Last Friday's session turned out to be Murphyless and "action"less: Kathleen was laid up with a bum knee, and so Robert Horton, Bruce Reid, and I tabled the projected portion of the talk on Andre De Toth's Ramrod, Otto Preminger's River of No Return, et al. which KAM was jazzed to spearhead. Later ... say, when the enterprising Olive digital distribution outfit brings out Ramrod on disk.... Meanwhile, the July 13 installment is now up in the "An Evening With..." section of The Seattle Channel's website. Kathleen's in that one: http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3411202 -RTJ
Premium Rush opens on a helmeted bike messenger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) flying slo-mo across the screen, a long-legged bird against the sky. How daredevil biker Wilee (as in Coyote) came to be so dangerously and beautifully airborne requires backtracking through a thriller narrative packed with twists and turns to eventually fetch up where we began.
Suggests Kathleen Murphy at MSN/Movies:Step back and catch your breath with these cool fall picks coming your way.
A syllabus of smart ideas rather than a persuasive life-changing journey, Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts is another in a long line of recent cinematic Bildungsroman. That fancy literary handle describes stories about sensitive souls, usually a young man, coming of age—or trying to—courtesy of eye-opening and/or mind-blowing experiences. Hollywood and indie helmers alike continue to be hot for a particular big-screen variant of this genre: movies about not-so-young Peter Pans stuck in something like permanent adolescence, dudes still struggling to make it over the hump into adulthood.
Olive Films has just released DVDs and Blu-rays of four films in the fondly remembered "Three Mesquiteers" series from the late Thirties/early Forties. When they were about 20 years old and I was 14-15, I thought they were swell. An old Amazon review of one of them follows.
Just a quick recommend, before it's too late. One of my very favorite movies is making a rare TV appearance Monday, Oct. 1, at 5 p.m. West Coast time on Turner Classic Movies.
During one week last year, two film versions of Louis Pergaud's popular 1912 book War of the Buttons dueled for pride of place on French theater screens. Having hit the American critical and commercial jackpot with French imports like The Artist and The Intouchables, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was happy to snatch up the Buttons guaranteed by helmer Christophe Barratier to be an entirely "new" take on the familiar story (already filmed three times) about country kids playing at war.
There was a period in the late Seventies when the peculiarities of tax law and international financing led some American filmmakers, including a number of interesting mavericks, to make movies in Europe on European money for sometimes evanescent production entities. The end result of one of these deals is about to reappear on DVD and Blu-ray after decades of obscurity. I wrote about it at the time of its release, mostly admiringly. And I recall a rainy night during its first-run engagement when I whiled away a pleasant hour rewatching part of it in the late, lamented UA70 Cinema on Sixth Avenue—killing time before slipping through the manager's office into the UA150, to join my wife and a crowd throbbingly anticipating the prerelease screening of (insert the phrase "a little picture called") Star Wars.
Kathleen Murphy finds that, "Though deliciously rude and crude, 3, 2, 1 ... Frankie Go Boom possesses a surprisingly sweet heart."
Jazzed at the prospect of two months packed with holiday pleasure, from Thanksgiving turkey feasts to Christmas' orgy of gift-giving and getting? Jump-start your cinematic fun by turning off your Smartphone and your iPad and your monster-screen TV! 'Tis the season when movie marquees sparkle and shine, luring us into 2012's biggest, best and sexiest flicks.
Everybody involving in the making of Chasing Mavericks swore this surfing film would be different. Well, good intentions don't hang ten.
John Huston's 1979 film of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood is about to be shown as part of a Turner Classic Movies marathon of literary adaptations (11:15 p.m. tonight, Nov. 21). Here's my Weekly review from when the movie reached Seattle in spring 1980.
On Dec. 5, Nancy Scurlock, a resident of Merrill Gardens Retirement Community, 805 Fourth Ave. N., presented Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen with a thank you letter for his role in getting a crosswalk at the site repaved.