"Alien"

In Hollywood, August is rather indelicately known as a “dump month”— a time when studios traditionally litter theaters with films that have low box-office expectations and pack all the heft of a half-eaten Twizzler (à la this year’s “Let’s Be Cops” and “The Expendables 3”).  However, now and then over the years, the scheduling gods have managed to include a real gem with all the other celluloid junk. Here’s a look at some of the films that—from the 1950s to the 2010s—have defied their dog-day August release dates and become timeless works of art.   

It boggles the mind that only a couple of generations back, women were sometimes referred to as “the weaker sex.” That’s not only sexist, but misleading.  Plenty of tough, cunning, even deadly female characters have graced the screen over the past six decades that prove this idiotic saying wrong.   Here are an even dozen.

Though we live in the era of the multi-hyphenate and multi-tasker, we still get a boot out of personalities we know for one function, showing up in a totally unexpected context, and in doing so revealing an otherwise hidden side—and hidden talents.  When a non-actor appears on-screen there is a moment of held breath. Will he or she be…good? After all, acting is hard. Acting takes sweat and years of training, whether in techniques by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, or doing improv on weeknights for decades, with no break in sight. And yet, from out of the blue, a soccer star, jazz musician, or gossip columnist will cruise onto the set and turn in the performance of a seasoned vet.

One of my favorite “insider” books about the film business is 1983’s “Adventures In The Screen Trade,”  an often lacerating, highly insightful expose about the inner workings of Hollywood. Its author is veteran screenwriter William Goldman, who scripted numerous high profile movies in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.  

“Godzilla” is lumbering back out of the deep, spoiling for a fight and hungry for various delicious looking landmarks. Be warned, this relic of Japan’s atomic age nightmares has grown grumpier (and apparently more pot-bellied) in his fifteen years away from the big screen. And he’s definitely still growling from his treatment in Roland Emmerich’s 1998 big-budget disaster starring Matthew Broderick. In this newest iteration of cinema’s favorite Kaiju (Japanese for “monster” - something made exhaustively clear if you watched any of Guillermo del Toro’s plodding, nonsensical “Pacific Rim”) you’ll see the requisite shots of anonymous roving citizens gazing upward in horror, running full tilt, and glancing over their shoulders as cars tumble over the Golden Gate Bridge, sewer gasses explode, and your favorite bodega is demolished with a sweep of Godzilla’s powerful hind parts. But will you get your money’s worth? Should you spend the extra couple of bucks for 3-D?