James Beard Movies
- 1996
This release contains highlights from three of the appearances jazz great Wayne Shorter made at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The filmmakers include renditions of "On the Milky Way Express," "Over Shadow Hill Way," "Endangered Species," and "Footprints." ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Wayne Shorter, James Beard, (more)
Sam Elliot stars as Rick Carlson, a thirty year old lifeguard who thinks life is passing him by. Rick loves the beach life and his job, but after attending his fifteen-year high school reunion and receiving advice from his family and friends that he's wasting his life, Rick begins to question his livelihood and wonders whether he should quit and find a more normal line of work -- such as selling cars for the local Porsche dealership. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sam Elliott, Anne Archer, (more)
- 1971
- R
Based upon the novel by Lois Gould and adapted (under the pseudonym Esther Dale) by Elaine May, Such Good Friends focuses on Julie Messinger (played by Dyan Cannon), a woman with intense, often wild emotions that are held in check beneath a rather conventional façade. After her chauvinistic and self-centered husband Richard checks into the hospital for a simple mole removal that goes seriously wrong, Julie discovers that he has been titanically unfaithful to her. This is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and Julie decides it is time for her to break out of her shell, no matter what the consequences. She begins to exhibit a sexual interest in other men (sometimes indiscriminately, as when she seduces her family doctor, played by James Coco), and speaks her mind to others, including her egocentric mother (Nina Foch) and her hypocritical best friend (ennifer O'Neill). At the end, Julie wanders into Central Park and, presumably, a new life. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
- 1970
Upon completing Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a tearful Liza Minnelli declared publicly that she would never, ever work with tyrannical director Otto Preminger again. Worse luck for her: Junie Moon contains what may well be Minnelli's best non-musical performance. Based on the novel by Marjorie Kellogg, the film surprisingly manages to evoke humor and pathos from some of the least promising material in movie history. Minnelli plays an emotionally imbalanced young girl whose face is horribly disfigured by her psycho boy friend Ben Piazza. Ken Howard is cast as an epileptic who has wrongly been diagnosed as mentally retarded. And Robert Moore (future director of such films as The Cheap Detective and Murder by Death) portrays a homosexual, confined to a wheelchair after a hunting accident. After meeting one another in a hospital, these three social outcasts decide to move in together, forming a united front against a cold, judgmental world. The devastating events that follow might have lapsed into the grotesque and exploitational, but director Preminger is extremely careful to depict his protagonists as three-dimensional human beings rather than "freaks." Unfortunately, some filmgoers, assuming that any film with a title like Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon just had to be a campy laff riot, were turned off by the repellant aspects of the early scenes and refused to give the rest of this fascinating film a chance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Liza Minnelli, Ken Howard, (more)
