Wilmington By Mike WilmingtonWilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: The Graduate
Sometimes a movie comes at exactly the right time. Like The Graduate — director Mike Nichols’ and screenwriters Buck Henry’s and Calder Willingham’s marvelously edgy and arousing romantic comedy about plastics and family affairs and life in California, with one of those heroes, or anti-heroes, who strike a chord: young, nervous, recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who’s a little worried about his future and also torn between his clandestine affair with a married lover, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and his seemingly genuine open-air love for her beautiful college-age daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Ted
Listen, I’m like almost everybody else. If you make me laugh, I’ll forgive you. I’ll forgive almost anything. In fact, I feel here like the priest with the Mafia guy on the other side of the screen. There’s a lot to forgive and expiate: a lot of Hail Marys here. But what the hell. It made me laugh. I forgive it. Bring it in, yuh bastid. Where’s the brewskis?
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: The 39 Steps
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC THE 39 STEPS (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars) U.K.: Alfred Hitchcock, 1935 (Criterion Collection) Back in 1985, I wrote these liner notes for one of the earliest Criterion Collection releases: a videotape, in a silver-colored box, of Alfred Hitchcock’s love-on-the-run spy-story masterpiece, The 39 Steps. (The original is still on their website.)…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: 21 Jump Street; Spider-Man; Spider-Man 2; Spider-Man 3; Erin Brockovich; Sister Act; Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
The first two Spider-Man movies were such smash critical hits (Spider-Man 2, co-scripted by Alvin Sargent, has been hailed as the acme of the whole genre, until The Avengers), that an inevitable backlash plagued the vulnerable and tearful Spider-Man 3. (Seen by itself, most critics would have probably liked it fine – just as the public liked all three). But some smasheroos deserve their popularity and this is one (excuse me, these are three) of them.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Deliverance
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC DELIVERANCE (40th Anniversary collector’s edition) Four Stars U.S.; John Boorman, 1972 (Warner Bros.) Four Southern businessmen, searching for the joys of youth, join together for a Georgia canoe trip on the beautiful but often dangerously turbulent Cahulawassee River. Soon however, after a violent confrontation with two evil backwoodsmen, they find themselves…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: The Artist
It’s a cinematic feast in the style of the old time silent movies that flourished from the time of film‘s invention in 1895 — or at least since Georges Méliès started telling stories with them before the turn of the century — until 1927, when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer made the screen speak and croon and told us we ain’t heard nothing yet and, unmaliciously of course , drove a nail in the coffin of the old technology, while ushering in the new.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
The whole movie is nervous and over-loud and expensive-looking, full of tacky jump-at-you 3D effects; and watching it sometimes makes you feel as if the country was under attack by a conspiracy of blood-sucking idiots. Even though it was shot by the sometimes marvelous Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, The Black Stallion), the film’s visual style seems like a mistake.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Brave.
“Brave” is a beautifully visualized, sometimes blisteringly funny and exciting Pixar cartoon fairytale about a wee Scottish lassie who grows up into a feisty, flame-haired young adventuress who shoots off great big arrows and battles bears and witches and boisterous clansmen.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Andrew Sarris (1928-2012)
Andy Sarris was my favorite movie critic because, in “The American Cinema,” he opened up a world for me, for all of us. That’s what a good critic, or a great one, does.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: And Everything Is Going Fine; Sex and Death to the Age of 14.
He’s dead now, and his friends suspect he threw himself off the Staten Island Ferry and drowned, took his life because he was suffering the pain from a bad traffic accident on a lonely road in Ireland that left him with a smashed skull and some brain damage, and, according to Nell Casey “an orbital fracture, a broken hip, and a permanent limp“ — unable to swim, unable to ski. Unable… So he jumped, maybe. Drowned, maybe. As the Manhahttan skyline approached or receded — maybe. Unless he was on the other side of the ferry. We don’t know because he isn’t around to tell the story.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Rock of Ages
“Rock of Ages” is a rock movie for people who still have their old Foreigner and REO Speedwagon album collections intact, but can’t really feel the beat.
