Review: The Hangover Part II

The wolfpack takes a trip they’ve by and large taken before.

Probably since the moment of its official announcement, the hype and anticipation surrounding The Hangover Part II speculated that the sequel to the 2009 monster hit comedy couldn’t avoid a presumed – and expected – sophomore stumble. Much of that first film’s success, really, grew out of its out-of-left-field surprise : with its pairing of journeyman comics Ed Helms and Zack Galifianakis with then-unproven leading man Bradley Cooper, and a concept that seemed to owe more to Las Vegas tourism commercials than organic inspiration, the film’s raunchy escapism and bromantic camaraderie was, if not exactly fresh, a modern take on the “boys will be boys” comedic trope. Enjoying a playing field more or less left to itself in the no-fun zone of the summer 2009 movie season, the original grossed close to half a billion dollars worldwide.

Jump ahead two years to this sequel, whose guiding maxim seems to run something along the lines of “nothing succeeds like success.” But can it succeed? Well no, maybe of course not, but then it doesn’t often try very hard. The budget is more than doubled, the jokes are raunchier and there are more genitalia on display, but audiences will likely find a depressing amount of sameness anyway. If you liked the first, you’ll like this one, but not as much and perhaps even in spite of yourself.

Changing the environs from Vegas to the more picturesque – but perhaps no less heady – setting of Bangkok, this second adventure has the gang decamping for Thailand to celebrate the marriage of “wolfpack” member Stu (Ed Helms) to a woman of Thai descent (Jamie Chung.) Buddies Phil (Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) are onboard as groomsmen, and the gang reluctantly invites Doug’s brother-in-law Alan (Galifianakis), as before, at the urging of Doug’s wife (Sasha Barrese.) The marriage is far from ideal almost at once. The bride’s father (Nirit Sirijanya) disapproves of Stu, comparing him to rice porridge, and Alan takes an immediate, competitive dislike to her brother Teddy (Mason Lee.)

Stu’s plans for a low-key, beachside campfire bachelor party take a turn for the disastrous – the movie has to happen somehow – and the gang wakes up the next morning in a Bangkok hotel room with, naturally, no memory of the previous night. Teddy is missing, though one of his fingers is recovered from a glass of water, and bumbling criminal Chow (Ken Jeong) is naked and unconscious on the hotel room floor.

Panicked but determined to find Teddy, the group reenters the sun-drenched, sun-bleached Bangkok streets hoping to find him before the wedding ceremony that evening. Their search gets them entangled with a corrupt businessman (Paul Giamatti, completely wasted here), a hermaphrodite strip bar/brothel, and Russian gangsters who want the obnoxious, cigarette-smoking monkey the wolfpack found in their room.

Even before the search really begins, anyone paying attention can spot the crippling loyalty to the original’s bag of tricks: the seamy morning-after locales, the replacement of Teddy for Doug as missing person, the use of Chow as manic comic foil; Teddy’s final rescue comes not as a result of the group’s diligence but as a brainstorm that reveals his hiding place all along. That’s fine by itself, but the innovation this time around seems largely based on amping the shock value of the first: as the original had frontal nudity, this one displays transsexual body parts. Stu has sex with a man instead of a woman. People are shot instead of beaten up.

In time the devotion becoming slavish, then almost compulsive, except the jokes fall flat – nothing’s as funny the second time – and there aren’t enough of them to make the repetition besides the point, as in similarly comedy sequels like Airplane II and all the iterations of National Lampoon’s Vacation. Director Todd Philips, working with two screenwriters who didn’t participate in the first, keep the jokes at the same pitch as the predecessor. But without the element of surprise – with the expectation of getting shocked – the shock value deflates, like a punch you know is coming and then doesn’t sting as much as a result.

The performances are similarly uniform, and not in a way that’s always endearing. Cooper can coast by on looks and charm – that’s all the role asks of him, really – but Helms, Galifianakis, and Jeong have a harder time keeping their respective schticks fresh. We’ve groused before that Galifianakis was already on his way to becoming what Steve Zahn was in the 90s: a talented, oddball comic actor whose welcome was squandered on inferior projects. But his weirdo routine is starting to show its age already, particularly in the malice Alan shows for Teddy and his childlike devotion to the monkey. Helms and Jeong, meanwhile, go through R-rated motions of the characters they play on NBC Thursday nights.

There’s an old piece of conventional wisdom that sequels will typically reap sixty percent of the box office as their hit predecessors. Why shouldn’t the same formula apply to audience satisfaction? The Hangover Part II is sixty percent as entertaining as the first, the rest lost to limp shock value and diminished inspiration. If you can settle for that, you won’t have a bad time.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Miscellaneous Debris, May 2011

The summer movie season is a swimming pool. This is the diving board.

Winter may have the prestige pictures and springtime has the festivals, but for those of us who love watching movies, summer is the time to go. It’s like a trip to the circus, or an amusement park; the winter prestige releases  are like a classroom excursion to the museum and the festivals a Sunday afternoon trip to the eclectic bookstore Uptown (or Midtown, or whatever your city calls that area.)

Here’s our list of news that didn’t get a full post over the last couple of months, but probably deserved it – our commentary on items worth discussing. All opinions are just that, but as always feel free to post your own in the space provided. Thanks, and have a fun holiday weekend.

1. Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life won the Palme D’Or at the 64th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 22, despite a contentious reception that had some people booing its screening while others cheered. By some accounts, the film – about the meaning of life in the cosmos filtered through the life of a 1950s Texas family – is Malick as his most – well, Malick, and audience’s take on it will likely depend on how well they appreciate the writer-director’s meditative style.

Kirsten Dunst won best actress for her starring role in auteur provacateur Lars Von Trier’s apocalyptic thriller Melancholia. French actor Jean DeJardin won best actor, for his performance in the period romance The Artist.

Tree of Life opens May 27 in selected cities; Melancholia opens November 4. As of press time The Artist has no US release date listed on IMDB.

We hear the beaver did great work.

2. Going from controversial success to almost unmitigated failure, director Jodi Foster’s attempt to resuscitate buddy Mel Gibson’s career with the odd melodrama The Beaver opened to just $107,000 in limited release May 8, with subsequent box office so small that distributor Summit Entertainment has scrapped plans for a wide release. The film earned mixed reviews, alongside the predictable speculation about the state of Gibson’s career moving forward.

As a comeback vehicle, The Beaver is probably just too weird: Gibson ‘s last effort, the far more conventional revenge thriller Edge of Darkness, broke even on its $80 million budget in worldwide release.

