Threed Murray

The Sting: written by David S. Ward; directed by George Roy Hill; starring Paul Newman (Henry Gondorff), Robert Redford (Johnny Hooker), Robert Shaw (Doyle Lonnegan), Charles Durning (Lt. Snyder), Ray Walston (Singleton), Eileen Brennan (Billie), and Harold Gould (Kid Twist) (1973): The Sting won 7 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, while also making a ton of money (domestically and adjusted for inflation to 2015, it sits $100 million or more ($2015) above The Dark Knight and Jurassic World as of August 2015). A twisty caper/scam comedy pits grifters Robert Redford and Paul Newman against New York mobster Robert Shaw in a complicated con game involving race tracks, gambling, poker, Western Union, assassins, and vengeance. 

The actors are all terrific from the leads to all the fine character actors like Eileen Brennan, Ray Walston, and Charles Durning who fill out the roster. They don't really make Hollywood blockbusters with clever scripts like this any more -- it's a relic of a more elegant age, the early 1970's... Highly recommended.

Groundhog Day: written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis; directed by Harold Ramis; starring Bill Murray (Phil), Andie MacDowell (Rita), and Chris Elliott (Larry) (1993): One of the more philosophically interesting of all comedies past or present, and a fantasy-comedy bracingly buttressed with despair and existential anomie. Of all the great comedies Harold Ramis wrote, co-wrote, and/or directed, this is probably the greatest. That Bill Murray didn't get a sniff of a Best Actor Oscar is yet another example of the ridiculous lack of respect the Academy has for comedy. Highly recommended.

Mad Dog and Glory: written by Richard Price; directed by John McNaughton; starring Robert De Niro (Wayne 'Mad Dog' Dobie), Uma Thurman (Glory), Bill Murray (Frank Milo), David Caruso (Mike), and Mike Starr (Harold ) (1993): Enjoyable dramedy sees introverted, lonely police photographer Robert De Niro save gangster Bill Murray's life and in return receive Uma Thurman as a "friend" from Murray for a week. Richard Price's screenplay is surprisingly pungent yet humane (which sounds like the description for the worst wine ever made). 

Murray conveys a fair bit of menace in his handful of scenes as a mob guy who dreams of being a stand-up comic. De Niro is painfully withdrawn, and Thurman charming. The movie doesn't avoid the tougher issues raised by its premise, though it does sugarcoat them -- and anyone tired of the massive age gaps between male and female leads in Hollywood movies could use this one as Exhibit A. Recommended.

St. Vincent:  written and directed by Theodore Melfi; starring Bill Murray (Vincent), Melissa McCarthy (Maggie), Maomi Watts (Daka), Chris O'Dowd (Brother Geraghty), Terrence Howard (Zucko), and Jaeden Lieberher (Oliver) (2014): One can see how this movie won the People's Choice Award at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. It's a crowd-pleasing dramedy with a fine performance by Bill Murray as the grumpy Vincent of the title, a hard-drinking retiree who's just been either blessed or cursed with new next-door neighbours for his Brooklyn home, Melissa McCarthy as newly divorced Maggie and 12-year-old Jaeden Lieberher as Oliver.

Everything stays just enough on the comedy side of things to forgive the movie some of its improbabilities, not to mention its occasional resemblance to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino. The leads are all winning. Murray is irascible but occasionally serious and haunted. McCarthy seems to be relieved to be playing an actual sympathetic character instead of a caricature. Jaeden Lieberher is extraordinarily good as the small but feisty Oliver -- it's a totally non-annoying kid performance. Hallelujah! Naomi Watts is funny in the somewhat thankless role of a wacky, malaprop-spewing, pregnant Russian prostitute with a heart of, perhaps, copper. You'll see most of the prop beats coming, but they are well-handled, and Murray's character is never forced to undergo a complete domestication of his often unlikable character. Recommended.

