Lou Tayor Pucci and JK Simmons in The Music Never Stopped
The best bets in theaters now are the combo thriller/love story The Adjustment Bureau and the Baby Boomer-friendly The Music Never Stopped.
Cedar Rapids is a fun and unpretentious comedy. Nora’s Will is a wry family dramedy, which is also now playing on HBO Signature as Cinco Dias Sin Nora (Five Days Without Nora).
Oscar winnerThe King’s Speech is on my Best Movies of 2010 and is still kicking around in some theaters.
Elizabeth Taylor was a fine actress and a compelling screen presence. The movies are full of extraordinary beauties, but few could better dominate a camera’s attention.
She won her Oscar for Butterfield 8, which was entirely her vehicle. But my favorite Elizabeth Taylor performances were in the ensemble casts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Giant. Although A Place in the Sun is Montgomery Clift’s movie, Elizabeth Taylor is essential – if an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor fell in love with him, what man wouldn’t at least think about killing for her?
Here’s you chance to see the Oscar-winning performance by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in The Fighter. Mark Wahlberg stars as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Bale) and his powerful, trashy mom (Leo). As one would expect, Bale nails the flashier role of the addict, deluding himself about both past glories and his importance to his family. Leo is almost unrecognized under her teased hair, and is accompanied by a hilarious Greek Chorus of adult daughters, each trashier than the last.
The boxing scenes are very well done, and Wahlberg matches Sylvester Stallone and Hilary Swank in making us believe that he is, indeed, a boxer. See my list of 10 Best Boxing Movies. It’s also on my list of Best Movies of 2010.
On March 23, Turner Classic Movies is airing Shock Corridor (1963). Director Sam Fuller started out as a tabloid reporter and never missed a chance to shamelessly sensationalize a subject (except for war, which he insisted on treating realistically). Shock Corridor is one of Fuller’s most sensationalistic films.
In Shock Corridor, Peter Breck plays a reporter who gets himself committed to an insane asylum so he can gather facts for an expose. He meets an African-American patient who dons Klan garb and gives white supremacist speeches in the corridor. He meets a fellow patient named Psycho who thinks he’s pregnant. He is attacked by a horny mob of women in the nymphomaniac ward, which causes him to yell a truly great movie line, “Nymphos!”. And then things don’t go so well for him after the electroshock therapy…
And, as you can see from the trailer, if Sam Fuller could get a stripper in his movie, he would find a way.
In recommending Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter as my DVD of the Week, I mentioned the amazing tsunami scene at the beginning of the film. You can easily find and watch this sequence on YouTube by searching for “Hereafter tsunami”.
Here’s a featurette by Scanline VFX that illustrates how they created the Oscar-nominated special effects for Hereafter.
To compare it with the real thing, here are some real tsunami videos from last week.
The Must See film right now is The Adjustment Bureau, a first rate love story embedded in the action thriller genre. The Music Never Stopped is a crowd pleaser that opens this weekend.
Cedar Rapids is a fun and unpretentious comedy. Nora’s Will is a wry family dramedy, which is also now playing on HBO Signature as Cinco Dias Sin Nora (Five Days Without Nora). The Illusionist is the wistful and charming animated story of a small time magician who drifts through an ever bleaker array of gigs while helping a waif blossom.
Oscar winners True Grit, The King’s Speech and The Fighter are on my Best Movies of 2010 and are still kicking around in some theaters, as is Oscar nominee 127 Hours.
On March 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing Trouble Along the Way (1953). John Wayne plays a gleefully corrupt football coach who buys players in an attempt to build up the football program overnight at a small Catholic school. And he utters the famous coachspeak, “Winning isn’t everything – it’s the only thing.” John Wayne wasn’t the first to utter that line – it was UCLA coach Red Sanders. But the Duke said it nine years before Vince Lombardi did.
I discuss Trouble Along the Way and other football movies on my Best Sports Movies (scroll down for football).
For the first time, Clint Eastwood ventures into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death. It’s also a departure for screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United). The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.
The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans. Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings. Young boys enabling a druggie mother. People in a hostel watching for the last breath of a loved one. Experienced, skilled and loving foster parents facing a challenge that they cannot fathom. Every instance of human behavior is completely authentic.
Equally realistic is the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film – an Indonesian tsunami, not overblown in any way, but frightening in its verisimilitude. The sequence lost the special effects Oscar to Inception.
Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances. Bryce Dallas Howard gives an Oscar-worthy performance of a woman achingly eager to move past the painful episodes of her life. The child actor Frankie McLaren carries significant stretches of the story with his unexpressed longing and childish relentlessness. Cecile de France ably plays a successful television anchor compelled by events to veer her life in a different direction. Richard Kind delivers a moving portrayal of a man seeking closure after the death of his wife.
This delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one). DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness. He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode. He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.
Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – why is it so damn funny? It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore. And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.
Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling. Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.
Fortunately, Potiche will have an American releases on April 1.
This documentary tells the remarkable Cold War spy story of Army Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski. In his service on the Polish General Staff, Kuklinski saw that the Warsaw Pact’s war plans for an invasion of Western Europe would inevitably lead to the nuclear obliteration of Poland. To avoid that horror, he passed on the Warsaw Pact war plans to the West so NATO could strengthen its stance and thereby deter the invasion by making it a less attractive option for the Soviets.
Kuklinshi passed over 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA – the largest act of espionage in world history. After the screening, Director Dariusz Jabloński said that Kuklinski considered himself a Polish soldier doing his duty, not a spy for the West.
Kuklinski died just before he could be interviewed for this documentary. However, Jabloński did secure interviews with the senior commanders of the Soviet and Polish militaries, former Polish heads of state, CIA officers and Kuklinski’s widow, as well as screen shots from Warsaw Pact war simulations. At 110 minutes, it’s a little long, but the story is compelling.