We were going to post a trailer for The Beaver but the hell with it. Here’s the drug bust scene from Lethal Weapon instead:

Did Riggs every get that Christmas tree? We’ll never know.

Ulrich on L&O:LA

3. As long as we’re on the subject of failure, here’s a recipe for how to tank one of the year’s most promising television dramas: put it on extended hiatus, release the cast member with the organized, devoted fan base, and then reschedule it behind a drama that was doomed almost from its start, runnning the episodes blatantly out of their production order. That’s what NBC had the brains to do with Law & Order: Los Angeles, the latest incarnation of the aging franchise but a worthy successor to the “mothership” original series that the Peacock Network canned last year.

Had the show continued, its breakout star would likely have been Corey Stoll, whose Detective Tomas “TJ” Jaruszalski gave laid-back California mellow a fresh coat of cool. On that note, NBC’s The Event (the show’s ill-starred lead-in) features Jason Ritter, Ian Anthony Dale, Taylor Cole and Sarah Roemer, whom we see as some of the biggest stars of 2013 or so.

4. From the “we should have reviewed this a while back” desk: A&E’s original drama Breakout Kings continues to surprise with its shrewdly intelligent writing, building all its half-dozen interpersonal tensions to a slow boil week by week. The cast’s chemistry, bumpy in the first episodes, has improved as the show nears the end of its first season (to middling ratings).

Jimmy Simpson, formerly the scene-stealing Liam McPoyle on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, brings the best work playing a gambling-addict psychiatrist, and plotlines often pause to let him take center stage with his Hannibal-Lector-gone-geek weirdness. Meanwhile The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi has a beefy intensity that evokes the early work of Gene Hackman, and Laz Alonzo (Avatar) brings retro cool to the center straight-man role.

Breakout Kings‘ season finale airs May 29.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides had a $90 million opening weekend, the biggest of the year so far, but some analysts wonder if even that amount has Disney shivering its timbers. The studio predicted the film would enjoy a $100 million opener – an amount still less than the openings for the series’ two previous installments – but that analysts likely felt was conservative given the additional revenue from 3-D and IMAX showings.

Already the subject of lukewarm reviews, the film faces stiff competition in the coming weeks for the all-important 18-49 demographic, with The Hangover 2 opening this weekend and X-Men: First Class the week after.

6. A better show than anyone who’s never seen it realizes, FX’s Archer is much more than the genre-spoofing jokes its tame promos would indicate. Not for the faint of heart or gentle of stomach, it’s nevertheless a very smart, very dark comedy that most often recalls the first-season heyday of Arrested Development (partly a small wonder, given the bevy of AD veterans among its voice cast.)

Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is the premiere secret agent for the quasi-governmental agency ISIS, run by his domineering, emotionally withholding mother (Jessica Walter) and staffed by a crew of sexual degenerates and deviants (voiced by, among others, Judy Greer and Chris Parnell.) Arrogant but achingly aware that his stunted maturity comes from a miserable childhood, Archer carries out missions with fellow spy and bittersweetheart Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) while avoiding the machinations of the KGB, rival spy organization ODIN, and pretty much the entire world. Meanwhile the ISIS staff carries on workplace satire that would strip the paint off NBC’s cute/wacky/cute Thursday night sitcoms.

The second season recently concluded, with reruns currently appearing sporadically amid FX’s schedule.

7. With The Dark Knight Rises officially in production as of last week, the film’s official site released this picture of Tom Hardy (Inception) as the monstrous gang boss known as Bane.

In the comics, Bane is a criminal genius who uses a volatile steroid known as Venom to augment his musculature, giving  him incredible strength and terrific rage. Raised from childhood in the Caribbean prison of Pena Dura but eventually dominating its inmates through sheer intimidation, he journeyed to Gotham City to beat that city’s own “ruler by fear” – Batman. In his bid to conquer Gotham’s underworld he fought the hero hand-to-hand in a brutal Batcave-set duel that ended when he snapped Batman’s spine.

Currently reformed, more or less, he works with other villains-for-hire The Secret Six, whose perversely witty book is among the best DC publishes each month. Bane also previously appeared in 1997′s little-loved Batman and Robin, where he was played by the late wrestler Jeep Swenson.

8. Finally, because no one wants to work when the weather is nice, here’s Christian Bale in a clip from the unfairly ignored Harsh Times to help you articulate your workplace frustrations. Just let his words ring through your head when your coworkers annoy or frustrate.

We have a review of this film and several other worth-seeing Bale films in this feature from 2009. Finally, it should go without saying but nothing about his clip is SFW.

We’ll return next week with a review of The Hangover 2. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Sidney Lumet: 1924-2011

Iconic film director passes away at 86.

Sidney Lumet, director of several classic American films including Network, Dog Day Afternoon, and Twelve Angry Men, died Saturday of lymphoma at his Manhattan home. He was 86 years old.

Born in Philadelphia to parents already veterans of Yiddish theatre, as a child Lumet appeared several times on the Broadway stage. He served as a radio repairman in the Army in World War II before returning to new York in 1946, joining the Actor’s Studio and shortly thereafter organizing his own off-Broadway troupe.

Lumet went to work in television during the early years of its ascendancy, garnering a reputation for working quickly that well-suited the new medium’s sparse production schedules. He directed live televised performances for theatrical programs including The Alcoa Hour and The Goodyear Playhouse, and collaborated with Walter Cronkite on the seminal history series You Are There.

In 1957 Lumet made his feature film debut with 12 Angry Men, an adaptation of the televised play he had previously directed. The film, starring Henry Fonda and a virtual Murderer’s Row of the era’s best character actors, was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Direction recognition for Lumet as director as well as Best Picture. His film career continued through the 1960s with works including Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Fail Safe, and The Pawnbroker.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, however, that the director reached his artistic prime. Turning his attention to the corruption and moral decay then seemingly endemic in American society, Lumet’s works throughout the first half of the decade – Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976) displayed sparse, uncompromising critiques of the systems normally used to check society’s worst excesses – the police, businesses, the media -  all crumbling beneath human weakness. As with his earlier dramatic efforts, the films displayed an objective, almost detached directorial voice, letting character interaction and story, rather than style or artifice, advance the film’s subtexts.

Ever versatile, during this same time he also directed the posh mystery Murder On The Orient Express and the Texas-set romance Lovin’ Molly (both 1974). In 1978 he became the improbable director of The Wiz, a musical, urban retelling of The Wizard Of Oz starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.

