360 2011
113 minutes This is a remake
of the 1950s classic La Ronde. It was o.k.
Whenever you can watch Anthony Hopkins, it’s probably going to be worth
it, even if he’s playing a spent and grieving old man.
Battleship 2012
131 minutes I never thought I
would sit through a two hour plus movie based on a computer game, but it turned
out to have some very interesting aliens, a lot of naval action and the USS
Missouri underway, firing the big guns and saving the world. The Missouri is partly manned by some
superannuated veterans who usually spend their time explaining the ancient ship
to tourists. One wonders how there
happened to be live ammunition on board.
The Black Dahlia 2006
121 minutes Most of the time I
couldn’t follow what was going on. When
actors mumble their lines as they did in this dark picture, subtitles are the
only solution. Unfortunately they
weren’t available on Instant View. This
may be a pretty good Tinseltown detective story. I guess I’ll never know
Broadway Danny Rose 1984
84 minutes A group of comedians
sits around a restaurant table telling stories about Danny (Woody Allen), a
theatrical agent whose client list consists of freaks except for an aging
crooner, Lou Canova, for whom Danny is trying to arrange a comeback. To keep Lou in line and sober and to keep him
as a client, Danny has to escort Lou’s mistress Tina (Mia Farrow looking really
good but a little slutty) to Lou’s club dates.
When the big chance comes with a appearance at the Waldorf, Danny goes
out to Long Island to pick up Tina.
After many adventures including being chased by two mafia hit men and
crossing back to Manhattan on a tug boat, they get to the Waldorf and find Lou
there drunk. Danny uses his secret
formula to sober him up, Lou’s performance is great and, when it’s over, he
dumps Danny for another agent. In a very
nice ending, Tina dumps Lou for Danny.
The Campagn 2012
85 minutes Will Ferrell takes
campaign negativity to new and lower levels.
He does make a point: what voters would really like to see is an honest
and straightforward campaign that addresses the issues and tells voters where
the candidate stands. The extremes these
candidates go to are pretty funny, could never happen, but eerily remind one of
what we have just seen. I think of Tim
Kaine’s commercial in which he criticizes George Allen for voting in the US Senate
to extend the debt limit. For Allen to
have done otherwise would have been irresponsible, and Kaine knows that. If he had been in the Senate, he would have
cast the same vote.
Casa de Mi Padre 2012
84 minutes Will Ferrell decided
he wanted to make a movie in Spanish and what better theme could there be than
Mexican ranches giving way to drug lords.
His character is ridiculously straight arrows but also lethal when
aroused by injustice. It’s a hoot. If you like Will Ferrell, you’ll like the
movie; if you don’t, you won’t.
Chico & Rita 2010
93 minutes This animated film
tells the story of Chico, a Cuban musician who followed a singer named Rita to
New York just before the Cuban revolution.
Chico and Rita had been lovers off and on and had had a successful act
in Havana. When she got a contract in
New York, it did not include Chico.
“There were plenty of piano players in New York.” Chico tries to get Rita to recreate their act
in New York. Rita rejects him off and on
but he persists and also begins to make his way in his own career. When it looks like Rita will reject a movie
offer in Hollywood and rejoin Chico, their agent frames Chico for drug
possession, and he is deported. When he
arrives back in post revolutionary Cuba, his kind of music is no longer wanted,
and he makes his living shining shoes.
Forty-seven years later an American who loves jazz is amazed to find
Chico still alive and arranges for him to come to New York. Rita has been waiting for him all that
time. The story is pretty ordinary, but the
music plays all through the film. That
was my music in the late fifties and listening again reminded me of why I could
never buy into rock ‘n roll.
The Couple
2004 119 minutes An ancient Martin Landau plays a Hungarian
industrialist who agrees to give all of his holdings to Himmler in return for
passage to Israel for him and his extended family. This works, but at the last moment he learns
that the Aryan couple that has been running his household is actually Jewish
and that the Nazis know this. Jewish or
not they were to be murdered to cover up the direct transfer to Himmler. Landau makes some last minute ad hoc
arrangements to get them out, and the drama is in their escape to Switzerland
with a mad dog of an SS man in pursuit.
Death at a Funeral 2007
90 minutes The funeral of the
patriarch of a British family is being held in the home of the elder but less
successful of two sons. He and his wife
have their own problems, but the funeral brings new ones that are almost
unimaginable. A dwarf shows up claiming
to have been the gay lover of the deceased and has pictures to prove it. He wants money. And then there’s this bottle of LSD or
whatever that’s labeled “Valium.” It
gets misplaced and misdirected with comically disastrous results. Some of the “valium is forced on the dwarf to
shut him up; he jumps around, falls and appears dead, so they hide his body in
the father’s coffin. But he’s not quite
dead. Matthew Macfayden -- maybe you remember Tom from the early
episodes of MI-5 -- plays the elder brother straight laced and poker faced
through this whole black comedy and is able to set things right in the end, to
everyone’s surprise
Entrapment 1999
113 minutes Catherine
Zeta-Jones plays an insurance investigator who tries to trap a famous thief
played by Sean Connery in order to recover a painting. What she really wants is to partner with
Connery to steal $8 billion from a settlement bank in Malaysia. She has to prove herself to him and vice
versa. They train in his castle for a
trial robbery that involves an underwater approach and then nice visuals of
Zeta-Jones going through contortions in black tights to get through the laser
field guarding a statue they want to steal.
