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Sunday, June 29, 2014

Twelve Films: The Agony and the Ecstasy; Anything Else; Bang the Drum Slowly; Cassandra’s Dream;The Flaw; Her; Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit; Melinda and Melinda; The Monuments Men; Page Eight; Primo Levi’s Journey; Spaceballs; The Starving Games; and The Wolf of Wall Street



The Agony and the Ecstasy   1965   138 minutes   I guess we can blame Irving Stone, the author of the novel , for any historical inconsistencies.  Charlton Heston was about perfect as the crabby, unwashed, and temperamental Michelangelo.  Rex Harrison as the mercurial Julius II had a bit of Henry Higgins in him, but he made it work, and he got is ceiling painted.  That’s an actor.  At the beginning of the film they did something I’d never seen before; they gave us a little tour and explanation of some of Michelangelo’s work even before rolling the opening credits.  This flick may be old, but it’s still good.  For comic relief, there’s a debate whether the earth is round or flat.
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Anything Else   2003  109 minutes   Yes, I’m trying to work my way through Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre.   This is a bit of fluff about a young writer in NY named Jerry Falk who falls in love at first sight with Amanda, played by Christina Ricci.  He dumps his fiancé and has Amanda move in.  She’s the girl friend from hell.  Woody Allen plays an aging comedy writer who has become the Falk’s mentor and is pushing Falk to move to Hollywood with him to collaborate on a comedy writing job.  Falk asks him for advice about Amanda and Allen is happy to oblige.  Eventually Falk and Amanda part ways and Falk is ready for the Job in Hollywood.  He has to go alone, because Woody, who is a gun nut, has shot a policeman because he objected to a speeding ticket.
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Bang the Drum Slowly   1973   97 minutes   This is a baseball movie that could have used a little more baseball.  Robert De Niro plays a catcher with Hodgkin’s disease.  His friend, who is the team’s best pitcher, helps him conceal his ailment until they finish the season.  Paul Newman played the pitcher in a 1950s movie of the same story.
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Cassandra’s Dream   2007  108 minutes   This is two first rate actors, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, trying to make something out of a 3rd rate script.  Colin has serious gambling debts and Ewan needs some investment capital.  Their rich uncle persuades them to murder a whistle blower, who is about to take him down.  They do it, which is when I should have turned this off.
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The Flaw   2011  82 minutes   An interesting documentary on the financial collapse of 2008.
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Her   2013   126 minutes   Joaquin Phoenix plays a young writer who falls in love, that’s romantic love,  with the advanced operating system he purchased to run his life.  I only lasted a few minutes.

Jack Ryan:  Shadow Recruit   2014  105 minutes   With Chris Pine as Jack, Kenneth Branagh as the Russian bad guy, Kevin Costner as the jaded CIA agent and Keira Knightly as the clueless girl friend who helps the good guys save the world, how could you go wrong.  When you know what you’re getting into, it’s easy to suspend belief and just sit back and watch the car chases. 

Melinda and Melinda   2004   105 minutes   The film switches back and forth between two stories.  In both of them Radha Mitchell plays a woman who drops suddenly into the lives of a married couple.  In one story she’s an old friend known for screwing up her life and needing rescue.  In the other she’s a stranger who moves into the building and needs help.  At times I found it hard to keep the stories separate, because both involved young affluent New Yorkers living the good life.  It’s pure Woody Allen.  You may like it; I wasn’t sure.
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The Monuments Men   2014  118 minutes   George Clooney leads a team of somewhat aging art historians, architects and so on in an effort to recover art stolen in Northern Europe by the Nazis during  WW II .  There was concern that the Nazis would destroy the art works when they finally accepted that they were losing the war.  I had really been looking forward to this film, and I found it a crashing disappointment.  It’s a great story that somehow got fractured in the transfer to the screen.  I haven’t read Robert Edsel’s book, The Monuments Men, but I have to assume that it is as interesting and moving as  Saving Italy, his book on the work of the monuments men in Italy.  Skip the movie and read one or both of the books.

Page Eight (Masterpiece Contemporary)   2011  99 minutes    Johnny Worricker is an aging and dedicated MI5 agent, who learns that a major cover up of British involvement in American torture operations is underway.  He has to decide what to do about it.  This is as cool and cynical as any spy thriller I’ve ever seen.
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Primo Levi’s Journey   2006   92 minutes   This was a bit of a disappointment.   Levi survived Auschwitz and then had a long journey home after he was freed by the Russians.  His trip took him east deep into the USSR before he turned south and then west to get home to Italy.  The film goes to all the places he went, but it seems to be just a travel movie through featureless villages.  Maybe I was sleepy, but I didn’t feel like I learned much about Levi or his trip except that he made it.
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Spaceballs   1987  96 minutes   I will watch anything by Mel Brooks including this spoof of the Star Wars series.  The best two things in the movie are the female version of C-3PO who accompanies Princess Vespa  and a giant vacuum cleaner with which Rick Moranis AKA Dark Helmet hopes to steal the air from Princess Vespa’s planet.  Needless to say, that can’t be allowed and the vacuum lands on a beach.  The wreckage looks like the head of the statue of liberty; as two apes on horseback ride up, one says “There’s goes the planet.”  Oh, and there’s a guy named Lone Star who is a lot like Hans Solo.  He’s the one who destroyed the vacuum cleaner and rescued Princess Vespa.  When he goes to see Yogurt he learns he’s a prince so he heads back to Vespa’s planet and marries her.  George Lukas loved this movie.
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The Starving Games   2013  83 minutes    This is a spoof of The Hunger Games and, according to Netflix,  The Avengers, Sherlock Holmes and the Harry Potter saga.  I wasn’t too aware of references to anything but the Hunger Games.  In any event it was mildly amusing.  Kantmiss is the heroine.  She’s good, but she’s not Jennifer Lawrence.
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The Wolf of Wall Street   2013   179 minutes    Martin Scorsese keeps this running at a frantic clip for nearly 3 hours.  Leonardo DiCaprio, who has experience playing a con man, plays Martin Belfort who moved from mainline dishonesty on Wall Street to flogging penny stocks until he had the capital to open  his own totally dishonest brokerage firm.  He toys with the FBI until he gets nailed and plea bargains his way into a relatively brief time in the slammer.  It’s all scams, booze, sex, drugs, yachts and Maserati’s and someone should get a count of the F-words.  Perhaps we can develop a new rating scale – FPM for F-words per minute.

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