ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[oilgun]

Plot:   Randy commits a crime that would normally get him probation and a hefty fine, but in the "three-strikes" world of justice, he finds himself locked up for 25 years. His cellmate Jake is a congenial yet remorseless lifer who casually informs Randy that he slit his wife's throat because she slept with another man just three months after they exchanged vows. Jake recognizes Randy's fear and offers him advice on how to make it in prison. But it soon becomes clear that Jake has much more than mentoring in mind as he takes Randy under his wing. "Jailbait" sets a darkly cerebral tone, juxtaposing brutality with the unattainable ideal of intimacy in the harshest of psychological environments. For these two men so yearning to be anything but who they are and where they are, power is the goal, and it's never clear who truly holds it right up to the last unsettling moment.

[Fran]

Otis Skinner as Hajj

From IMDb:  Otis Skinner created his most famous stage role, Hajj in "Kismet," and went on to play it until his death. He first filmed it as a 1920 silent and then recreated the role in this 1930 talkie with Loretta Young. The work used an experimental 65mm wide-screen format and some Technicolor. Unfortunately no print or negative is known to exist so we can't gauge it's effectiveness. This version is considered to be one of the "lost" films.

Plot keywords include: 

• Jail
• Jailer

[memento]

From IMDB: Levity is a good psychological thriller about Manual Jordan (Billy Bob Thornton) that is drawn towards the city where he murdered a young man, a crime that he spent 23 years in prison for. He seeks redemption by befriending his victims sister (Holly Hunter). He also meets Sofia Mellinger (Kirsten Dunst) who is a young drunk that Manual is often found assisting. And finally, he meets Miles Evans (Morgan Freeman) who is a shady man that soon turns out to be even more unusual then he was at first.

Levity is an interesting movie that will keep you gripped from start to finish.

[southendmd]

AKA "The Lizard"

Plot:  Reza is a petty thief who escapes jail by posing as a mullah. When he has to stay in disguise longer than he expected, he accidentally becomes the revered leader of a small-town mosque, bringing people flooding in with his on the hoof sermons featuring sexual innuendo and references to 'brother' Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

IMDb trivia:  The movie was shown for 2 weeks in Iranian theaters, but was quickly pulled since it was deemed too insolent towards Islamic clerics.

Broke Iranian box-office record although it was only in theaters for two weeks.

[oilgun]

Plot: In the not-too-distant future, Capt. J.T. Robbins (Liotta) is sent to prison for killing his superior. The corporately (and corruptly) run prison causes Robbins to rebel against the Warden (Lerner). His rebellion only gets him sent to the most maximum security facility there is - Absolom. The worst hardcore criminals are just dumped onto the island Absolom to live or die as they can. The island is patrolled by heavily armed helicopters and fenced by impenetrable sea defenses. Two different societies have formed over the years; an evil 'empire' run by Walter Marek (Wilson) that is conflicting with the other, more pacific, group run by The Father (Henriksen). Resources are kept scarce by the warden as a game to keep the population down by destroying themselves. Who will our hardcore Captain fit in with the best? Can anyone escape from Absolom?

[Fran]

From IMDb:  U.S. Marshal Jeff McLeod, forced to shoot his friend Kentuck in the line of duty, resigns his office and starts for the Oklahoma territory with his pal "Frosty" to join the 1893 Cherokee Strip land-rush. He meets childhood friends, brother and sister Tom and Janet Rankin, and agrees to help them stake a claim which controls the water to a large area. George Frazier and J. W. Saunders are also after the same tract, and force Jeff to draw them a map to the site. The map is phony and Jeff escapes. Later, Jeff draws a real map and gives it to Tom. Saunders ambushes Tom and steals the map. Jeff is framed for the killing and scheduled to be hung on the morning of the land rush. Janet discovers she has to be 21 and/or married before she can file a claim, so she visits Jeff and they are married in the jail. While Jeff is being led to the gallows, "Frosty" causes a commotion by yelling that the land rush has started, and Jeff breaks from his captors and escapes. He then goes after Frazier and Saunders.

