Dial 'M' for Murder: adapted by Frederick Knott from his own stage play; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Ray Milland (Tony Wendice); Grace Kelly (Margot Wendice), Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday), John Williams (Chief Inspector Hubbard), and Anthony Dawson (Swann) (1954): Mostly minor Hitchcock has the cast but lacks a top-rate script: if you didn't know it was based on a play, you'd figure it out by the second act. Ray Milland's cunning plan to kill wife Grace Kelly by proxy turns out to have too many moving parts -- or perhaps too few. It's a nice time waster, and all of the leads are fine, including John Williams as an increasingly Columbo-esque English policeman. Originally shown in 3-D, only the repeated establishment of an extreme foreground in most shots overtly acknowledges the process. Lightly recommended.
The Wedding Ringer: written by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender; directed by Jeremy Garelick; starring Kevin Hart (Jimmy Callahan), Josh Gad (Doug Harris), Kaley Cuoco (Gretchen Palmer), and Jorge Garcia (Lurch) (2015): Sloppy but engaging buddy comedy manages to graft the narrative apparatus of a Heist movie onto a wedding scenario. Josh Gad plays a lovable, insanely wealthy tax attorney who has no friends -- not even one to be the Best Man at his wedding. Enter Kevin Hart as a man who sells his services as a Best Man to the friendless. And the services of whatever people he can round up to fill the roles of Gad's imaginary groomsmen, Gad having invented and named those groomsmen and the imaginary Best Man to his fiancee and the wedding planner prior to engaging Hart's services. There are rough spots and sections that fall flat, but overall this is a decent, lightweight comedy buoyed by the charms of both Hart and Gad. Recommended.
The Terminal Beach (1964) by J.G. Ballard, containing the following stories: A Question of Re-Entry (1963); The Drowned Giant (1964); End-Game (1963); The Illuminated Man (1964); The Reptile Enclosure (1963); The Delta at Sunset (1964); The Terminal Beach (1964); Deep End (1961); The Volcano Dances (1964); Billennium (1961); The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon (1964); and The Lost Leonardo (1964).
Icy, engaging collection of early 1960's short stories from J.G. Ballard. Many of the stories are at least nominally science fiction. All of them are Weird, though in several cases this Weirdness is entirely a question of tone: nothing overtly fantastic or science-fictional occurs in five of the twelve stories. Nonetheless, even those stories disturb one enough that they straddle the line between the strange and the horrific.
Ballard was only a couple of years away from his avant-garde, experimental period. None of the stories included here are challenging in a structural sense. Several challenge the reader's perceptions of genre, however, along with one's ability to navigate subjective narration and altered states of consciousness. Ballard's concern with the fragility of the human psyche manifests itself again and again in various ways. So, too, the apocalypse, always observed in a cool and somewhat detached manner by either his narrators or the third-person narrative voice.
But as dry and cool a voice as Ballard can be, behind all those narrative masks exists the mind of an aesthete. The end of the world (if that's what it is) is a hauntingly beautiful place in "The Illuminated Man." Thoughts on art, and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, dominate the quietly horrifying "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and the jolly fantasy "The Lost Leonardo." And a description of the decay of the body of a mysterious giant takes up the bulk of "The Drowned Giant," a description that haunts and troubles even as the story questions the very nature of the fantastic and people's reactions to unusual events.
One could call "The Drowned Giant" a horror story about familiarization and the ever-encroaching Un-fantastic. So too "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and "The Delta at Sunset" with their mentally disturbed narrators seeking an escape into a fantastically distorted hallucination that surpasses the 'real' world in scope and beauty, the same 'real' world that reduces the drowned giant to a debased and dismantled normativity. In all, a fine collection. Highly recommended.
The Big Clock: adapted by Jonathan Latimer and Harold Goldman from the novel by Kenneth Fearing; directed by John Farrow; starring Ray Milland (George Stroud), Charles Laughton (Earl Janoth), Maureen O'Sullivan (Georgette Stroud), Rita Johnson (Pauline York), Elsa Lanchester (Louise Patterson), and George Macready (Steve Hagen) (1948): Enjoyable, occasionally quite quirky film noir/ 'Wrong Man' thriller starring Ray Milland as a crime-magazine editor who finds himself tracking himself as a wrongly accused murderer. Yes, it's an American noir with more than a hint of Borges in its DNA.
There are a lot of gratifyingly wacky supporting characters and off-beat situations, to the extent that one figures the Coen Brothers may have watched this movie at some point during their artistic evolution. Charles Laughton is a creepy, blustery hoot as a tyrannical, time-obsessed magazine publisher. Fun and under 100 minutes. Recommended.
The Sapphires: adapted by Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson from the stage play by Tony Briggs; directed by Wayne Blair; starring Deborah Mailman (Gail), Miranda Tapsell (Cynthia), Jessica Mauboy (Julie), Shari Sebbens (Kay), and Chris O'Dowd (Dave Lovelace) (2012): Based on a stage play that was based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the story of an Australian aboriginal girl group that ends up entertaining troops in Viet Nam in the late 1960's. Chris O'Dowd's Irish band manager seems to have been parachuted in from the realm of pure fiction in order to secure financing.
But while he's billed first, O'Dowd plays a supporting role to the four women. The movie may be fairly breezy and song-packed, but it does hit on some of the horrible truths of the Australian treatment of aboriginals in general and children in specific over the years. Nonetheless, this is more a celebration of the power of song (and songs are a key component of aboriginal culture and mythology) than it is a scathing historical drama. Recommended.
Bad Words: written by Andrew Dodge; directed by Jason Bateman; starring Jason Bateman (Guy Trilby), Kathryn Hahn (Jenny Widgeon), Rohan Chand (Chaitanya Chopra), Philip Baker Hall (Dr. Bowman), and Alison Janney (Dr. Deagan) (2014): Jason Bateman directs himself starring as a 40-year-old man who exploits a loophole in the rules for a U.S. spelling bee (based on the Scripps bee) so as to compete against 49 tweens for the $50,000 prize. He does so for reasons that become obvious about halfway through.
The movie and Bateman's character are both gratifyingly nasty throughout, though this isn't wholly a black comedy. Bateman's character's growing friendship with one outcast contestant -- cleverly played by Rohan Chand -- leads to some pretty funny, non-Hollywoodesque scenes of debauchery. So too Bateman's relationship with Kathryn Hahn's reporter, and Bateman's psychological gamesmanship with whatever tweens are unlucky enough to sit next to him during the activities. The movie could be funnier, but it's still pretty funny. Recommended.
