When I Stop Dreaming

2008. Starring Daniel Craig, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench. Directed by Marc Forster. There were so many negative reviews of this, the second movie in the series of reinvented James Bond adventures, that I was not in any kind of hurry to see Quantum of Solace. Even though I loved 2006’s Casino Royale, which introduced us to Daniel Craig’s icy, brutal James Bond, who lacks the winking casualness of past Bonds, and substitutes his bare knuckles for the increasingly goofy devices that drove earlier movies. Casino Royale began its reinvention with a bang — a relentless parkour chase that leaves the …

2008. Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross. Directed by Stephen Daldry. The secrets we keep from each other, with varying degrees of shame, is the theme that seems to run through The Reader, the adaption of the Bernhard Schlink book and last year’s Oscar nomination vehicle for Kate Winslet. It is a sad, quiet story that imagines an intense, brief love between two people neither can handle. Winslet is deserving of the Oscar win, especially for her work in the second act of the movie, but her young co-star nearly outdoes her. Ralph Fiennes portrays the adult Michael Berg, …

2008. Starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. The talk leading up to this past Oscar season was that there couldn’t have been a better actor for the role of the washed-up warrior in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler than the once-famous Mickey Rourke. That may be true. But I think that, instead, there could not have been a better way to reintroduce the natural and intuitive acting skill of Mickey Rourke than this role — a role that seems written precisely for him. Rourke becomes Randy “The Ram” Robinson very seamlessly, and it may be because he looks …

1943. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Choosing a favorite Hitchcock movie is a hopeless challenge. Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and the unbearably suspenseful scene when Raymond Burr comes home early. North By Northwest has Cary Grant dealing with a worst-ever case of mistaken identity. Strangers on a Train has that amazing plot, plus the carnival scene. Psycho has Norman Bates, the shower scene and its overall weirdness. Vertigo, its own weirdness and Jimmy Stewart. Finally, the scene in The Birds in which the birds attack the townsfolk caused me, as a child, …

1933. Starring Richard Barthelmess, Loretta Young. Directed by William Wellman. It wasn’t my intention to watch a movie about an economic depression, labor troubles and soup lines. I was actually hoping to find some escape from those topics. But the TCM Archives “Forbidden Hollywood” DVD series has been on my Netflix list for quite a while and I thought it might be a welcome alternative to the almost-always-pessimistic nightly news. There weren’t any financial troubles in the 1930s, right? Richard Barthelmess stars as Tom Holmes, a WWI grunt who takes a German machine-gun nest and captures an officer before being …

2008. Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin. Directed by Gus Van Sant. While watching Milk, I felt that I was seeing three stories told by using the same events. There is the biopic story of Harvey Milk, driven by an amazing performance by Sean Penn, telling the story of a 40-year-old New Yorker who realizes that who he is requires a drastic life change. Milk moves with his partner to San Francisco in order to be himself and, once fully becoming himself, finds his calling in city politics, representing the Castro District and, by extension, the gay community. There’s …

1964. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur. I don’t pretend to fully understand what Godard was trying to say with this enthusiastic exercise in film, but I love watching the results. I think I like this film more than Breathless, his earlier and better-known film also portraying a criminal who seems more-than-usually inspired by American gangsters. Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) are small-time crooks on the trail of a big score, with the help of their English-language classmate Odile (Anna Karina, who happens to be Godard’s wife). They case the house where Odile …

2008. Directed by Tomas Alfredson. Starring Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson. Oskar is a sad little kid. Living with his mother, separated from his father, taunted and tortured by classmates, a little too smart and too weird to fit in anywhere. Wintertime in Sweden is a bit on the bleak side too — snow drifting across a black sky, sterile apartment buildings, a quietly unsympathetic school. Then, one night, neighbors move in next door. He doesn’t really see the neighbors, only the cardboard and posters that now cover their window. He sits outside, watching his breath in the air, sitting …

1974. Written, directed and starring H.B. Halicki. I’m almost done with my drive-in movie phase. I’m building up to Vanishing Point. Gone in 60 Seconds is essentially two movies. The first half involves an insurance scam/car theft ring that requires the stealing and delivery of 48 cars in two days. H.B. Halicki portrays the lead of a team who steal some of the most beautiful cars (they refer to the different makes and models by women’s names) by deception or opportunism. They complete the theft of all the cars on their list, but one — a yellow Mustang they call …

1960. Starring Toshiro Mifune. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. The great Toshiro Mifune plays Nishi, an ambitious corporate assistant eager to climb the ladder of a shady land development company, going so far as to marry the chairman’s daughter. But unlike the other bureaucrats and salarymen who bow and scrape as part of their job, Nishi doesn’t want the respect of his father-in-law or the money that comes with his position. He wants revenge. Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well has many of the elements found in American film noir, but instead of focusing on human corruption, it peels back the corruption …