M-FOR-MOVIES!!

Richard Donner’s big screen offshoot of the old TV Western series, from a Butch Cassidy-meets-The Sting script by William Goldman, is slick, cute, formula, and full of lazy gags. Gibson lobs in a narcissistic performance as card-sharp Brett Maverick, up to his neck in oater shenanigans with the likes of con-woman Annabelle (Foster, not a natural comic),’Marshal ‘ Zane Cooper(Garner, the original TV Maverick),bandido Angel (Molina), and Indian chief Joseph (Greene, in a turn that comes on as PC but seems somehow offensive).A financially successful exercise in target-marketing ,but not much of a movie. GA

An enchanting comedy which starts with Colbert, as an American chorine on the make, stranded in Paris in a gold lame evening grown (what else?). She is befriended on the one hand by a poor taxi-driver who is really a Russian count (Ameche), and on the other by a wealthy socialite (Barrymore) who introduces her to society so that she can oblige by lurking a gigolo away from his wife. Uncanny coincidental parallels with La Regle du Jeu abound, and although the film echoes Renoir’s bark more than his bite, it has a superbly malicious script by Brackett and Wilder, gorgeous sets and camerawork, and matchless cast. All in all, probably Leisen’s best film.

A comedy of manners which cocks a wryly amused eye at the pomp and circumstance attending preparations for the marriage of a nice Jewish boy (Berri himself) to a nice Jewish girl (Wiener).He is French ,poor, a bit of a dreamer; she is Belgian, rich, practical and pregnant .Complications set in when she realizes she truly loves him ,but he goes starry-eyed about an English teacher (Harrington).All comes out in the wash ,of course ,though not without the caustic implication that a happy Jewish family in the land is worth two grand passions in the bush. What makes the film, really, is its complete refusal to fall back on stereotypical characters and situations .Its constant alertness to eccentricities of behavior makes it both engaging and often very funny.

A Sweet-souled, down-to-earth daughter of zoologists, 15-year-old Cady (Lohan, reigning queen of the tweenies) goes from a lifetime of home tutoring in ‘the African bush’ to a sprawling high school in suburban Chicago. Once there, she immediately grasps that the pitiless laws of the jungle apply equally to the various sharp-toothed species of American teendom. A scowly artiste (Caplan) and a zinger-zapping gay guy (Franzese) adopt comely Cady as one of their own and, just for laughs, set her on an under-cover mission to infiltrate the ‘Plastics’, a consortium of high priestesses led by terrifying alpha girl Regina (McAdams). The deft, precisely detailed script by Saturday Night live star Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason maths teacher) dramatizes Rosalind Wiseman’s bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other realties of Adolescence. Happily, Fey and Waters – who also directed Lohan in Freaky Friday – gently, tweak the studios’ usual high-gloss caricature of adolescence and aim for acutely hilarious and surprisingly empathic sociology. The movie nails the servile malice of 15-year-old girls, the voodoo art of sparkly-eyed mind-fuck (blindsiding case study: Regina tells Cady she’s pretty, Cady bashfully thanks her, Regina fires back, ‘So you think you’re pretty?’), and, of course, the lunch-table caste system. Emeritus losers will wince with recognition when Cady takes her tray into bathroom stall rather than face the infernal maw also known as the school cafeteria.

A costume comedy which, despite the best efforts of urbanely professional Saville, looks more like an English pantomime than the breakthrough to Hollywood it was intended as. Wooden old Tom Walls hasn’t much to do as Marlborough, and his hangdog ragbag of an army is no match for ebullient principal Boy Courtneidge. Strutting, pouting, singing, brawling, her women soldier Kit Ross reduces the ruffianly riff-raff around her to a pack of sulky schoolboy’s .If the anti-patriotic populism of music hall songs like “I am Colonel of the cold stream guards” is missing, there’s still a slimy villain of a recruiting sergeant, and the film’s cynicism about martial valour and the glories of war is refreshing.