Manhattan Murder Mystery: written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman; directed by Woody Allen; starring Woody Allen (Larry Lipton), Diane Keaton (Carol Lipton), Jerry Adler (Paul House), Alan Alda (Ted), and Anjelica Huston (Marcia Fox) (1993): Amiable, somewhat overlong mid-career Allen comedy sees bored married couple Woody and Diane Keaton fall into investigating what Keaton believes to be the murder of one of their Manhattan apartment neighbours. Happily, pursuing a murderer spices up their marriage. The narrative spins its wheels a lot for the first 45 minutes before getting traction, at which point it becomes something of a romp recalling Allen's earlier, funnier work. Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston offer humourous supporting work. Recommended.

Mickey Mantle Vs. The Waste Land

The Natural: adapted from the Bernard Malamud novel by Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry; directed by Barry Levinson; starring Robert Redford (Roy Hobbs), Robert Duvall (Max Mercy), Glenn Close (Iris Gaines), Kim Basinger (Memo Paris), Wilford Brimley (Pop Fisher), Barbara Hershey (Harriet Bird), Robert Prosky (The Judge), and Darren McGavin (Gus Sands) (1984): 

Bernard Malamud's much more downbeat bit of American Arthuriana becomes instead a whimsical myth of a movie, filled with out-sized moments, signs, portents, lightning, and destiny. I like it a lot. If you're looking for a realistic baseball movie, look elsewhere. The cast is terrific throughout, including the curiously unbilled Darren McGavin as gambler Gus Sands, who probably fixed the World Series in the universe of The Natural. 

Set in 1939, The Natural follows one miraculous season in the life of 36-year-old rookie Roy Hobbs, a phenom who vanished for 16 years after being shot by a woman who went around shooting great athletes, usually fatally. Hobbs gets signed by the New York Knights, whose crusty old manager/part-owner Wilford Brimley is reluctant to play him despite the fact that the Knights are super-terrible. But eventually Hobbs will play. Birds will sing. Lightning will strike.

Malamud loaded up the original novella with a mash-up of mythic elements. The movie also plays with the stories of King Arthur, the legend of the Fisher King, and the journeys of Odysseus. Or in other words, that dug-out water fountain that Pops Fisher complains about early on has mythic significance. His name is Fisher, he's the king of a baseball team named the Knights, and he's having trouble getting decent water. Oh, go look it up. 

Is there a never-healed wound in someone's side? Is there a temptress whose name keeps getting pronounced so as to rhyme with 'Nimue'? Will someone at last set his lands in order? Oh, watch it. It's great, and Barry Levinson keeps things just light enough and goofy enough at times that the viewer doesn't choke on all the allusions and portents. 

Robert Redford was perfectly cast as Roy Hobbs, who is in many ways the Light Side of Jay Gatsby, whom Redford also played. And it's bracing to see Robert Duvall play a complete jerk as reporter/cartoonist Max Mercy -- it makes you realize that he seems to have spent the 30 years since The Natural playing lovable curmudgeons. Highly recommended.

American Lives

The Great Gatsby: adapted by Francis Ford Coppola from the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald; directed by Jack Clayton; starring Robert Redford (Jay Gatsby), Sam Waterston (Nick Carraway), Mia Farrow (Daisy Buchanan), Bruce Dern (Tom Buchanan), Lois Chiles (Jordan Baker), Scott Wilson (George Wilson), Karen Black (Myrtle Wilson), and Roberts Blossom (Mr. Gatz) (1974): Faithful, somewhat plodding adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age masterpiece. Mia Farrow makes for a somewhat weak Daisy, but Redford as Gatsby and especially Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway are pretty much pitch perfect, as is Bruce Dern as the almost Mr. Hydesque brute from old money, Tom Buchanan. Coppola parachuted in to save a hated, unfinished Truman Capote adaptation in about three weeks. It's too bad they couldn't have had him direct the film as well -- I'd imagine it would have had a lot more bounce and zest than what it got from the workmanlike Jack Clayton. Recommended.

