SLAM DANCE (USA 1987) — Director Wayne Wang spins a terrifying web of madness in this LA noir where Tom Hulce (Amadeus) plays an artist who slides in and out of the shadows and the prostitute’s world ruled by Bobby Nye (Millie Perkins). Harry Dean Stanton is the cop, naturally, in this far out gem that may have escaped your purview. A local angel is salting the Blue Box movie exchange with long lost treasurers. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0911061/?ref_=fn_nm_nm_1
BEVERLY HILLS HILLBILLIES (the movie) — Zsa Zsa Gabor is in a police lineup for slapping a cop and Cloris Leachman is granny in the big screen nod to the popular TV show where we learned that there’s not much difference in stupidity density between the hillbillies and the Beverly Hills snooty cliche in their Bentleys. If they remade BH today the entire clan would have been elected to Congress and protesting against gays, lesbians, women and teachers.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962) —A ghost from cinema’s past has risen from the grave. Cinerama has been restored on Blu-ray with a SmileBox bowtie shaped image and minus the separation lines. It’s almost a 3-D sensation. IMAX is heir apparent to the Cinerama legacy, giving thrill seekers something they can’t get on their 32” Sony. HTWWW is a defining film in the careers of Debbie Reynolds and George Peppard. I never saw it when it debuted in 1962 and I was a student at the University of Wash., Seattle, where the Cinerama theater is in limbo. https://cinerama.com/
CODA (2021 - France, US, Canada) — Oscar winner; romance, drama about uniqueness of hearing impaired families. A remake of a French film. Inspirational, entertaining. See it now at the Riverview Theater. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10366460/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
DOUBLE INDEMNITY — Every time Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) looked at her unpleasant husband she saw dollar signs and a rotting corpse. Then libidinous insurance salesman Walter (Fred MacMurray) knocked on her door and this brazen femme fatale envisioned a pot of gold and a deceased mate. But then nothing this gauche could happen in real life, huh? Events leading up to the demise of an inconvenient husband are detailed by reporter Joan Didion in 1965 San Bernardino. “This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book,” Didion writes in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” where white suburban housewife Lucille Miller incinerates her clinically depressed dentist husband in hopes of $80,000 in insurance money and bliss with a local married attorney. https://www.criterion.com/films/30460-double-indemnity
