ROBERT ALTMAN’S LONG GOODBYE

Robert Altman had been through so many ups and downs in his long career, written off by so many studio producers he had spurned and critics he had confounded, and yet each time had come back from the “dead”. So that when he died this past week at age 81, it seemed something of a surprise. And now that he is really gone, we see what a loss it is: Robert Altman was a unique filmmaker.

            Of course his best-known film is M.A.S.H. Its enthusiastic reception and success (including the still-syndicated TV series) was due to Altman’s audacity and timing -- he made it against studio resistance during a political atmosphere saturated with anti-Vietnam War feeling. Donald Sutherland, fearing the film would be the end of his career, wanted out of the deceptively uncontrolled party atmosphere of the set. Screenwriter Ring Lardner damned Altman for completely altering his script along the way. But Sutherland went on to be continually ubiquitous in movies and TV and Lardner, later that year, gratefully accepted the Academy Award for the Best Screenplay he didn’t write.

            But then Altman’s imprint on all his films was that of an anti-authoritarian maverick and rebel. Altman didn’t like to receive either history or marching orders handed down; he liked to tell the truth as he saw and felt it, and how he saw it often meant not only bending studio directives but the genre itself. McCabe and Mrs. Miller beautifully and tellingly deconstructed the western (protagonists Warren Beatty as the dimwitted dreamer, Julie Christie as the gold-digging prostitute) just as The Long Goodbye (Eliot Gould playing it soft-boiled) deconstructed the hard-boiled detective story. He de-mythologized Buffalo Bill and the Indians and stretched the lampoon of Popeye to manic bursting. He told of war and politics as those realities played among us (and we among them) in M.A.S.H. and the TV series Tanner on Tanner, and as he more seriously saw them in Streamers, Secret Honor, and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (which reinserted the element of anti-Semitism that had been dropped from the earlier Bogart version). He refashioned the origins of jazz in Kansas City (where he was born) and skewered fashion in Ready to Wear. But his perhaps most illuminating and scathing and entertaining eye was for the studio system that supported and fought him, in one of my favorite Altman films, The Player. This is actually how movies are made, and these are the people who make them, he seemed to say, and isn’t it dark and devilish fun!

            It’s true that Altman was unpredictable and independent, that he was fond of re-writing scenes -- even sometimes the whole film -- as he went along. And he encouraged improvisation from his actors, thinking, often correctly, that a party atmosphere gave them room to breathe an expanded life into their characters. In his effective wiliness, he figured he could goad better performances from his actors by seeming not to goad at all. Perhaps so many of his films were adapted from plays (notwithstanding his so-called dislike of writers) because he loved stage actors so much. His final film, A Prairie Home Companion, about the last show of a long running live radio series, is about being on the stage and behind it while a pretty much improvised routine is going on. One gets the feeling that this last film (which, it was revealed afterward, he directed while undergoing Cancer treatment), and where death (in the luminous guise of Virginia Madsen) literally and figuratively stalks the boards, was, for Altman, about first and last things.

To the very end, Altman was an actor’s director, and he was beloved by them. What is perhaps his most admired and accomplished film, Nashville, with a unique overlapping tapestry of sound and interplay of its clearly etched cast of 24, but a paean to actors? This tour de force juggling of sounds and actors suggested an entirely new mode of making and viewing a film (a method he later reiterated in Short Cuts.)

In his fifty or so professional years Altman made a lot of movies, of varying popular and critical success. But my own personal favorites would add up to the sum body of the best work of almost any other great director. In addition to the aforementioned McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and The Player, I would have to include in that list the southern gothic mystery thriller The Gingerbread Man (with Kenneth Branagh), the rascally, very funny down home epic Cookie’s Fortune, the elegant and tender Dr. T and the Women (Richard Gere as a gynecologist!) and, in my view Altman’s very best film, and one that capped his latest return to grace – Gosford Park. This film’s many and various virtues include its writing and one of the best ensembles of actors ever gathered for a film; it won him Best Director from both the Golden Globes and the New York Film Critics, numerous awards for his actors, as well as an Oscar for Best Original Script (Julian Fellowes). (Be sure to watch this film, with a mostly British cast, with the subtitles on so as not to miss any of the delicious and revealing dialogue). I also enjoyed his last movie, A Prairie Home Companion: no, not for the writing or throw-away plot, but because, well, it was just plain fun. The music and spontaneity were enveloping; I discovered Meryl Streep was not only a great actress, but a wonderful singer; and this film made me a fan of Lindsay Lohan -- who knew? Only Altman could do that.   