The Last Picture Show: adapted by Peter Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry from the novel by Larry McMurtry; directed by Peter Bogdanovich; starring Timothy Bottoms (Sonny Crawford), Jeff Bridges (Duane Jackson), Cybill Shepherd (Jacy Farrow), Ben Johnson (Sam the Lion), Cloris Leachman (Ruth Popper), Ellen Burstyn (Lois Farrow), Eileen Brennan (Genevieve), Sam Bottoms (Billy), and Randy Quaid (Lester Marlow) (1971): Often found on 100 Best Movie Lists either All-Time or All-American, The Last Picture Show is a gritty, minutely observed look at life in a small Texas town in the early 1950's.

Naturalistic and episodic though carefully structured, starkly black-and-white, beautifully acted by newcomers like Cybill Shepherd and old-timers like Ben Johnson, who would win a posthumous Best Supporting Oscar for his role as Sam the Lion. Cloris Leachman would also win an Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the haunted, lonely wife of the town's high school's coach and phys. ed. teacher. A young Timothy Bottoms is the protagonist, while a young Jeff Bridges plays his best friend, Duane. Well deserves its place in the upper reaches of the pantheon of American movies. Highly recommended.

Malcolm X: adapted by Spike Lee and Arnold Perl from the book by Malcolm X and Alex Haley; directed by Spike Lee; starring Denzel Washington (Malcolm Little/X), Angela Bassett (Betty Shabazz), Albert Hall (Baines), Al Freeman Jr. (Elijah Muhammad), Delroy Lindo (West Indian Archie), Spike Lee (Shorty), Lonette McKee (Louise Little), Tommy Hollis (Earl Little), James McDaniel (Brother Earl), Kate Vernon (Sophia), and Theresa Randle (Laura) (1992): Spike Lee's epic biopic towers over most movies of the 1990's, and should at the very least have earned Best Picture and Best Actor (for Denzel Washington as Malcolm X) Oscars. But Hollywood really loved Al Pacino chewing the scenery in Scent of a Woman that year. So it goes.

The movie takes surprisingly few liberties with the facts of the story, primarily in creating compound characters to streamline the narrative. As Malcolm X (nee Malcolm Little), Denzel Washington gets to travel from hustler and hood to questing intellect over the 3+ hours of the movie, and all of it convincing. The rest of the cast is superb, with stand-outs including Angela Bassett as Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz, and Al Freeman Jr. as the manipulative, charismatic Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam.

Lee's direction conveys gravitas, lightness of tone, and impending disaster with equal surety. One can see the energetic, bombastic director of previous films that include Do the Right Thing, but that director can now give the viewer a moving, often very formal biopic in which the didactic moments are dramatically satisfying. Lee also plays with film stock and other factors to simulate period-specific 'real' footage from the time in as deft a manner as anything Oliver Stone had managed in JFK the previous year (and Malcolm X actually uses footage from JFK for the Kennedy assassination in this film, as Stone was one of many who helped Lee get the long-delayed Malcolm X made).

Washington, Lee, and the screenwriters credited and uncredited make Malcolm X into a sympathetic figure on an almost unbelievably rich and complex journey of spiritual growth. One misses him when he's gone from the film, while the film brilliantly shifts from its depiction of events to actual footage of the real Malcolm. The two-part conclusion to the film, with Ossie Davis's 1965 funeral oration followed by contemporary footage shot for the film, is a stunner. So too the movie. Highly recommended.

At the Ends of the West

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: written by William Goldman; directed by George Roy Hill; starring Robert Redford (The Sundance Kid), Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy), and Katharine Ross (Etta Place) (1969): Pitch-perfect Western dramedy gives us terrific, charismatic performances from Redford and Newman and lovely supporting work from the under-rated Katharine Ross. The musical interlude set to "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" doesn't seem so weird now that every film and TV show sets at least one scene to a pop song.

A distinguished member of a long line of Westerns that are also requiems for the Western, with this one set at about the same time as the dark and apocalyptic The Wild Bunch. William Goldman's script and George Roy Hill's direction keep everything zipping along merrily, even in the direst moments. The cleverest stylistic touch is the use of both period and fake-period photography and footage as chapter markers in the story. Highly recommended.


