You had me at first scene
We open on teenage Maria chewing gum while applying lavender lipstick to her already painted mouth. She asks her father for five dollars. Soon, we learn that she’s quit school because she’s pregnant and getting married. Her father calls her a tramp. She leaves the house and he drops dead on the kitchen floor.
In Maria (the late Adrienne Shelly) meets Matthew (Martin Donovan), an electronics repairman who hates technology and still lives at home with his domineering father. When Maria’s grim mother kicks her out, and her jock boyfriend dumps her, the mismatched pair meet and begin to depend on each other.
Welcome to writer/director Hal Hartley’s America, where familial love is a hopeless practicality and
Star Trek
almost everyone lives in not-so-silent desperation. It’s a warmly cynical world, optimistic in its misanthropy, brought to life by Hartley-specific pacing and cadence. Even when what the characters say is cryptic, their lines are delivered in a very straightforward manner that gives the dialogue a theatrical quality. The movie is imbued with a particularly Generation X brand of disaffected artistic experimentation. It’s a comfortable space for Hartley, whose early work often balanced pathos and absurdity, mixing philosophical meaning-of-life stuff with a surreal take on the meanness of ordinary people. Dark romantic comedy, rated R, 107 minutes, Vimeo (Jennifer Levin)
As director Steven Spielberg’s throwback to the cliffhanger serials of the early sound era begins, the Paramount Pictures iconic mountain logo dissolves
Touch of Evil
to a shot of a real mountain, framed by the foliage of the Peruvian jungle. John Williams’ score strikes an ominous tone as we get our first view, from the rear, of archeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford). A bullwhip dangling at his side and sporting his well-worn fedora, Indy leads a band of porters to the mouth of a cave. Accompanied only by the duplicitous Satipo (Alfred Molina), he cautiously navigates the booby traps in the cave’s interior to retrieve a golden idol. Once he’s acquired the idol from its altar and replaced it with a bag of sand, he turns to make his retreat. Mission accomplished. But then the sandbag starts slowly sinking, and the rumbling begins. The walls of the cave start collapsing around him.
The opening sequence to sets the tone for the rest of the picture: a globe-trotting adventure where Indy, conscripted by the U.S. government, races against a company of Nazis in pursuit of the fabled
Ark of the Covenant. The Führer wants to tap the Ark’s power to aid in his quest for world domination.
But first, Indy has to make it out of that cave while being shot at by poisonous darts, abandoned by Satipo, and nearly squashed by a massive rolling boulder. He emerges, covered in cobwebs, to find himself surrounded by spear-toting natives, his hard-won idol wrested from his hands by his nemesis Belloq (Paul Freeman). It’s a breathless mini-adventure and the perfect introduction to the classic hero that Harrison would go on to portray in three more feature films. Action/adventure, rated PG, 115 minutes, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, and Netflix. (Michael Abatemarco)
There’s a tight, low-angle close-up of someone setting the timer on a homemade bomb to three minutes, then putting it into the trunk of a big Chrysler convertible. As a couple gets into it and drives away, the camera floats up over the seedy border town’s rooftops, then comes down to follow the car’s slow journey through nighttime streets filled with pedestrians, cars, cops, and food cart vendors.
Soon the car seems to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with a welldressed young couple, sometimes pulling ahead only to be passed by them at a traffic stop or when some goats block the street. At an immigration checkpoint, we learn that the young couple are a Mexican federal detective named Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his American bride, Susan ( Janet Leigh).
The cat-and-mouse game resumes as everyone crosses into the United States. Eventually, the camera moves in for another close-up, this time on the Vargases. He embraces her and says, “Do you realize I haven’t kissed you in over an hour?” The three minutes are up. This has all been filmed in one long, painstakingly choreographed tracking shot, with an enormous amount of information conveyed through snippets of conversation and brief visual clues. is now considered a masterpiece, and the opening sequence is one of the most celebrated (and imitated) in film history.
It flopped on its original release, however, due to Universal Studio’s ham-handed re-editing of the film without writer-director-star Orson Welles’ involvement. This included mucking up the opening sequence with an overlay of credits and Henry Mancini’s flippant score.
Universal released a longer version in 1998 (by 15 minutes), which restored much of Welles’ original vision, including the pristine opening. Unfortunately, the digital versions currently available are the 1958 release, misleadingly described to sound like the restoration. is still a great film and well worth watching online, if you can’t borrow the DVD of the restoration from a film fan friend. Film noir, rated PG-13, 95 minutes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, and YouTube. (Mark Tiarks)
An alien starship arrives in a lightning storm. The captain of the U.S.S.
is taken prisoner and brutally murdered. A young crewman takes the helm of the ship as the crew escapes but he must stay to carry out the self-destruct. And on a shuttle, a woman is in labor with a boy they will name James Tiberius Kirk.
That’s just the first few minutes of J.J. Abrams’ bone-rattling reboot of the venerated franchise. But here, characters take unexpected paths to a universe fans will likely recognize. It’s fast-paced and thrilling, and manned by actors who manage to capture the spirit of the main characters without parroting them. Sci-fi, rated PG-13, 127 minutes, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, iTunes (Tracy Mobley-Martinez)