lightweight fare

The Thomas Crown Affair: (1968. dir: Norman Jewison) Featherweight story counting on its surface charms to pull it through: its soundtrack ("Windmills of my Mind", a massive hit at the time), its "edgy" editing style (Hal Ashby goes crazy with the geometrical shapes), and the magnitude of the individual charismas of and purported chemistry between its two megastars (McQueen and Dunaway). The chemistry is lacking, they largely left the charismas at home, the story is absurd, the editing style distracting, and most pop songs sound dated after forty some-odd years. Mostly you watch McQueen's playboy distract himself (gliders, dune buggies, polo, Sotheby's, pouting girls with foreign accents, arranging multi-million-dollar bank heists) and then enter into a pretty dull and unconvincing relationship with Dunaway's insurance sleuth (plagued by a costumer who must have hated her. Check out the continuing parade of terrible hats) who's trying to bring him to justice. Even my boyfriend, a big McQueen fan who felt genuine jealousy over that glider, said, "That might have been the most uninteresting movie I've ever seen."

The Curious Dr. Humpp: (1969. dir: Emilio Vieyra) Had Ed Wood and Russ Meyer collaborated, in Argentina, on a remake of Eyes Without a Face, using a budget of about twenty-five bucks and a case of beer, the result might have looked something like this.

Easy A: (2010. dir: Will Gluck) Comedy daunts me. For every good one you find, you have to slog through another fifteen that either suck or offer at best one or two laughs.

But here, at last, we have it! A well-written, well-acted, well thought out, unified comedy! Never having been a John Hughes fan back in the day, imagine my amazement to find such joy and satisfaction in the old high-school-coming-of-age comedy-package. In addition to being inspired by the Scarlet Letter, that compact yet tedious novel through which we all had to slog in school, Easy A is a kind of tribute to all those high school movies from the '80s, but it's so much better than they were. First of all, Emma Stone is so relaxed, un-vain and with such perfect timing that she could carry to success a far lesser script than this one. Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci (who must be married in real life, because it seems like they've made about a hundred movies together) are beyond perfect as her parents, and Penn Badgley (who?) is the exact fit to be that secret crush guy, the guy who's so cool that he's uncool, the one she'll end up with.

Also, as is so crucial in a high school comedy, the music is just about perfect.

Absolute thumbs up, with no reservations. It renews my faith in comedy, and not a moment too soon. I was about to give up.

the brilliant sami frey, a lawman with a past, and a bad hamlet

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Little Drummer Girl: (1984. dir: George Roy Hill) This is easily my favorite film from a le Carre story. The Oldman Tinker Tailor is a better film, almost perfect, in fact, but I love the Drummer Girl like you do a redheaded stepchild, the better for all its flaws. Most of the shortcomings lie within its time: the music (Dave Grusin), Diane Keaton's massive-shouldered, big-plasticked costumes and jewelry, not to mention her mullet, and the slow, schmaltzy scene transitions, all these things and more reek of the eighties. Keaton is miscast as a young theatre actress (too old, and with a truly appalling attempt at an English accent) but in the end carries a good role well enough to serve, with a few really wonderful scenes, including one when she tries and fails to go back to parlour-room comedy after living the life of a spy. As in the Deadly Affair, one of the best parts of this film is the glimpse it gives into English theatre, peopled by the likes of a young Bill Nighy.

I saw it in the cinema when it came out. It was the first I ever saw of Klaus Kinski, and, more importantly, Sami Frey, whose late-arriving double-role he performs with jaw-dropping skill and subtlety. If I were making a list of my favorite cinematic performances of all time, Frey would be on it for this.

the Law and Jake Wade: (1958. dir: John Sturges) It starts with a bang: a jailbreak for a cynically amusing sociopath played by Richard Widmark (an actor who lovingly drew up all the maps of cinematic Cynically Amusing Sociopath territory. My favorite line, drolly underplayed, after shooting two men: "Those guys sure picked the wrong time to walk in"), including an enigmatic relationship between him and his rescuer (Robert Taylor). The second unit long-shots are beautifully framed, but the rest of it descends quickly into that stagebound, pedestrian dialogue one has wearily come to expect from the TV-influenced Westerns of the fifties and early sixties. This movie sports all the symptoms of the spoilage: bad television writing in the middle, with one of the lesser characters given cheap dysfunctional familial motivations, little bonding between characters, and largely shot on soundstage in medium shot.

