Movies I Watched in November, Part 2

Continuing the recap of last month's movies...

I remember seeing this in the theater a few years ago, sitting behind a bunch of goofballs who wouldn't shut up during the trailers about how much they loved the "Twilight" films. I envisioned hearing them blather through the entire movie, but the magic of Wes Anderson's stop-motion movie won the entire theater over. It's completely charming. Roald Dahl's tale of an ambitious fox and his family and friends fits perfectly with Anderson's fastidious style, and the attention to detail is frequently breathtaking. Plus, like Anderson's other movies, all that wit and style occasionally makes room for some genuinely touching moments -- my favorites are when Mrs. Fox announces she's pregnant, and her figure is briefly replaced with a plastic doll who, fittingly, "glows." Good news for fans of "Fantastic Mr. Fox": Criterion has a deluxe edition arriving in Feburary.

Believe it or not, this is one of my mom's favorite movies. And why not? It's a tense, smart thriller that takes a compelling premise -- a master assassin is hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle. It doesn't muck about with romance or personality conflicts or distracting subplots. Instead, it methodically follows the assassin (Edward Fox) as he prepares for the kill and the authorities as they get wind of the plot and desperately try to stop him. I read somewhere that one of the most compelling things to watch is a person doing their job well, and that's what "The Day of the Jackal" delivers in spades. Fox is determined, intelligent and oddly likable, and seeing him put all the pieces in place is fascinating, even -- especially? -- if he's trying to commit a horrible crime. It's just one reason of many I love that movie ... and, of course, love my mom.

Funny, fast-paced comedy about a career criminal (Eddie Quinlan) who's sprung from prison to play quarterback for a college's struggling football team. As is the case with many early 1930s movies, the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense and serves mainly to move things from one entertaining set piece to another, but I'm not complaining. Quinlan is a lot of fun in a fast-talking, semi-Cagney way, and the supporting cast is a who's who of second-banana characters from the golden age of movie comedy: Margaret Dumont (of Marx Bros. fame) plays (what else?) a rich woman, Edgar Kennedy (of "Duck Soup" and Laurel and Hardy films) plays a campus cop, and Grady Sutton (of "The Bank Dick") plays a fellow football player. There's even Clarence Wilson, an actor who played a mean old guy in dozens of old movies (including some Our Gang shorts) showing up to add to the fun. It's movies like this, forgotten showcases for long-dead actors, that make me grateful for Tuner Classic Movies.

Straightforward  documentary about talk show host Morton Downey Jr., whom I wasted plenty of hours watching in the 1980s during my misspent college days. Like the guys interviewed in this doc, we tuned in to see how crazy things could get -- and believe me, they got plenty crazy, with guys like Al Sharpton (back in his chubby days) getting physically violent with other guests. Downey was the smoke-breating center of the whole thing, stirring up trouble and shouting at the "pukes" who went against his all-American, largely right-wing philosophy. If you wonder how we got where we are, with jerks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity somehow shaping national policy, look no further than this movie. Then start weeping.


Here's a much cheerier documentary about 1980s pop culture, this time focusing on the rise of home video and the dedicated souls who still collect actual tapes and treasure their memories of those glory days. The format itself, as everyone agrees, was pretty terrible, but videotape deserves to be remembered -- and saluted -- as the technological development that made it possible for ordinary, non-wealthy film fans (you know, people like me and you) to not only collect movies, but to actually see many films in the first place. I try to tell my daughter that when I was a kid, if you missed a movie in a theater, you had to just hope it might show up on TV someday. Otherwise, you might never -- ever -- see it again. When I was in high school and my dad bought our family's first (huge) VCR, it opened a whole new world of cinema. I'll never forget walking into those old mom-and-pop video stores and staring at the walls of boxes, figuring I could never live long enough to see all those tantalizing movies. If you remember feeling the same way, you'll love this movie. Check out the official site for information on ordering it online.

Entertaining melodrama that doesn't quite live up to its title (really, what movie could?) about a group of clean-cut teen types who find a suitcase full of heroin and decide to make a fortune selling it. Naturally, everything goes wrong, though this being a 1958 mainstream movie, things don't go as wrong as they do in, say, "Requiem for a Dream." The only cast member I recognized was Jonathan Haze, two years before Roger Corman's classic "Little Shop of Horrors." The highlight of the movie comes midway through, when recovering junkie Danny (Allen Kramer) describes heroin addiction in a horrifying scene bordering on the surreal. If the rest of the movie had that intensity, this would be some kind of classic.

I'd never seen this much-praised 1973 chiller, despite the fact that it shows up consistently in horror best-of lists and TV retrospectives. Unfortunately, because I had seen clips of the movie in those retrospectives, I had the genuinely unnerving last-second twist spoiled for me -- but it's still a damned good movie. A couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) are in Venice, trying to cope with the death of their young daughter, when all sorts of strange things start to happen. Director Nicolas Roeg generates an almost overwhelming sense of paranoia using little more than camera angles and lighting, and it all builds to a bracing finale (that, again, I had spoiled). The film was controversial in its day for the extended sex scene between Christie and Sutherland, and it's easy to see why -- they really don't make 'em like that anymore. (Between this and parts of "Animal House" I've watched recently, I've seen way too much of Donald Sutherland's body.)

I'd heard criticism of this 2012 drama about the tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004, most of it centering on the fact that the movie focuses on a family of wealthy tourists and not the Thai natives. It's a valid argument, I suppose, but this is the story the movie is telling and director J.A. Bayona (who also directed the excellent horror film "The Orphanage") tells it very well. The destruction hits early in the film, separating Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor), dividing their sons between them. The rest of the film is a grueling (but compelling) view of how they manage to survive, find civilization and desperately try to find each other. Their story expands to include many other stories as they witness the almost unimaginable destruction and misery left in the tsunami's wake. Special praise to Tom Holland, who plays the couple's oldest son. The scenes of him saving his mom, discovering a way to help in the hospital and then almost losing everyone are some of the best in the movie.