Ask FlickChick

Ask FlickChick: What's that sci-fi movie, multigenerational family drama, time-tripping love story and more

Question: I saw several scenes from some film — a "several decades in the life of a family" tale — as a kid in the '80s and they've been coming back to me for a decade, but my attempts to find the movie have been futile. I don't think I saw the ending, which may explain why it's stayed with me so many years. I'm afraid these snippets are all I can remember:

The family has moved to a large city and invested in a store selling television sets — then a new technology — but their area has no broadcasts. No one is buying the sets, which just show a test pattern, but then the TVs spring to life, showing, I believe, Howdy Doody.

Almost a generation later, this success has been parlayed into a large department store. Some family youngsters are playing there after-hours, and leave a candle lit or set off a firecracker. That night, the store burns to the ground and the kids are guilt-stricken. To their relief, the fire department eventually traces the origin of the blaze to a floor other than the one they were playing on.

In the last scene I remember, one of the same kids gets shut into a car and watches helplessly as his older brother or father is attacked and killed by some shady associates.

Thank you in advance for your help. — Sean

FlickChick: You must be remembering Barry Levinson's Avalon, even though it was released in 1990 rather than the '80s. It's the multigenerational saga of an immigrant family in Baltimore — Levinson's hometown — and chronicles the way their deep family bonds disintegrate as their financial fortunes rise.

The mixed blessing of television is the film's underlying theme, from the store that sets the Krichinskys on the road to middle-class comfort to the set patriarch Sam (Armin Mueller-Stahl) winds up watching alone in a nursing home.

All three of the scenes you describe are in it, though the father (Aidan Quinn) is stabbed by a mugger rather than an associate and recovers from his injuries. His son, by the way, is played by a young Elijah Wood.

Question: Last night I watched Footlight Parade, starring Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell. Cagney's character produced live musical "prologues" for movie theaters. My question is, were there really such prologues at the movies? (Obviously, the awesome production numbers that Busby Berkeley created for the movie were beyond the reach of a real movie theater.) Thanks! — Andy

FlickChick: Musical shorts were shown before movies for several years; they succeeded the live musical performances that more upscale theaters offered before feature films in the mid-1920s.

Warner Bros. was the first studio to embrace sound technology, and musical shorts were part of their cost-benefit calculations. Not only were filmed musical shorts vastly cheaper than live shows — for a one-time outlay, you could play them as long as you wanted — but they could also go out to every theater on the Warner circuit, not just the expensive ones in big cities.

You are, however, right about the elaborateness of Footlight Parade's "shorts," which were "Honeymoon Hotel," "By a Waterfall" and "Shanghai Lil." The real things were far less spectacular, but they now provide fascinating glimpses of singers, dancers, popular musicians and other performers whose acts would have otherwise been entirely lost.

Question: I'm looking for a TV-movie, probably from the mid-1990s. It's about a couple that buys a desk, and the man finds a letter hidden in it. He answers the letter and leaves it in the desk, and it goes back through time to the girl who owned the desk during the Civil War. Do you have any idea of the title? — Mark

FlickChick: It's The Love Letter, a 1998 Hallmark movie starring Campbell Scott and Jennifer Jason Leigh — their performances make this improbable story work extraordinarily well.

It was directed by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis and based on a short story by the prolific Jack Finney, whose credits include the much-filmed novel The Body Snatchers and the excellent time-travel novel Time and Again, which has never been filmed.

Question: Here’s one for the die-hard sci-fi fans. I’ve been on the Web searching for an old flick that was probably released in the 1960s and I think was called Time Travelers.

It features a scientific lab where they’ve got a wall-sized screen that enables them to view the future, which is filled with war and strife. One of the scientists realizes that the screen is actually not solid — he can reach through it. The scientists walk through this portal into the world of the future. I think the scientists could tune this screen to the static/snow, and that was a portal to an even stranger world. Any of this ring a bell? — Marc

FlickChick: Pretty much everything. You're describing The Time Travelers (1964), directed by B-movie stalwart Ib Melchior. As far as I can tell, it's never been released commercially on DVD or VHS, but there are copies available on eBay.

It's widely said to have been the inspiration for the TV series The Time Tunnel, which debuted in 1966. Legendary sci-fi fan Forrest J. Ackerman, founder and editor of the much-loved magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-1983), made the first of many genre-movie cameo appearances in The Time Travelers.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

DVD Tuesday: A children's movie to give adults nightmares — dare to enter the mindscape of Dr. Suess via The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T!