Lumet remained prolific in the 80s and early 90s, directing several more New  York-set crime and corruption dramas including Prince of the City (1981), Family Business (1989), Q & A (1990), and Night Falls On Manhattan (1996). His 1992 legal drama The Verdict, starring Paul Newman, garnered five Oscar nominations including Best Director and Best Picture. In 1996 he published Making Movies,  his critically acclaimed memoir and guide to filmmaking.

In time, and following a string of box office and critical disappointments, Lumet’s output slowed down a bit. Much of the 00′s were given towards a return to television, including creating the A&E series 100 Centre Street and directing the telefilm Strip Search. His 2007 indie crime drama, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, received his best reviews in two decades.

Lumet’s work encompasses virtually all film genres and five decades, and though he was often accused of lacking a defining theme to his work in the strictest auteurist sense, nevertheless his films always bore the same respect for story and empathy for characters regardless of their subject matter. He presented stories he believed worth telling in the best way he knew how, which was often virtually flawless. We believe that the fullest appreciation of his work is yet to happen, that greater stature awaits his place among the great American directors.

By way of tribute, here’s a scene from Dog Day Afternoon, in which Al Pacino’s beleaguered, inept bank robber rises to the applause and control he’s craved his whole life:

Our most sincere sympathies to Mr. Lumet’s family and friends.

- Michael Kabel

Review: Paul

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s close encounter comedy revives the comic adventures of the 1980s.

Geek culture has entered the American mainstream, not from any cultural impetus or because the film and television industries realized the tremendous storytelling potential of its legions of franchises. Rather, money – the fortunes to be made in celebrating and exploiting what was once an outlying, fringe element of society – is too good to pass up. Too, it helps that some of the best comedic minds around right now proudly wave their geek cred.

That crossover continues in glorious scale, and in fact probably makes its grand arrival, with the very funny satire/homage Paul, the funniest American film since last year’s The Other Guys and a career high for several of its creative forces. Not for the faint of sensibilities and especially not for anyone humorless about their purpose driven life, it’s nevertheless bawdy, smart fun for the rest of us.

After years of anticipation, lifelong British geeks and (to quote geek tycoon Kevin Smith) hetero life-mates Graeme (Simon Pegg) and Clive (Nick Frost) embark on a trip across America, beginning with a visit to the San Diego Comic-Con and continuing with a sojourn to the sites of reported extraterrestrial contact throughout the American Southwest. The two are pleasantly astonished by American excess, drinking in the oddities of the alien-themed tourist traps but mostly remaining at a safe distance within their rented RV. Clive, though, is restive after a convention meeting with their favorite science fiction author (Jeffrey Tambor) proves underwhelming.

Driving along a desolate highway at night and fleeing two bullying rednecks (David Koechner and Jesse Plemons), the two witness a black sedan fly crashing off the road. Investigating the wreck, they encounter the ET code-named Paul (voiced by Set Rogen) by his government caretakers. Paul had crashed to Earth decades before, and since then has covertly advised the U.S. military and the American entertainment industry. Now with his knowledge all but exhausted by his top-secret hosts, Paul fears vivisection at the hands of the shadowy “Big Guy” controlling his concealment. He begs for Graeme and Clive’s help in reaching an unspecified destination – “You’ll know it when you see it, guys,” he tells them - before government Agent Zoil (Jason Bateman) catches up to him.

At times evoking memories of comic book icon and movie disaster Howard The Duck, Paul is no one’s idea of an enlightened being. Quick to curse and nursing a love for cigarettes, pot, and easy living, he’s nonetheless privy to cosmic secrets that leave mere humans scratching their heads. Able to camouflage himself to his surroundings and to heal minor energies through energy transference, he’s also a stronger personality than his human cohorts, more assured by way of being confident of his place in the universe.

Stopping overnight at the Pearly Gates trailer ranch, the trio picks up an unintentional hostage in Ruth (Kristen Wiig), a creationist and devout Christian immediately at odds with Paul’s very existence. When Paul heals an eye that was damaged during childhood, she resolves to live the most debauched life she can, arguing if there’s no such thing as sin then her behavoir can’t be wrong. “I plan to fornicate a lot!” she tells a smitten Graeme.

The group inches towards their destination while eluding Zoil, Ruth’s bible-thumping father (John Carroll Lynch) and two junior agents (Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio) looking to prove themselves to the Big Guy. A detour to the site of Paul’s arrival on Earth gains them another passenger, the woman (Blythe Danner) who as a girl saved him from the wreckage of the UFO. Paul regrets her involvement, and the social ostracism it caused, and wants to make amends before leaving.

Ultimately the group reaches the site of the alien rendezvous, escaping the agent’s clutches and facing down the Big Guy in a series of surprising twists. (The villain’s identity is meant to be a surprise, so I won’t spoil it here.) A neat epilogue brings the story back around to the Comic-Con, where Clive and Graeme revel in the success Paul’s inspiration has brought them.

Written by Pegg and Frost, the script under the direction of Greg Mottola plays as a more well-rounded and mature effort than the duo’s previous Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and another accomplishment for Mottola following 2009′s deeply underrated Adventureland. Their American costars – Rogen, Wiig, Heder, Bateman – understand the deadpan glee the two bring to their stories, and adjust their performances accordingly. Wiig, probably comedy’s next great leading woman, is alternately melancholy and explosive as the newly- and happily-unsheltered Ruth; Bateman, an odd choice to play a heavy, twists Michael Bluth’s legendary sarcasm to a new pungency. Hader and Lo Truglio perform the least, though their parts are written barely above the level of stock characters.

Only once does the film seem to lose its comic footing, during an excessively violent chase sequence that sees two characters blown up and another shot in cold blood. Though Pegg and Frost have said the film is an homage to Steven Spielberg (the script is loaded with references to his 1980s films, and even includes a brief but oddly tepid phone conversation between Paul and Spielberg as himself), the influence of other comedy adventures from the decade stays readily apparent. In its occasionally unwieldy fusion of snarky comedy and special effects-driven adventure the film sometimes resembles, probably deliberately, 80s classics including Ghostbusters, Spies Like Us, and Neighbors. (We can easily imagine a 1985 version starring John Candy and Dan Ackroyd as the geeks, with Bill Murray as the voice of Paul.)

Though it’s not necessary, and indeed may only have bogged things down, for as intelligent as the film can sometimes become the absence of explanation or discussion of geek culture – its sources and enduring resistance to mainstream ridicule as well as the passage of time – remains an odd emptiness at the center of Graeme and Clive’s characters. They’re, at heart, intelligent and intrepid men, and their fascination with three-breasted alien women and samurai swords seems at cross-purposes to their capacity for daring. It’s suggested, vaguely, that a life of sci-fi fascination gave them such strengths, but only barely and not enough to resonate through the entire film. 

