Shaun Berk's 10 Movie Recommendations

Welcome to the 128th edition of my long-running series. I hope you are all enjoying yourselves. Next week, I will be auditioning for a couple shows in attempt to make my big comeback to the stage. Now, enough about me, get out your queues whether that be Netflix or Blockbuster and start adding to them and if they are on the bottom of your list, move them on up, only if you want to though since we are a free society.




El Cid (1961): With the recent death of Charlton Heston, I thought I should feature something of his and I picked out this epic. Anthony Mann directed this epic starring our former NRA president as the title character whose real name was Rodrigo Diaz but to his followers he became El Cid which means The Lord and leads his Spanish army against the Moors while still seeking peace. Sophia Loren plays his love interest Jimena who first wanted him killed but then saw his nobility. I'm not going to sit here and go through every little thing that Rodrigo goes through, he goes through a lot, but that he was known as the "peaceful warrior" and was a real person.




What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993): Now for something quite different than my first selection. Lasse Hallstrom directed this adaptation from a novel by Peter Hedges. Johnny Depp, in a more "normal" role, plays the title character. He lives in a small town and works at the local grocery store and is part of a rather dysfunctional family who had an overweight mom, played by Darlene Cates, an autistic younger brother, played very well by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a couple sisters who did not seem to appreciate Gilbert though that is my own observation, something he never brings up. I say that because he was pretty much left responsible for his brother and anything that happened was squarely on his shoulders but they never seemed to offer to relieve him of the burden. Maybe I'm too observant. Juliette Lewis plays the love interest of Gilbert. Other people in this movie include John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, and Crispin Glover. This was a good slice of life film with an interesting ending.




The Wild One (1953): Now we go to a biker film which seemed to be a bit of a propaganda piece but oh well, still very enjoyable. Laszlo Benedek directed this iconic film starring Marlon Brando as the leader of a biker gang who goes around terrorizing a small town and fight another rival gang in the process. Marlon is Johnny and he starts to see more error of his ways when he meets a girl played by Mary Murphy. Also look for Lee Marvin as one of the bikers. Check out the original of the biker films.




Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996): Jim Mallon directed this movie adaptation to the hit tv series which I watched some as a kid, mostly with my dad even though the tv series was usually just as long if not longer than this movie. This was a show about a mad scientist wanting to take over the world and is making a simple man named Mike Nelson watch some of the worst movies possible. This time Mike and his robot buddies watch THIS ISLAND EARTH and they go on with some great one liners making this a very entertaining film to watch.




La Vie en Rose (2007): Olivier Dahan directed this French award-winning film charting the early life, rise and premature death of real-life singer Edith Piaf. She is poor all her life until night club owner Louis Leplee discovers her singing on the street and gives her a job. Gerard Depardieu plays Leplee who was on screen far too sparingly in my opinion. There is just something about Gerard Depardieu that he is just always likable to me and just that look as an actor including that big, rounded nose and good screen personality. Marion Cotillard plays Edith and was great in that role winning an academy award playing the role in her prime and in her older age when she was dying.



Thru the Mirror (1936): This is part 4 of at least 6 of my long-running Disney series and my short filim for the week starring cartoon icon Mickey Mouse. When Mickey goes to sleep he has the book ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS and soon finds himself on the other side of the mirror where everything is alive and is experiencing chaos just like Alice. There are also some good animation dance numbers like one with some playing cards. These are the pioneers of animation which gave way to the awesome computer animation of today but we should not overlook the art of paper animation.



The Year of the Yao (2004): This is a documentary I found on the Independent Film Channel which charts the rise of Houston Rockets center Yao Ming. We start in his early days of Chinese basketball, to the day he was drafted by the Rockets, his early struggles and then the day he became a force to be reckoned with. This was actually a very insightful documentary and features a lot of his translator Colin Pine who was always there for Yao even in his struggles. It was interesting to see how he dealt with these pressures like no one else ever had.





The Violent Professionals (1973): This is my Grindhouse selection for the week which focuses on a vigilante cop who goes to avenge his boss' murder at all cost and that means going undercover and going after the mafia single-handedly. This one is pretty entertaining, not really original but good enough. The VHS transfer was awful which might make it harder to watch.