Shane: adapted by A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher from the novel by Jack Schaefer; directed by George Stevens; starring Alan Ladd (Shane), Jean Arthur (Marian Starrett), Van Heflin (Joe Starrett), Brandon de Wilde (Joey Starrett), Jack Palance (Jack Wilson), and Ben Johnson (Chris Calloway) (1953): George Steven's elegy to the end of Western expansion, and the attendant end of gunslingers and open ranching, holds up pretty well: the things that might annoy us now also annoyed Francois Truffaut when it came out. Stevens loves having animal behaviour comment on the human proceedings, a love that sometimes borders on unintentional comedy. Well, he did cut his directorial teeth on Laurel and Hardy!

The other flaw, the annoying Brandon de Wilde as Joey Starrett, the boy who idolizes Alan Ladd's melancholy gunslinger Shane, sometimes make one long for a CGI-corrected version of the film with someone less strident as the boy. So it goes. The adults are all great, from Ladd's noble gunslinger to Van Heflin's naturalistically played farmer and Jean Arthur's hopeful wife to Van heflin, all the way to the grimy land baron and his ruthless mob and, at the end of it all, Jack Palance as the menancing hired gun brought in to drive the farmers off land the rancher wants for grazing. Looming above all the action are the majestic Grand Tetons, setting the affairs of humans against the Sublime and indifferent arc of geological time. Recommended.

Based on...

A River Runs Through It: adapted from the story by Norman Maclean by Richard Friedenberg; directed by Robert Redford; starring Craig Sheffer (Norman Maclean), Brad Pitt (Paul Maclean), Tom Skerrit (Reverend Maclean), Brenda Blethyn (Mrs. Maclean), Emily Lloyd (Jessie Burns), and Robert Redford (Narrator) (1992): Winner of the 1992 Oscar for Best Cinematography for Philippe Rousselot, A River Runs Through It reverentially adapts Norman Maclean's beloved novella/memoir to the big screen. It's a tale of two brothers, fly-fishing, and a rural world mostly lost today. The cinematography is gorgeous, and the script and the direction by Robert Redford nonetheless keep the small-scale, human story of the Maclean family front and centre amongst the splendour in the grass.

Brad Pitt has never been better than his naturalistic portrayal of cocky, doomed Paul Maclean. Redford's greatest touch has been with actors, and that's true here -- either this performance should have made Craig Sheffer a star, or Redford got a performance out of Sheffer he could never again approach. Tom Skerrit and Brenda Blethyn are terrific as the Maclean parents, and Englander Emily Lloyd is charming and American as Norman's love interest. I think this is far and away Redford's finest film as a totality of direction, cinematography, writing, and acting. Highly recommended.


Somebody Up There Likes Me:  adapted from the book by Rocky Graziano and Rowland Barber by Ernest Lehman; directed by Robert Wise; starring Paul Newman (Rocky), Pier Angeli (Norma), Everett Sloane (Irving Cohen), Eileen Heckart (Ma), Sal Mineo (Romolo) and Harold J. Stone (Nick) (1956): Paul Newman's first critically acclaimed film has its moments, especially once the story actually gets to the real-life boxer Rocky Graziano's rise as a boxer. Common for the period, the regional accents are quite broad, including Newman's. He'd eventually fare better as an actor once people realized that his strengths lay in underplaying a role, and rolling with his own natural charm, preferably without showy accent or dialect work. Nonetheless, the real story of Graziano is a doozy, and increasingly involving as we move towards the climactic title bout. Recommended.

The Ocean and All Its Containers

Dallas Buyers Club: written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack; directed by Jean-Marc Vallee; starring Matthew McConaughey (Ron Woodrof), Jennifer Garner (Eve), Jared Leto (Rayon), Steve Zahn (Tucker) and Denis O'Hare (Dr. Sevard) (2013): There's something uneasy-making about an AIDS docudrama set in the 1980's that doesn't have any major gay characters. Jared Leto doesn't count -- he's clearly established as a pre-operative transsexual, though the movie itself (and not the era depicted) seems to be a bit unclear as to whether or not this makes Leto gay.

The narrative instead focuses on Ron Woodrof, a heterosexual Dallas-area rodeo cowboy and electrician whose HIV diagnosis sets him off on a quest for better drugs to combat HIV and AIDS at a time when the U.S. medical establishment was fumbling in the dark.

