The Killing of Sister George (1968)

The weird thing about this "British" movie starring Beryl Reid, Susannah York, and Coral Browne (who was actually born in Australia) is that it is an American film, produced and directed by Robert Aldrich.  Based on a play of the period and set in London, it is the tale of butch lesbian Reid, a supposedly beloved character in a TV soap, and her childish lover played by a gormless York, and the ups and downs in their relationship as Reid's character is killed off by the Corporation suits.  Browne, a purportedly straight BBC executive, is enchanted by York and in a fairly explicit scene for the time contrives to win her for her own.  All three actresses are riveting, with special praise for Reid who plays a monstrous, controlling gargoyle with no vanity.  As a relatively early mainstream example of gay cinema, this film wins a place in movie history, but I doubt that it won many friends at the time of its release. 

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)

I was going on yesterday about the injustice of classic films being missing in action on disc and really bad movies being available, and this is a fine case in point.  This film is among the all-time stinkers of British film-making, yet there it is on its shiny DVD.  Part of the reason it smells bad is that it may be a British movie, based on the notorious novel by James Hadley Chase, but all of the cast (apart from the imported male lead, Jack LaRue) are pretending to be Americans, with the worst assortment of accents imaginable.  The violence of the book has been toned down, but the film still received really horrid reviews at the time, being described as 'something out of a sewer'.  A kidnapped heiress falls for the dubious charms of the gangster and instead of her being brutally treated, we are asked to believe a story of doomed love -- padded out with excrutiatingly bad variety numbers from a so-called night club.  The book had been regarded as unfilmable, so the awfulness of this first effort is no surprise; however it was in fact re-made in Hollywood in 1971 as "The Grissom Gang" and is a rare example of a re-make being the more watchable movie.  Incidentally, British actress Linden Travers in the lead role here never made another film nor did the hopeless director.  Carry-on regular Sid James has a bit part as a Chicago bartender.  Unbelievable!

The Notorious Landlady (1962)

One of these days someone will explain to me why really crap films are available on DVD (and I'm not thinking of only recent ones) and why certain studio classics have just disappeared from public view.  So in my down time -- such as it is -- I burn my own DVD copies from my elderly beta tapes, so at least I have some sort of resource to fall back upon.  Not that I can claim that this is one of the great comedies of all time, but it is certainly a superior one, co-written by Blake Edwards, with Jack Lemmon in his third picture with Kim Novak and with Fred Astaire (in a non-musical role) in great support.  While it is set in London and feels pretty authentic, it was completely filmed in California and tells the story of recent-appointee to the US Embassy Lemmon finding digs with Novak who both her neighbours and Scotland Yard think has murdered her husband.  One of these busybodies is Estelle Winwood who just about holds the record for the longest career in motion pictures; she was 79 here and went on for another 18 years.  Both Astaire and Lemmon fall for Novak's charms -- she was never a great actress but always a highly attractive screen presence -- and are determined to prove her innocence.  This pleasant movie also makes great use of popular music to frame its action and I particularly liked the chase at the denouement where the background was 'The Gang's All Here'.  So where's the DVD?

Sky High (2005)

After my relative disappointment with the film reviewed below, I am beginning to think that it occasionally pays off to approach a movie without any expectations and to hope for a pleasant surprise. That, more or less, applies to the above flick about kids with "powers" of various strengths attending a high school for superheroes (where the principal appropriately is Wonder Woman, Linda Carter).  On arrival the intake are judged on their abilities and relegated to either the hero or sidekick stream -- kind of like the popular jocks and nerds in other U.S. school movies.  Our hero's abilities had not yet manifested themselves, despite his being the son of two of the greatest, and he is initially dumped with the other outcasts, whose skills range from being able to glow or to turn into a puddle or a very small hamster.  Apart from his parents, played by Kurt Russell and Kelly Preston (and horrified that he may not be able to follow in the family tradition), it is a no-name cast but a very appealing one.  Full of imaginative effects and ever good-natured, our hero learns the Disney lesson that everyone has worthwhile qualities -- except of course the obvious villainess who finally receives her just desserts.  Apart from Russell being somewhat obnoxious in his self-esteem and his expectations, it was by and large a wholesome and recommendable view for all the family.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

