CHE Part One (2008) is the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour biopic of Che Guevera, the iconic (almost literally — the poster image here had a long reach) Latin American revolutionary of the 1960s. The film alternates between scenes of Che in the Cuban revolution and a 1964 interview (which serves to put a lot of this in context); while the individual scenes are good, there’s not enough of a dramatic arc to keep me reading even to the end of Part One (it makes me look fondly at fictionalized biopics like Viva Villa).“I think you should forgive me in advance as i know you will not like what I’m about to say.”
The great British TV writer Nigel Kneale (best known for the Quatermass TV serials—Quatermass, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit) adapted Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black for TV in 1989. As in the novel, THE WOMAN IN BLACK has a solicitor in post-Great War England visiting an isolated house to dispose of the recently deceased owner’s possessions. But why does this woman in mourning wear constantly show up, watching him from a distance? What’s in the room that he can’t unlock? Are those screams of terror from the marsh really just birds? This is slow, old-school horror, taking its time to get to the scary bits but it works — much better than the later Daniel Radcliffe version. “You’re a London solicitor — have you ever heard a gull?”
BALL OF FIRE (1941) is the Billy Wilder-scripted, Howard Hawks take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the dwarves being seven elderly professors (including Richard Haydn and SZ Sakall) led by Gary Cooper in compiling the ultimate encyclopedia. When Cooper discovers his section on slang his hopelessly out of date, he goes looking for help and winds up meeting nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). She wants nothing to do with him —
—until triggerman Dan Duryea shows up on behalf of her mobster boyfriend (Dana Andrews) and tells Sugar she needs to hide from the cops. Next thing Cooper and his crew know, they’ve got a beautiful, flamboyant woman moving in with them and tying them up in knots. Hmm, is it possible she might start developing some knotty feelings of her own? This is a fun, fast-moving film and one of my favorite Stanwyck movies. A shame I didn’t watch it with TYG as there are lots of scenes she’d have enjoyed making raunchy jokes about. “That man spoke a living language; I’ve embalmed a dead one.”
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Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (1972) remains a much superior version, never dragging even though it’s almost twice as long. According to TCM host Bob Osborne (I caught part of his narration taping this off the air) Tarkovsky made the film after seeing 2001 and thinking it spent too much time on SF and not enough on the people. Thus this starts out with the psychiatrist (the Clooney role) spending time on Earth learning about what’s going on (which is never clear in the Soderbergh). Despite emphasizing people it feels more science fictional that the later film did; a shame Tarkovsky couldn’t make his Stalker equally good. “In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally helpless.”
While in Florida I rewatched THE BEST OF TIMES (1985) with my BFF Cindy and she thoroughly enjoyed it. Robin Williams’ entire life has been defined by dropping the ball in the Big Game; now he launches a crazy scheme to lay his ghost to rest by re-enacting the game, much to the discomfort of his lifelong buddy and former star quarterback Kurt Russell, who’s worried this could destroy his own legend (“I was good for around here but everyone remembers I was great.”). Donald Moffatt plays Williams’ malevolent father-in-law; a fun film about obsession, old injuries, high school and making peace with your past..“Victories for the underdog are an aberration in the natural order of the universe.”
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road films had them cast as vagabond Dioscuri entertainers, always united until it came to figuring out who gets the girl. ROAD TO RIO (1947) was in a two-movie set with 
With a cast of Karen Gillen, Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino, Lena Headey, Angela Basset and Paul Giamatti, GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE (2021) should have been way better than it was. After her hitwoman mother (Headey) goes on the run, Gillen follows in her footsteps as a deadly assassin for the all-powerful Firm. Unfortunately a)her latest mission required whacking the son of a powerful crime boss and b)she sacrificed some of the Firm’s stolen money to rescue the daughter of a man she killed (the kid triggers her own abandonment issue). With her life on the line, can the mysterious librarians (Bassett, Gugino, Yeoh) give her a fighting chance?
DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD (1954) stars Mickey Rooney — I frequently forget what a good actor he can be — as a mechanic and amateur race-card driver who dreams of someday competing in a major race like the Indy or Le Mans, both far beyond his means. Heck, he’d be happy if he could find a woman who doesn’t dismiss him as too short to date. Enter Dianne Foster, a seductive woman who takes an interest in him, but only to set him up so Kevin McCarthy can recruit him as wheelman for a bank robbery. 