I'm not a huge fan of most children's films and never have been, but The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) is a mind-boggler, and as regular FlickChick readers know, I love having my mind boggled.

Regular suburban kid Bartholomew "Bart" Collins (Tommy Rettig, star of TV's Lassie… OK, co-star) hates taking piano lessons and really hates his paino teacher, the tyrannical Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried). He'd rather be playing baseball or hanging out with Mr. Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes), the plumber who always seems to fixing something in the Collins house. But Bart's widowed mother, Heloise (Mary Healy), believes piano lessons build character, so there's no getting out of them.

Hence Tommy's extended nightmare — which lasts most of the movie — about being trapped in the bizarre world of the Terwilliker Institute, where Dr. T has built a monstrous piano that seats 500 unhappy, imprisoned children. They arrive in yellow school buses surrounded by armed guards, their suitcases are searched for contraband toys and sports equipment — and Mrs. Collins is Terwilliker's stern right hand and wife-to-be.

The Terwilliker Institute set looks like De Chirico paintings, all oddly angled corridors, ladders to nowhere and hard, menacing shadows, surrounded by barbed wire and lit with sky-scraping searchlights. Terwilliker's enforcers include an odd pair of roller-skating gentlemen who share one single long, gray beard, and the dungeon is full of unfortunates who dared to play instruments other than the piano. (They even have a little dance number designed by noted choreographer Eugene Loring.)

Don't even get me started on the little blue beanies topped by yellow hands the kids are forced to wear — creepy. Short of the short, Salvador Dali-designed nightmare in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, Dr. T probably the most authentically surrealistic vision in the history of Hollywood films.

And that's before you get to the Freudian nightmare of Mrs. Collins — a vision in stern, rhinestone glasses and super-glam, blue-sequined evening gown — surrendering to the sinister allure of Dr. T, soon to be — sob! — Bart's new dad.

And let's talk about Dr. Terwilliker: Hans Conried acted in dozens of films, but is best known as a voice artist — you've heard him in everything from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show to the 1970 animated TV version oh Dr. Suess' Horton Hears a Who. His insinuating, oddly accented voice is peculiar in that Vincent Price way, and Conried puts a cheerfully unnerving spin on Suess' signature wordplay, especially in the number that celebrates dressing up for the big recital. His sartorial musings include "undulating undies with the marabou frills," a "purple nylon girdle with the orange blossom buds" and "peek-a-boo blouse with the lovely interlining made of Chesapeake mouse" — none of which, fortunately, he actually wears. He just ends up looking like a deranged drum major.

The whole film is weird, perverse, wildly imaginative and a hit at parties, especially if drinking is involved.

Things to Consider:

Do you think the recent live-action Dr. Suess movies How the Grinch Stole Christmas or The Cat in the Hat do justice to his unique style?

How about the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas?

What are the pitfalls of adapting Dr. Suess' very particular vision?

People often use the word "surreal" to mean weird, but real surreality is hard to evoke on film, and it's rare. What examples can you think of?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Shoot 'Em Up
Freeway
A Mighty Wind
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

And now to the films that made out like bandits:

There's Juno, of course, and Paul Thomas Anderson's bleak There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair's muckraking 1927 novel Oil!, was nominated for best picture, best actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), best director and best adapted screenplay. The quietly effective Paul Dano, of last year's indie favorite Little Miss Sunshine, was passed over for best supporting actor. Lewis was widely considered a shoo-in, but the rest of the nominations were less than givens, despite critical raves for this lengthy (158 minutes), epic examination of greed, false prophets and near-biblical retribution.

Thinking-man's thriller Michael Clayton scored big with critics without exciting much attention among moviegoers. It's nominated for best picture, with star George Clooney recognized in the best-actor category. Costars Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson were both nominated in the supporting categories and first-time director Tony Gilroy got a nod both for direction and for his original screenplay. Way to go! Let's hope that the multiple nominations get moviegoers to take a look when it goes back into theaters this Friday.

The Coen brothers' grim No Country for Old Men, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, also took a best-picture nod, along with best supporting actor recognition for Javier Bardem as a sociopathic killer and double recognition for Joel and Ethan Coen in the directing and adapted screenplay categories. Apparently my feeling that there's far less to this gloomy, Texas-set thriller than meets the eye is very much the minority one.

