Screen Test

A certain shade of chartreuse upholsters the seats of an art-deco private airliner crashing to earth in the opening scene of “The Phoenician Scheme.” That dazzling green color framing the cartoon-mustached face of Benecio Del Toro is the sort of mind-bending vision that can only be beheld in movies made by Wes Anderson.  Whimsical, eccentric, brightly colored, unmoored in time between a literary past and a cockamamie present, these visions are postcards from the parallel universe where the Oscar-winning filmmaker's imagination resides. His characters speak English in clipped cadences out of storybooks, rather than actual geographical states or nations. His scripts seem childishly naïve, but their storylines are as intricate as vintage clockwork. His singular visual style is like live-action cartoon, blurring the line where animation and “real life” meet. Now, just don't ask what the movie's about. The plot revolves shaggy-dog-like around sad-eyed industrialist and arms deal...

Joaquin Phoenix on the job in “Eddington.”  A24 photos via IMDb.com So, what does  dark comedy  mean, exactly … ? “Eddington,” which falls under that genre on the Internet Movie Database, isn't the first movie that's left me asking the question. It's just the most recent. The film is also labeled a Contemporary Western, a concept easier to grasp. Eddington is the name of a tiny, out-of-the-way New Mexico town, grappling – as the rest of the country was when the story opens in 2020 – with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.  You can't get much more contemporary than that. Written and directed by Ari Aster, who has developed a cult following for leading audiences into scary sometimes gross places, its cast is heavy with Oscar winners and nominees. Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Pablo Pascal, Dierdre O'Connell, Michael Ward, Luke Grimes and Austen Butler, for openers. Phoenix plays Eddington's Sheriff Joe Cross, a sad-sack lawman who's got about as much as he can...

           Click on the link for video.   https://youtu.be/W3rXipubv14?si=UGq9jItSYgq_0d3G   Freight train, freight train, run so fast Freight train, freight train, run so fast Please don't tell what train I'm on And they won't know what route I'm going Accompanied by Dirk Powell's gentle finger picking on Elizabeth Cotton's classic folk song, Rhiannon Giddens opened a sold-out concert at Tucson's Rialto Theatre Friday with a voice as pure as a bell, as free as a bird, as powerful as a locomotive, as lonesome as midnight. Two hours later, she concluded the concert triumphantly with a joyful jig, riding a crest of artistry and energy that had shaken the historic theater to its rafters. You'd think being an awesome artist would be enough. But for the 48-year-old native of Greensboro, North Carolina, it's only the beginning. She's more a force of nature, a barefoot prodigy, a virtuoso on banjo and fiddle with an operatically trained voice. Daughter ...

                                                                                             Poster and photo images via IMDb.com Seeing “F1: The Movie” with my 11-year-old grandson reminded me of my own motor racing career when I was about his age more than a half-century ago. It took place on a go-kart track at the Marlboro sports car raceway outside Baltimore. My dad would pack my kart in the trunk of his Pontiac Bonneville, and we would go racing a couple of Sundays a month. That go-kart was the greatest joy of my junior high school wonder years in an era when a young senator from Massachusetts was inaugurated president of the United States one sunny snow-covered Friday morning a few miles from our home in the Washington suburbs. Feeling like that kid ...

  Ellen Parren in “I'm Not a Robot.”  Image via IMDb.com You may not know the name. But you've had the experience. It's CAPTCHA, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Whether the acronym is coincidental or intentionally designed to trigger paranoia, it does sound uncomfortably close to  capture. It refers to the squiggly obscured letters and numbers, or the sign-in photo grid on a lot of websites, telling you to click all the boxes with bicycles, bridges or stoplights to prove you're not a robot.  You know what I'm talking about, right? But what happens if you fail the test? That's the premise for “I'm Not a Robot,” a joint production from the Netherlands and Belgium that just won the Oscar for best live-action short. Hauntingly acted and elegantly filmed, it's a story of a young woman (Ellen Parren) who can't convince CAPTCHA that she's human. What follows falls somewhere between the blackest of comedies...

                                            Gene Hackman in “Unforgiven.”  Warner Bros. photo via IMDb.com. It goes without saying that the most touching – and most real – part of most movie award shows is the In Memoriam segment. The recent death of Gene Hackmen along with his wife Betsy Arakawa marked another star going dark in the night sky. Hackman will be remembered, among the year's other great and tender losses, when the Academy Awards return Sunday, live on ABC and Hulu, beginning at 4 p.m. Hollywood time. I used to watch the beautiful people at the Oscars, trying to keep count of how many of them I had met, shared a few minutes with, maybe a handshake, on rare occasions a hug. Quite a few, actually. But over years, then decades, the migration began. Gradually, more and more of those gorgeous striders on the red carpet were young strangers. And more and more of the ...