Still, few modern comedies even try as much at once as Paul, and if there’s not room for everything the filmmakers could have done there’s still quite a lot – including at least a dozen inspired references to all those 80s sci-fi adventures. Listen for them pepper their way through the dialogue, because they demonstrate the affection that fuels the entire movie. You don’t have to catch all of them, but you’ll probably feel closer to the characters if you do.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Noir Cinema: The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, City of Fear

Concluding our reviews of Columbia Pictures’ Film Noir Classics Volume II collection.

With Warner Brothers’ once-mighty film noir compilations nearing the end of their quality barrel and Fox’s library of single-servings discs seemingly DOA, Columbia Pictures’ recent box set releases have a good claim on sitting atop a genre market that, despite the flood of product available, is nowhere near exhausting itself. It’s been fairly said elsewhere that the studio waited a long while before getting into the back-catalog noir marketplace, yet the second half (or so) of this second volume – we reviewed the first two films a couple of weeks ago – offers some rare and unexpected treats for the noir fan, with only one comparatively weak film in the bunch.

Adapted from Georges Simenon’s bleak novel and arriving pretty close to the end of the classical noir era (and perhaps creaking a bit under the weight of the genre’s advancing years), director Phil Karlson’s The Brothers Rico (1957) nevertheless features one of the genre’s great leading men, Richard Conte, in a storyline that sometimes plays like a coda to both the gangster films of the 1930s as well as the more classical noir cycles of the 40s. It’s overly simplistic and chronologically inaccurate to say it’s a “last call film noir,” but it’s hard not to see it as such while you’re watching.

When his wiseguy brother (Paul Picerni) begs him to find the younger sibling (James Darren) who’s disappeared after driving the getaway vehicle on a contract killing, former mob accountant Eddie Rico (Conte, older than his 1940s heyday but no less commanding as a leading man) gets badgered by his former capo (Larry Gates) to bring the brother back into the fold “for his own good.” Despite a legitimate business and a wife (Dianne Foster) hoping to adopt a child (an odd subplot, especially for the mid-50s) Eddie travels first to New York and then out West on his brother’s trail, uncovering a snarling tangle of duplicity and treachery within the same organization that used to command his loyalty.

Perhaps that sense of changing times fuels the sense of finality to much of the plot – the gangs and fraternal mobs that the Rico brothers grew up within have mutated in the sunshine of 1950s wealth (the film is largely shot in sparkling, sun-drenched Florida towns) into impersonal, ruthless “organizations” with little sense of personal worth or individual dignity. The screenplay’s ‘s sharp contrast between the amiable malice of the organization’s underlings and the Old World emotionality of the Rico brothers’ mother (Argentina Brunetti) drive such comparisons home, as does Conte’s turn as a man slowly realizing the integrity and honor he believed in for much of his life has come to nothing.

Karlson and screenwriters Lewis Meltzer, Ben Perry and Dalton Trumbo do right by the Simenon’s story until a cluttered third act works too hard to shuffle all the plot threads into a happy, Americana ending. As with set companion film Human Desire, cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s composition work is engaging and  flawless, giving the syndicate scenes a flat, sterile look while investing Conte’s boyhood neighborhood and his brother’s hideaway homestead with depth and texture.

Guffey also worked on Nightfall, teaming with director Jacques Tourneur; for the lay audience, Tourneur directed Out of the Past, the 1947 Robert Mitchum thriller that’s become both paragon and poster child for the genre as a whole. The teaming of the two, and with a screenplay from Sterling Silliphant (In The Heat of the Night) adapting George Goodis’ novel, ought to be a better film than it is, even if determining why it’s not seldom proves especially difficult.

Aldo Ray plays James Vanning, a commercial artist from Chicago who stumbles across two stranded bank thieves (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) while camping in Wyoming with a friend. The thieves kill the friend and leave Vanning unconscious, but a simple twist leaves Vanning with their stolen $350,000. Fleeing to Los Angeles because he suspects he’ll be accused of the murder – the friend’s young wife was making a play for him – Vanning tries to lay low but is soon discovered by a curious insurance investigator working for the bank (James Gregory). He also starts reluctantly, irresistibly pursuing a fashion model (Anne Bancroft) with whom he crosses paths.

Keith and Bond are fantastic as the ruthless, persistent thugs dogging Ray’s every step, and an early interrogation scene at a darkened oil derrick provides the kind of shadowy brutality that will leave noir fans drooling. Keith is sharp as the methodical brains of the two, but Bond brings such sadistic glee to his part that his every movement is chilling:

If only the protagonists were so exciting. Ray was seldom accused of grace or fluidity in his acting, and as the straight-arrow Vanning he’s believable but stolid, though the script sometimes gives him enough edge to allow for desperate outbursts of violence and fear. Bancroft is less compelling as the good girl who falls into Vanning’s orbit and never quite comes out. The film stalls whenever their romance revs up, including a mid-film fashion show that’s as prolonged as it is unnecessary. Gregory’s insurance investigator is no Jim Reardon of The Killers, and most of his scenes – except for a dull domestic interlude with his wife – serve merely to move the plot forward.

Ultimately, all those side elements ballast the film from getting either dark enough or violent enough to really work on its own, with the promised retribution and vengeance taking a last-minute back seat to the extraneous plot motions. Nevertheless Guffey excels at framing both the city and the Wyoming countryside (at times matching or even exceeding George E. Diskant’s glorious rural noir photography of On Dangerous Ground), and Tourneur’s agile manipulation of the flashback-heavy narrative keeps the story crisply suspenseful.

Cool poster, though.

If Nightfall‘s greatest sin is a surplus of its story elements, 1959′s City of Fear labors under a paucity of details. Starved for plot despite a head-swimmingly weird – and incredible – premise and padded out to even its 81 minute runtime, it sometimes succeeds when sticking strictly to the noir playbook. Other times it’s not so competent, with too many stalls and doldrums to allow any real momentum to build under its meager machinery.

Vince Edwards, a little while yet before becoming television’s Ben Casey, stars as an escaped convict racing to L.A. with a canister of what he believes is pure-grade heroin. He plans to cut the dope up and sell it, the better to live in luxury with his sexpot girlfriend (Lee Remick lookalike Patricia Blair), with help from his former boss at a ladies’ shoe boutique (Joseph Mell). But the white powder in the canister isn’t heroin, it’s… well, best to let the film explain:

If you can accept that the government allowed San Quentin inmates anywhere near “the most deadly thing in existence,” you’ll enjoy the film so much more.