A WWI-era drama with a vicious sting in its tail, Atonement — based on Ian McEwan's novel — came away with only two major nominations: best picture and best supporting actress for 14-year-old Saoirse Ronan. That's not too shabby, but it falls short of expectations. Perhaps it looked too much like a highbrow soap opera for Academy members, though it's much more than that… and anyway, highbrow soap operas have a tradition of doing just fine come Oscar time.

On the other hand, three French-language films found themselves in the spotlight outside the best foreign-language film ghetto: The animated Persepolis, based on the autobiographical graphic novels by Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi (nominated for best animated feature); painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which nabbed him a best-directing nomination and screenwriter Ronald Harwood recognition for adapting the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's heartbreaking memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon); and La Vie en Rose, which earned star Marion Cotillard a best-actress nomination for her no-holds-barred performance as tragic French singer Edith Piaf.

Perhaps it is a small world after all, even in Hollywood!

• Oscar Surprises, Part 1: Juno and Tommy Lee Jones
• Oscar Surprises, Part 2: Blanchett, Mortensen and Hal Holbrook

A surprising number of movies had to make do with single nominations in the major categories:

Viggo Mortensen picked up a best-actor nom as an icy Russian Gangster in David Cronenberg's brutal thriller Eastern Promises, ditto Johnny Depp for Tim Burton's gothic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Sentimental favorite Hal Holbrook, 82 (he'll be 83 by the time the ceremony takes place), took a best supporting actor nomination for Sean Penn's Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer's nonfiction account of a troubled young man's search for meaning that eventually takes him deep into the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness. It was also ignored in all other major categories despite strong reviews for Penn's direction and adapted screenplay, as well as Emile Hirsch's performance in the lead role. Audiences failed to warm to the film.

Much-loved veteran character actress Ruby Dee, 83, got the only nomination — for best-supporting actress — accorded Ridley Scott's American Gangster, stealing the spotlight from leads Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe as, respectively, a courtly drug dealer and the cop who brings down his heroin empire.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was recognized for his supporting performance as a scruffy CIA agent in the otherwise ignored Charlie Wilson's War — not for his excoriating turn in 83-year-old, much-lauded director Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which was ignored entirely.

Supporting-actor nominee Casey Affleck represents for the Brad Pitt starrer The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — I'm sure you don't need to be told who played Jesse and who played Ford. Affleck's leading turn in the thriller Gone, Baby, Gone (from the novel by multiple Oscar-winner Dennis Lehane of Mystic River fame) was ignored.

But for me, the real shocker is double-nominee Cate Blachett's best-actress nod for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, an overblown historical drama whose sumptuous sets and costumes are by far the best things about it. That said, her supporting nomination for playing one of the many Bob Dylans featured in Todd Haynes' kaleidoscopic I'm Not There is richly deserved. Blanchett is this year's only double acting nominee; neither film was recognized in any other major category.

• Oscar Nomination Surprises, Part 1: Juno and Tommy Lee Jones
• Oscar Surprises, Part 3: The Films That Made Out Big. Plus: Foreign Invasion!

Sid Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and actress Kathy Bates have just announced the major Oscar nominations for last year's films, and for my money there are some real surprises among them.

The critically acclaimed comedy Juno — which is also doing strong business — has been recognized in a major way, especially surprising since traditionally comedies often get short shrift in the major categories. Written by first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody, starring up-and-coming Canadian actress Ellen Page and directed by Jason Reitman, it took a best-picture nomination, and major category recognition for the key players: a best-actress nom for Page, original screenplay for Cody and director for Reitman.

Tommy Lee Jones nabbed a best-actor nomination for the sober Iraq War picture In the Valley of Elah, directed and written by 2005 Oscar-winner Paul Haggis (Crash) and ignored in all other categories; like every other fiction film dealing with the Iraq War that opened last year, it sank without a trace at the box office. Critical reaction was mixed, leaning to the positive for this sober stateside murder mystery in which bereaved father Jones investigates the murder of his son, newly returned from a tour of duty.

• Oscar Surprises, Part 2: Blanchett, Mortensen, Hal Holbrook and More
• Oscar Surprises, Part 3: The Films That Made Out Big. Plus: Foreign Invasion!

Ask FlickChick: An earlier Mr. & Mrs. Smith? Plus: A family trapped by green goo in their house, Rendezvous with Rama and more movie questions answered

Question: I just saw the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith and I could have sworn I've seen the same story before. Am I misremembering? I know I'm not thinking of the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title — that has a totally different plot. — Frank

FlickChick: I'll bet you're thinking of a short-lived 1996 television series called — wait for it — Mr. & Mrs. Smith, starring Maria Bello and Scott Bakula as spies recruited by a mysterious intelligence agency and required to pose as a married couple to carry out their assignments.

