June 3 – Casino Jack
2010/Rated R/108 Minutes
The sordid tale of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his greedy, felonious power plays during the
glory days of the W. presidency are fine fuel for the antic romp Kevin Spacey turns out in
Casino Jack. Spacey's signature twist of smug sincerity and self-satisfaction perfectly suits
the portrait of a man whose morals are so corrupt and ego so glorified that he truly believes
he's doing God's work at the same time he's swiping cash from every opportunistic situation
he can wrangle.
As a companion piece to Alex Gibney's equally entertaining documentary Casino Jack and
the United States of Money, this comic rendering of a political life led with such impolitic
indiscretion ramps the ridiculousness of Abramoff's schemes up several notches thanks to a
liberal dose of dramatic license. Nevertheless, the events portrayed are real.
Because it does come off as high-end sketch comedy, Casino Jack sometimes feels a little
sketchy in its execution, but the cast is uniformly excellent in making scenes crackle with
hilariously vituperative flair. Especially good are Barry Pepper as Abramoff's oily cohort, Jon
Lovitz as a doltish, mobbed-up mattress salesman, and the late Maury Chaykin as a
seemingly harmless mafia functionary who's way more dangerous than his clownish exterior
betrays. But the movie belongs to Spacey as a man obsessed with his own importance.
Spacey apes and mugs with typically borderline-manic panache, giving masterful insight
into the master of a universe that exists almost entirely in his own avaricious mind. --Ted
Fry, Amazon
June 10 – Red
2010/Rated PG-13/111 Minutes
You can take the agent out of the CIA, but you can't take the CIA out of the agent--or so
discovers Frank Moses, to his chagrin. Frank, played by Bruce Willis, simply wants to live his
simple life with his government pension. But when a troop of black-ops guys descends on
his house one night and blows it to smithereens, Frank realizes he needs to get a few of his
old colleagues together and find out what's what. That's the premise of Red, a jolly action
flick based on a rather more serious graphic novel. Because Frank's old posse includes kicky
roles for Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and a tea-pouring, hot-lead-spraying Helen
Mirren, the movie boasts a certain appeal just at the "Holy cow, can you believe who's in
this thing?" level. Actually, the rest of the cast is pretty sweet as well: Mary-Louise Parker
steals much of the film as Frank's unsuspecting civilian date (swept into the action because
she might innocently become a CIA target, too), Brian Cox hams it up as Frank's former
Soviet adversary (wistfully recalling how he always wanted to assassinate a US president),
and Karl Urban (Star Trek) supplies brawn and brains as the current CIA agent in charge of
bringing the hammer down on Frank. The breezy tone barely pauses to notice the semiserious story point at the heart of the plot (a hazily recalled disaster in Guatemala many
years earlier), nor the dead bodies that pile up around the edges of the action. Flightplan
director Robert Schwentke lets his actors act up, which is not a capital crime given the skills
of the cast list, and he shoves the plot along with fitting speed. It's not art, but as a
multiplex diversion, Red scatters a decent share of legitimate jolts and rim-shot one-liners.
--Robert Horton, Amazon
June 17 – Eye of the Needle
2011/Rated R/
Eye of the Needle is a superbly effective World War II spy thriller from the Ken Follett bestseller of the same name.
Donald Sutherland is "the Needle," a German spy in England bearing critical information on Allied invasion plans
that he must deliver personally to the Führer. He's so named because of his preferred method of assassination, the
stiletto. As played by Sutherland, he's a coldly calculating psychopath, emotionlessly focused on the task at hand,
whether the task is to signal a U-boat or to gut a witness to avoid exposure. On his way back to Germany, a fierce
storm strands him on an island, occupied only by a woman (Kate Nelligan), her disabled husband, and the
lighthouse keeper. A romance of sorts develops between the woman and the spy, due to an estrangement of
affections between the woman and her husband, whose accident has rendered him emotionally crippled as well.
Much of the suspense of the latter half of the movie has to do with this romance, and the way it begins to reveal
the Needle's motivations and whether there's a sympathetic personality buried somewhere inside him, though he
remains by-and-large tantalizingly enigmatic. Early on, we discover that he may not enjoy the hand life has dealt
him. When a courier asks him about the way he lives, and "What else can one do?" the Needle answers, "One can
just stop." But as the film makes amply clear in its final third, one doesn't stop, does one? The direction by Richard
Marquand (known primarily for thrillers such as this one and Jagged Edge, although he also did Return of the Jedi)
is crisply done, boasting numerous suspenseful episodes, including a deadly encounter between Sutherland and
the disabled husband, which is jaw-droppingly surprising. –by Jim Gay on Amazon.com.
June 24 – The Legend of 1900
1999/Rated R/125 Minutes
The Legend of 1900 is a movie unlike almost any other I have seen. It takes place entirely
on a ship at sea, but the action spans more than 40 years. It is the story of a musical
genius who is born, lives out his life, and ultimately dies on board a grand trans-Atlantic
liner in the first half of the 20th century. He watches the world pass him by just a few
thousand people at a time, has a fabulous piano-duel with none other than Jelly Roll Morton,
is sought after by recording companies, and listens to and learns from the music of all the
different cultures who are emigrating from the Old World to the New, but he never once
leaves the ship. Indeed, the mere thought of setting foot on land is his ultimate nightmare.
I remember having a guest over one evening who was seeing it for the very first time. His
reaction (after wiping a tear from his eye) was to exclaim "what a wonderful movie! How did
anyone even get a film that quirky made?" There is no Hollywood 'formula' to this film. It
proceeds without any of the usual conventions: no good guy vs. bad guy struggles, no sex,
no violence, and no crude jokes. It is like that really good book that you start reading one
night when it is already too late but are unable to put down until you have turned the last
page. --D. Edward Farrar, Amazon