REVIEWS IN A HURRY For Spring 2006 All the President’s Men (1976, 138 min, PG) ***1/2 – Directed by Alan J. Pakula, starring Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, and Jason Robards.  A great movie—and then it stops when I thought there was going to be a whole other act.  Still, watch this as a trilogy after “JFK” and “Nixon” and you’ll have a heck of a good time seeing what it was like the last time newspapers did what they’re supposed to do, that is, question and afflict the powerful.  As Woodward and Bernstein, Redford and Hoffman give low-key performances, emphasizing the material and not themselves.  Roles like these are exactly what movie stars are for:  we see them, we like them, and then they carry us along without talking about themselves.  If they have wives, girlfriends, kids, or lives before the movie started, we don’t know for certain.  The movie is patient and calm as it follows the reporters making endless phone calls, interviews, and tracking down men and women who don’t want to be tracked down, all leading back to the Watergate break-in.  Director Pakula turns sitting at a desk with a notepad and phones in each hand into the stuff of a thriller. The Apartment (1960, 125 min, NR) ***1/2 – Directed & co-written by Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley Maclaine, and Fred MacMurray.  The script is as prescient as ever:  an otherwise moral man whores himself to get ahead in business.  (In fact, the expression “fouled up” in place of a certain other four-letter word shows that the movie wants to be even MORE prescient.)  In this case, he lets married executives use his apartment to nail their mistresses; in return, they give him promotions.  As you’d expect, Jack Lemmon is perfect as the stuttering, spinless, and apologetic bureaucrat who hates what he’s doing.  More shocking is the pitch-perfect performance from Fred MacMurray—who came to fame playing “The Absent-Minded Professor” and on TV’s “My Three Sons”—as Lemmon’s absolute slimebag of a boss, who treats his mistress and Lemmon with the same degree of affectionate expendability.  He isn’t outrightly villainous so much as self-righteously entitled in his nonchalant awfulness; put this performance next to MacMurray’s equally decadent (yet wholly different) sleazebag in “Double Indemnity” and you have a magnificent screen actor.  Shirley Maclaine is the mistress who’s wasted her womanhood on MacMurray and gets involved with Lemmon.  It’s an enormously popular film among critics, yet I’ve seen it twice and found Wilder’s camerawork and widescreen compositions to be distractingly stiff.  It lacks the tighter, more exciting visual schemes he used in “Double Indemnity” and is more of a writer’s movie.  But “Double Indemnity” was 1944 and 1960 is after a decade of stuffy melodramas.  “The Apartment” won multiple Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (beating out Hitchcock for “Psycho”), the year after the notoriously stiff “Ben-Hur” picked up the same awards. Assisted Living (2005, 74 min, NR) *** - Directed & written by Elliot Greenebaum, starring Michael Bonsignore and Maggie Riley.  Here’s a good description of the American independent movie:  there are lots of laughs, but none of them come cheap.  In “Assisted Living,” a nursing home employee gets high, stares blankly at the residents, and calls them pretending to be their dead relatives in heaven.  He gets more and more burnt out as the movie progresses; he is blown away by his inability to give meaning to the lives of these forgotten oldsters and equally terrified of the idea that he’s looking into his own future.  He’s played by Bonsignore, who is reminiscent of Paul Schneider of “All the Real Girls” and “George Washington,” as a well-meaning, if selfish, dope.  Key to his qualms is a woman (Riley) starting on her Alzheimer’s.  If I could still read books and watch movies, I wouldn’t mind being completely abandoned by my family and suffering a million embarrassing health problems.  But I’m terrified of my attention span shrinking the way it sometimes does after a certain age.  Movies about nursing homes have a limited number of endings; “Assisted Living” handles its nicely in long-shot.  Filmmaker Greenebaum borrows some methods from the Italian Neorealists by casting real nursing home employees and residents in many of the roles.  Window lights are overblown and the movie has an improvised, documentary feel in many of its scenes, as the star interacts with the reals sans script.  A slight movie, but enjoyable and well-made, with a sincere spectrum of emotions.
		Brazil (1985, 142 min, R) ***1/2 – Directed & co-written by Terry Gilliam, starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, and Michael Palin.  Mind-boggling visual extravagance that, if it can be faulted for anything, it’s losing control of itself in the last act—yet, how else could this film end except to go utterly mad, and even have the madness seem to spill out of the frame?  “Brazil” is the most characteristic piece by ex-Python Terry Gilliam (“The Holy Grail”), in which he creates a mad, mad cinematic world the likes of which we’ve never seen.  In this case, it’s a Kafka-esque bureaucracy of Biblical proportions, of tall, grimy skyscrapers, paperwork that can literally swallow a man, and plastic surgery gone dreadfully amok.  Is it 1940 or 2140?  Who knows.  Jonathan Pryce stars as the last sane—and therefore maddest—man, navigating his way through officious desk jockeys, rebels, and Bobby De Niro’s plumber, who swings like Spider-Man.  The whole thing is openly farcical, bloody, and beautiful.  Gilliam’s style is aloof in that way that hip film school kids like, but old-fashioned cineastes often look down on.  A huge and grotesque supporting cast, and an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Gilliam and Tom Stoppard. Breathless (A Bout le Souffle) (1957, B&W, NR) **** - Directed & co-written by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Jean-Paul Belmundo, Jean Seberg, and Jean-Pierre Melville.  One of the first films of the French New Wave, alongside Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” although its title isn’t nearly as dirty.  I love “Breathless” for the same reason I love Scorsese’s “The Aviator” nearly half-a-century later:  the “movie” elements are just so exciting.  The editing, the handheld camera work, the tracking shots, and the general defiance of visual and narrative conventions.  Every independent filmmaker who has ever wanted to make something that looks and sounds different—and isn’t just ABOUT something different—is indebted to Godard.  The natural lighting, natural sounds, and mid-conversation jump cuts give “Breathless” a jarring, edgy feel.  Watching it break rules that are still held fast today is like a breath of fresh air.  Yes, there is the inevitable 15- to 30-minute Godard conversation that goes nowhere, but even that is liberating, because it shows characters in their own milieu, stewing in their own juices.  “Breathless” loosely follows a gangster (Belmundo) who is half-thug and half-poseur as he spends a day roaming around Paris trying to avoid the law.  He’s not above taking in a movie, begging his on-off girlfriend (Seberg) for some action, or staring worshipfully at photographs of Humphrey Bogart.  He steals a lot of cars; his lusty driving around, in adoration of his youth and the city around him, mimics Godard’s joy at being able to do the same from behind a camera.  The movie has a lightness and insouciance to it—it’s not taking its gangster story very seriously.  It’s more about an explosion of energetic delight.  I have a camera and a crew, Godard seems to be saying, and I’m the happiest boy in all France. More Reviews in a Hurry for Spring 2006.