Klute

This is the second film I have watched with Jane Fonda in one week...this time around with a really bad hairdo but in a much better film.

The Klute in the title is John Klute, acting as private detective when a friend disappears, leaving behind one very strange letter of abuse addressed to a prostitute in New York City, and the police are ready to give up on the case. That would be six months after the disappearance.

John goes off to New York to investigate and talk with the prostitute in question, one Bree Daniel. Now, Bree has regular meetings with a psychiatrist, musing about how she wants to quit 'tricks' and concentrate on her work as a model and actress (wait, is this officially called 'actor' now, too?). Or maybe she doesn't want to quit. She seems unsure and her efforts to turn her life around are half-hearted at best.

Initially reluctant to help John in any way, she does eventually get involved, tagging along as he interviews people working within her trade, trying to find other prostitutes said to have met with a weird guy that used to beat them up. It is generally believed that this is the missing friend, named Tom. Then they come upon one girl that does not identify Tom from a photo John Klute shows her and says that it was an older looking man, instead.

It is at this point that I knew who the real culprit was and the conclusion that Tom is probably dead is pretty obvious, as well. The real criminal is the person actually financing John Klute to investigate Tom's disappearance. Now that John is getting close, though, he starts to try and clean up all lose ends.

In the end, John saves Bree and they leave her apartment together, although to a voice over of her again sounding unsure about what is going to happen.

7/10

Barbarella

Barbarella is called upon by the President of the Republic of Earth to find the runaway mad scientist Duran-Duran and bring him back to earth before he destroys, well, everything with his newly created weapon (a ray of some sort, I forget).

But first, she must undress in zero gravity, very slowly, to music.

Throughout the remainder of the film, she will change from one skimpy outfit to the next and sleep with every man that helps her in any way (more or less). Also, she is the ditziest of blondes.

Then the peace-loving earthling is given weapons for her mission. This does not make her particularly happy, but she takes off in her spaceship anyway. The inside of the spaceship appears to be covered in muppet skin (Fozzy Bear) or deep shag carpeting.

Barbarella crash lands on her target planet, where she is taken by a group of children, tied up in a cave and attacked by creepy dolls. She is, however, saved in the nick of time by a catcher who - you guessed it - catches children. As a thanks he suggests sex, but not the new, clean earth kind, but the savage old-fashioned way. This is so old, it is new to Barbarella, but she concedes. She loves it.

Next she crashes into the labyrinth, the exile in which all the good creatures live. One of them is a blind angel. With her spaceship all trashed, she looks to him for help. Alas, he has lost the desire to fly. The solution for this particular problem is sex, of course. ('An angel doesn't make love. An angel is love.')

Revived by this encounter he flies Barbarella to her final destination. Basically a creepy, bad town, run by the great tyrant, who turns out to be a woman. Among the things that happen next are: the angel gets crucified, which elicits the wonderful line, "De-crucify him or I will melt your face!", Barbarella joins the revolution (led by a rather hapless idiot), she gets 'tortured' by the concierge by a sort of organ that will kill her with physical pleasure. Also, the concierge is Duran-Duran and he wants to get rid of the great tyrant to take over this planet and then maybe the earth and then, who knows?, the entire universe.

Big shoot-out.

Barbarella and the great tyrant are flown to safety by the blind angel, who has been previously tortured by the tyrant, but 'An angel has no memory'.

The End

No, seriously.

2/10

The Butler

To shorten the time until midnight this New Year's Eve a friend and I decided to go watch a film, the options were limited, as a lot of theaters weren't open, but The Butler was one film I was interested anyway and it played right into our time frame.

The entirety of black history in the US happens to the family of Cecil Gaines. Cecil himself grows up picking cotton and witnesses the murder of his father that has no consequences to his owner, of course. His older son joins every black movement he finds, from the Freedom Buses to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to the Black Panthers and finally to politics. The younger son dies in Vietnam. And his wife Gloria is an alcoholic for half of their live together to boot. 

But the actually interesting part is Cecil's work in the White House and his brush with the other side of history happening from the one his older son is on. He started serving in the Eisenhower administration and left under Reagan. He appeared to not be much of a fan of Nixon and took issue (or appeared to be) with Reagan's stance against a boycott of South Africa and his invitation to an event as a guest, seated on President Reagan's table. During the dinner he felt like he was there just for show.

The most memorable president of the lot for me, or rather the portrayal, was President Johnson. The scene with Johnson sitting on the toilet with some advisers and Cecil standing just outside the open door - Cecil handing the president prune juice. 

Cecil himself seemed to appreciate Johnson and Kennedy the most. He is shown wearing a tie that used to be Kennedy's and a tie clip given to him by LBJ when invited back to the White House to meet with Barack Obama.

So yeah, it's overloaded and sentimental. But this is an interesting slice of history.

7/10

The Chase

A small town in Texas is in upheaval because Bubber Reeves escaped from jail. He was sitting in for one of a string of felonies. On the run, the prisoner he broke out of jail with kills someone and takes of with their car. So now the authorities also want Bubber for a murder he did not commit.

A handful of people in his hometown want to help him. There are Anna, his wife, and Jake Rogers, son of the rich man that practically owns the town. The two have been lovers for a long time (and everyone except old man Rogers knows) and now want to help Bubber by providing him money and a means to make a run for it.

The local Sheriff, who doesn't quite believe that Bubber had anything to do with the murder does his best to try and return him safely to jail because quite a few of the town's inhabitants have been drinking through most of the night and are out for blood. Sheriff Calder takes a beating from an especially anxious trio.

Eventually, a lot of the town folk make it out to Lester Johnson's junk yard by the wharf, where Bubber is said to be hiding out. Various drunken parties have relocated there and the people start throwing Molotov cocktails into the yard and singing songs asking Bubber to come out. It all gets out of hand and an explosion severely injures Jake. He dies some time later.

Bubber finally surrenders to the Sheriff, who takes him calmly to jail but on the steps, the idiotic trio cause one last ruckus and one of them guns Bubber down.

Good film with a fiery finale and a great cast.

7/10

California Suite

The film follows four different story lines set in the same hotel, all of people either sparring off with each other verbally or - in one case - going at each other with everything they have.

My favorite coupling is played by the wonderful Maggie Smith and the equally wonderful Michael Caine. Smith plays actress Diana Barrie, who is in Hollywood because she was nominated for her first Oscar. Incidentally, Maggie Smith herself won the Best Supporting Actress award for this role.

Also out west is Jane Fonda, who flew in to meet with her ex-husband (played by Alan Alda) because their teenage daughter ran off. The pair has to settle the question of where their daughter will spend the year before going off to college.

Then there is Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau), who is in town for his nephew's bar mitzvah. He spends a night out with his brother, who is something of a womanizer and - as a favor to Michael - hires a hooker for him. The hooker gets drunk on Tequila and Michael is unable to raise her in the morning in time before his wife arrives.

Lastly, two couples spend a vacation together, but they don't appear to have any fun at all. They trash the rental car, one room reservation got lost and it all dissolves when they spend the morning playing a mixed double of tennis. Then one of the wives hurts her ankle, a bottle of perfume breaks and the glass gets stepped in, a head is hit on the cabinet door, fainting spells, a few swings with a tennis racket and a brawl between the husbands concludes the trip.

Funny.

7/10