyot,
    Patrick Catalifo, Gérard Loussine, Patrick Magee
This movie opens with a young woman on a slab in the hospital morgue, the apparent victim of an ecstasy overdose. The morgue attendants (a fairly sick bunch) stash her away and go home, but one of them slips back in later on to perform a little sexual post-mortem on his own. And guess what? The woman comes to, aroused from a drug-induced coma. The rest of the movie has the woman and the guys from the morgue hanging out together, engaging in some discreetly shot kinky sex, and standing watch with a friend who's dying of AIDS. They talk a lot, too, but it's hard to care about anything they're saying, and the subtitles are hard to read, anyway. (I guess it helps to know French.) The girl who turns out not to be dead is played by Elodie Bouchez, who's never hard to watch, but if getting it on with a corpse is something you'd like to spend more time learning about, you'd be better off checking out Jorg Buttgereit's "Nekromantik", or the 1996 Molly Parker movie "Kissed".

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fredric Hobbs
    Christopher Brooks, Stuart Lancaster, Richard Marion,
    E. Kerrigan Prescott, Karen Ingenthron, Peggy Browne
Somewhere outside Reno, Nevada, some toxic gas from an abandoned mine contaminates a flock of sheep. One of the sheep gives birth to an embryo that grows into a giant sheep monster that lumbers around the countryside on its hind legs, frightening little children and bumping off the occasional gun-toting vigilante. It'd be easy to dismiss this as one of the worst movies ever made, but that would miss the point that it's also one of the most bizarre. The underlying themes are greed, racism and mob justice, and it ends in complete chaos, as avarice triumphs and society collapses and devours itself. So, yeah, it's a ridiculous, terrible movie, but it's also crazy in a way that's hard to ignore. The monster's the most sympathetic character in the film. Welcome to Indian Flats. 

Listomania / Take 10

Some American actors who have portrayed nationalities other than their own (or tried to):

John Wayne in "The Conqueror" (Mongol)
Burt Lancaster in "The Train" (French)
Jack Palance in "The Professionals" (Mexican)
Myrna Loy in "The Mask of Fu Manchu" (Chinese)
Henry Fonda in "War and Peace" (Russian)
Marlon Brando in "The Young Lions" (German)
Gregory Peck in "Behold a Pale Horse" (Spanish)
Spencer Tracy in "The Old Man and the Sea" (Cuban)
Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast At Tiffany's" (Japanese)
Gary Cooper in "The Adventures of Marco Polo" (Italian)

Between the Lines (1977)

BETWEEN THE LINES  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joan Micklin Silver
    John Heard, Gwen Welles, Jeff Goldblum,
    Lindsay Crouse, Jill Eikenberry, Bruno Kirby,
    Stephen Collins, Joe Morton, Michael J. Pollard
The prospective sale of a once-scrappy alternative newspaper to a profit-driven mainstream publisher causes the paper's staff to evaluate the costs of selling out and the risks of moving on. A smart, lively ensemble piece with a great young cast, and a pretty good time capsule for the counter-culture '70s. It'd fit nicely on a double bill with "Return of the Secaucus Seven".

Michael J. Pollard

(1939-2019)

Hudson Hawk (1991)

HUDSON HAWK  (1991)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Lehmann
    Bruce Willis, Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell,
    James Coburn, Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard
Bruce Willis co-wrote this alleged caper comedy about a cat burglar who gets out of prison and immediately goes back to work stealing priceless Da Vinci artifacts. You know how some movies get a lot of bad ink, and then you see them and they turn out to be better than you expected? That's  not the case with "Hudson Hawk". It's cartoonish, categorically stupid and mostly just flat-out dull. Grant and Bernhard go way over the top as the villains, and even they're not any fun. One thing you'll see in this movie and nowhere else: the pope adjusting his TV so he can watch "Mr. Ed".

Danny Aiello

(1933-2019)