I do realize I’m a little late with this.

I am trying to make up some lost time.

I am extremely lazy…

(April 3)

——Blood Simple (1983)——

The back cover describes this debut film from the Coen brothers as one with “calculating round(s) of double and triple crosses.” I’m not really sure where they are getting that, or even if they’ve seen the film they’re writing about because there is really only one real double-cross in the film and it doesn’t really have much to do with the plot. Actually, in pure Coen brothers’ fashion, the film is about mistaken assumptions that cause bizarre and macabre ripples that effect all of the main characters. Nothing is really calculated. It’s all accident. Someone sees something, thinks incorrectly that they know what’s going on, and does something that causes the next unfortunate event to occur.

The plot is about a husband who discovers that his wife (Frances McDormand) is sleeping with his bartender and hires the private eye who makes the discovery to rub them out. The private eye is a sleazy mother though, and he tries to rip the cuckold off by taking his money and killing him, but he forgets a key piece of evidence that ties him to the crime. Meanwhile the bartender finds out about the missing money, finds the body and thinks that the wife did it. And well, it just gets crazier from there. The bodies just start to stack up and nobody knows the real reason why it is all happening. I’ll leave the rest of the twists to you.

(MUST SEE)

(April 4)

——Slither (2006)——

I wouldn’t hardly classify this as a “great” movie and I’d also be hard pressed to admit whether or not it was a good movie. What Slither is is a fun movie, great fun for anyone who likes a little silly mixed in with their horror every once and a while. Slither has it all, rotting meat, hot women, slug monsters, comic male leads (played by the ol’ captain from Firefly), and zombie deer. A small town is having their annual party to start off hunting season and the captain of the police force is still pining for his high school girlfriend who has since become a teacher and married the richest man in town. That same man finds an alien in the woods that attaches itself to his brain and causes him to steal cattle to feed his alien bride, who is carrying thousands of his alien slug children. The slugs go in through the mouth and make you into a flesh-craving zombie designed with one hive mind meant to propagate the species and take over the world.

If the above didn’t get you excited then this probably isn’t the movie for you. Especially if you don’t like to see flesh explode, then this isn’t he movie for you. The rest of you horror fans will probably eat this one up. This isn’t a movie you’ll cherish years from now, but for immediate goofy pleasure, it’s hard not to find some solace in this film.

(SEE)

——Secuestro Express (2005)——

Think City of God in Venezuela only about kidnapping and not as good. Which isn’t to say that this is a bad film. Mia Maestro stars (you may know her as Sydney’s unbelievably hot sister on Alias) as a kidnapping victim in a city where kidnapper is actually a job description. The film follows the kidnappers from their home life (briefly) through all sorts of odd episodes until we finally get to the ransom and drop off. The film is actually pretty good, a slick sometimes funny, often pretty scary little tale about how the kidnapping is bad enough but the police are even worse. I’m definitely not booking my flight to Caracas anytime soon.

(SEE)

(April 7)

——Capote (2005)——

One of my very favorites of last year, made all the more memorable in my mind because of the extremely low expectations I had going into seeing it. I didn’t expect to even like it, much less love it as much as I did. And yet the writing is solid, the direction extremely evocative and the acting above all is fantastic. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a career high performance as Truman Capote. Not only does he get down the voice and mannerisms, but he also manages to fit them to the role and breathe life into a caricature and turn it into an extremely well drawn character study. Capote manages to tell the story of the man through one period in his life: the writing of In Cold Blood. It’s about how he gets sucked into the story. About how he changes non-fiction with his work. About how this giant chunk of his life ended up changing him forever.

(MUST SEE)

——Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)——

You can probably take the majority of my 42nd Street review and copy paste it over here, as much of the basic plot and structure is the same, as well as the brilliant and extremely over the top Busby Berkeley musical numbers. This time the story is about a young couple in the theater who fall in love (played by the same two actors who fell in love in the last movie) when it is found out that the writer and reluctant star of the show is actually part of a millionaire family. Of course when his brother finds out about the romance he thinks she’s a gold digger out for his money, but because of a case of mistaken identity two of her friends take him and his friend out on the town gold digging them up to prove a point…that is until they also fall in love with their respective man.

This is an extremely famous piece of Depression era filmmaking, as the story is all about struggling to work chorus line girls and the musical numbers have a lot to do specifically with the Great Depression. Probably the most famous sequence from the film is the opener, We’re in the Money filled with coin twirling chorus girls and a great Ginger Rogers doing some impressive pig latin. The final sequence is rather political and the most amazingly constructed in the film, moving from soldiers in WWI marching to men marching in the breadline (Remember My Forgotten Man). Despite some serious bookends, though, the rest of the film stays in the realm of slapstick, and can be quite sexually charged, at that. My favorite musical number is Pettin’ in the Park, where boyfriends try valiantly to get in their girl’s blouses, only to be finally set back by some armor plating, but not before a sequence where all of the girls undress in silhouette. The whole thing is rather naughty, typical of pre-production code Hollywood. Well done and very entertaining.

