ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[southendmd]

Jack plays Henry Lloyd Moon in this film.

Plot:  Henry Moon is captured for a capital offense by a posse when his horse quits while trying to escape to Mexico. He finds that there is a post-Civil War law in the small town that any single or widowed woman can save him from the gallows by marrying him. Julia Tate needs a man to help her work her mine and marries him. The sheriff makes it very clear to Moon what the consequences of his leaving Julia will be. The two begin to try to form a relationship based on necessity in which they have nothing in common.

With Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen and John Belushi.

[memento]

Jack played the part of Mark Forman in this film.



From IMDB: An autobiographical look at the breakup of Ephron's marriage to Carl "All the President's Men" Bernstein that was also a best-selling novel. The Ephron character, Rachel (Meryl Streep) is a food writer at a New York magazine who meets Washington columnist Mark (Jack Nicholson) at a wedding and ends up falling in love with him despite her reservations about marriage. They buy a house, have a daughter, and Rachel thinks they are living happily ever after until she discovers that Mark is having an affair while she is waddling around with a second pregnancy.

=aside= Fran
I didn't know there was a sequel either.  Too bad the reviews weren't very good.

[oilgun]

Maureen Stapleton played Pearl in this film and was also in Warren Beatty's REDS with Jack Nicholson.



Plot:   Homage to Ingmar Bergman in this family drama involving a fashionable Long Island interior designer who tries to impose her overbearing, critical standards on her husband and her three grown daughters. The film is a realistic look at the relationships among one artistically-oriented family; one daughter is a successful writer; the second is looking for an artistic outlet; and the third is an actress. The mother has been deserted by her husband, their father. She thinks and hopes they may reconcile, but she soon learns that he has other thoughts that circle about a new acquaintance, a woman who has had two husbands and is still lively.

[oilgun]

What movie is this from? 

[Fran]

"The Jammed" featured Saskia Burmeister, who appeared in "Ned Kelly" with Heath Ledger, who was awesome in "The Dark Knight" with Morgan Freeman, who starred in "The Bucket List" with Jack Nicholson.

From IMDb:

Just when it was beginning to look like a ho-hum year for Australian film, along comes "The Jammed," a low-budget, locally made shock of electricity that further restores one's faith in just how good Australian social-realist films can be.

Set largely in the underworld of Melbourne's illegal sex trade, the film is a prime example of how a factually based story about a hot-button topic can be morphed into compelling fiction. For want of a more eloquent analogy, watching The Jammed is the cinematic equivalent of having a bucket of cold water thrown into your face.

The film kicks off with a traditionally frenetic "what the hell is going on?" opening sequence as an illegal immigrant working as a prostitute undergoes interrogation in an immigration office, on the verge of being deported.

We then jump back in time a mere three weeks for the back-story and are introduced to five women. Crystal (Emma Lung), Vanya (Saskia Burmeister) and Rubi (Sun Park) have been imported into Australia with false papers and forced to work as prostitutes. Sunee (Amanda Ma) is a frightened Chinese mother with a purse full of cash looking for her missing daughter.

Linking these women is Ashley (Veronica Sywack), a bored, single insurance clerk who unwittingly becomes involved in the search when she meets Sunee while picking up somebody at the airport.

Reluctant at first to help this stranger, Ashley is overtaken by growing compassion for her plight, first putting up missing posters on poles then pressing an ex-boyfriend into service to help her out. She, of course, has no idea how nasty and violent the underworld is, and at one point is the recipient of the most violent verbal threat since Robert De Niro told Nick Nolte in "Cape Fear" that he was going to learn about loss.

=aside= Gil
Love the intermission idea!

I'm clueless as to where it's from, though...
(and to be perfectly honest, I don't even
know which actor that is -- well, unless it's
Gene Wilder).

[memento]

Helen Hunt appeared in this movie as Bev Kilmartin and also costarred with Jack in "As Good as it Gets."



IMDB: A loose remake of the classic 1947 film noir, this version boasts an impressive cast: Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ving Rhames, Stanley Tucci as well as the underrated David Caruso. As Kilmartin's first wife Bev, Helen Hunt is particularly good, and one feels the film loses intensity when her character shortly disappears. Unfortunately the presence of all this talent doesn't make this film anything more than a commercially entertaining 90 minutes or so. Schroeder sacrifices many of the strengths of the original production to create a thriller with a much more contemporary impact, but average results. Whereas Hathaway's film was praised at the time for its documentary feel, Schroeder's location work remains fairly anonymous, excepting the impressive crane and tracking shot through the junkyard over which the opening credits are played out. At the heart of the film is the character of Kilmartin. Dragged back into the underworld and danger by the call of an imagined debt, his journey is a gradual one from a position of weakness and entrapment to that of strength and liberation. As he says later to Junior,"whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - hardly original philosophy, but his growing assertiveness confirms the truth of this inspiration. Kilmartin has to overcome in turn his injuries, his imprisonment, his wife's crash, betrayal and his own fear before he finds his feet again. His adventures become a means to recover his self-respect, to regain personal equilibrium, a result only achieved in the final scene.

=aside= Gil

Is the pic Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I remember that look of horror on his face.

I like the idea of the intermission also and think we should have more of them.

[southendmd]

Jack played SM1 Billy "Bad A$$" Buddusky in this film.

Plot:  Two Navy men are ordered to bring a young offender (Randy Quaid!) to prison but decide to show him one last good time along the way.

Trivia:  The script was completed in 1970, but contained too much profanity to be shot as written. Columbia Pictures waited for two years trying to get writer Robert Towne to tone down the language. Instead, by 1972, the standards for foul language relaxed so much that all the profanity was left in.

=intermission aside=
Great and fun idea!
Donald Sutherland with a bad perm...

[louisev]

What movie is this from? 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the remake with bad Donald Sutherland hair?

[Fran]

Jack Nicholson played President James Dale and Art Land in "Mars Atacks!"

From IMDb: 

This movie is hilarious. It works at all levels. It's funny, it's original in its approach, and it's a perfect satire on all those euphoric sci-fi movies. It's a laugh-all-the-way roller-coaster with a script that never stops to shock you. It is such a pleasant diversion from the serious, heavy and pretentious sci-fi disaster films full of preachings and heroism of a few.

The characters in the film are damn funny and very well developed. The huge cast has been assembled so well by the casting director, that I feel each and every actor was born to play his/her character in the film. The double dose of Jack Nicholson is awesome. He plays the Texan millionaire cowboy so well that I couldn't identify him when he appeared the first time. Tim Burton does a commendable job of building up so many characters with so little time. He doesn't waste any time at all -- every one gets a few minutes as the movie is on the run from the word go -- but, still, each character is rock solid. I wonder how was he able to manage Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnon, Annette Benning, Glenn Rose, Michael J Fox, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Natalie Portman, Danny Devito, Pam Grier and Tom Jones. Each one of them delivers a worthy performance. The special effects are too good. They are not sleek and heavy as in other big budget films but unpolished and cocky, in line with the message of the film. The martians are hilarious, but devilish at the same time. The music has the touch of 60s sci-fi films, which only adds to the effect.

[oilgun]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the remake with bad Donald Sutherland hair?

And we have a winner!  Give the lady a Cupie doll!




It's basically the final scene of the 78 remake with Donald Sutherland.