Only Widmark has any charisma, and the girl (Patricia Owens) is just annoying. DeForest Kelley plays one of the outlaw gang, and again I cite the general rule-of-thumb: if an oater's got an actor from Star Trek in it, it's probably not very good. I'm not saying one is a direct result of the other, just that you can usually count on a mysterious and synchronicitous correlation.

The hide-and-seek shootout in an old ghost-town at the end is nice, with no music or excess noise to distract. Here's the way to do it: watch the beginning and the end, and skip the hour and a half in between.

Royal Deceit: (1994. dir: Gabriel Axel) It's a Danish movie about the origins of the Hamlet story, which is a fine idea, except that it's done in English with British actors, and any time somebody takes one of Shakespeare's stories and rewrites it, let's face it, it's not going to be as good. What you get are actors like Helen Mirren and Christian Bale running around embodying Gertrude and her infamous son while NOT speaking Shakespeare, and the contrast is both jarring and disappointing. Also, it's badly directed (no doubt this poor fellow's first venture in directing in English, often a thing which leads to dismal failure), with poor timing, over-idealized scenery, and over-sentimental music, none of which helps.

This is one of the movies on Bale's road to stardom, but he's far better in Little Women from the same year.

the lords of salem: it's the women who matter

(2013. dir: Rob Zombie) This may be the first truly gynocentric horror film I've ever seen: most of the characters, and all the characters who matter, are women. Villains, ostensible hero, intended victims, all women. It's not spoken in the script, but you come away with a sense that within the vast, metaphysical reality of this film, it's the women who are fighting, hip-deep in the blood and muck and quagmire of the things that matter, life and death and the consequences of the war amongst angels in heaven, while the men live superficial, dancing existences in a sort of lightweight, parallel existence. There are male characters, and they feel true and three-dimensional, and they try to help, try to get involved, but ultimately their efforts glance shallowly off the sides of the true action and they can do nothing but helplessly observe. Even the original witch-killer who kicked the whole plot into whirring motion, you could argue he did very little. Yes, he burned a coven of witches, but here they still are, centuries later, while he is worm-food, long past. As one of the witches (there is also a strong sense that every woman in this film, whether she knows it or not, is a witch, and not in some sleazy, she's-a-spider-and-lured-me way, but a witch of immeasurable, untapped power) points out, destiny gives you some room to maneuver, but your fate was written in stone long before your lungs ever filled with breath.

This is the first horror film I've ever seen that never once uses female nakedness, which is plentiful here, for titillation. Nakedness is, rather, a stripping away of the false trappings of society, and a necessary state for the birthing and blooding and mudding and murdering that is involved in the metaphysical war which is their true work. Zombie gives aging actresses strong roles to play, women of an age at which you never hope to see them playing anything but powerless and dotty: Judy Geeson (10 Rillington Place), Dee Wallace (the Howling, Cujo), Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror), Maria Conchita Alonso (Running Man) and, most notably, Meg Foster, who was all over American television in the '70s, with her astonishingly beautiful, strange-looking eyes. Now she looks amazing, a true crone, with a fantastic, otherworldly voice and as strong a presence as ever as the original coven's Master-Witch, Margaret Morgan.

Most obviously an offspring of Rosemary's Baby and Ringu, it reminded me several times of the Tenant, with its claustrophobia and the horrible sense that insanity is encroaching and there is not a thing you can do about it. It really ought to be seen in a cinema, in a bounded, inescapable, darkened room, so that its creeping atmosphere can close slowly around you. As I watched it in my living room, I felt guilty whenever I paused it to answer the phone or get something to drink, aware that I was cheating, not allowing the spell to weave its full course. Sit still, if you can, while you watch it.