Robert Altman was 81, but young to the end.

HANK’S THANKSGIVING PICS

Thanksgiving is upon us, making it a time to give thanks for, among other things, video. Family, of course, has its place in this time-honored holiday, but after the meal is over and one becomes tired of staring at Uncle Charlie’s nostril hairs, it’s time to pile into the car and go to the video store in search of something to fulfill everyone’s taste and mood. Here are my suggestions that will make your visit to the store a thankful and rewarding occasion. Which is to say, if Home for the Holidays, What’s Cooking and Fly Away Home or My Man Godfrey are not available, then check out any of these great films, some tried-and-true, others off-beat but on-target.

RETURN TO ME

 

This film not only has heart, it’s about a heart – the one David Duchovny’s wife, after dying in an auto accident, posthumously “donates” to Minnie Driver, while leaving Duchovny to grieve. Until, months later, he coincidentally meets and falls in love with Driver, who wins Duchovny’s heart, but then has to tell him she’s also carrying his wife’s. This unusual film is infectiously and thankfully low-key. Its charm and believable writing, along with winning characters (including Driver’s grandfather and great-uncles who run the Italian restaurant where Driver is waitress) enable Return To Me to sidestep plot cliches and easy sentimentality, although it is in the end upbeat (no pun intended). Don’t be reluctant to donate your attention to this film; it’s bound to win your heart. 
 

FINDING FORRESTER 

A popular black basketball-playing student, playing it safe by not displaying his brilliant writing gifts, befriends a legendary writer who’s long hidden his own talents away as a recluse in a Bronx tenement neighborhood. Sean Connery, as the curmudgeon writer and Rob Brown as the student are gifts enough in this well directed story that deals, in the best Hollywood mainstream fashion, with issues of family, integrity and originality. Rob finds his writing voice, Sean finds a personal connection to a world he’s long shunned, and you’ll find a film that, in its own elevated writing, makes you feel cozily entertained and intelligent at the same time. 
 

CAST AWAY 

If watching Tom Hanks on a desert island for over two hours is not your cup of mango juice, think again. For one thing, it’s only the middle hour that we spend on that bare and menacing but beautiful atoll, and while we’re there, mystery and suspense attend, with Hanks’ point of view frighteningly and touchingly limned. This, we come to realize, is Survivor in a very good mainstream Hollywood film. But what this film most has going for it is its decidedly non-Hollywood touches, as it moves toward a climax and denouement that could have gone any number of Hollywood ways but winds up being neither contrived nor sentimental. The film takes pains to extend the notion of island castaway to the question of what is inevitably “cast away” (the actual two word title of the film) and what one should be thankful for keeping. Cast Away ultimately has the feeling of being psycho-dramatically true, and even philosophically intriguing. And, having been forced to become used to Dolby overload in most movie soundtracks, the absence of music in that middle section, with only the constant sound of the deceivingly benign South Pacific surf, is a refreshing approach that effectively underscores Hanks’ isolation and perhaps compensates for a prior surfeit of dinnertime conversation.