The manhunt for Edward’s crazed, ailing Vince Ryker forms the film’s second and third acts, which too often include long, establishing takes that allow suspense or tension to fizzle. Director Irving Lerner often seems at a loss for where to point the camera, and given the obvious small-scale budget that’s somewhat understandable. But given the outrageous premise, the building of desperation – 84 hours to save every man, woman, and child! – seems to deserve more ratcheting.

Regarding the performances, Edwards and Blair are comely in that uniquely 50s American sort of way, sexy without every really becoming carnal, and Mell is ferret-like in his turn as the scheming Crown. And though most of the film’s law enforcement types seem sent directly from central casting, trash film cinemaphiles will recognize Lyle Talbot, co-star of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda?, as Police Chief Thorsen. City of Fear isn’t quite on those film’s humble level, and it’s obviously not meant to be great cinema, either. But when matched with the other films in the compilation, its great sin lies in showing its poverty among such proud company.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

70s Cinema: Save The Tiger

Jack Lemmon reigns in a character study that only gets better with age.

“Quarterbacks get knocked down, nurses get knocked up, somebody invented the Edsel. Everybody misses.” - Harry Stoner

Character-driven studies of men and women in crisis are commonplace in modern cinema, especially featuring movie stars eager to expand their acting chops and resumes with a project that might get them respect or – even better – awards. To a greater or lesser extent, modern films like Up In The Air,  American Beauty and even The Fighter all owe a debt to 1973′s Save The Tiger, the pater familias of American men-in-meltdown character pieces and probably the apex of Jack Lemmon’s formidable screen career – as well as the role that won him the Best Actor Academy Award.

Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, a World War II veteran  experiencing simultaneous career and personal meltdowns as both his business and personal lives take a turn for the worse. As he explains first to his wife and then his business partner Phil (Jack Gilford), Harry feels the world has passed him by. A veteran of the World War II battle at Anzio, he feels deep survivor’s guilt that’s been complicated by years of ethical and personal compromises in his dress-making company. He expresses his guilt and nostalgia by reminiscing about the baseball of his childhood, reconstructing team lineups and explaining how pitchers wound up before throwing. In less capable hands such weariness would come across as heavy-handed and self-pitying, but Lemmon’s tightly controlled performance communicates such emotions as fatigue rather than self-indulgence.

Meanwhile Harry has some difficult decisions to make. The previous year, it seems, he and Phil performed some creative accounting to keep their business solvent. With a government audit looming, Harry considers hiring an arsonist to burn down their warehouse for the insurance money. Then, with a fashion line debut happening just downstairs, an important client has a heart attack while enjoying two prostitutes Harry arranged to visit him. Enraged at the client, the prostitutes and at himself, but reacting to the injury as if back on the Italian front, Harry nearly snaps. “This isn’t a man, it’s a casualty,” he tells Phil. Obliged to make a speech to his buyers, he visualizes the men he saw die in battle staring at him from the seats. The screen trick of putting the wounded on camera, visible only to Harry, will likely seem overly familiar to modern audiences, thanks to its legions of imitators. Director John G. Avildsen (Rocky) keeps the camera going back in forth in rhythm, making one of a series of clever camera movements that keeps the story’s momentum brisk.

Perhaps unfortunately Harry and Phil’s new line is a success, increasing the pressure to get themselves out of their financial hole. A mob shylock breezes through, offering them money the banks won’t. Harry drags Jack to consult the arsonist (Thayer David) instead, a Sydney Greenstreet-esque professional who explains what he does as a faux-documentary porno plays on the movie theater screen before them. Phil wants out, but Harry recognizes the grim necessity of the move.

“I want another season,” he explains later, to his senior tailor (William Hansen.) The rest of the film becomes increasingly loose in structure, as Harry spends the night stoned with a hitchhiker he’d met that morning. Aching and weary, he rambles a long monologue about 20th Century America while the girl (Laurie Heineman) looks on in helpless pity. “I want… to walk in that rain that never washes perfume away,” he tells her. “I wanna be in love with something. Anything. Just the idea. A dog, a cat. Anything. Just something.” The next morning, he agrees to the arsonist’s stipulations but begs to keep Phil out of the deal.

The final scene is one of those symbolic 70s endings that people discuss and argue about until the meaning becomes clearer but always up for debate. Wandering the streets, Harry finds a group of children playing baseball in a park. Given the opportunity to throw the ball, he winds up and sends it soaring into the trees behind the dugouts. “Why’d you do that, mister?”  the kids ask. “I wanted you to see it once,” Harry tells them. The children are unforgiving – “You can’t play with us!” one of them shouts – and the final image is of Harry watching the game go on from behind a fence, a short but crucial distance separating him from the world for which he aches.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Miscellaneous Debris, January 2011 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news and analysis that didn’t get a full post.

And the award for coldest winter ever goes to…  Old Man Winter’s giving an Oscar-caliber performance this year for much of the United States, freezing millions in place and slowing life to a standstill. And just like us, we imagine plenty of those people are staying inside as much as possible and killing time by watching lots of movies.

With the awards season in full swing and the Academy Awards just around the corner, there’s plenty of movie and television news to go around just now, even there’s not enough time to capture all of it in blog form. Yet, despite and nevertheless, here’s some of it.

1. Speaking of the reliably unreliable Academy Awards, we were disappointed that the list of nominations announced this week failed to include Mark Wahlberg’s starring turn in The Fighter for Best Actor, especially considering all three of his principal cast mates – Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo – secured nominations, as well as director David O. Russell and the film itself for Best Picture.

With all respect to his castmates, Wahlberg’s low-key, lived-in turn as hard-fighting boxer Mickey Ward isn’t the kind of performance that wins the Oscar. Like Kurt Russell or Dennis Quaid, his craftsmanlike acting style is the kind seldom appreciated mid-career but instead gets the lion’s share of its respect in retrospect. On the flip side, we hope The Fighter and The Other Guys (which has had us laughing our asses off for weeks) helps reverse the recent career doldrums of The Happening, Shooter, and Max Payne.

2. It won’t win any Oscars, but contrary to plenty of industry expectations it’s making plenty of money. Michael Gondry’s  The Green Hornet, delayed for months while Sony reprogrammed its schedule and retrofitted 3D effects, has quietly made more than $100 million dollars in its first ten days of worldwide release, opening at number and falling the following week just behind the Ashton Kutcher-Natalie Portman sex drivel No Strings Attached.