Neither trusts the other, in part because they've both worked for other covert agencies in the past and know that they may well have been on opposite sides then, but there's a sexual tension that would presumably have led to them becoming Mr. and Mrs. Smith for real, had the show not been pulled in the middle of its first and only season.

I frankly find it very hard to believe that the Doug Liman movie wasn't inspired at least in part by this series, but the writing credit goes to Simon Kinberg alone, with no mention of any source material.

Ironically, Kinberg and Liman reteamed to do a pilot for an ABC series based on the movie and starring Jordana Brewster and New Zealand-born Martin Henderson. ABC passed on the show and it appears that efforts to shop it around have come to nothing.

Question: I understand that Morgan Freeman is trying to bring Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama to the big screen. Do you know what the status of that is? Thanks. — John

FlickChick: The status of Rendezvous with Rama, based on Clarke's 1972 allegorical science-fiction novel, is the dreaded "in development," which means it could get made six months from now or never.

The good news is that Morgan Freeman is producing it through his company Revelations Entertainment, which has coproduced six features, including Along Came a Spider, Under Suspicion and Ten Items or Less.

Freeman would star as the commander of a spaceship sent to explore Rama, a vast alien craft of unknown age and origin, and David Fincher is attached as director. French artist "Moebius" (Jean Giraud) is supposed to be the conceptual designer.

The bad news is that the project has been kicking around since 2001, and that's a long time for a film not to get made and remain viable. But that said, movies do get made after years of languishing in development, so it could still happen.

Question: Late one night, I saw a B&W movie where all the characters were dogs dressed like people. Someone told me it was Pound — but I checked it out and that's about people playing dogs. What I saw was dogs playing people. Do you have any idea what it might have been? — Sami

FlickChick: You saw one of the vintage Dogville shorts, which were made at MGM between 1929 and 1931. They were brief parodies of MGM feature films, jokingly referred to as "barkies," and all the roles were played by dogs dressed in human clothes, walking on their hind legs and "speaking" post-dubbed dialogue.

I've only seen one, Dogway Melody, which spoofed The Broadway Melody (1929); it's included as an extra on the DVD. All I can say is: bizarre.

But it's no more bizarre than Pound (1970), a surreal film in which actors — including a 5-year-old Robert Downey Jr. — play dogs trapped in, yes, a dog pound waiting to be adopted. It was directed by Downey Jr.'s father, underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.

Question: I've been trying for years to find out what this movie I saw on TV was: I think it's from the 1970s and it's about this family that is trapped in their house because the windows and doors have been bricked up. All these weird things happen, like green stuff coming down the chimney, the TV only getting one channel with a picture of a lightning bolt, and the house suddenly heating up or getting so cold that they can hardly stand it.

The twist at the end is that they're not people at all: They're dolls in a dollhouse. No one can tell me what the title was and I'm starting to think I imagined it. — Karen

FlickChick: You didn't imagine it, but it's not a movie: It's an episode of the 1980's anthology series Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense called "Child's Play," directed by Val Guest and starring Mary Crosby and Nicholas Clay. The series was shown in the U.S. as Fox Mystery Theater and the episodes were long — about 70 minutes, so you could easily have thought "Child's Play" was a movie.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

DVD Tuesday: A girl, a gun, a baby and Clive Owen careen through this sly meta-action movie romp in an exhilarating hail of bullets

Writer-director Michael Davis' deliriously trashy mash-up of John Woo and Loony Toons was greeted by a mix of scathing denunciations and cluelessly slavering encomiums applauding its over-the-top excesses; rare was the reviewer who deigned to notice its sly, poignantly affectionate deconstruction of contemporary action-movie clichιs.

Shoot 'Em Up tanked at the box office, but I suspect it's going to find its following on DVD, where each and every knowingly audacious frame can be frozen and savored.

An itinerant, carrot-chomping, down-on-his-luck man with no name (Clive Owen) — come on, "Mr. Smith" is not a name — is waiting at a deserted big-city bus stop in the middle of a dark, dark night when a hugely pregnant woman waddles by with a gun-toting thug in hot pursuit.