TWO FAMILY HOUSE

On Staten Island in the ‘50’s, newly married Buddy Visalo buys a down-at-the-heels two family house in hopes that the second floor rental will underwrite his dream of opening a bar and becoming the venue’s crooner. But his wife, who has already made him skip a post-War singing audition with Arthur Godfrey (Julius La Rosa got the gig instead) as a condition of their marriage, conveys to Buddy where she’s coming from: namely, the terra firma of domestic and financial practicality. And the second floor “family” turns out to be no help either: a volatile penniless Irish drunk married to a pregnant woman from Russia who speaks little English. Their eventual and hysterical (in both senses of the word) eviction becomes a literally bruising battle. Yet through years of setbacks and disappointments to open his bar and sing his own sweet song, Buddy’s dream lives on. Yes, this golden-hued movie with authentic, heart-felt writing and gold-plated characters starts off on nostalgic pathways that we’ve trod before; but if you think you know where it’s going, you’re wrong. The characters deepen, the plot takes interesting turns, the nostalgia sweeps us through darker, uncharted regions until, without losing its gentle incisiveness, Two Family House racks up the realistic cost of pursuing your dreams. For those in your family who have responded to Moonstruck or Marty, this film is highly recommended.

STATE AND MAIN

Director/writer David Mamet leaves the suspenseful gamesmanship of his House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner for the amusing and sometimes hilarious hi-jinks of a subject he knows so well: the making (and unmaking) of a Hollywood movie -- in this case in a bucolic Vermont village. Of course, the subject of all Mamet’s films is mendacity, scam-artistry, and gambling, and here the ove-budget and under-pressure production crew confronts townspeople who are as scheming and enterprising as they are. Bill Macy is the beleaguered director, Sarah Jessica Parker the slut star concerned about exposing her breasts on celluloid, Alec Baldwin the aging Lothario constantly forswearing his addiction to seducing underage girls, Julia Stiles the faux innocent hotel clerk only too willing to be seduced, and Charles Durning the mayor with a portly generosity trying to put off his wife’s nagging, social climbing excesses. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rebecca Pidgeon are the novice screenwriter and town’s book shop owner who present a romantic interest and the movie’s only spotlight of integrity as they try to remain aloof from the shenanigans and, parenthetically, prevent the town’s historic town hall stain glass window from being clandestinely demolished for the sake of a tracking shot. This joyous, cynical fairy tale takes us to the small town crossroads of big time filmmaking, leaving us with a wide grin at the hardscrabble process of making movies. 
 

HOLIDAY 

One of the most enduring classics is The Philadelphia Story. Not a bad choice for this occasion, but a better choice (adapted from the same playwright and starring much of the same cast) is Holiday. Like the former film, it takes place at an upper crust party where ‘dough’ doesn’t necessarily make for good taste in marriages. Here Katherine Hepburn is the unmarried independent woman whose witty, earthy patter hides a yearning to be free of her high class, wealthy family. When her beautiful, chic sister brings new fiancé Cary Grant in tow from a ski holiday to introduce him to her family, Kate recognizes in the witty, free-spirited Grant a kindred soul, and an impending conflict with her beloved sister and domineering family. How all this works out at the engagement party, amid acrobatic lines of dialogue (and, literally, somersaults!) makes for superbly engaging viewing. Hepburn’s early astonishing beauty and swift timing is a clear match for Grant’s. As good as The Philadelphia Story is, Holiday -- one of the richest and most satisfying films ever made -- is a greater cause to rejoice.

GREAT DIRECTORS’ LITTLE-KNOWN FILMS THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT 

This is the first in a periodic series heralding Best Video’s newly enlarged Directors Section, featuring films (DVD & VHS) of landmark or prominent directors, and focusing on those films that you probably don’t know about but should. 

  JOHN HUSTON:

Flamboyant. Theatrical. Unpredictable. These words sum up John Huston’s life (his early youth as a boxer, Mexican cavalryman, artist, writer, and all around bon vivant), his acting style (e.g. his politically corrupt, brazenly incestuous role as Noah Cross, L.A.’s would-be water czar in Polanski’s Chinatown), and, above all, the wide range of films he directed -- from his very first, The Maltese Falcon (adapted from the Dashiell Hammett noir thriller), to his last, The Dead (adapted from James Joyce’s famous story). A generalization his wide filmography supports is that he liked adventure (Across the Pacific, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Man Who Would Be King, Victory) and stories that embraced the cynical/seedy side of life (Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, Fat City) or proffered a belief less in moral virtue than in fate (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Under the Volcano). The very range of his work expresses a nonjudgmental fascination with multifarious humankind (Night of the Iguana, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Moulin Rouge, Freud, The Misfits, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Judge Roy Bean), and, above all, fun in filmmaking itself. Beat the Devil (with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and Gina Lollobrigida) is the quintessential fun movie (a blackly comic one-upmanship spy spoof) that expresses the notorious, legendary fun that the actors and director had while making the film. One might say brashness is the key to Huston’s madness: an American gaining fame and having fun with noir and adventure but not hesitating to cross boundaries into the literary and artistic (The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, Wiseblood), the musical (the enormously popular Annie), or even the classic British whodoneit (The List of Adrian Messenger). And who else but Huston would have had the chutzpah to tackle the entire Bible (The Bible) from Genesis to, well, not quite the apocalypse (although the enormously high-budget multi-studio production threatened to be one), and cast himself (ironically?) as husbandly, paternal Noah? In fact, blatant nepotism was not beneath him: his direction of his famous father, Walter Huston, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and of his daughter, Anjelica Huston, in the twisty, polished, blackly humorous Prizzi’s Honor, and, later, in The Dead. This last movie, which he directed while half blind and breathing on a respirator from a wheelchair, is one of Huston’s most beautiful films, and certainly his most intimate. This largely interior and poetic yet unsentimental drama is a long way from the scope of The Bible and The Man Who Would Be King. The Dead portrays a turn-of-the- century Christmas dinner in Dublin where the snow falls ceaselessly and Donal McCann (Frank Patterson) sings an Irish song that evokes a quiet but ravishing revelation in an upper middle-class housewife (Anjelica Huston). This film is Huston’s valedictory to his enduring theme of the fickleness of time and fate, his interest in the playfulness of that fate and, above all, reality of his characters, and his devotion to filmmaking, about which he was never cynical. 

In his films, Huston tended to wear his knowledge of the world on his sleeve, which, in whatever kind of movie, always evoked a strong response in his audience. But here is a mystery that has always eluded me about Huston, or, really, about people’s response (or, in this case, lack of response) to his work: Why is his movie The Unforgiven (not to be confused with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven -- also a great movie but another story entirely) never mentioned in criticism, shown on TV, rented on DVD or video (unless I happen to recommend it to customers), or, basically, even known about? Mention any film of Huston’s -- even the lesser ones, such as The Barbarian and the Geisha or The Macintosh Man -- and people will likely have heard of it, even if they don’t know it’s a Huston film. But mention The Unforgiven and people will say, “Oh you mean that Clint Eastwood film.” 

No. I mean that 1956 western starring Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Lillian Gish, Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford, John Saxon, Doug McCLure, Joseph Wiseman, and Albert Salmi. Does not the cast alone deepen one’s curiosity about the mystery? This film realistically and provocatively touches on the very contemporary themes of incest and racial prejudice in the context of a classic (and classy) western of the 1950’s. The Unforgiven tgells the story of an isolated community of homesteaders that try to eke out their survival against an unsteady truce with the unpredictable Plains Indians. This film does not offer a politically correct worldview, or any other Hollywood varnish, but, rather, a sense of how it was then, while highlighting themes approaching the forbidden, the unforgiven, and the unforgivable.  

NO TRICKS – ALL TREATS:

HANK’S HOUSE OF HORROR:

 

MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE HORROR FILMS

YOU MAY NOT KNOW (OR HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT)

 

SHARE A SCARE: FOR KIDS AND ADULTS

 Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein

Beetlejuice

The Blob

Changeling, The

Day of the Triffids

Goonies

Invader’s From Mars

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (orig.)

It Came From Outer Space

So I Married An Ax Murderer

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Village of the Damned

War of the Worlds (orig.)

Watcher in the Woods

Wizard of Oz

 

 

 

MY FAVORITE HORROR FILMS FOR ADULTS (& OLDER CHILDREN)

 Dead of Night

Dead of Winter

Devil Doll

Devil’s Advocate

Diabolique (orig.)