Industry analysts expect the film to perform even better in Asian markets, where Jay Chou, who plays the Hornet’s partner Kato, is already a popular singer. It’s a reasonable bet: Asian fans of the 1960s television series co-starring Bruce Lee in the role reportedly called the program “The Kato Show.”

3.  Possibly not a sound strategy to improve ratings, but you have to applaud the ballsiness: this week’s episode of TNT’s ratings-challenged Southland depicted the shocking, senseless beating death of (SPOILERS) gang task force detective Nate Moretta (Kevin Alejandro) following an encounter with drunken gang members. We say shocking because Alejandro was probably the best looking member of the cast, and also one of the most charismatic. The scenes depicting the event and its aftermath were a series highlight.

The episode drew about 2.2 million viewers, about half the third season average of Alejandro’s other series True Blood. Meanwhile Southland remains one of the best shows on television, and it’s continuing failure to find an audience (despite dedicated support from adoptive parent TNT) remains a mysterious shame.

It's a crime: Ulrich leaving LO:LA

4. Another departure from Los Angeles based police procedural television was even more disappointing: longtime SBR favorite Skeet Ulrich is leaving the cast of Law & Order: Los Angeles as part of NBC and show creator Dick Wolf’s extensive reworking of the show’s cast and profile.

Ratings for the eight episodes aired last fall sagged following a strong premiere, but what’s wrong with the show – more specifically, how it might draw a larger audience – has nothing to do with Ulrich’s performance. As of this writing the show remains on indefinite hiatus.

Hello! Greer

5. Turning from departures to arrivals, we’re happy to see the return of the ridiculously sexy Judy Greer to live-action television with next month’s Mad Love, even if the show itself looks suspiciously like another rehash of Friends. Greer, Sarah Chalke, Tyler Labine and Jason Biggs star as a quartet of New Yorkers looking for love with the help of their pals; Chalke and Biggs’ characters are getting close while Greer and Labine’s singles despise one another. The preview below shows its additional resemblance to CBS’s How I Met Your Mother:

The show premieres February 14. (Aww…)

6. Similarly lovely, underrated star Sarah Shahi returned to television last week in USA’s new legal comedy/drama Fairly Legal. Shahi (Life) plays Kate Reed, an attorney turned legal mediator working at the law of her deceased father but now run by her stepmother (Virginia Willams). Also included in the regular cast are Battlestar Galactica‘s Michael Trucco as Reed’s prosecutor ex-husband and Baron Vaughn as her assistant.

The pilot episode was edgier than we expected, with more substance than some of USA Network’s fluffy promos (such as the one below) might suggest.

The Bane of our existence: Hardy

7. Casting announcements for the third and probable final installment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy The Dark Knight Rises brought a couple of surprises this month: Anne Hathaway is signed to play Selina Kyle, the jewel thief better known as the Catwoman, and Inception co-star Tom Hardy will play Bane, the steroid-powered muscleman that in the comics once broke Batman’s back.

We were slightly more intrigued by rumors appearing just previous to these announcements, rumors that included Eva Green (Casino Royale) playing the daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul and Naomi Watts appearing as reporter Vicki Vale (played long ago by Kim Basinger in Tim Burton’s Batman.) But as with Bale himself and then Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, Hathaway and Hardy represent intriguing, unexpected choices for their roles that carry tremendous potential nonetheless.

8. The Dark Knight star Aaron Eckhart won’t return as Two-Face, but he’s busy elsewhere. March sees the release of Battle: Los Angeles, starring he and Bridget Moynahan in an action film that from the trailer below looks like a cross between Black Hawk Down and… well, pretty much every alien invasion film made. Yet if the film keeps the emphasis on realistic action dynamics – in other words, if it remembers the Black Hawk Down side of its hybrid – it could make for thrilling B-movie fun. We missed Eckhart the last couple of years and it’s good to see him back in this and last year’s Rabbit Hole (Love Happens kinda doesn’t count.) If only we could get him into Joss Whedon’s The Avengers as Dr. Hank “Giant-Man” Pym.

Battle: Los Angeles opens nationwide March 11.

We’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Miscellaneous Debris, December 2010 Edition

Closing the year with our roundup of news and observations that didn’t get a full post.

This year ends with a whimper in entertainment, the way most years do. Like too many of the previous years, we doubt 2010 will go down in the books as a particularly rewarding year for film or television, the occasional bright spots like The Social Network and The Fighter, and Terriers notwithstanding. (We’ll have our review of that second film up next week.) There was plenty to dissent about though, including The American and The Girl Who Played With Fire.

As this year shudders to a conclusion and the new one lurks just around the corner (beginning with the date 1-1-11, no less), here’s the news and other items we didn’t get around to blogging about this month. All opinions are our own, of course.

You gross 7.6 million opening weekend. That's how you know.

1. If 2010 concludes the decade, its last month in a sense ought to serve as a closing bell for the comic actors of the late 1990s. Both Jack Black and Owen Wilson had films that flopped this month – Gulliver’s Travels and How Do You Know, respectively – while Ben Stiller’s Meet The Fockers is making money but not fooling anyone about quality.

Ignoring for a moment that all three became paycheck actors years ago, each needs to start taking greater risks with their film choices again. (a couple of qualifiers: Greenberg was too mannered and too self-conscious by half; we’re not sure Black ever took risks.) By way of contrast, Luke Wilson has been quietly making offbeat work for several years now, even if most of his recent films (Middle Men, Henry Poole Is Here) have been neglected by the general public. We hope his contemporaries follow suit.

Surely they can't be serious.

2. The Library of Congress announced its list of 25 inductees into the National Film Registry this week, including no-surprise cultural heavyweights The Empire Strikes Back and Saturday Night Fever but making room for a few dark horses, too. This year’s list of inductees includes  The Exorcist, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Malcolm X. Perhaps the most surprising addition, however, was 1981′s disaster spoof Airplane!

Films included in the registry are preserved for future generations in environmentally controlled vaults. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington selected the movies from a list of 2100 films and short films suggested by the public. The complete list of 2010 inductees can be found here.

Bale in The Fighter

3. Speaking of films and awards, we’ll go ahead and start making our Oscar predictions now: The Social Network for Best Picture and David Fincher for Directing; Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor in The Fighter, Nathalie Portman for Best Actress in Black Swan.

