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Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, The Worx

This week, Valley Cinemas is holding over its two films from last week. A good entry in the James Bond series, Spectre shows signs that the filmmakers thought the long-running franchise was getting to resemble the Bourne movies and so have retooled Bond to hark back to the glory days of Sean Connery, with the result that new film resembles Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, as others have pointed out.

The dimensional CGI of The Peanuts Movie takes some getting used to, but once that’s accomplished the film is in the tradition of the daily comic strip and the TV specials.

On December 5, PBSMontana is re-airing Fort Peck Dam. The resultant behemoth graced the cover of the first issue of Life magazine because it was the Ninth Wonder of the World. Produced and directed by Scott Sterling, and also produced by Gene Brodeur, Fort Peck Dam traces the construction of this marvel of engineering, erected in a most foreboding location. Interview subject Ivy Stebleton, a resident of a tar paper shack boom town, says, “When I woke up in the morning in the wintertime, the dipper would be frozen in the water pail, and the mattresses were frozen to the wall.” Temperatures could dip to 54º below zero in the winter, and reach 115º in summer. As the film’s PBS site reminds us, “The conditions were dangerous, the pay low, and housing inadequate. Over six long years, 50,000 workers faced rugged conditions in three shifts, 24 hours a day. Sixty men lost their lives during construction, six of whom are entombed deep in the dam following a massive landslide in 1938." Featuring archival footage and contemporary interviews with many of those who worked on the dam, the documentary is also a look at a time – the Depression – when such an ambitious project gave hope of economic recovery. The film doesn’t skimp on the political and environmental implications of the structure for land use, conservation, and policy planning.

Among the new DVDs coming to The Worx are Terminator Genesis, Trainwreck and Mr. Holmes.

Terminator Genesis is one of the weak links in the Terminator series, which sadly gets worse as it goes along, and as James Cameron ignores it in favor of Avatar. Uninspired casting doesn’t help.

Trainwrecked is the career-making rom-com writing by, and telling the story of, comic Amy Schumer. The wonderful Brie Larson plays her sister. It’s a funny film, but in the end repudiates the main character’s hedonism. Among the extras on the DVD is an alternative ending featuring a baby.

Mr. Holmes is a poignant, quiet look at what might have become of the Great Detective in his dotage, as he tries to remember an early case with the help of neighboring child.

At Amazon for a short period of time, you can vote new shows in, or off the digital island. The online service is offering six pilots for the adult viewer’s delectation (and six for kids), with the ability to comment and recommend which series should be greenlit. Highston is vaguely described as a story about an imaginative fellow (Lewis Pullman), which features Mary Lynn Rajskub, rock’s Flea, Chris Parnell, and Shaquille O’Neal as himself. Patriot concerns family tensions between supporters and protesters of the Iraq war. Edge is a western from Shane Black, of Lethal Weapon fame, with Max Martini from Pacific Rim as the title character, based on a violent series of revenge tales by George G. Gilman. Good Girls Revolt follows the adventures of young women in the 1970s, all working for a news weekly. One Mississippi follows the “coming back home” exploits of comedian Tig Notaro, with direction by Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said), and writing by Diablo Cody (Juno). Finally, there is Z, about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, from actor turned director Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother Where Art Thou).

 

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