Entity, The

The Evil Dead

Frighteners, The

Hidden, The

Hills Have Eyes

Hitcher

Horror Express

House

House of Wax (orig.)

Hunger, The

I Bury the Living

Incubus, The (John Cassavetes)

Innocents, The

Last Wave, The

Lifeforce

Magic

Mute Witness

Near Dark

Ninth Configuration

Ninth Gate

Omega Man, The

Omen, The (orig.)

Prophecy

Pulse

Q: the Winged Serpent

Rosemary’s Baby

Sentinel

Serpent and the Rainbow

Seventh Sign

Stepford Wives (orig.)

Stir of Echoes

Thing, The (remake)

Tremors

Vanishing, The

When A Stranger Calls

Wicker Man, The

Wolfen

 

 

 

MY FAVORITE STEPHEN KING HORROR ADAPTATIONS (e.g. The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me don’t count here)

 
Storm of the Century

Salem’s Lot

Cat’s Eye

Silver Bullet

Misery

 

 

 

MY FAVORITE HORROR DIRECTOR: VAL LEWTON (He was really a producer, but he put his own low budget, highly stylized stamp on a series of nourish horror films that he assigned to great directors (including Jacques Tourneur, who directed the first four titles on this list, Mark Robson, who directed the last, and Robert Wise (e.g. The Sound of Music) who directed Lewton’s Return of the Cat People, which, though nourish, is not really a horror film). Jacques Tourneur also directed Out of the Past, which many regard as the best noir ever made (but that’s for another list).

Cat People

Curse of the Demon

The Leopard Man

I Walked With A Zombie

The Seventh Victim

PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

 Forget the plot; this film offers pure entertainment (especially if you’re a fan of the long running radio show). Meryl Streep’s beautiful, heartfelt singing voice; Kevin Kline as the inept but dapper detective Guy Noir; the dry presence and warm nostalgic wit of Garrison Keillor (who wrote the non-script: he and Altman wisely lace the film with the brilliant cast’s spontaneity and improvisation); and, perhaps most of all, the longtime house band of amazing instrumentalists (watch the bonus features of the full renditions of songs featured in the movie - worth the price of admission alone). Of course, it’s always good to see Virginia Madsen, though here she’s unfortunately saddled with a (no pun intended) dead end role as a benign angel of death wandering the backstage. For me the true surprise was the charming presence of and strong singing voice of Lindsay Lohan, making it clear she has a future beyond teen films.

 

 

ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

 In this subtly hilarious film a genuinally talented but innocent suburban youth (Max Minghella) goes to a big city art school aspiring to be a “great artist” and, hopefully, have his first sexual encounter. What he finds instead is artistic pretension posturing, as well as an amorous blank canvas: the only real thing happening is the serial killer haunting the campus. Everywhere our hero turns is an impediment and threat to art, rather than an inspiration. The advice of Minghella’s hypocritical professor (John Malkovich) is to branch out and try different things, when all Malkovich has ever done is paint triangles. The manner in which all these suspenseful and satiric plot strands get resolved is a brilliant balancing act, just like art itself, which this film is.

(Also highly recommended: director Terry Zwigoff’s two prior films, Ghost World and Bad Santa.)

 

 

ONLY HUMAN

 A daughter brings home her fiancé to meet her Jewish family, hoping not to reveal that he’s Palestinian. This is just the opening screwball gambit in a film that quickly spirals into hilarious complication involving the peccadilloes and foibles of the entire eccentric family. This Spanish film offers clear subtitles, but what you’ll see is largely visual - a true return to the classic screwball comedy that’s far more trenchant, and funnier, than Meet the Parents (or …the Fockers). Meet and welcome this satiric import instead.

Alas, summer is over, and the only traveling you’re likely to do over the next few months is armchair traveling. That’s where Best Video comes in. We do, of course, have many travel DVD’s, including ones out this week on Istanbul, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, the Eiffel Tower, and Smithsonian’s Great Battles of the Civil War. But there are also many feature films whose virtues include transporting you to some enticing locales. Here are my picks of great movies over the last year or so that just happen to be set in places that might give you some good destination ideas for next summer. In this regard, check out my last two reviews of The Proposition and Mountain Patrol. Aloha!