The spirit of this year’s Oscars will no doubt reflect youth and change, with hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway presiding over a ceremony that will likely include potential nominees Jesse Eisenberg, Mila Kunis, Amy Adams, and Ryan Gosling, among others. We’ve said before the torch is overdue to be passed – maybe this year’s ceremony will signify as much.

Oswalt's Wikipedia photo

4. Sooner or later, we think Patton Oswalt’s going to get some kind of Oscar of his own. It’s a strange world, and he’s a very smart guy. We came across his eulogy for geek culture in this month’s issue of Wired and want to pass it along. While we can’t agree with his tastes in all things geek, he’s pretty spot on about where fan culture and subcultures as a whole are heading, and (more importantly) where they need to go. As usual, he’s funny and candid too, rewarding geeks who’ll get his arcane cultural references but not making them necessary for his arguments to work.

5. We’re not sure where Kenneth Branagh’s film version of the Marvel comics hero Thor fits into the overall scheme of “all things geek” – like next year’s Green Lantern, the viking godling come to Earth is a perennial top-of-the-second-tier character. The trailer debuted on the Internet and in theaters this month, just slightly exceeding our fickle expectations.

On the plus side, star Chris Hemsworth seems to have natural leading man chops, and the production design looks like goofy fun in an Excalibur kind of way. On the downside, Nathalie Portman in a superhero movie is the answer to a question nobody asked, and the fight scenes seem suspiciously like standard action movie fare. At worst,  the film can still serve as the warmup to The First Avenger: Captain America, which debuts later that summer.

Thor arrives in theaters nationwide May 6.

So money: Lightyear, Woody

6. We’re reminded of a quote from the late, great Tip O’Neil: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”  Despite the second highest box office gross in history, 2010 will go down as something of a disappointment when compared to initial estimates by industry analysts. Entertainment Weekly‘s Keith Staskiewicz blames the letdown on a summer of disappointing tentpole attractions and an equally weak winter; much of the year’s first quarter, too, was buoyed by the carryover success of Avatar.

Final box office estimates for 2010: 10.55 billion dollars, down slightly from last year’s $10.6 billion. The highest grossing film, by the way, was Toy Story 3 with $415 million in ticket sales.

7. We’ve talked it up it a couple of times already, so we feel a little obligated to mention that Matt Damon’s The Adjustment Bureau is now scheduled for a March 4 release. Based on a short story by Blade Runner author Philip K. Dick and with a supporting cast that includes Emily Blunt, John Slattery and Terence Stamp, the film tells the story of star-crossed lovers engineered to remain apart by a team of reality mechanics, despite their best efforts to come together.

Universal had previously scheduled its release for last September, around the same time as advance promotion for Damon’s ultimately underwhelming Hereafter.  We’re always in the mood for brainy, stylish sci-fi, and the delay is only fueling our expectations.

8. We’ll end the year with the same plea we made last year, to ask everyone to seek and demand better entertainment across the media spectrum – film, television, online, and so on. It seems to us that the general feeling, more and more, is that our culture is on the decline, becoming “schlocky and superficial” (to quote Boston Legal) while focusing increasingly on the regressive and the reductive. But that’s not going to change until we all agree to do something about it.

As a new year’s resolution, swear off the junk of reality television and other “guilty pleasures,” and resolve to see one classic film and read a classic book each month – twelve classic books, twelve classic movies in 2011. We promise you that you’ll feel good about it, and that the old junk will seem so much more meaningless in comparison. If you need a place to start, here’s a list of the American Film Institute’s Greatest 100 Movies.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back in the new year with more reviews and features each week than we had in 2010. Have a great holiday weekend.

- Michael Kabel

Sour Christmas, Part Two

Continuing our list of a dozen movies and TV shows to help you skip the holiday cheer.

“So bolt the door and hit the floor…”

Christmas is just three days away, and we’re still not feeling it.  Just the same, or maybe because of it, here’s the rest of the dozen movies and gone-too-soon television shows that we recommend as smart, funny, honest, and wickedly creative – in other words, everything the holiday season is not.  They’re all available on DVD, and they all make perfect ways to escape from holiday celebrations into something that better fits a sour mood

A couple of days ago we published the first half of the list here, but the total listing remains (as always) in no particular order of importance. Where possible, we’ve included video that was available on YouTube when we looked for it.

Thank You For Smoking (2005) – Smug, blithely amoral tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhardt, never better) juggles raising his tween son (Cameron Bright) with romancing a journalist (Katie Holmes) and pitching cigarette product placement into Hollywood films. Opposing him are a yokely U.S. Senator (William H. Macy) and… well, pretty much the entire world.

Writer-director Jason Reitman (Up In The Air) adapts Christopher Buckley’s novel with fierce comic wit and timing, and the leads get a giant boost from a supporting cast full of ringers – Macy, the great J.K. Simmons, Maria Bello, David Koechner, among others. It’s the kind of film that at first you think you shouldn’t laugh at, then admit you can’t help yourself.

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – Struggling, bottom-feeding New York press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) lives at the beck and call of cynical, world-loathing newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Hunsecker, who despises Falco and the whole world besides, can make or break Falco’s clients – and, by extension, Falco too. Hunsecker offers him the chance to get his clients real publicity, but only if Falco will sabotage the jazz guitarist (Martin Milner) currently romancing his sister (Susan Harrison).

By and large, the mainstream films of the 1950s aren’t known for their character depth or social commentary, but like Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd (released the same year) Alexander Mackendrick’s film has dozens of barbed comments to make on the media, public image, and moral hypocrisy; consider it Mad Men from the time of Mad Men.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) – Ben Affleck’s directing debut adapts Dennis Lehane’s novel about a pair of romantically attached detectives (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) pulled into helping the search for a young girl kidnapped from a poor neighborhood. But the investigation ends unhappily, and the couple drifts apart. Months later, a second kidnapping raises nagging questions about the first, complicated by police treachery and the girl’s own conniving, possibly complicit mother (the superb Amy Ryan, in an Oscar-nominated performance.)

This was one of the first films SBR reviewed, and it still holds a warm, if dark, place in our film memory. Read our complete review here.

 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) – A film lover’s dream movie, George Roy Hill’s loose, self-assured take on the two real-life train robbers still sets the bar for all things masculine cool. Pursued by a crack team of investigators to the remote hills of Bolivia, Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) continue their life of crime even though the stakes are higher and the authorities deadlier. Times’s running out for the two gentlemen bandits, largely because their era of frontier freedom is ending.