Read the full article »Wilimington on Movies: Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
Jane Fonda plays Grandma Grace, whom you might describe as the permanent ambassador from Woodstock Nation. A devotee of sex, drugs and rock n’roll — as well as peace, love and understanding — and a still sexually adventurous old gal who claims she was once in a threesome with Leonard Cohen, Grace lives in Woodstock in a combination pot farm and upscale painters studio that looks as if it were designed by somebody rich and famous for somebody like Jane Fonda.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: That’s My Boy
Say one thing for Adam Sandler: He isn’t afraid of looking like an idiot on screen. Or a boor. Or a horny dude. Or a comedian who doesn’t give a damn what the the critics think of him. In Sandler’s outrageously uninhibited, defiantly obnoxious but good-natured new movie, That’s My Boy, he plays, to the hilt, Donny Berger, an outrageously uninhibited, defiantly obnoxious, good-natured guy who became famous in the ’80s — or had fame thrust upon him, as his classmates colorfully put it — when, as a lippy 13-year-old eighth-grader, he had an affair with his sexy junior high (or middle school) teacher, Mary McGarricle (Eva Amurri Martino), had a baby with her, and became a tabloid sensation.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: La Terra Trema; Conversation Piece
La Terra Trema is an almost didactic and preachy leftist film, which often tells you how it feels. (Visconti, along with Antonio Pietrangeli, writes and speaks the narration himself.) But there‘s a majesty in the images of landscape and sea, and an unforced naturalism in the performances, by the actual villagers of Aci Trezza, that both pull you deeply into the human side of the story.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs. Sherlock Holmes: AGOS; Journey 2; Ghost Rider: SOV
Elementary…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: In Darkness
The sewers of Lvov are small and inky black and steeped in an airless-looking gloom, cramped and comfortless, wet with sewage and slime. These sewers look like real sewers. They are true hellholes, and the people hiding there are a mismatched crowd of businessmen, operators, snobs, adulterers, ordinary people, families and even children, all escaping from the Lvov ghetto, crowded together on the walkways and pressed to the breaking point.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Children of Paradise
Prevert’s script has never been surpassed as sheer literature for the screen. The cast is a great one too, from that ultimate femme fatale Arletty as the irresistible beauty Garance, to the four superb actors who play the four men who adore her unto death: lively, cheerfully seductive Pierre Brasseur as the commanding virtuoso classical actor Frederick LeMaitre; cold Louis Salou as the reptilian Count Edouard de Montray; Marcel Herrand with his evil smile, as the nihilist/dandy/playwright/thief/murderer Lacenaire; and melancholy-looking genius Jean-Louis Barrault as the great sad-eyed mime.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Prometheus
The template for both the first Alien and Prometheus — movies about small, isolated groups of humans besieged by a malignant space alien or aliens — is probably John W. Campbell’s famous story “Who Goes There?” which was later made, not very faithfully, into Howard Hawks’ and Christian Nyby’s zingy 1951 pop classic The Thing from Another World, and later, more faithfully, into John Carpenter’s gory and generally underrated 1982 The Thing. The 1979 Alien sort of reset that template for all time, at least for movies. (It’s still much used and abused).
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs. Coriolanus
Here we have another film treasure taken from the vast and wonderful dramaturgy of William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright who ever lived: “Coriolanus,” bitter, bleak, murderous play of the hell of warfare, of deadly comrades in arms, of the masses and the few, of the ties of blood and the evils of politics — now made into a movie set in the age of bombs and the land of ethnic cleansing (Serbia), directed by and starring, in the title role, that fine melancholy actor Ralph Fiennes, with a performance so extraordinary by Vanessa Redgrave, as Volumnia, the ultimate warrior‘s mother, that it takes your breath away to watch her, and to hear her — as it must have staggered Fiennes while he watched and directed and acted with her, and said the words above, with feeling.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs.The Woodmans
One problem with being a great artist, or a hugely gifted artist, is that the temperament isn’t always easy to live with — especially for the artists themselves. Another problem: You have to depend on perceptive critics and audiences to earn your living or win recognition, and they aren’t always available.
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