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Articles

• That's Entertainment (G)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 5 days ago

  Genre: Compilation Documentary

  Director: Jack Haley, Jr.

  Starring: Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Debbie Reynolds

  In Brief: Riding in on the last of the late 1960s/early 1970s nostalgia wave, That's Entertainment positioned itself as a documentary about the Hollywood musical. In truth, it was a two-hour commercial for MGM that presented one seriously skewed version of film history. That's not to say the film doesn't include some pretty impressive (and more than a few clunker) musical numbers — all culled from the MGM library — but it presents a very small fragment of the movie musical genre as if it was the whole story.

  4 comments

  98 views

• I'm Not Rappaport (PG-13)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 12 days ago

  Genre: Drama

  Director: Herb Gardner (A Thousand Clowns)

  Starring: Walter Matthau, Ossie Davis, Amy Irving, Martha Plimpton, Craig T. Nelson

  In Brief: Playwright and sometimes filmmaker Herb Gardner brings his play I'm Not Rappaport to the screen with Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis in the leads. The first hour of its rather too expansive running time is very good indeed, if not especially great filmmaking. Matthau and Davis make an appealing pair of old men — not exactly friends, but who else is around? — whiling away their time in Central Park, each with his own problems. The dialogue — while sounding like dialogue — is good and penetrating. Then we get to what amounts to the second act and the film's desire to evolve into a more elaborate drama bogs things down pretty fast. It remains easily watchable, but it turns into less by trying to be more.

  1 comments

  99 views

• The Blue Angel (NR)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 26 days ago

  Genre: Drama with Music

  Director: Josef von Sternberg

  Starring: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti, Hans Albers

  In Brief: The Blue Angel (1930) marked not only the first German sound film, but, more importantly, the meeting of filmmaker Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. It remains the most well-known of the seven films they made together, but it's hardly the best of the lot — which doesn't keep it from being iconic. (Is there anyone who doesn't know the image of Dietrich straddling the chair singing "Falling in Love Again?" It's one of cinema's indelible moments.) Its story of a stuffy school teacher becoming obsessed with Lola Lola, a crudely sexy cabaret performer, is more of a downer than the subsequent Sternberg-Dietrich pairings, making it less viewer-friendly. However, it's an important film — and without it, we would have never had those subsequent movies.

  0 comments

  148 views

• Brass Target (PG)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 04/23/2013

  Genre: Action Thriller

  Director: John Hough (The Incubus)

  Starring: Sophia Loren, John Cassavetes, George Kennedy, Robert Vaughn, Patrick McGoohan, Max Von Sydow

  In Brief: The cast and the premise of John Hough's Brass Target (1978) is considerably more interesting than the film itself. The idea that General Patton was deliberately killed in that 1945 "accident" to prevent him from uncovering what happened to a hijacked trainload of Nazi gold is intriguing enough. And the prospect of Robert Vaughn as a colonel with a penchant for younger men, with Edward Herrmann as the object of his obsession, sounds more promising than it actually is. (So is the idea of seeing 1960s TV spy icons Vaughn and Patrick McGoohan in the same movie.) It's just not much fun, but it does keep moving and is worth a look.

  0 comments

  136 views

• To Kill a Mockingbird (NR)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 04/09/2013

  Genre: Drama

  Director: Robert Mulligan (Summer of '42)

  Starring: Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, John Megna, Frank Overton, Ruth White, Brock Peters

  In Brief: Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, has become a classic of modern American literature, and Robert Mulligan's film has become something of a classic itself — though perhaps one more of association than on its own merits, notable as they are in capturing the book. Gregory Peck has rarely been as good as he is here and the rest of the cast is of equally high caliber. It is, in fact, hard to fault on any level (and in my opinion, that may not entirely be a good thing).

  0 comments

  402 views

• An Affair to Remember (NR)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 04/02/2013

  Genre: Romantic Drama Comedy

  Director: Leo McCarey

  Starring: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson, Cathleen Nesbitt

  In Brief: In 1957, Leo McCarey was a director out of vogue and out of favor, so he tried to restart his career by remaking his 1939 film Love Affair — rechristened An Affair to Remember. While it was a hit, it really didn't revive his career, but this story of a shipboard romance that turns into much more (with a large injection of tragedy) has certainly claimed a notch in American cinema.

  5 comments

  256 views

• The Battle of the Sexes (NR)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 03/19/2013

  Genre: Drama

  Director: D.W. Griffith

  Starring: Jean Hersholt, Phyllis Haver, Belle Bennett, Sally O'Neil, Don Alvarado, William Bakewell

  In Brief: A middle-aged businessman falls prey to the wiles of a gold-digging flapper and throws everything away in his pursuit of this transparently duplicitous woman. Something of a surprise from the last days of D.W. Griffith's career, The Battle of the Sexes manages to be sophisticated while still adhering to the director's own sensibilities. Though marketed as a comedy, this is really a domestic drama with comedic touches. Approached that way, it's actually one of Griffith's more accomplished films.

  0 comments

  244 views

• The Mechanic (PG)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 03/12/2013

  Genre: Action Crime Thriller

  Director: Michael Winner (The Sentinel)

  Starring: Charles Bronson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Keenan Wynn, Jill Ireland, Linda Ridgeway

  In Brief: A mechanic — or hitman — ill-advisedly takes the son of one of his victims under his wing as an assistant in training. Pure 1960s-'70s action thriller of the Charles Bronson kind, The Mechanic benefits from ultra-stylish direction by Michael Winner. It may not make it exactly good, but it makes for a fascinating artifact, as well as a nigh perfect encapsulation of Winner's style.

  0 comments

  172 views

• Tower of London (NR)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 03/05/2013

  Genre: Historical Drama with Horror Trappings

  Director: Rowland V. Lee

  Starring: Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Barbara O'Neil, Ian Hunter, Vincent Price, Nan Grey

  In Brief: Somewhere in between history and Shakespeare with a dollop of house-brand horror (this did come from Universal Pictures, after all) is Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London. Despite the presence of Boris Karloff and the score from Son of Frankenstein (also directed by Lee), this a reasonably non-horrific offering — but certainly not shy of mayhem — that purports to show the grisly (this was pre-revisionist) rise and fall of Richard III (Basil Rathbone). It's not particularly deep or subtle, but it's a lot of fun and a solid production.

  4 comments

  474 views

• Les Miserables (NR)

  

  

  MOVIES

  Ken Hanke | 02/26/2013

  Genre: Drama

  Director: Glenn Jordan

  Starring: Richard Jordan, Anthony Perkins, Cyril Cusack, Claude Dauphin, John Gielgud

  In Brief: Lew Grade's 1978 TV version of Les Miserables with Richard Jordan as Jean Valjean and Anthony Perkins as Javert is a reasonably solid version of the book that hits the main plot elements and adds more backstory. Apart from Tony Perkins as a twitchy Javert, it's pretty much a kind of "Classics Illustrated" take on the material. But it's a good half hour shorter than the musical.

  0 comments

  276 views
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