Smith intervenes — you just know he once knew someone like her, except that then there was no one there to help — and finds himself delivering the stranger's baby (of course he cuts the placenta with a bullet) while fighting a pitched gun battle. Infant in hand, he stages a daring escape from sneering, sadistic head villain Hertz (Paul Giamatti) who, it turns out, wasn't after the now-deceased woman: He wants the baby.

"Smith," who knows little about birthing babies and less about looking after them, makes a beeline for the most maternal person he knows: Donna (Monica Belluci) — could that be as in Ma-donna? — a lactating prostitute who caters to middle-aged "babies" with the big bucks to patronize super-specialized brothels.

With Donna onboard as wet nurse and occasional concubine, Smith sets about finding out why Hertz and his goons are so hell-bent on killing an infant, a quest that's consistently subordinated to ecstatically deranged action sequences: The naked Smith fighting off an army of gun-toting mercenaries while making love to Donna (and you thought you could multitask); Smith improvising a series of Rube Goldberg-esque booby traps at a gun warehouse owned by pervy firearms magnate Hammerstein (the gauntly seductive Stephen McHattie, once first in line to replace Robert Englund as Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series); Smith sliding down a conveyer belt, baby in one hand, blazing pistol in the other.

Davis' influences are clear: Sergio Leone Westerns; John Woo's Hard-Boiled (1992), whose iconic centerpiece involves brutal cop Chow Yun Fat with a chubby-cheeked infant on his hip; Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones' Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner vs. Coyote cartoons — Hertz's "Ride of the Valkyries" cell-phone ring isn't an homage to Apocalypse Now, it's referencing the classic cartoon What's Opera, Doc, featuring none other than Bugs and his perpetual nemesis Elmer Fudd.

It should come as no surprise that Davis sold Shoot 'Em Up on the strength of an animated version of one of the film's balletic gunfights.

But the wonder of Shoot 'Em Up is its willingness to transgress without being mean — it's not torture porn, but it's also not a brainless imitation of weightless video-game excesses. Writer-director Davis, whose unpromising previous credits range from direct-to-video teen sex comedies (Eight Days a Week, Girl Fever) to kiddie pix like Prehysteria! 3, somehow synthesized every action-movie clichι into an όber-action film that simultaneously plays it so straight it's darkly funny and cuts straight to the overworked genre's heart.

Things to Consider:

What's the difference between spoof and homage to a familiar genre? Examples?

Is it possible to love a particular genre — horror, romantic comedy, Western — while fully acknowledging its clichιs and flaws? How?

Why do smart, sophisticated moviegoers who like to be challenged also love genre movies?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Freeway
A Mighty Wind
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Ask FlickChick: A scary TV-movie memory and more movie questions answered

Question: Years ago, when I was very young, I remember watching a movie on television that featured a boy who took up residence in a hollowed-out redwood tree. All I can remember is how neat I thought that was and I've always wanted to watch that movie again but have no idea what the title is. Could you help? — jshrewsberry

FlickChick: It sounds to me as though you're remembering The Enchanted Forest (1945), in which elderly, nature-loving recluse John (Harry Davenport), who lives in a hollow redwood tree, finds a baby that's survived a train crash and brings him up in the forest.

Apparently this film used to be on television all the time, but has now dropped out of circulation. It has a significant cult following made up both of people who loved it as a child — John the hermit can talk to the woodland animals, which is the kind of thing I certainly loved when I was kid — and of those who appreciate its message about living in harmony with nature and respecting the environment, which was seriously forward thinking for a film made at the tail end of WWII. It's available on video, but has not yet been put out on DVD.

Question: OK, you've put names to two of my scariest childhood memories... Crowhaven Farm (best made-for-TV movie ever) and the horribly disturbing Something Wild (so creepy, and what the heck was it doing on when small children could watch?!).

Now let's see if you can help me put the name to a made-for-TV movie that kept me up a couple of nights in a row. I thought it was called "The Hand of Mary Constantine," but I can't find anything about it. A woman has lost her daughter (in a car accident, I think) and thinks the girl is haunting her, culminating in a spooky arm/hand, complete with her daughter's finger prints, left in an aquarium. It turns out she's not being haunted but driven crazy by someone, for reasons I cannot remember.

Can you fill in the blanks... and the actual name of the movie? Thanks. — TaMara

FlickChick: The movie's title is Daughter of the Mind (1969), but you must have been a credits-reading youngster, because it's based on the novel The Hand of Mary Constable, by prolific writer Paul Gallico (1897-1976) — his credits range from The Poseidon Adventure to Thomasina: The Cat Who Thought She Was God, which was filmed as The Three Lives of Thomasina, one of my favorite movies when I was a small, cat-loving child.

