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Archive for March, 2014

HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “JESSE JAMES”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Tyrone Power as Jesse, Jane Darwell as Ma James

Tyrone Power as Jesse, Jane Darwell as Ma James

“Jesse James” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 15, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St.  Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

You don’t watch the Tyrone Power/Henry Fonda version of “Jesse James” for an accurate history lesson.

If you want something approaching realism in a depiction of the infamous James Gang, try 2007’s excellent “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” with Brad Pitt as the psychotic outlaw and Casey Affleck as the repellent little creep who shot him in the back.

Back in 1939, though, audiences were all about a romantic Jesse James, and this Henry King-directed Western delivered.

It’s highly selective in the story it tells. For example, it makes no mention of the James brothers’ background as ruthless Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. Rather, Jesse (Power) and Frank (Fonda) are presented as simple farm folk (albeit good with guns) who turn to violence when a brutish agent for the railroad attempts to seize their land – and kills their mother with a bomb.

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“STRANGER BY THE LAKE”:

Posted in Uncategorized on March 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »

stranger“STRANGER BY THE LAKE” My rating: C+ (Opening March 7 at the Tivoli)

97 minutes | No MPAA rating

There are movies with gay characters, and then there are gay movies.

Writer/director Alain Guiraudie’s “Stranger By the Lake,” to its detriment, falls into the latter category.

Guiraudie is nothing if not ambitious. Here he has created an erotic thriller about a young man who falls for a hunky fellow whom he knows is a murderer. Alfred Hitchcock’s fingerprints are all over this tale of sexual obsession, and Guiraudie’s distinctive presentational style has its source in Antonioni’s 1966 headscratcher  “Blow-Up.”

The film contains a great deal of casual male nudity — which is no big deal. But the enterprise is very nearly derailed by several hardcore sex scenes — the full stand-up-and-salute monty — which work against the eerie mood Guiraudie is trying so hard to create. At this point “Stranger By the Lake” stops being a thriller populated by gay characters and becomes a gay movie, one geared to satisfy the sexual voyeurism of the gay audience.

(I’m not picking on gay cinema.  If the relationship depicted had been heterosexual it, too, would have trouble recovering from full-penetration porn moments.)

The entire movie unfolds during one summer week at a rural lake where gay men congregate. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a pleasant young guy out cruising for a bit of action. He makes the acquaintance of the oddball Henri (Patrick d’Assumcao), a fat, sad-sack straight guy who sits apart from everyone else like a contemplative Buddha. But Franck’s real interest is in Michel (Chrisophe Paou), a moustachioed Adonis who is dealing with a very clingy and jealous boyfriend.

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“JIMMY P.”: A Troubled Mind

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Jimmy_P_Movie_Wallpaper_10_qlaon“JIMMY P.”My rating: B (Opening March 7 at the Screenland Armour)

117 minutes | No MPAA rating

Mental health movies tend to run in well-established ruts.

The theraputic breakthrough. The hellish hospital. Indifferent doctors and sadistic aides/nurses.

“Jimmy P.” isn’t having any of that. This drama from French director Arnaud Desplechin (his last movie was 2008’s “A Christmas Tale,”  a fondly remembered family drama with Catherine Daneuve as the head of a troubled but still tight family) is fiercely, stubbornly realistic.  As well it should be, since  Desplechin adapted it from a memoir by psychiatrist George Devereux, who worked for years at the famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka.

Jimmy Picard (Oscar winner Benicico del Toro) is a Blackfoot Indian from Montana, recently returned from World War II. While in France he suffered a severe head injury in a fall from a moving truck.  Now he’s suffering from what today we’d call PTSD, which manifests itself in crippling headaches, blindness, and visual and auditory hallucinations.

The Veterans Administration sends him to Topeka, Kansas (it was shot in Michigan and Montana), where the doctors conclude there’s nothing wrong with him physically.  Conventional psychiatric therapy seems the best option.

But Jimmy won’t talk. Though he can be perfectly lucid and even eloquent, something in his Native American background gets in the way of the probing that is part of therapy.

As a last resort, clinic head Karl Menninger (Larry Pine) calls an old friend, Romanian anthropologist and psychiatrist Devereux (Mathieu Almaric), who might be described as an Indian groupie.  He’s fascinated with all things Native America and just spent two years living with a tribe in the Mojave Desert.

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“ADULT WORLD”: That sucking sound

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Emma Roberts, John Cusack

Emma Roberts, John Cusack

“ADULT WORLD” My rating: D (Opening March 7 at the Screenland Armour)

 97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In the skin-crawling indie comedy “Adult World,” former tweener star Emma Roberts (TV’s “Nancy Drew”) dulls up the screen as a college coed whose lack of self awareness and sense of entitlement  is so total as to be crippling.

Her Amy, a student at Syracuse University, has convinced herself that she’s a great poet. In fact, she is a ghastly poet (“…shattered wings catapult the vulva to vast oblivion…”), but nothing like a reality check gets in the way of her quest for literary greatness.

In short order she has dropped out of school and been kicked out of her parents’ home.  She gets a job clerking at Adult World, a mom & pop adult book/video store owned by a mom and pop (Cloris Leachman and John Collum, who make an early appearance and then bail) and managed by the sweet/cute/ironic  Alex (Evan Peters, Jesse Eisenberg now being too old for these parts.).

Given the setting, you might expect some “Clerks”-style satire of the whole porn thing, but  we get only a few half-hearted stabs at the store’s loser clientele (“Do you have the anti-microbial anal beads?”). Outrageous? Hardly. It it all feels very 1980s made-for-television. (Still can’t figure out what earned the movie an R rating.)

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HOLLYWOOD’s GREATEST YEAR: “DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 2, 2014| 1 Comment »

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert

“Drums Along the Mohawk” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 8, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St.  Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

Director John Ford had a terrific year in 1939.

One of his films from that year, Stagecoach, was instantly recognized as a classic and was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture. Plus, it turned around the career of a middling cowboy actor named John Wayne, who thereafter was one of Hollywood’s greatest stars.

Another Ford effort from ’39, Young Mr. Lincoln (with Henry Fonda excelling as the future president), is recognized as one of the finest pieces of Americana ever captured on celluloid.

Given the stratospheric acclaim directed at those two landmarks, it’s not unusual that Ford’s third film from ’39, Drums Along the Mohawk, often gets overlooked.

Which is a real shame, since it’s a strong effort that dovetails seamlessly with Ford’s recurring theme of what it means to be an American.

In addition, it was Ford’s first Technicolor film, and right out of the gate he excelled at capturing brilliant, vibrant images.  In fact, he dismissed color as ridiculously easy to work with when compared to black-and-white.

Based on Walter Edmunds’ bestselling novel (it’s still a great read), Drums centers on the Revolutionary War as it was fought on the frontier, with Yankee settlers battling Indian tribes. The Indians have been convinced by the British that as an independent nation, Americans would waste no time in sweeping westward and seizing tribal land, and that their best interests are to be found by siding with the redcoats.

That’s the story’s background.  But the real meat of the yarn lies in the relationship of and Gil and Lana Martin, newlyweds carving a life out of the wilderness.

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