Sorry, Wrong Number (1948): Anatole Litvak directed this radio play by Lucille Fletcher. Barbara Stanwyck stars as a bedridden heiress who overhears a misrouted phone conversation over a murder plot where she does whatever she can to prevent the murder and finds that it is not as random as she thinks. Burt Lancaster also stars as her husband who has not returned home. This must be watched very carefully but this is quite suspenseful and well performed. It was interesting to see the rise of a telephone and that being the object of hearing a murder plot. It's just too bad that I can't work a switchboard. I know I would have done a great job.



The River (1984): We end this week on the farm in Tennesee. Mark Rydell directed this story by Robert Dillon which stars Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek as husband and wife with a son and daughter. Mel Gibson plays Tom Garvey who is having a lot of trouble on his farm with storms and the bank trying to shut him down for business purposes and he refuses to back down. His character reminded me a lot of Harrison Ford in THE MOSQUITO COAST with his stubborn attitude and his unwillingness to give in which sometimes makes it hard to sympathise but we know they have all the right reasons. Sissy Spacek is good as the wife who is having difficulty with the struggles on the farm.



Well, that is the end of my recommendations but I am trying to add even more variety to these so keep on reading. Each week, I want to add some type of honorable mention which might be books, plays, and whatever else besides film so this week I take a look into the world of musicals. I don't want any of you to worry though, I won't be like MTV and VH1 where they have taken all the music out of the channels for the most part. The movies will always be the main part of this.



HONORABLE THEATER MENTION


Assassins: I just went to go see this Steven Sondheim musical last night on opening night. For those of you who don't know who Steven Sondheim is, he is the man who wrote the musical SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. That musical may be quite strange but now we go into the world of the assassins and would-be assassins of the Presidents of the United States. My myspace friends Tom Cherry and Erika Peterson co-star in this musical. Tom was hilarious and disturbing as Samuel Byck, the man who unsucessfully tried to assassinate Richard Nixon and is the same person Sean Penn plays in THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON. Erika was good and funny as Manson girl Squeaky Froame who attempted to kill Gerald Ford.



Now, before I go into this, let me give you a little history lesson. We all know who John Wilkes Booth killed. He was an actor in the theater during the Civil War and unhappy with the state of the south and Abraham Lincoln. He then formed a plan with three other people to kill different people in the government but only Booth succeeded by killing Lincoln in the Ford Theater. A lesser-known presidential assassin named Czolgosz who was the son of immigrants and had a hard time finding work leading to depression and much more when he shot President William McKinley while he was making a speech and McKinley would go on for another hour to finish his speech before dying. Charles Guiteau was a religious and ambitious person and wanted a diplomatic position in the White House but was rejected and with so many unsuccessful business ventures, he would go onto kill President James Garfield while he was boarding a train. Lee Harvey Oswald would go onto become a huge subject of debate on whether or not he killed Kennedy and if he did whether or not he acted alone. Those are the assassins who succeeded but Sondheim did not discriminate in this musical so now we go to the ones who were not successful. First, we'll look at the two Charles Manson women Squeaky Froame and Sara Jane Moore who made separate assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford. Squeaky Froame pointed a pistol at Ford but there were no bullets in the firing chamber and apparently went to trial so that Charles Manson could testify his cause in court. Seventeen days later Sara Jane Moore made her own attempt on Ford and got a shot fired off. She was originally undercover for the FBI and then was dropped when she confessed to her radical group. Her assassination attempt was apparently to show her loyalty to the radical group. Next, we have Samuel Byck as mentioned above formed an attempt to kill Richard Nixon but never even got to the vicinity of Nixon. Byck had failed in the business world and blamed Nixon. He then wrote a series of angry letters and then made a tape of his plans to kill Nixon and sent tapes to many people including Leonard Bernstein. When getting to the airport, he killed a security guard. When he got on the plane, he actually wounded the pilot and killed the co-pilot before getting hit by a sniper and eventually died. Giuseppe Zangara, a much less-known person and situation actually fired some shots at Franklin Roosevelt's limosine. In the process, he killed the mayor and wounded four others. He would eventually get the electric chair. That is something I didn't even know about. Now, for my last one is John Hinckley. Most people's actions were for a cause or being disgruntled about the government. Hinckley tried to kill Ronald Reagon for Jodie Foster due to a scene in TAXI DRIVER which starred Jodie as a 12 and a half year old hooker. He ended up hitting reagon in the chest, shot a plain clothes officer and the worst part was him hitting Reagon's chief press aide James Brady in the head resulting in a lot of struggles and with a lot of look at gun control. He was found not guilty by reasons of insanity and is in a mental institution. You can all find more detailed histories on these people, I just wanted to get them exposed a bit to show who is featured.