 

My advice to someone who’s sick or under the weather has always been to “watch two videos and call me in the morning.” Former Best Video member Helaine Patterson, who reluctantly (video-wise) moved to Washington D.C. a couple of years ago, has recently weighed in with her contribution to national health care: a list she sent me, compiled by a Medical College of Wisconsin physician Glenn Flores, M.D., of great doctor movies. My second opinion: these lists are better than chicken soup.

 

Best Doctor Movies

Red Beard

The Hospital

Article 99

Miss Evers’ Boys

The Elephant Man

Panic in the Streets

Death and the Maiden

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

 

Most Humorous

M*A*S*H

Body Parts

High Anxiety

The Patriot

What About Bob

What’s New Pussycat

Torture Ship

Malice

 

Most Useful in Medical Education

The Doctor (William Hurt)

Arrowsmith

Pressure Point
And the Band Played On

Two impressive films take us to lands that are both sacred and god-forsaken, and tell based-on-true stories that are both beautiful and brutal. The Proposition is what a turn of the century outlaw reluctantly accepts from a police captain  (Ray Winstone) determined to bring justice to the ruthless Australian outback: namely that the outlaw (Guy Pearce) track down and kill his older, more hardened brother in return for the release of his younger, incarcerated brother. Themes pertaining to aborigines, family, civilization, nature, cruelty, and justice receive visceral illumination in the sand blasted palette of the antipodal frontier.

 

In Mountain Patrol, set in the 1990’s, a dedicated but non-government sanctioned group of vigilantes tracks down an equally determined group of poachers who are decimating the sacred antelope of Tibet’s Kekexili tundra. Protection of the ecology of this harshly beautiful landscape involves both redemption and murder as the relentless manhunt funnels down to the question of everyone’s survival. Both films are fascinating and highly recommended.

Lucky # Slevin

An innocent visitor to New York is mistakenly coerced into being an assassin of, and by, two lethal enemies.

Josh Hartnett actually acting, Morgan Freeman as a smoothly vicious crime boss, and Ben “Mahatma” Kingsley as an orthodox rabbi who is Freeman’s criminal rival are just a few of the surprises in this suspenseful and intriguing crime thriller. The stolidly reliable Bruce Willis as a coolly efficient hit man is the one familiar constant in a twisty, genuinely surprising film that has echoes of The Usual Suspects and Seven Samurai.

State of the Union

A noted and decent industrialist is handpicked by a ramrodding woman newspaper editor to run for United States President. The woman happens to be his clandestine lover, yet dictates a campaign agenda that requires the estranged wife’s cooperation and endorsement. This is a Frank Capra film starring Tracy and Hepburn that even fans of the three probably never heard about. Here’s your lucky chance to make up that omission. Tracy is perfect as a strong man caught between warring impulses. Hepburn puts in a particularly luminous and winning performance as the wife trying to hold on to the husband she loves at the cost of losing the politician’s he’s become. (As an ironic side note, Hepburn’s character in the film is the reverse of the role she actually played in real life as the lover and soul mate to the never-divorced Tracy.) With dialogue every bit as brisk and intelligent as The West Wing, the film moves along like the airplane Tracy acrobatically pilots in one thrilling scene. The only flaw in this unacknowledged gem is a tail ending that indulges Capra’s penchant for, as David Thomson puts it, the “libertarian poetry” of a single individual altering the political course of a nation. But this is an easy compromise in electing to watch one of Capra’s (and Tracy and Hepburn’s) best movies.

United 93 and Flight 93

United 93, this week’s release, is well produced and very intense, a film that many people, for obvious reasons, will not want to see. Some may think it too exploitive, the events too recent. But it is unquestionably a story worth telling. All of the same can be said for its predecessor Flight 93. The two offer very different points of view: one (the more recent United…) from the airport control towers alternating with escalating events on the plane; the other (Flight…) from passengers we get to know on the plane alternating with their loved ones on the ground. The latter has been criticized for some sentimentality. But there is a lot of feeling in the story; there can’t be too much in response to it. I detected no note of falsity in either film. Without taking anything away from United…, I thought the earlier Flight… more involving. Both films overall received excellent critical reviews. You decide whether to watch either. This is still pretty much a free country.