McConaughey's Oscar-winning performance is fine, in that creepy Machinist way that relies an awful lot on our body horror at an actor's Methodistic emaciation. I'll be damned if I know how Leto won an Oscar for Supporting Actor, though. Oh, right. He played a guy who wants to be a woman in a movie based on a true story. Though apparently of the three leads (sexy, button-down doctor Jennifer Garner being the third), only McConaughey is playing an actual person.

Really, the movie succeeds or fails on how much one enjoys McConaughey's performance. And it is fine, though it's very much in line with the history of his performances in all those terrible Romantic Comedies he's inhabited like a plague for more than a decade. He's a bad cad who learns better. And a homophobe who, through discrimination against himself, becomes a heroic pariah. And he will ride that bull again!

Is there something morally dubious here in making a heterosexual male (who in real life was purportedly bisexual) into the hero of a movie about the early days of the AIDS crisis? I'm not entirely sure. Per Oscar Wilde, if it were a better movie, I probably wouldn't be asking these questions. There are no moral or immoral books. Except when there are. Lightly recommended.

All is Lost: written and directed by J.C. Chandor; starring Robert Redford ('Our Man') (2013): Perhaps a bit more grueling than is workable, All is Lost nonetheless is a worthwhile journey into apparent doom. The obvious model for this story of Robert Redford vs. The Ocean is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. However, Hemingway's fisherman had a giant fish to get home. Redford's unnamed character is just trying to survive after his one-man sailing trip across the Indian Ocean goes increasingly FUBAR.

Much of the cinematography is haunting as we alternate between a lot of very close camerawork on Redford and a series of establishing and re-establishing shots of the ocean, the sky, and the surface of the water shot from below. The contrast between claustrophobia and the Sublime works wonderfully at points. The soundscape of the movie also works marvelously, with a particularly effective scene set on a rapidly sinking sailboat that groans and moans like the walking dead.

As Redford almost never talks in the film (his character isn't a self-talker, and he doesn't have a volleyball or a parrot to hang out with), pretty much everything rests on his physical acting, his physical presence. Well, and one drawn-out 'Fuck!' that's both funny and heart-breaking.

Does it all go on a little too long? Yeah. There's at least one false climax too many. But Redford, 77 and apparently unafraid to look old, holds the screen throughout the ordeal. His character does pretty much everything right (or a lot more right than most audience members who aren't experienced sailors would) while things go increasingly wrong. As Hemingway had one of his characters note in The Old Man and the Sea, it's better to have luck than to have skill. Recommended.


Midnight Run: written by George Gallo; directed by Martin Brest; starring Robert De Niro (Jack Walsh), Charles Grodin (Jonathan Mardukas), Yaphet Kotto (Alonzo Mosley), John Ashton (Marvin), Dennis Farina (Jimmy Serrano), and Joe Pantoliano (Eddie) (1988): One of the five or ten great comedies of the 1980's was a cult hit at the time that's grown in stature over the years to also become one a handful of the great Odd Couple movies in the history of cinema.

Do I even have to give a plot synopsis? Bounty hunter De Niro must find and return accountant Grodin to Los Angeles by midnight Friday to collect a $100,000 fee from a bail bondsman who set bail for the subsequently-gled Grodin. The Mob, the FBI, and another bounty hunter are also after Grodin, who stole millions from mobster Dennis Farina and gave most of it to charity. He's now the key material witness against the mobster.

Because the movie is two hours long, things obviously don't go smoothly. There are lots of great scenes both action- and character-related. There's fine supporting work from everyone involved, and a fun, piquant script from George Gallo. Martin Brest, who directed the first and best Beverly Hills Cop movie, does solid work. His characters have time to breathe, and if the police chases get a little Blues Brothers at times, they're at least funny and not tiresome.

But everything really comes down to the chemistry between De Niro as the terse, eternally F-bombing bounty hunter and Grodin as the soft-spoken, sarcastic accountant. It's a great comic bromance. Grodin, underplaying in his usual way, is great, and De Niro would never be (intentionally) funnier. Highly recommended.