Remember
The concept is hard to accept but the acting is first rate. A 90-year-old Holocaust survivor with dementia, Zev (Christopher Plummer) is sent on a mission by his non-ambulatory friend, Max (Martin Landau). The plan is for Zev to kill an equally aged Auschwitz guard who had evaded justice. Plummer nails the mental uncertainty, emotional vulnerability and physical trepidation of old age as he proceeds on a quest by train and bus across North America.
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of National Lampoon
In that drunken after-hours party for the ’60s known as the ’70s, the National Lampoon became the formative voice for comedy as it gave rude voice to absurdity, pomposity and hypocrisy. Writer-director Douglas Tirola lets surviving staffers tell their story of how The Harvard Lampoon, an extra-curricular project for the elite, became America’s platform for mocking and parodying everyone and everything from Richard Nixon to Patty Hearst, from Playboy magazine to philanthropic rock stars.
City of Women
In Federico Fellini’s City of Women (1980), Snaporaz (Marcello Mastroianni) seduces a woman in the restroom of a moving train and eventually follows her into a hotel where feminists are having a convention—mostly militants who insist that “penetration is a crime” and most sex acts are “culturally oppressive.” Their antics give rise to Fellini’s characteristically playful surrealism while the viewer is left to wonder: Is he spoofing the male ego, feminist separatists or both?
Try and Get Me!
Leftist director Cyril Endfield would soon be blacklisted and forced into British exile by the time of Try and Get Me! (1950). The film noir makes many allusions to media fear-mongering and crowd mentality while narrating its story of a hard-luck everyman lured into petty crime until becoming an accomplice to murder. Although preachy at times, the film has many great scenes, including a rampaging lynch mob led by right-wing college students.