Daughter of the Mind was directed by Walter Grauman, who made Crowhaven Farm the following year, and revolves around scientist Samuel Constable (Ray Milland), who specializes in the field of cybernetics. He and his invalid wife (Gene Tierney) lose their 10-year-old daughter Mary in a car accident, and some months later he sees the child on a lonely road. Her ghost seems to be haunting him, telling him that the high-security government research he's doing is wrong. But is it really a ghost, or is it an effort to derail his work?

The hand-in-the-fish-tank scene appears to have spooked the hell out of a lot of viewers, and I vividly remember Daughter of the Mind showing on the much-loved 4:30 Movie in New York. The bad news is that it's not commercially available on commercial VHS or DVD, but it looks as though there are bootlegs floating around online.

Question: Please help me find the name of an old movie. I don’t have much information: It was B&W and involved a number of soldiers who were in the war together — I think it was WWI, but it may have been WWII. They make an agreement that the last surviving member of the group would drink a special bottle of wine or liquor — the storyline was sort of like the M*A*S*H episode where Colonel Potter has the last bottle. I know this isn’t much, but thanks in advance if you can give me some hints or a name. — Jim

FlickChick: First, I have to confess that I have no idea what the movie you remember is. But I do know what a group agreement of this kind is called. It's a "tontine," a term that dates back to 17th-century France and figures into the M*A*S*H episode "Old Soldiers," to which you refer.

In its most traditional sense, a tontine is a group investment: Each participant pays in a certain amount and receives dividends; when an investor dies, the dividends are divided equally among the survivors; the last man (or woman) standing gets everything. The name comes from an Italian-born, French-based banker named Lorenzo de Tonti, who either came up with this variation on the standard investment pool or merely popularized it. But it can also be a group agreement with some kind of non-monetary payoff — say, the M*AS*H episode's bottle of brandy — at the end.

Curiously, M*A*S*H cocreator Larry Gelbart wrote the screenplay for The Wrong Box (1966), a dark comedy involving a tontine adapted from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

As you can imagine, the tontine has figured into many mystery stories — the thing might as well have been invented as a motive for murder — as well as episodes of The Wild Wild West ("Night of the Tottering Tontine"), Barney Miller ("The Tontine") and The Simpsons ("The Curse of the Flying Hellfish").

But I'm counting on my readers to help out in naming the movie Jim is looking for!

Question: There is a movie about a Mexican teenager who gets pregnant and has to sell drugs to make money.... I remember at the end she's at the airport. Please help me figure out this movie's title! — Nancy C.

FlickChick: I'd say you're looking for Maria Full of Grace (2004), which earned first-time actress Catalina Sandino Moreno an Oscar nomination for her performance as a 17-year old Colombian girl who agrees to work as a mule for a local drug dealer.

DVD Tuesday: Before she was Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon, she was a modern-day Red Riding Hood in Freeway

Once upon a time there was an underaged trailer-trash chippie named Vanessa Lutz (Witherspoon), who hit the road when her mom and stepdad get arrested, hoping to crash with her grandma until social services forgets about trying to get her into the system. But there are big bad wolves prowling the freeway, like serial killer Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland, looking suitably lupine). Little lost girls, beware!

Writer-director Matthew Bright's modern-day fairy tale Freeway is a blast, and Witherspoon is flawless casting as Vanessa: She's so tiny she looks convincingly vulnerable, but that little bulldog jaw tells you that she's tougher than she looks... and is she ever. Bright clearly saw the same steely determination that served Witherspoon so well in the role of Election's (1999) high-school overachiever Tracy Flick, but he saw it sooner. And I have to say, the twists and turns of Bright's plot really are cruelly spectacular.

I like contemporary spins on fairy-tale narratives, which may be why I'm one of the few people who adored the much-reviled Running Scared (2006). But Freeway is the cream of the crop: It puts a genuinely clever spin on one of the most familiar fairy tales of them all and has a great cast, including Brooke Shields as Wolverton's wife and Amanda Plummer and Michael T. Weiss as Vanessa's junkie parents, plus Dan Hedaya, Brittany Murphy, Bokeem Woodbine, Tara Subkoff and Alanna Ubach in various small roles.

It may not be on the short list of favorite films that Witherspoon mentions in interviews (OK, it absolutely isn't), but I highly recommend it!

