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all_the_way-posterAll the Way, the 2014 Tony winner for Best Play and Best Actor (Bryan Cranston) is now nominated for eight Primetime Emmys including Best Television Movie, Actor (Cranston), Supporting Actress (Melissa Leo), and Director (Jay Roach).

Roach is no stranger to political drama made for TV, having previously won an Emmy for directing Game Change, the 2012 TV movie about the 2008 Presidential election. Here the subject is Lyndon B. Johnson, from his becoming president upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 to his own election a year later, during which he pushed and prodded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

Cranston does a commendable job of recreating LBJ with all his bravado, contradictions, and foibles, along with his essential goodness. Lady Bird Johnson is not as full-blooded a character as her husband, but Leo makes her memorable in several moving scenes. Other players of note include Anthony Mackie as Martin Luther King Jr., Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey, Todd Weeks as Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins, Joe Morton as NAACP head Roy Wilkins, Stephen Root as J. Edgar Hoover, and Frank Langella as Georgia Senator Richard Russell. The relationship between LBJ and MLK is given much more depth and understanding than in the highly touted theatrical film Selma. Cranston, who received what I thought was an undeserved Oscar nomination for last year’s Trumbo, which was also directed by Roach, earns the accolades he has won and continues to win for this. The parallels between the 1964 and 2016 Presidential elections are chilling.

All the Way gets its name from LBJ’s campaign slogan, “All the Way with LBJ”. It’s available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Jodie Foster’s career as a director hasn’t been anywhere near as successful as her career as an actress. The two-time Oscar winner for Best Actress (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs) has directed just four films in twenty-five years. In the 1990s, there were Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays, and five years ago there was The Beaver, none of which were major successes. Her latest, Money Monster, hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, either.

In this potboiler about a cable TV network show being taken over by a gunman with grievances against Wall Street, George Clooney is the show’s egomaniacal host who thinks everything is a joke until he is captured at gunpoint, forced to put on a vest packed with explosives, and told if his director (Julia Roberts) doesn’t keep the show broadcasting, he will be shot in the head. Jack O’Connell, who brings his usual intensity to the role of the aggrieved gunman, walks off with acting honors such as they are. Dominic West overacts as the film’s obvious villain. If you don’t see the ending coming during the opening credits, you haven’t seen many recent films or TV shows.

Money Monster is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Among the films newly receiving Blu-ray upgrades are Night Train to Munich from Criterion; and Daddy Long Legs, Where’s Poppa? , and My Bodyguard from Kino Lorber.

1940’s Night Train to Munich, released as Night Train in the U.S., was directed by up-and-coming Carol Reed, who would later receive Oscar nods for The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, and a win for Oliver!. The screenplay was by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes two years earlier.

The film’s train sequence, with The Lady Vanishes‘s Margaret Lockwood, may be as thrilling as the journey in the previous film, but it is only a small part of the film in which most of the action revolves around star Rex Harrison playing an actor pretending to be a Gestapo agent. The problem with that, of course, is that Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be would do that so much more memorably with Jack Benny and company two years later.

The 1955 version of Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs, directed by Jean Negulesco, was the third official version of her 1912 novel, with numerous unofficial versions in between including the 1935 Shirley Temple movie, Curly Top.

This version has its charms, most of them belonging to 23-year-old Leslie Caron who is completely believable as the innocent 18-year-old school girl. The problem is Fred Astaire who looks every one of his 55 years as her benefactor/love interest. They are simply not believable as a romantic team. Fortunately, the ever resourceful Thelma Ritter and Fred Clark are on hand to keep things light, and the score, featuring the Oscar-nominated “Something’s Gotta Give,” is pleasant on the ears.

Ruth Gordon was one of the 20th Century’s greatest actresses (Rosemary’s Baby, Harold and Maude) and playwrights/screenwriters (Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike). When she was good, she was really good, but when she was bad, she was pretty hard to take as both Where’s Poppa? and My Bodyguard can attest to.

Carol Reiner’s 1970 film, Where’s Poppa? , has dated badly. What was funny in the late 1960s-early 1970s days of movies being able to say and do whatever they wanted, often comes across as juvenile today. A whole movie of watching George Segal trying to decide between killing his whacky senile mother and putting her in a home is just not funny and Gordon’s excessive mannerisms as his mother don’t help.

If 73-year-old Gordon wasn’t annoying enough, 83-year-old Gordon in 1980’s My Bodyguard certainly is. Tony Bill’s directorial debut is a sweet little movie about a bullied teenager (Chris Makepeace) who hires a bodyguard (Adam Baldwin) to protect him from the class bully (Matt Dillon), a wonderful film except when Gordon is on screen as his grandmother. The inexperienced Bill either couldn’t or wouldn’t rein her in as she mugs, fondles, and pinches poor Makepeace to add color to her already hammy performance. Mercifully, she isn’t on screen long enough to cause real damage.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray debuts of Frankenstein: Complete Legacy Collection and The Wolf Man: Complete Legacy Collection.

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