In the meantime the pacing is sharp and the performances perfect, as in this following scene where Butch confronts a mutinous member of his Hole In The Wall Gang (Ted Cassidy.)

Point Blank (1967) – You always hear about how the 1960s was a decade of change yet Lee Marvin remained the biggest badass on the planet throughout, as this John Boorman (Deliverance) pseudo-homage to French New Wave proves again and again. Here he’s cast as Walker, a thief and enforcer double-crossed and left for dead by both his partner (John Vernon) and wife (Sharon Acker).

But he recovers, and with help from a mysterious benefactor (Keenan Wynn) begins to take apart the criminal syndicate that his ex-partner now represents. Walker wants revenge and no more, no less than the $93,000 that was his take of their last heist. He’s helped, in her kitten-with-a-whip Sixties way, by his wife’s sister (Angie Dickinson). If any of this sounds familiar, Mel Gibson remade the film with 1999′s much weaker Payback.

Arrested Development (2003) – We’re still parsing out how good this dark comedy actually was, seven years after its debut.  A labyrinth of in-jokes, meta-humor, recurring gags and brilliant character beats formed the structure of the Bluth family’s saga in Orange County, as storylines of infidelity, coming of age, treason, and so much else moved them from episode to interconnected episode.

The show nominally centered on straight-laced son Michael (Jason Bateman, kicking off his career comeback) but included more than a dozen regular and recurring performers including Portia de Rossi, Jeffrey Tambor, Will Arnett, Michael Cera and David Cross. All three seasons are on DVD, and lately IFC has put reruns heavily into its nightly schedule.

Happy holidays. We’ll return once next week, to close out the year with its last installment of Miscellaneous Debris. Be safe on the roads and take care.

-  Michael Kabel  

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Sour Christmas, Part One

Not feeling the holiday spirit? Here’s the first of a dozen movies and TV shows to help you avoid the season.

Spend the holidays with friends.

Bah, humbug. With Christmas finally arriving this weekend, some of us aren’t feeling the holiday spirit, despite all the efforts of the media and our economy to get us in line. Still, the cold weather and ready supply of DVD’s and Blu-Rays, combined with some long, bleak days off from work, make the next week or so a perfect time to catch up on some movie watching.

This week we’ll profile ten great movies and two superb television series, none of which have a damn thing to do with Christmas, New Year’s, or any of the other reasons to “celebrate.” As always, they’re ranked in no order or importance or quality. Where possible we’ve included trailers or other video clips that were available on YouTube when we looked for them.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) – Say what you will about his later films, Guy Ritchie’s debut feature about bratty gangster wannabes hustling the London underworld remains an irresistible whirlwind of style, violence, and swaggering retro cool. The shaggy plot, about a crooked poker game, two vintage musket rifles and a strain of greenhouse grown super-pot, is almost incidental to the brazen energy and gritty atmosphere. The film’s ugly, smart, witty, and honest – all the things Christmas ain’t.

The great cast of (then-) up and coming actors includes Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Nick Moran and Vinnie Jones, but it’s Lenny McLean who frequently steals the show as mob enforcer Barry the Baptist.

The New World (2005) – Terrence Malick’s fourth feature follows the romance between 17th Century lovers John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) as the Virginia colony of Jamestown gets off to a shaky start. Sent on a reconnaissance mission by colony chief Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) to look for trade partners among the area’s “naturals,” Smith is capture by a local tribe and sentenced to death until the chief’s daughter saves him. The two fall in deep – if star-crossed – love.  

Malick uses the setting and time to explore some of his favorite themes – the moral capacities of the human spirit, mankind’s relation and place within nature, individual will against tightening social norms – and creates a tighter story than 1998′s more expansive (and less cohesive) The Thin Red Line. Farrell is somewhat miscast as the fundamentally restless Smith, but Kilcher, Plummer, and Christian Bale are all just about flawless.

Magnolia (1999) – Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, overreaching saga about interconnected Los Angeles lives at the end of the millennium remains amazing a decade later if only for its sheer audacity and scope. Long, complicated, and at times self-indulgent (the film concludes with a biblical “plague”), Anderson nevertheless keeps things moving by keeping small-scale but taut suspense brewing for all his many characters; some storylines resolve tidily and some don’t, but you have to think a while to determine which ones do which.

The ace cast – the names of which read like a Who’s Who of late-90s talent – keep the events from getting too cumbersome or letting Anderson’s reach exceed his grasp (as it has in both of his films since.) All of that and a career-best performance by Tom Cruise, too.

Ruthless People (1986) – For those who want a snarky holiday, this pitch-dark comedy from the creators of Airplane! showcases both Danny DeVito and Bette Midler’s scene-chewing gusto while still remaining a clever comic thriller.

Fashion marketer Sam Stone (DeVito) plans to murder his wife Barbara (Midler) until she’s kidnapped by a hapless couple (Judge Rheinhold and Helen Slater) that Stone cheated out of millions. But Barbara’s an impossible hostage, and Stone’s attempts to negotiate the ransom demands – the better to provoke the kidnappers into killing her – cause a storm of comic mishaps. Ugly, misanthropic, and shrill but quotably funny, it’s the right movie for the day after Christmas.

Night and the City (1950) American grifter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) moves through the post-war London underworld scheming to get out from beneath his employer’s (Francis L. Sullivan) iron grip. Pulled into his tragic plans are his kind girlfriend (Gene Tierney), an ageing champion wrestler (Stanislaus Zbyszko) and his employer’s wife (Googie Withers).

Noir auteur Jules Dassin (Brute Force) adapts Gerald Kersh’s novel by making London’s underbelly both the film’s antagonist and its explanation for the desperation of its inhabitants. Widmark is criminally underrated as a leading man, and he’s at his best here. The downbeat ending remains as haunting as any story put to film.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip (2006) – dismissed as an epic white elephant by critics and media virtually upon its debut, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The West Wing easily holds its own against contemporary Emmy-bait fare like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

When the veteran showrunner (Judd Hirsch) of a Saturday Night Live-like variety show has an on-air meltdown, a newly hired network executive (Amanda Peet) replaces him with the writer-director team (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford) fired from the show’s staff several years before. Complicating the teams’ return are the writer’s pious, gorgeous ex-lover (Sarah Paulson) and the wrath of the network chief (Steven Weber) who canned them.

NBC cancelled the big-budget affair after 22 episodes, though lately the DVD box set has reached clearance sale prices. The first half-dozen episodes especially are simply unmissable, as this clip from the pilot illustrates.

We’ll be back later this week with five more films and another late, lamented television series that was long before its time. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::