Things to consider:

What's your favorite "skeleton in the closet" movie — something a now-famous star made when he or she was just starting out? How about:

Tom Hanks in the slasher flick He Knows You're Alone (1980)?

Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) or future Medium Patricia Arquette in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)?

Kevin Bacon getting skewered in the original Friday the 13th (1980)?

Matthew McConaughey and Renιe Zellweger in Texas Chaimnsaw Massacre: The New Generation (1994)?

Sound off!

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland MFriday the 13thcDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

A Mighty Wind
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

A movie about growing up at the movies, she-demons vs. holy man, a time-travel comedy and more!

Question: I love reading your weekly column and know you'll be able to help me. I can't remember the name of an Italian movie I saw in the late 1980s or early '90s. It's about a boy growing up in a small village; he spends a lot of time at the cinema and the man who runs it becomes a father figure to him. The church requires that the man cut out any kissing scenes before the movies are shown and the boy is always trying to look at the deleted scenes, which the man keeps in a box. Lots of stuff I don't remember happens in the middle, but the boy grows up and I think he becomes a filmmaker. When the old man dies, the boy — now a man — returns to the village and finds that the man spliced together all the kissing scenes to create a "movie" and left it for him. I remember it being a very moving story and would like to share it with my friends, but I don't remember the title and I didn't recognize any of the actors. Thanks. — Dawn

FlickChick: Your confidence in me is touching, and as it happens I can help out here: The movie is Italian writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's semi-autobiographical Cinema Paradiso (1988). The first part revolves around a movie-besotted child, Toto, who is growing up in small-town Italy after WWII — much of it was shot in Tornatore's own Sicilian hometown — and his relationship with the avuncular Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the projectionist at the town's movie theater. In the second part, the grown boy, now an internationally renowned filmmaker, revisits his past.

It's one of a select group of movies critics like to call "love letters to the cinema," movies that include Francois Truffaut's Day for Night (1973), Agnes Varda's One Hundred and One Nights (1994), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain (1952), Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om (2007), Roman Coppola's CQ (2001), Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Once Upon a Time, Cinema (1992), Davide Ferrario's After Midnight (2004), Xiao Jiang's Electric Shadows (2005) and even Federico Fellini's starkly hallucinatory 8 1/2 (1963).

Given the range of countries from which these movies hail — Italy, Iran, France, China India, the U.S. — it seems pretty clear that movies are an international language of longing, desire and memory. And like most of its brethren, Cinema Paradiso is a bittersweet rumination on the intersection of glorious fiction and all-too-imperfect life.

Cinema Paradiso exists in several versions: The two-and-a-half hour version that was released theatrically in Italy in 1988, the subsequent two-hour cut that played the U.S. and became a huge hit, and a restored version released in 2002 that clocks in at three hours and includes a major subplot involving Toto's first love, which was excised from the first U.S. version.

Question: Do you remember the movie "Warrior Monk" — I think that's what it was called — about a monk who fights two female demons who come back to life? These demons suck out men's souls and substance. I've been trying to find it on DVD, but all I get when I search on the name is karate movies. Please help! — Frank

FlickChick: I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is the made-for-TV movie Saint Sinner (2002), written by Clive Barker. Confusingly, it shares its title with one of the Razorline comic books Barker created for Marvel in the 1990s, but the premise is entirely different. It involves a 19th-century monk who accidentally unleashes two succubi — female demons — on the 21st-century world and has to travel through time to stop them. Originally broadcast on the SciFi Channel, it was released on DVD by Universal in 2004 as Clive Barker Presents Saint Sinner.

Question: I was overseas in China between 1999 and 2004 and saw what I think was an American movie dubbed into Chinese. It's about a duke and his servant; they're part of a Chicago museum exhibit and they come to life. They find out that the duke has a relative or someone in Chicago and end up living with the family. The husband can't stand them because they're so uncouth, but the good-natured wife tolerates them and the duke falls in love with her. In the end, the duke and his servant go back into the exhibit. It seems as though it would have been produced in the 1980s or early '90s. If you could help me, it would fulfill a lifelong journey of mine… thanks! — Ruth

FlickChick: You saw the broad time-travel comedy Just Visiting (2001), writer-director Jean-Marie Poire's English-language remake of his own French box-office smash Les Visiteurs (1993). Jean Reno and Christian Clavier starred in both versions as a 12th-century knight and his squire who wind up flung far into the future, where their quaint ways and poor personal hygiene occasion a series of fish-out-of-water gags.

