Kick-Back Friday: February 2009 Archives
HBO's Recount (2008): A left-leaning dramatization of the 2000 recount of Florida votes, which determined the outcome of the US Presidential race by a hair's breadth.
A very tight script of a very complicated story was ostensibly written by 34-year-old actor Danny Strong ("The Gilmore Girls," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), who I suspect got a lot of rewrite help from the late Sydney Pollack (executive producer) and others. Florida's infamous Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, is handled mostly with care by Laura Dern—a difficult job, given that Harris is such a real-life cartoon.
Also Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary have a nice exchange about chads.
More than just a movie with a really, really good title, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) shows off the right-honorable talent of the right-honorable Spencer Tracy. While searching for a Japanese farmer in a dying desert town, a saintly Tracy, as WW2 veteran John J. McCreedy, faces off against the unholy trinity of Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine.
When Tracy and Borgnine finally go at it, notice Tracy's method of defense.
Edward G. Robinson does comedy, see, in Larceny, Inc., see.
A consummate idea man, Robinson's "Pressure" Maxwell pairs up with 2 fellow ex-cons—dim-witted gorilla "Jug" Martin (Broderick Crawford) and the merely dim-witted "Weepy" Davis (Edward Brophy)—to pull off a labor-intensive bank heist. Anthony Quinn and a nearly unrecognizable Jane Wyman co-star.
Pressure: This job's got to be handled with finesse.
Jug: Who's that?
An unprecedented recommendation from this century (hell, from just last year): Wildly successful playwright Martin McDonagh takes a shot at (pardon...) film directing with In Bruges (2008).
McDonagh's Laurel-and-Hardy hitman duo, played by Brendan Gleeson (aka Professor Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody in the Harry Potter movies) and a surprisingly amusing Colin Farrell, hang out in Bruges (Belgium, that is) to wait for their next assignment from their very principled boss (Ralph Fiennes).
