ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[memento]

From IMDB: Fed up with her small-town Bay City existence, Adele August leaves her family and second husband and heads for Beverley Hills with her daughter. The teenager resents the move and her mother's always flamboyant behaviour and in turns plans to get away to university on the east coast. Mum's plans are different - she wants a movie star for a daughter.

[Lynne]

From Wiki, we have Keanu's big break:

The film opens in the future San Dimas, California, with Rufus (George Carlin) preparing to use a time machine disguised as a phone booth to travel back to 1988 to make sure that Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore "Ted" Logan (Keanu Reeves) remain together as the band "Wyld Stallyns", as their music is the core of the future's Utopian society...

[Fran]

From IMDb:  Romantic, obsessive Steve Thompson is drawn back to L.A. to make another try for Anna, his former wife. However, Anna belongs now to the L.A. underworld. Steve believes he can rescue her, ignoring the advice and warnings of people who would try to save him. He commits himself to a dangerous course of action that quickly takes everyone somewhere unintended.

[memento]

From IMDB: New York cop John McClane flies to Los Angeles on Christmas eve to spend the holidays with his family. He arrives at the Nakatomi corp. building for his wife's office party. International terrorists take over the building and hold every one as hostage to steel $600 million of bonds from the vaults of the building. Now its up to McCLane to face the terrorists and save his wife and the other hostages.

[southendmd]

Plot:  In the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, everyone is more than they initially seem. May waits tables, raises a son, Henry, and is an aspiring actress. She needs a roommate and takes in a pizza deliverer named Jonathan, an aspiring songwriter. In the adjoining flat is August, an Austrian body sculptor who appears in a deodorant commercial and dreams big dreams. May takes a job delivering singing telegrams as a stripper, Jonathan invites Henry to tag along with him on deliveries, August gets into trouble with the police who call his father in Austria, and the friendships, frustrations, and love affairs of everyday life come to a head.

With Susan Dey and Tom Hulce.

[Fran]

From IMDb:  Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher, Los Angeles journalist, really lives for his profession. As Jane Doe, he publishes articles that have caused several heads to roll in the past. Now, Fletch is at it again: In disguise as a bum, he lives at the beach, researching drugs and their dealing. One day, Fletch is addressed by Alan Stanwyk, a rich man, who asks him, the bum, a favour. For the sum of $50,000, Fletch should kill poor cancer-ridden Mr. Stanwyk with a gun, so that his wife will get the insurance money. What the guy didn't think of was Fletch's real profession. Returning into normal life, Fletch instantly takes up research not only to find out that Mr. Stanwyk is healthy as life itself, but he also runs into certain connections between drug dealing at the beach, Alan Stanwyk, his private jet, the police and a very expensive piece of Land in Utah.

[oilgun]

Can't believe this hasn't been played!



Plot: Set in 1957, James Whale, the director of Show Boat (1936), The Invisible Man (1933), Frankenstein (1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), had long since stepped back from the glamor and glitz of Hollywood. A stroke triggers once buried flashes of memory of his life in Dudley, his film career, and, most influentially, the trenches during the Great War. Haunted and lonely, he recounts many of his experiences to his musclebound gardener, Clay Boone. Despite the divide that exists between them, their friendship develops. Reliant on his sternly disapproving housemaid, Hannah, the flamboyant director whose time has passed sees himself slipping away, unable to stop the decline, and indulges his fantasies by coaxing Boone to model for him

[southendmd]

Plot:  A detective examines the mysterious death of George Reeves, TV's Superman.

Trivia:  The famous Hollywood sign originally read Hollywoodland, promoting a real estate project in the 1920s. The last 4 letters were removed in 1949.

[Fran]

From IMDb:  Susan Hayward never lets her foot up. As Lillian Roth in "I'll Cry Tomorrow," she sticks with her strident, pedal-to-the-floor style. Whether she's belting out "Sing, You Sinners" on a Paramount set, screeching at her mother or one of her husbands, or writhing with the D.T.s, Hayward elbows Roth clear off the screen.

And that's a shame, because this story of a singer laid low by her alcoholism (based on Roth's memoir) doesn't need turbocharging. But, like his star, director Daniel Mann keeps twisting the dials up to 10, opting inflexibly for ear-splitting melodrama over quieter insight. Those necessary connecting passages hold little interest for him. So, with abrupt, disorienting shifts of time and locale, the movie judders along from one star turn to the next (as would, two years later, the almost identical "The Helen Morgan Story").

In his rush to get to the juicy parts when Roth starts sliding off banquettes in ritzy nightclubs, he whizzes through the Lower East Side shtik of stage-mama Jo Van Fleet pushing young Roth in front of the footlights, and through a pivotal romance with childhood sweetheart Ray Danton (his death starts her drinking). During a blackout, she marries a stage-door Johnny; after a drunken spat, it's suddenly two years later and he's long gone. From Roth's lavish layout in Manhattan, she boards a train and ends up in a dump of a Los Angeles apartment; we're left to supply the why.

When cool sadist Richard Conte enters her life, all but twirling a moustache, he slows things down a bit. But it's never clear who he is or why he married her. For her fame and money? Or just because he needed a vulnerable victim to torment? Leaving him furtively in the middle of the night, she stumbles around the Bowery for – days? Weeks? Years? The director's grasp of the passage of time is as slippery as his subject's.

Most centrally, we never see the precise point when she becomes unreliable – unemployable. In one of the most affecting scenes, when she can barely walk but must perform, she tells a grip, "Better put the chair on the stage." But then, propped against it, she sings the truest, most understated number in the movie, "Happiness Is A Thing Called Joe."

Finally, after failing to hurl herself out a hotel window, Hayward/Roth creeps into AA. But even that venerable fellowship gets treated to a full Hollywood rewrite. She and sponsor Eddie Albert fall in love, she turns the meetings into her private cabaret, and then goes on "This Is Your Life" to tell her story on national television (so much for principles before personalities).

As a tale of transformation, "I'll Cry Tomorrow" is seldom less than fascinating. But it's not as much a journey from alcoholic squalor into sobriety as it is the change from a heartfelt account of recovery into an ambitious actress' overwrought bid for an Oscar.

[memento]

From IMDB: Jackie Brown is the name of a flight attendant who gets caught smuggling her boss' gun money on the airline she works for. Luckily for her, the Fed Ray Nicolet and the LA Cop Mark Dargus decide to team up in order to arrest the arms dealer she works for, whose name they don't even know. Here's when she has to choose one way: tell Nicolet and Dargus about Ordell Robbie (the arms dealer) and get her freedom -except that if Ordell suspects you're talking about him, you're dead- or keep her mouth shut and do some time. That's when she meets Max Cherry -her bail bondsman-, a late fifties, recently separated, burnt-out man, who falls in love with her. Then Jackie comes up with a plan to play the Feds off against Ordell and the guys he works with -Louis Gara and Melanie Ralston, among others- and walk off with their money. But she needs Max's help. No one is going to stand in the way of his million dollar payoff..