Annie (1982)

  This is the version of Annie that I grew up with.  It's been remade several times since then but this is adaptation that sticks with me.

Annie (Aileen Quinn) is an orphan chosen at random to go live for a week with war profiteer and billionaire, Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney).  Warbucks comes to care for the plucky youngster, but an unscrupulous con man (Tim Curry) hatches a plot with the orphanage owner, Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett) to pose as Annie's parents and claim her for the reward money.

Ah, my favorite sub-genre of fiction:  billionaire suddenly stops viewing relationships as transactional, puts others above himself.  Always a classic.

More than other adaptations, this one feels like a cartoon from the 1920s, complete with ridiculous racist caricatures.  The music is the best part of it, with performances from Burnett, Curry, Ann Reinking, and Bernadette Peters.  It's campy, syrupy, and shallow in its declarations of hope but sometimes that's all you want.

The Mexican (2001)

  It's been a minute since we've had a Christy movie but this is definitely one.

Jerry (Brad Pitt) is a perennial fuckup and his girlfriend, Sam (Julia Roberts) has had it.  A chance accident led Jerry to be indebted to a mobster and as a final repayment, Jerry is told to go to Mexico to retrieve an antique pistol rumored to be cursed.  Every single thing that could go wrong, does and Jerry fumbles his way back and forth across the countryside.  Meanwhile, Sam is taken hostage by Leroy (James Gandolfini) as an incentive for Jerry to get his shit together.  

Gandolfini is the best part of this movie and he's not in it nearly enough.  Pitt and Roberts have zero chemistry together so the romance aspect falls a little flat for me.  Mr. and Mrs. Smith this ain't.  It's fine as a comedy of errors.  It kind of reminded me of Pure Luck with Martin Short and Daniel Glover in that respect.  It didn't blow me away and I felt like the first half dragged along interminably, but once it got going I was content enough.  It is streaming on Paramount+ if you're interested in a time capsule from the turn of the century.

Danny Collins (2014)

  This is a cute, middling film.  It's not terrible, it's not great.  It's very middle-of-the-road, especially for actors of this caliber, but work is work, right?

Danny Collins (Al Pacino) achieved rock star status after starting as a humble folk musician.  As a birthday present, his manager (Christopher Plummer) gives him a letter written to Danny from John Lennon in 1971 but never delivered.  The letter was sold to a memorabilia collector instead.  Forty years later, Danny finally reads what was written to him and vows to make changes.  He cancels his "greatest hits" tour, gives up booze and drugs, and camps out in a New Jersey Hilton to write original songs for the first time in forever, much to the consternation of the hotel manager (Annette Benning).  New Jersey is not just as far away from L.A. as he can manage, it's also the home of his estranged son (Bobby Cannavale), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Gardner), and granddaughter (Giselle Eisenberg).  

There is nothing really new in this variant of an aging-rocker-mid-life-crisis tale except the John Lennon letter, which was based on a real story.  Steve Tiltson, a Welsh folk rocker, actually got a letter from Lennon 34 years too late, because someone at the magazine it was sent to sold it instead of delivering it.  Tiltson never reached the Barry Manilow-esque levels depicted in the film, but he has had a 40-year career in the music, so he's doing all right.

This feels like a small, indie film that inexplicably has a cast full of Oscar and Emmy nominees and winners.  Like Barack Obama delivering a middle school book report.  Nice, but a little overkill.

It's currently streaming on Kanopy.

The Deer Hunter (1978)

  Content warning:  suicide, war violence, domestic violence, animal death (deer), homophobic slurs, Russian roulette, compound fracture

Three small town friends, Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage) are excited and happy to serve their country in Vietnam.  One comes back with a chest full of medals, one comes back with one working limb, and one comes back in a metal box.  

So here's what we're not going to do:  we're not going to do a think piece about the horrors of war, the particular willful blindness of patriotic jingoism, or PTSD.  This movie has been out for over 40 years and smarter, better people than I have written those pieces.

What we are going to talk about is Christopher Walken.  He won an Oscar for this and it was probably the most well-deserved Oscar for a film role in history.  He out-acted Meryl fucking Streep.  Do you know how hard that is?  Now, if you're like me and you've mostly ever seen him as the villain or as a dancer or comedian in silly, supporting roles, this movie may well come as a shock to you.  (I mean, most of the movie is designed to shock and appall you.  Look at those content tags.)  Walken is the beating heart of this film.  