[memento]

Chris Auty, Time Out (London).  Some men are above the law. “But how do they know who they are?” “They ask themselves.” But if Martin Lassalle’s Michel seems outstanding only for his arrogance and detachment, there are feelings and reasonings we only learn about by increments and accretion in a film that director Robert Bresson firmly declared not a thriller, even if it does chronicle a young man’s rise and fall as a master pickpocket. If suspense was not unknown in the works of arguably the most austere of major directors (check out the prison break in A Man Escaped), little in his previous oeuvre could prepare us for what amounts to a tour-de-force action scene, a series of takings, passings, and disposals in the actual Gare de Lyon done with amazing sleight of hand, including a purse moved almost immediately through three sets of hands; a wallet taken, dropped in a passer-by’s pocket, then finally taken again; a wallet taken, plucked, then returned empty. (If the light-fingered “boosting” looks authentic, credit the singly-named Kassagi, a presumably reformed criminal master and the film’s technical adviser, who also plays Michel’s criminal mentor).

This was Bresson’s first completely original script (he eventually realized the unconscious inspiration from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) although he provides his own literary genesis in Michel’s diary (or is it a statement?), which provides the narration. Analogies between Hollywood moviemaking and Bresson seldom come to mind, but if the prison conclusion seems familiar, Paul Schrader (whose early critical work Transcendental Cinema highlighted his deep respect for Bresson) has acknowledged that Pickpocket directly influenced his American Gigolo screenplay, as well as Taxi Driver’s. “Black-and-white images in the summer sun... of hands flexing uncontrollably, of eyes opaque to the camera’s gaze... all part of a diary/flashback that is in the process of being ‘written’ by the thief himself in prison. Read it as an allegory on the insufficiency of human reason; as a tone poem on displaced desire.”

[southendmd]

Plot:  A young man, falsely imprisoned by his jealous "friends," escapes and uses a hidden treasure to exact his revenge.

[Fran]

From IMDb:  "Riffraff" (MGM), directed by J. Walter Ruben, stars Jean Harlow, as Hattie who lives by the waterfront with her married sister, Lil (Una Merkel), her husband (William Newell) and their kids, Jimmy and Rose (Mickey Rooney and Juanita Quigley). She works as a tuna-cannery worker for Nick Lewis (Joseph Calleia), but her real interest is Dutch Muller (Spencer Tracy), a loudmouthed, conceited fisherman. Although she pretends to hate him, she keeps his picture in her room and follows him about, and during a festivity where she proves herself lucky for him at the gambling tables, Dutch dumps his beauties and changes his interest towards her. Eventually, they marry and prove to become the typical husband and wife, always yelling and screaming at one another, usually saying things for which they mean the opposite. After Dutch rises from fisherman to union leader, he becomes responsible for a strike that causes many men, he included, to be out of work for a length of time. Being more concerned with his pride than with his wife and people who look up to him, Dutch deserts. When Hattie learns that Dutch is sick and is living amongst homeless bums, she steals some money from Nick to give to Dutch. Because of this, she is arrested. While serving time in prison, Dutch takes time to think things over, unaware that Hattie is not only serving time for his sake, but has given birth to his child.

[memento]

Plot: 1991: the Cold War is ending. Just days before the US President is to visit China for trade talks, a CIA operative named Bishop is captured in a rogue operation at a Chinese prison. He'll be shot in 24 hours unless the President steps in. CIA honchos hunker down at Langley, controlling the damage to the diplomatic mission by hanging Bishop out to dry. Enter Nathan Muir, one day before retirement from the Agency, the man who recruited and trained Bishop. Can he find a way to get the President to free Bishop; if that fails, can he engineer a rescue? He hangs around Langley, telling stories about Bishop, as he gathers intelligence, looks for opportunities, and runs his own spy game