I must confess to being sorely disappointed with this film which I approached with great expectation, since not only have the reviews been excellent, but Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed it, won a best actor award at Cannes, where it also won a best screenplay award for Guillermo Arriaga.  So what was the problem?  It certainly wasn't the fine cinematography or the fact that the film alternated betwee English and Spanish or even the fairly thin story.  Jones plays a Texas rancher who befriends an illegal Mexican labourer and when the latter is accidentally killed by a careless and brutal border guard (Barry Pepper), he not only decides to take justice into his own hands (since the local police don't give a damn), but also decides to honour his friend's request that he be buried in his home town.  So he abducts Pepper and forces him to dig up his friend from his second grave (the first having been a short-term matter of expediency) and to accompany him and the rapidly decaying corpse over the Border with Pepper's fellow border guards in lacksadaisical pursuit.  They eventually discover that neither Estrada's supposed family nor home town are real, but Jones feels at last that he has honoured his friendship.

Part of the problem I had with this movie was its very slow exposition, although I was not overly alienated by the to-ing and fro-ing of the time frame.  The main problem, I felt, was Jones himself who was just a tad laid-back from being a hero with whom one could identify or completely understand.  If anything, Pepper's was the better performance, especially since one came to believe that despite his cruel streak and Jones' abrupt treatment that he truly regretted Estrada's death.  The fact that the film just stopped after the third burial with Jones riding off and Pepper left in the middle of nowhere did not achieve the necessary closure.  An interesting but, I think, somewhat flawed attempt to make a classic Western.

Where There's a Will (2006)

I very briefly considered reviewing "Revolver" (2005) which I sort of watched last night, but while this Guy Ritchie effort shows some much valued maturity in comparison to his earlier 'diamond geezer' gangster films, it was so convoluted and flashy that I quickly lost the plot.  Yet another anti-hero from Jason Statham, but despite Luc Besson's writing credentials and a weird turn from Ray Liotta as Statham's adversary, I was really past caring or even trying to make head or tail of the farrago.  So I'll tell you instead about the above Hallmark TV Movie which I was tempted to set since Sky described it as "drifter Keith Carradine goes to look after his wealthy grandmother".  Well, as is often the case, Sky got it wrong and Carradine plays the local sheriff -- but I'm not sorry to have viewed it.  The curmudgeonly grandma was played by Marion Ross (Richie Cunningham's mom from Happy Days) and the drifter was played by Frank Whaley, who was so very, very good in "Swimming with Sharks" (1994); anyone who manages to give Kevin Spacey his comeuppance gets my vote.  Of course having gone to his grandmother's Texas home for purely monetary ends, he learns the meaning of responsibility and love -- and that's what Hallmark movies are all about -- more or less.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005)

Not that he was ever a great personal favourite, but I can recall when Steve Martin's "crazy guy" persona was vaguely amusing and not a trying-too-hard embarrassment as it is in this movie.  This sequel came about because of the relative success of the 2003 movie which was theoretically sweet in a kind of sickening way; what it wasn't was a remake of the original 1950 film of the same title which had an acerbic Clifton Webb as the paterfamilias (and even there it was far from my favourite Webb role).  In this unnecessary follow-up, Martin wants to bring his large family to a favourite vacation home one last time before the older kids go their separate ways.  Here he resurrects a long-standing rivalry with Eugene Levy who has only eight high-achieving kids and I'm uncertain whether Levy or Martin demeans himself more in the empty pursuit for laughs.  At least I think (and pray) that we will all be spared "Cheaper by the Dozen 3".

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Director-Producer Roger Corman may have been a master of churning out cheap yet profitable flicks, but the cycle of eight Edgar Allen Poe films that he unleashed in the '60s are nothing short of remarkable.  While my personal favourite has always been "The Masque of the Red Death", this -- his last -- is considered by many to be the best of the bunch.  As always the film benefits by having the ever-watchable Vincent Price in the lead, but the less well-known actors taking the remaining roles are uniformly fine, especially Elizabeth Shepherd in the dual role of his late wife Ligeia and his new wife Rowena.  As the Poe quote at the end of the film would have it: "The boundaries that divide life and death are at best shadowy and vague.  Who shall say where one ends and the other begins".  Perhaps Ligeia is not really dead or perhaps she is embodied in the castle's vicious black cat (or perhaps it is just a nasty cat) or perhaps her spirit is taking over the new wife.  The screenwriter Robert Towne -- later a prizewinner for his "Chinatown" script -- leaves the "facts" of reality to the viewer's imagination, while immersing one in the contrasts between the green English countryside surrounding the ruined abbey (some brilliant location scouting) and the eerie images within.