(MUST SEE)

(April 8)

——Leaving Las Vegas (1995)——

I’d never seen this film up until now, mainly I think on the absorbed opinions of others at the time when it came out that the film was extremely depressing. And it is really damn depressing. Watching a likable alcoholic drink himself to death has a tendency to be slightly anti-joyful. I definitely think there is a big difference though between this film on addiction and something like say, Requiem for a Dream. What is interesting about Leaving Las Vegas is how it is really one of the only films I can think of about a love story between an extremely likable alcoholic and a prostitute.

Nicholas Cage of late has become a bit of a parody of himself, which helps explain why it is so shocking to rediscover what a great actor he is. There is an amazing humanism and realism to Cage’s performance, not hampered by any of his cliché Cage-isms. Simply put, Ben is a Hollywood agent who has taken to drinking because his wife left him and the drinking has gotten so bad that he is now no longer able to function properly in society. He’s not a bad guy though. In one of the opening scenes where his boss has to fire him, we get the impression that his boss feels worse about him leaving than Ben does. Everyone seems to like him, but no one wants to be around him, because he drinking has gotten so out of control. So he takes all the money he has left and goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death.

There he meets a prostitute, Sera, played by Elisabeth Shue, who immediately finds something comfortable and likable about Ben. They both are just at points in their life where they need each other. Neither one really judges the other about how they lead their life and that is really why the seem like such kindred souls. This is a great love story. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea though, I’ll just let it be known that Ben still drinks himself to death.

Along with the great acting by the two leads there is some great direction from Mike Figgis and some amazing cinematography. Mike Figgis also did the soundtrack, which is just fantastic and finds a natural rhythm and mode to help connect all of the scenes together for us. If you don’t mind kind of being depressed for two hours I’d definitely suggest you pick this one up. It’ll surprise you.

(MUST SEE)

——La Bete Humaine (1938)——

This is part two of my three-part alcoholics’ weekend. This one isn’t as obvious as the other two are, though. In fact, our main character in La Bete Humaine never drinks. He does have a very interesting character trait, however, in that he can’t drink or get excited because he has a sort of rage blackout medical condition brought on by generations of alcoholism in his family. That fact is sort of just thrown out there at the beginning of the film and never really dealt with again, except that you know it is going to come back around as some sort of catalyst to the end.

Jean Renoir seems to have a love affair with trains, so much so that the lead character of the film, played by Jean Gabin, became a symbol for his countrymen up until this very day. The plot concerns a train engineer that gets caught up in a married couple’s problems. A husband finds out that his younger, beautiful wife, Severine, played by Simone Simon, has had an affair with a wealthier man. Not one to be a cuckold, he murders the man in his train car and Jacques Lantier, the engineer on vacation while his train is being repaired, is the only one to witness them leaving his cabin. He doesn’t say anything to the police about them, however, probably because he already has his eye on Severine. The two develop an intense romance, but in true noir fashion, Severine believes the only way they can truly be together is if he murders her husband.

I found it really interesting and ironic that the sex kitten Simone Simon, who would later go on to star in the Val Lewton classics The Cat People and Curse of the Cat People, first appears on screen with, you guessed it, a cat! She is just a remarkable actress and has definite sparks with Jean Gabin. Renior does such a fantastic job shooting the film. The trains, Gabin, Simon, everything just sparkles with energy and beauty. La Bete Humaine is absolutely one of the best examples of filmmaking I’ve seen to throw in the faces of those who don’t like black and white. It also manages to be pretty fun to watch, even if it does get off to a kind of slow start. Check this one out.

(MUST SEE)

(April 9)

——Verdict (1982)——

You may think that you know how this film is going to end and you’ll probably be right. The real magic of this film, however, is that you are never 100% sure that that’s the way that the final verdict in the court case will end, up until that jury finally comes back. And that’s where the driving force of the film lies. Everyone in the film agrees that Paul Newman’s case, if tried correctly, is a slam-dunk. The problem is getting it tried correctly.

Before he even takes the case Frank Galvin has the deck stacked against him. He did the right thing once against the wrong people and lost everything. Now he’s an alcoholic loser ambulance chaser. He’s just a shadow of the man that he used to be. A gimme settlement comes across his desk from an old friend throwing him a bone. He’s about to take the easy money. But then he does something he hasn’t done in a long time: he identifies with the client.

Some doctors in a Catholic run hospital make a simple mistake with anesthesia that puts a pregnant woman into a coma and ruins her chance of ever living a normal life again. Frank just has the simple task of proving a mistake was made. Thing is, witnesses are either bought off, they disappear, or just won’t talk. Every time that he thinks he has his ace in the hole the system crushes him. By case end he hasn’t really introduced one piece of viable evidence.

The cast is great for this one, especially Paul Newman, and the movie steams right along with a character driving efficiency. But then again, what do you expect from Sidney Lumet? I’m not usually a fan of courtroom dramas, but this one definitely hits it out of the park.

(MUST SEE)