moonspinner55

Kid from the sticks relocates to Los Angeles to live with his brother--but while he's at the airport, his suitcase full of clothes is switched with a drug lord's cache of heroin. The old baggage switcheroo resurrected once again! It's a plot device so old it wheezes, but what exactly it's doing in a movie from 1986 is the real puzzler. Anthony Michael Hall has the lead, straying too far from the Breakfast Club. An absolute disaster from director Richard Tuggle and screenwriter Tony Kayden, neither of whom shows any inspiration, instead going with a now-dated "trendy" look and spare parts recycled from other movies. NO STARS from ****

Tyrone Power as a studious, pre-World War I violinist from San Francisco's (S)Nob Hill who moonlights at night in the Barbary Coast playing with the boys a new kind of music: ragtime. Alice Faye is a flashy-trash singer who first introduces the band to ragtime and insinuates herself into the group as their vocalist. Despite a difference in personalities, everything on-stage clicks...but will Power's mother ever forgive him for turning his back on the classics? Thanks to a tight direction by Henry King and a solid screenplay by Kathryn Scola and Lamar Trotti (working from Richard Sherman's adaptation of a biographical story by Irving Berlin, who also lent the film his vast songbook of tunes plus an original, the Oscar-nominated "Now It Can Be Told"), "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is more than a cliched backstage story. The romantic clinches and proverbial patriotic slant are certainly present--and one waits for the daffodils while pianist Don Ameche gazes glassy-eyed at Alice Faye--but the personalities are well-drawn and King shows he has a sense of humor (there's a funny waiter at the Cliff House, and Jack Haley is a stitch as Power's trap drummer). Six Oscar nominations in all, with one win: Best Scoring by Alfred Newman. **1/2 from ****

Laura Dern plays this film's writer-director, Jennifer Fox, a documentary filmmaker investigating events in her now-hazy childhood that included being sexually abused as a 13-year-old by a grown man she trusted: her horse-riding coach. After a showing at Sundance, this autobiographical drama was picked up by HBO--apropos, since the film is strictly movie-of-the-week in concept and presentation. The flashbacks have a fancy overlay of 'art'--Fox's documentary eye coming to the fore, though inappropriate here--which compete with a narrative pulled along by phone conversations, internet investigations, drop-in visits to long-ago acquaintances, family albums, photographs and--God help us--searching for that elusive box of old letters! Dern's challenge of playing the same lady who's directing her in the movie must have been daunting, yet her performance isn't impressive--how could it be when Fox has her on the phone chatting with Mom, driving pensively in her car, arguing childishly with her lover (who wants to get to know her) or sleeping with a pained look of sudden remembrance on her face? This is a very superficial picture about serious issues; it's heartfelt, it's well-intentioned, and it flatlines. *1/2 from ****