In Kuala Lumpur things don’t go quite as planned; first they succeed,
then they don’t and then things work out.
They were fun to watch all the way through.
First Position 2011
94 minutes I guess this is a
documentary. It follows 6 or 8 young
dancers training to compete for the Youth America Grand Prix, one of the
world’s most prestigious ballet competitions.
Successful competitors hope to win scholarships to ballet schools or be
offered positions in ballet companies. It’s
a nice film to watch for the dancing, and one learns a lot about the difficulty
of entering a career in dance and the skills necessary to succeed. There are several shots of young people
putting on their toe shoes over their bandaged feet. Any young person who aspires to be a
professional dancer should see this film, preferably with his or her parents.
The Five-Year
Engagement 2012 124
minutes What is an old guy doing
watching a romantic comedy? Well, I put
it in the queue because it has Emily Blunt.
It’s a story about the difficulties that can arise when careers get in
the way of love affairs. It’s clever,
imaginative, charming and Emily Blunt is on screen almost all the time.
The Magic of Belle
Isle 2012 109 minutes
Morgan Freeman plays a burnt out writer struggling with alcoholism and
confinement to a wheel chair, whose editor arranges for him to spend his summer
in a friends vacation house. In his
interaction with a girl about ten who lives next door and her mother, who is in
the midst of a divorce, he sets the girl on a track to become a writer herself
and recovers his own desire to write .
There’s “magic” in the title and a lot more magic in the story. Can Morgan Freeman do anything wrong?
Monsieur Lazhar 2011
95 minutes After a young and
much loved Canadian teacher, Miss Martine, hangs herself in her classroom, an
Algerian man applies for her job. His
credentials seem to be in order and no one else is available, so after some
dithering, the principal takes him on.
The kids are about 11 or 12 and one of them, the boy who found Miss
Martine before the first class one morning, had a close relationship with
her. She had tutored him and coached him,
because he was getting nothing at home.
Students, parents and teachers are all very upset about the suicide and
a psychologist is brought in to help.
Monsieur Lazhar takes over the teaching; he seems to be very old school,
but the students’ performance is more than satisfactory. There’s a lot of give and take as he gets used
to them and they to him. The suicide
keeps getting in the way. The principal
tells him to let the psychologist handle it, but that doesn’t really work, and
he is able to help the student with their sense of loss, especially the boy who
found the teacher hanging in the classroom.
At this point the principal checks further on Lazhar and finds that not
only is he not a teacher, but he is a political refugee applying for
asylum. He’s allowed to finish one more
day in class, during which he is able to bring the students to a point where
they can accept the loss of Miss Martine and move on.
Moonrise Kingdom 2012
94 minutes With a title like
this you might be expecting vampires, but instead you get Bruce Willis, Bill
Murray, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton taking small rolls
to create a vehicle for the story of two troubled but talented 12 year
olds. It’s amusing, it’s fun, it’s
slapstick, it’s surprising and entertaining and serious. It seems I am always taken with good films
about kids. Kida are a source of endless
wonder.
The Raven 2012
111 minutes Apparently, what Edgar Allen Poe did in the
last few days before he died has been lost to history. This movie “explains.” A string of bizarre murders in Baltimore seem
to be inspired by Poe’s stories. A
Baltimore police detective enlists Poe’s help to catch the murderer. The screenplay takes us through several of
Poe’s scenarios until Poe identifies the murderer and gets shot for his
trouble. It’s great fun as they race
around the warehouses, cellars and sewers of Baltimore.
Sunflower 1970
107 minutes Almost immediately
after Giovanna (Sophia Loren) has a whirlwind romance with Antonio (Marcello
Mastroianni), he is sent to the Eastern front in Ukraine. When he doesn’t come back after the war,
Giovanna goes to look for him. And she
finds his wife and child. She leaves
without talking to him. An exhausted
Antonio had been left to freeze to death in the snow, when a Ukrainian woman
found him, dragged him to her house and nursed him back to physical health, but
he had amnesia and had already fallen in love with and married his rescuer
before he really remembered who he was.
He comes to Milan to try to visit Giovanna. At first she refuses to see him, but
eventually does. She too is married and
has a child.
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