This is actually a very interesting musical where it takes place mostly in a bar where they each kind of give their side of what happened and such. I don't know how else to explain it. They all interact in the bar. Booth has a very powerful ballad on why he killed Lincoln and everyone else explains their own warped mind for how they were wronged. This is not for all tastes but it is definetly something very interesting to see. It is hard to really explain so if you find it in your area, go check it out if you feel it is somthing you will really like.



CONNECTION TIME



-Charlton Heston (El Cid) and Gerard Depardieu (La Vie En Rose) were in the Kenneth Branaugh's 1996 version of Hamlet




-Charlton Heston (El Cid) and Mel Gibson (The River) were in a tv movie called A Night on Mount Edna


-Sophia Loren (El Cid) and Marlon Brando (The Wild One) were in Charlie Chaplin's last film A Countess from Hong Kong in 1967


-Sophia Loren (El Cid) and Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) are scheduled to be in a Rob Marshall film called Nine in 2009 and one of many writers credited was Federico Fellini. Something else a bit interesting is that they are the only two actresses to have won Academy Awards while mainly speaking in a foreign language


-Sophia Loren (El Cid) and Gerard Depardieu (La Vie En Rose) were in a 2002 film called Between Strangers


-Sophia Loren (El Cid) and Burt Lancaster (Sorry, Wrong Number) were in The Cassandra Crossing


-Johnny Depp (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Marlon Brando (The Wild One) were in Don Juan DeMarco in 1995 and in 1997 they were in a movie which I have never heard of until now called The Brave


-Johnny Depp (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) are scheduled to be in the 2009 film Public Enemies where Depp is to portray bank robber John Dillinger, something I am interested to see.


-Johnny Depp (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Verne Troyer (The Year of the Yao, archival footage) were in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and are set to co-star in Gilliams 2009 film The Imagination of Doctor Parnassus


-Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Gerard Depardieu (La Vie en Rose) most notably co-starred in the 1998 version of The Man in the Iron Mask and they were also in A Hundred and One Nights where DiCaprio had an uncredited appearance


-Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Jack Nicholson (The Year of the Yao, archival footage) were in the 2006 blockbuster The Departed


-Juliette Lewis (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Jack Nicholson (The Year of the Yao, archival footage) were in the 1996 film The Evening Star


-Juliette Lewis (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Adam Sandler (The Year of the Yao, archival footage) were in the 1994 comedy Mixed Nuts



-Mary Steenburgen (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Jack Nicholson (The Year of the Yao, archival footage) were in last week's edition of SBTMW for the 1978 western comedy Goin' South. They were also in Milos Forman's 1981 film Ragtime where Nicholson appears unbilled.




-Mary Steenburgen (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Sissy Spacek (The River) were in The Long Walk Home, The Grass Harp, and Four Christmases. Note that in The Long Walk Home that Mary Steenburgen was the narrator




-John C. Reilly (What's Eating Gilbert Grape), Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler, and Kevin Nealon (The Year of the Yao, archival footage) were all in the 2003 film Anger Management but Reilly was uncredited


-John C. Reilly (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) and Jack Nicholson (The Year of the Yao) were in the 1992 biopic Hoffa


-Marlon Brando (The Wild One) and Jack Nicholson (The Year of the Yao) were in Arthur Penn's 1976 western The Missouri Breaks


-Lee Marvin (The Wild One) and Barbara Stanwyck (Sorry, Wrong Number) were in the 1962 film Walk on the Wild Side




-Lee Marvin (The Wild One) and Sissy Spacek (The River) were in the 1972 film Prime Cut


-Gerard Depardieu (La Vie en Rose) and Burt Lancaster (Sorry, Wrong Number) were in Bertolucci's Novecento