How I Killed My Father (2001)

The title of this French film is more than a little misleading since no one is physically murdered and there is only very, very limited violence.  The killing in question is more of a metaphorical one as a cold and calculating gerontologist, played by Charles Berling at his iciest, copes with the return from Africa of his doctor father who had abandoned the family when he was a child.  The father is an amazingly sympathetic character played by Michel Bouqet -- so very, very good as the eponymous late president in "The Last Mitterrand" which I viewed recently but did not review.  Like a lot of French movies, not much happens, but we are presented with an acting master-class, not just by the two leads, but also by the actors playing Berling's isolated wife and his younger brother.  Part of the film's appeal is the contrast between the feckless good Samaritan father who is not afraid of death and the overly controlled son who panders to his rich clientele with ways of avoiding aging.  Berling has even convinced his complacent wife that she is barren, largely because he is traumatised by the whole father-child business.  As a wealthy man, he believes that offering money to his father will rid him of this intrusion into his tidy life, but the other characters are able to move ahead, even if he is not.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

The project of filming this best-selling book has been floating around Hollywood for what seems like ages and for a long time it was described as the "next" Steven Spielberg film.  In the end it was entrusted to Rob Marshall after his success with "Chicago", with Spielberg producing.  It was a rich and generally rewarding viewing experience without being totally absorbing and I don't know that it would have been any better had Spielberg taken over the reins, since it is somewhat different from his usual interests.  The bare bones of the story concerns the history of a young girl, sold together with her sister from whom she is soon separated, into bondage, and of her eventual training and success as a geisha.  The film is careful to avoid confusing the artistic side of a geisha with the sexual, and indeed there is virtually no explicit sex shown.  However, one is well aware that a geisha's life shares a great deal with a prostitute's and that it is one lifestyle that disallows any personal pursuit of the romantic ideal.  Not having read the novel, I don't know if the ending has been "Hollywoodized", but it somehow did ring false.

The positive virtues of the film include the gorgeous cinematography. costumes and art design and the three leading actresses -- Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi -- are all excellent.  However it remains something of a mystery why these leads were taken by well-known Chinese actresses rather than Japanese ones, especially since the main male leads were all played by Japanese actors.  Perhaps as Westerners we are not meant to notice this anomaly.  The other peculiarity is that the movie, being a prestige Hollywood production, was made, of course, totally in English; the actors' variable comfort with the spoken language made it something of a struggle to understand all of the dialogue (English subtitles on the DVD did help), but the film must have suffered mightily with its cinema audience and this probaby accounts for its relative failure.

Hoppity Goes to Town (1941)

Every time I manage to cross off a title on my ever-expanding list of films that I would like to see, I get a real frisson of pleasure, since so many of these have proved elusive over the years.  This family animation was the last joint project of the Fleischer Brothers -- Max and Dave -- now two nearly forgotten pioneers lost in the Disney shadow.  And while I would be hard-pressed to insist that this film is some sort of lost masterpiece, it is at least masterly done and deserving greater recognition.  As later well-known releases like "Antz" and "A Bug's Life", this handsomely-drawn story follows the ups and downs of an insect community, living in the cracks and wasteground of a cityscape and their struggle to survive amongst humans.  We are offered well-defined characters, a love story, hissable villains, and some excellent songs from Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser.  It also boasts some very inventitive animated sequences.  What else could you want in a family treat?

Keeping Mum (2005)

Sometimes there's nothing as good as a dose of jet black comedy to counteract the saccharine world, and this British flick made a good stab at it.  Rowan Atkinson (who usually makes me gag) is just about acceptable as a country vicar obsessed with perfecting his sermons and thus ignoring his wife, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who is tempted to begin an affair with her American golf instructor -- former heartthrob Patrick Swayze looking more and more grotesque as he ages.  Into this melange comes the new housekeeper played by the wonderful Maggie Smith who is even more of a "national treasure" than Dame Judi.  The opening sequences showed a heavily pregnant young woman jailed for murder some 43 years previously and wouldn't you know it, she just happens to be Scott Thomas' mum.  On arrival Maggie does her best to recreate a happy household for her daughter by bumping off any characters who seem to be in the way of her game plan -- and guess what, the murderous impulse seems to be hereditary!  Not the greatest of movies, but a happy nod back to a macabre tradition in British film-making.