Sentinel

Despite mixed reviews and a couple of creaky plot points, this thriller moves along with a good, nimble cast, sidestepping formula to offer a more-than-satisfying rent.

 

Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World

Another miscue from critics: here Albert Brooks adds some welcome comic relief to a clever and successful conceit in his inimitable low-key but infectious, occasionally hilarious style.

 

Friends With Money

Title says it all. Clever California yuppie-ish comedy drama with edge of realism and strong ensemble cast (Aniston, Joan Cusack, Keener, McDormand. Kisch with Tabasco.

 Inside Man

Denzel Washington, Clive Owen in superb Spike Lee crime entertainment.

 

Sorry, Haters

Pakistani cabbie subjected to passenger’s manipulation finds himself on a ride toward terror.

 

Who Am I This Time?

Itinerant telephone manager falls for shy hardware clerk who transforms himself into Romeo only on the community theater stage. Jekyll-and-Hyde theme played for whimsy and romance in tour-de-force Christopher Walken, Susan Sarandon vehicle. Not to be missed: one of my all-time favorite films.

 

The Wicker Man

Edward Woodward as a smug, priggish policeman goes to a remote Scottish island to find a missing child, and finds more than he bargained for in coming up against the genteel inhabitants with their strange island ways. With elements of dance, music, ethnography, mystery, and horror, this film is not a hybrid but simply unique. Like The Swimmer, this film will sift through inevitable memory loss to be an experience one never forgets. Currently being remade by Neal Labute.  

Double Indemnity 

At long last on DVD: Billy Wilder’s archetypal film noir, based on the James Cain novel and scripted by Raymond Chandler (often with a bottle in front of him and, literally, Wilder’s gun at his head). Even alcoholic Chandler admitted the result was worth it. Stunningly re-mastered and still as sharply appealing as Stanwyck’s ankle bracelet.

 

Terror Watch:

Understanding the war on terror in 8 arresting recent films:

United 93

Sorry, Haters

The War Within

Paradise Now

Walk on Water

Munich

Flight 93

Sleeper Cell (3 Discs)

Other Current and Recent Releases

That Hank Liked:

Lemming (Lynch meets Hitchcock; featuring the director and star of With a Friend Like Harry)

Broken Trail (Duvall & Thomas Haden Church of Sideways)

Do You Like Hitchcock? (Dario Argento)

Pretty Poison

Petulia

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 5

The Naked Spur (James Stewart)

The Sentinel

Trilogy of Terror (3 Karen Black horror tales)

Charles Bukoswki Tapes

Safety Last

Heart Like a Wheel (Bonnie Bedelia)

King’s Row (Reagan’s best role; a great movie)

Cheyenne Social Club/Firecreek (both Stewart/Fonda)

Syriana

Frenzy (Hitchcock’s last film)

Come See the Paradise (Japanese detention: Dennis Quaid)

Culpepper Cattle Company

Emperor of the North (Lee Marvin/Ernest Borgnine)

An Unfinished Life (Redford/ Freeman/Bart the Bear)

When A Stranger Calls

Human Trafficking

Elevator to the Gallows (Malle/Moreau)

The Passenger (Antonioni/Nicholson)

Magic (Hopkins/Ann Margaret)

Lords of Discipline

Prince of Pennsylvania

Ronin (DeNiro)

Educating Rita

The Valachi Papers (Brosnon)

Cross of Iron

Gallipoli (Mel Gibson)

Malcolm X (Denzel Washington)

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks)

Ellie Parker

The Chess Players

Punchline (Hanks/Fields)

Huff: Season 1

Sleeper Cell: Season 1 (3 DVD’s)

Domino

North Country

Nine Lives

The Best of Youth

Junebug