We can also talk about Michael Cimino's direction here.  The symmetry, the foreshadowing, the nature-as-religion overtones of Heaven and Hell.  Beautiful.  He also won an Oscar.  

Is this, as the original film poster says, "one of the most important and powerful films of all time"?  Mmmm.  Powerful, certainly.  Important?  Ehhhhh.  I think the documentaries of the time, the news footage, and the historical background and global context are probably more important.  But this is an incredibly well-made, harrowing film that I personally will never watch again.  Images from this film are seared into my brain now.  I can't fix that.  

But you can join me in viewing those images!  The Deer Hunter is currently streaming on Peacock, but only at their Premium level.

Red Hill (2010)

  Have you ever wanted to watch a movie from the POV of the evil townspeople from Hang 'Em High?  Good news!

It's Constable Shane Cooper's (Ryan Kwanten) first day on the job in the town of Red Hill, Australia (I don't know what state and I'm too lazy to look it up).  It's not going well.  He's misplaced his gun in one of the moving boxes, his new boss (Steve Bisley) is kind of a hardass, he doesn't know where anything is, there's no extra car so he has to ride Old Beth, and oh yeah, an escaped convict named Jimmy Conway (Tommy Lewis) has come back to wreak vengeance on the town that sent him to prison.

This was a damn good revenge Western.  If you've only ever seen Kwanten in True Blood, he's much more than just a pretty face, but this movie belongs to Tommy Lewis.  He says precisely seven words in the entire runtime.  Everything else is conveyed through his facial expressions, no easy feat when half of it is burn scar prosthetics.  It's streaming for free on Tubi but it's absolutely worth buying if you're into Westerns at all.

Footnote (2011)

  Thanksgiving is this week.  Maybe your family loves each other and you'd like to know what it's like to be dysfunctional.  Here's the movie for you!

Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is thrilled to have finally won the prestigious Israel Prize for Talmudic Studies after having dedicated 30 years of his life to reconciling minutiae.  The only problem is that the actual winner was his son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), also a Professor Shkolnik, also a researcher in Talmudic Studies, and also with the same first initial (in Hebrew).  Uriel learns of the administrative error and is paralyzed with indecision.  He knows exactly how much it would mean to his father, but he also desperately craves the recognition from his peers.

This film is set up as a comedy but I failed to find any humor in it.  Both Professors Shkolnik are fragile narcissists and bad fathers and I could not feel any sympathy for either of them.  Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine having my head so far up my own ass that I would be professionally jealous of my child.

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and for free on Tubi.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

  While suffering a little from sequel-itis, the follow-up to Black Panther is a worthy entry to the canon.

After the sudden death of T'Challa, the kingdom of Wakanda is feeling the pressure.  Outside interests have seen the monarch's passing as an opportunity to strike against the nation for its vibranium, but Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) is a stalwart defender, even as she struggles with her grief.  Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) has thrown herself into her work, trying to synthesize a replacement for the heart-shaped herb that gives the Black Panther its power, but is intrigued when the king of an underwater empire, Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), offers an alliance and a threat.  His kingdom, Talokan, also has vibranium and an American scientist, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), developed a machine that detects it, putting Namor's people at risk for discovery.  He wants Wakanda to join Talokan and wage war against all the surface nations, starting with Williams' death.  Shuri and Okoye (Danai Gurira) go after the young woman to get to her first.

The filmmakers and cast made a point of treating late star Chadwick Boseman's role as T'Challa with absolute respect.  There are no cheap tricks, no deep-fakes, or re-used footage to make it look like he's still there.  He is gone and the film acknowledges that.

But all is not doom and gloom.  The story is good, Namor is just sympathetic enough to be a really good villain, and there's a sense of tragic inevitability that adds to the mythological feeling.

Honestly, Namor is so much better than Aquaman it's not even funny.  I almost feel bad comparing them but the costumes, the underwater sequences, the CGI, and the makeup are So Much Better in Wakanda Forever.  Ruth Carter should probably get another Oscar for costumes.  We'll see if she does.  And hey, maybe Aquaman 2 will fix all the things that were cheap and tacky about the first film.  I'm not holding my breath, but maybe.