Anyone who worries that French comedy is all snooty and sophisticated can relax: Though the original version is a little more nuanced than the American remake, they're both broad, mainstream farces.

Question: I remember this old movie (1950s or '60s, I think). It was about a lady who took care of children throughout her life. When she was very old many of the children came to see her (at the end of the movie). I always thought it was So Big with Jane Wyman, but I looked up that movie online and So Big sounded totally different. I would love to buy a copy of the movie that I'm thinking of. Any idea of the name? Thanks. — Joan

FlickChick: Maybe Cheers for Miss Bishop? It's older than you recall — it was released in 1941 — and stars Martha Scott rather than Jane Wyman, but I see Wyman (click for a picture) and Scott as similar types.

Miss Bishop follows a small-town Midwestern woman from her collage graduation to old age, and while many of her dreams — travel, romance, adventure — never come to pass, she finds her niche teaching English to college freshmen. The film's conclusion — a testimonial dinner given by generations of Miss Bishop's students, all of whom attribute their success in life to her influence — is a classic tear-jerker.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

DVD Tuesday: Walk Hard, This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind — I got the music in me!

It's the first day of 2008 and I'm more than a little surprised that the musical biopic parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is tanking so dismally. Make no mistake, I think it's a flawed comedy, but when it's cooking it's flat-out brilliant. And it got me to thinking about one of my favorite music-business send-ups of all time: A Mighty Wind (2003).

I don't inherently love parody, especially not the lazy, bone-stupid kind of parody epitomized by the sorry likes of the Scary Movie franchise. But A Mighty Wind is a worthy successor to the granddaddy of all music-parody pictures, the utterly brilliant This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Which should come as no surprise, given that A Mighty Wind's writer, director and multitalented performer Christopher Guest's rιsumι goes back to, yes, Spinal Tap.

A Mighty Wind chronicles the staging of a memorial concert in honor of pioneering folk-music impresario Irving Steinbloom that reunites his three greatest discoveries: the relentlessly perky New Main Street Singers; The Folksmen, whose commitment to folk music's political roots was eclipsed by the success of the novelty hit "Old Joe's Place" ("There's a puppy in the parlor and a skillet on the stove/and a smelly old blanket that a Navajo wove.... "); and counterculture sweethearts Mitch & Mickey, who tapped into the romantic longings of a generation with their hit "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow," but whose tumultuous personal relationship drove her into a bourgeois marriage and him to a nervous breakdown.

The song parodies are dead-on: The musicianship is first-class and the lyrics just a couple of degrees off from the real thing. But what makes A Mighty Wind great is that it simultaneously pokes fun at the earnestness of the folk-music movement while respecting the very real ideals that spawned it.

"A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" may be filled with airy-fairy imagery ("Oh when the veil of dreams has lifted/And the fairy tales have all been told/There's a kiss at the end of the rainbow/More precious than a pot of gold"), but it's also heart-wrenchingly sincere.

And the performances are flawless: Every single old folkie can both act and sing, and most of them can play an instrument as well. The cast is a who's who of multitalented, improv-trained performers: Bob Balaban as Irving Steinbloom's high-strung son; Ed Begley Jr as Swedish-born public-TV producer and folk-music lover Lars Olfen, whose conversation is sprinkled with yiddishims; Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean as The Folksmen; Second City alumni Eugene Levy, who cowrote the screenplay with Guest, and Catherine O'Hara as Mitch & Mickey ; John Michael Higgins and Jane Lynch (both of whom appear in Walk Hard) as the leaders of the New Main Street Singers, whose upbeat harmonies and fresh-faced demeanor (let's just pretend we don't know Lynch's cheerful lead singer was a porn star) helped make folk music safe for mainstream radio.

The supporting cast includes Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Larry Miller and Fred Willard and trust me — not only is there not a bad performance in the bunch, but there isn't one that's less than brilliant. Walk Hard gets the musical pastiches right, but A Mighty Wind nails the characters as well.

A Mighty Wind isn't an obscure film, but I think it's grossly underappreciated; I rewatched it recently, and if anything it looked even more brilliant than when I saw it for the first time.

Things to consider:

Do you think parody is a parasitic form of humor, or does it shine a bracing light on unexamined attitudes and cultural conventions?

What's your favorite mockumentary?

Why is This Is Spinal Tap still so popular, nearly 25 years after it was made?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick