Three Movies With Little In Common

Jane Fonda in Five Acts (2018): directed by Susan Lacy: Fascinating HBO documentary about the life and times of Jane Fonda, clearly made with her full cooperation. It's not hagiographic, and Fonda is often the one to take the stuffing out of herself. Her troubled childhood, complete with a mentally ill, suicidal mother and the distant, philandering Henry Fonda as father, is perhaps the most closely observed part of the documentary. 

And I didn't know that all proceeds from the Jane Fonda Workout franchise went to charity -- that, indeed, the series was created for just that purpose. And the floating striptease in Barbarella was shot with Fonda lying on a glass floor. And here I thought she was on wires all these years. Recommended.

All Of Me (1984): adapted by Henry Olek and Phil Alden Robinson from the Ed Davis novel; directed by Carl Reiner; starring Steve Martin (Cobb), Lily Tomlin (Edwina Cutwater), Victoria Tennat (Terry), Richard Libertini (Prahka Lasa), Jason Bernard (Tyrone), and Dana Elcar (Schuyler): 

Brilliant, one-of-a-kind acting performance by Steve Martin with able support from Lily Tomlin. Martin plays a frustrated, unfulfilled lawyer who ends up with Tomlin's soul trapped in his body after a botched attempt at soul transference. Things progress from there, especially as Tomlin and Martin each controls one side of his body. 

This makes for inspired slapstick as they attempt to navigate walking, driving, using a urinal, and a variety of other tasks. A mostly sweet-natured movie, competently directed by veteran Carl Reiner with no visual flair whatsoever -- indeed, the opening titles make All of Me look like a TV movie. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Martin should at least have been nominated for a Best Acting Oscar for this one, but as we all know, the Academy hates comedy. Highly recommended.

Game Night (2018): written by Mark Perez; directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein; starring Jason Bateman (Max), Rachel McAdams (Annie), Kyle Chandler (Brooks), and Jesse Plemons (Gary): Adequate time-filler takes forever to set up its premise. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams make an appealing couple, though the 10-year age gap makes it difficult to believe they met in college. Maybe Bateman was going back to school after 10 years in the work force. Oh, Hollywood! 

Kyle Chandler is weirdly miscast as Bateman's swashbuckling, risk-taking older brother. Cameos from Danny Huston, Jeffrey Wright, and Michael C. Hall are so perfunctory that they seem more like accidental walk-throughs. Sort of genial, anyway, and Jesse Plemons exudes comic menace as a sad, creepy cop neighbour. Lightly recommended.

Beginnings and Endings

Cat Ballou: adapted from the novel by Roy Chanslor by Walter Newman and Frank Pierson; directed by Elliot Silverstein; starring Jane Fonda (Cat Ballou), Lee Marvin (Kid Shelleen/ Tim Strawn), Nat King Cole (Shouter) and Stubby Kaye (Shouter) (1965): A comic-musical elegy to the end of the movie Western as a viable box-office commodity, Cat Ballou was a huge hit that made Jane Fonda a movie star and got Lee Marvin a Best Actor Oscar for playing both the good and bad gunslingers.

Much of the younger male cast is weirdly bland, though they all try hard to be funny. Marvin actually is funny, as is whatever stunt man did the insane riding tricks the drunk gunslinger performs on a couple of occasions.

You could file this under the Farewell to the Western category of movies, a category that stretches from the farce of Blazing Saddles through the dramedy of Cat Ballou and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all the way to the drama of Unforgiven, The Shootist, and True Grit. There's a lot of singing from Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole, whose balladeers serve as both narration and Greek Chorus for the goings-on. Recommended.

Stripes: written by Len Blum, Daniel Goldberg, and Harold Ramis; directed by Ivan Reitman; starring Bill Murray (John), Harold Ramis (Russell), Warren Oates (Hulka), John Candy (Ox), P.J. Soles (Stella), and Sean Young (Louise) (1981): Bill Murray's first starring role in a genuine box-office blockbuster remains enjoyable more than 30 years later. It's interesting to note how careful the movie is to avoid killing anyone in the pursuit of laughs. It's also interesting to note how ridiculous the romance sub-plot is.

John Candy is great in his first major supporting role as "New Teen Heart-throb" Ox[burger], and Warren Oates is all angry grimaces and comic menace in what was, I believe, his last screen role. Harold Ramis can't act, even a little, but he sure could write successful film comedies. Ivan Reitman directs with his usual shaggy charm. Bill Paxton gets a credit as one of the platoon, though I didn't spot him. Recommended.

Two Christmas Stories and an Oscar

Brazil: written by Charles McKeown, Terry Gilliam, and Tom Stoppard; directed by Terry Gilliam; starring Jonathan Pryce (Sam Lowry), Robert De Niro (Harry Tuttle), Katherine Helmond (Ida Lowry), Ian Holm (Mr. Kurtzmann), Bob Hoskins (Spoor), Michael Palin (Jack Lint), and Kim Griest (Jill Layton) (1985): What's left to say about this scabrous, bleak, and jaunty sideways look into a dystopian future that looks a lot like the past? I don't know. Don't watch the studio's recut 94-minute version, for sure, with its bizarre happy ending.

How about the role of Christmas in this dystopia? Everyone's celebrating it throughout the movie, funny enough given the paranoid, joyless state of the State. Secret policemen carol in the basement of the Ministry of Information Retrieval (which is to say, the Torture Ministry). Everyone's got stacks of gifts on their desks to hand out to anyone who comes in. Everybody's shopping. Keep consuming, and put on a happy face, even if you need plastic surgery to do so.

This is Gilliam's masterpiece, filled with great performances by almost everyone (Kim Griest as the love interest is a bit weak, but she also doesn't have a lot to do). Jonathan Pryce, with his Stan Laurel face, makes a terrific bureaucratic Everyman, his daydreams making him also Walter Mitty in Oceania. Robert De Niro is amazingly loose and funny as a renegade duct repairman (there are a lot of ducts and tubes and pipes in the world of Brazil).

The whole enterprise gives us a burned out, crummy future in which the incessant terrorist bombings are really just another control method of the State. Weird motivational posters appear everywhere in the background. The mined-out countryside hides behind endless billboards covered with scenes of verdant nature. Pryce's daydreams give him a way out, but his fears of the State invade even them from time to time. Is there any escape from this particular Inferno? Highly recommended.

Iron Man Three: written by Drew Pearce and Shane Black; based on comic-book material by Stan Lee, Don Heck, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Larry Leiber, Warren Ellis and Adi Granov; directed by Shane Black; starring Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Don Cheadle (James Rhodes), Guy Pearce (Aldrich Killian) and Ben Kingsley (The Mandarin) (2013): Much better than the woeful second Iron Man movie, mainly thanks to co-writer/director Shane Black, of Die Hard fame. The whole movie seems to have been constructed around the problem of having Iron Man armor and Robert Downey Jr., unarmored, appear on camera as much as possible. The solution really boils down to Iron Robot and His Amazing Controller, Tony Stark. The movie is probably the campiest big-budget superhero movie since Batman & Robin, though here the lines are a lot funnier. Lightly recommended.




Klute: written by Andy and David E. Lewis; directed by Alan J. Pakula; starring Jane Fonda (Bree Daniels), Donald Sutherland (John Klute), Charles Cioffi (Peter Cable), and Roy Scheider (Frank Ligourin) (1971): Melancholy character study/film noir about a private detective (Sutherland's Klute) and the prostitute (Fonda's Bree) who may know something about the disappearance of Klute's businessman friend. Fonda deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her work here. Sutherland is also very good as the stoic, laconic Klute. Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis construct a film world occasionally dominated by looming shadows and a sort of run-down crumminess out on the streets of New York. Recommended.