The best thing about studios celebrating their centennial anniversaries is that they tend to dig into their vaults and roll out restored versions of some of their greatest titles, and they don’t get much greater than Paramount’s 1974 neo-noir nugget, “Chinatown,” now on Blu-ray for the first time.

Jack Nicholson was born to play sharp-dressed, wisecracking private investigator Jake Gittes, an ex-cop with some bad memories of his old Chinatown beat in 1937 Los Angeles, who’s doing much better for himself these days tracking down unfaithful wives and husbands — until he uncovers a monumental scam engineered by the corrupt powers that be that will shape the future of L.A.

One could argue that this film was a career best for many of its collaborators, including director Roman Polanski, production designer Richard Sylbert and cinematographer John Alonso, who created a beautiful film noir in color, its atmospherics enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score with its melancholy trumpet solos. Then there was Faye Dunaway, the lovely but flawed woman of mystery and tragedy with whom Jake becomes involved, and director John Houston in full acting mode as the mighty, menacing and unrepentantly sinful Noah Cross, the manipulator of deceitful doings within the Department of Water and Power.

And then there is the taut and complex screenplay that won an Academy Award for Robert Towne, who always intended “Chinatown” to be the first of a trilogy based loosely on the history of the shady dealings that built the City of Angels.

The Blu-ray edition contains a three-part documentary on that history, “Water and Power: The Aqueduct — The Aftermath — The River and Beyond,” plus commentary by Towne and director David Fincher (“Zodiac”). There’s also an appreciation of the film from prominent filmmakers and documentaries on the filming of “Chinatown” and its legacy.

And there’s that dark and jolting ending in a part of the city where things never went well for Jake, when one of his colleagues sadly implores him with that famous last line to “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Just try to forget it.

— Gene Triplett

One of the most enduring cinematic images of the hippie-dippy 1960s is of Dennis Hopper’s defiant biker Billy tooling down the highway – flowing long hair, floppy bushman’s hat and bandito mustache – astride a souped-up Harley chopper. The film was 1969’s “Easy Rider,” and Hopper was not only its co-star (with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson) but was also the movie’s co-writer, director and most dedicated, lifelong rebel.

In a film career that began with roles in 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause” and 1956’s “Giant,” opposite his fated mentor James Dean, and that forged indelible characters in pictures such as “Apocalypse Now,” “Blue Velvet,” “Hoosiers” and some 115 others, Hopper always maintained his bad-boy edge and air of earnest rebellion.

And the life of this most unpredictable of showbiz players is ably and almost too thoroughly surveyed in “Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel” (Barricade Books, $26.95), author Peter Winkler’s sporadically entertaining and exhaustively researched biography of one of the movie world’s most original and enigmatic characters on-screen and off.

In a career that spanned half a century of highs and lows, Hopper proved himself an artist always eager to push back boundaries. An award-winning actor, writer and director, a painter and photographer, a discerning collector of modern art, a notorious lady’s man and an eclectic counterculture figure, Hopper was definitely a Hollywood original, and publishers assert that this is the first book to chronicle his erratic life and career.

Winkler is certainly thorough and painstaking in detailing Hopper’s life trajectory – from his lonely childhood in rural Kansas through a career of some 200 on-screen roles (earning Oscar and Emmy nominations) and seven directing credits to his death last year from prostate cancer at age 74. Unfortunately, the author never interviewed his subject and most of the quotes in the book (even those of Hopper’s colleagues and co-stars) come from second-hand sources.

Winkler provides a encyclopedic tour of Hopper’s acting life, recounting his seminal early roles opposite Dean (with whom he clashed over the worth of Lee Strasberg and The Actors Studio in New York) through his “Easy Rider” period and the comedown failure of 1971’s “The Last Movie,” to the drug-fueled weirdness of his roles in “Apocalypse Now,” “Blue Velvet” and “River’s Edge,” to his late-career comeback as the reigning villain in big-budget actioners such as “Speed” and “Waterworld.”

In his personal life, Hopper’s world was no less erratic and eventful, and Winkler duly covers his long-standing romance with Natalie Wood; his five marriages (including his efforts to divorce his last wife even in the midst of terminal cancer); his sometimes quarrelsome friendships with Dean, Fonda, Elvis Presley and John Wayne; his drug and alcohol addictions and his mystical sojourn in Taos, N.M.; his emergence as a respected artist and photographer and his forward-looking patronage of modern artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein.

It’s all very methodical and detailed, even if the book occasionally threatens to get lost in turgid detail (do we really need to know the precise time, day and date of a staging for a one-act play Hopper wrote in high school?).

Still, “Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel” more than lives up to its title. It is indeed a wild ride – through biographical minutiae and sordid scandal, through name-dropping celebrity and dense psychological torment – to paint a pretty fascinating and compelling portrait of the artist who created Billy the biker, the man who went off in search of America.

- Dennis King

If there are places you remember, as the old Beatles song goes, such as the Twilight Gardens Drive-In (where we saw “A Hard Day’s Night,” 10 of us in a Ford Fairlane, half of us hidden in the trunk going in), the Cinema 70 or the North Penn Twin, then you’ve probably seen a few of the coming attractions clips contained in “Trailers From Hell: Volume Two.”

This second volume of “coming soon” teasers contains all of the scenes worth seeing in otherwise mostly dreadful low-rent B-features such as “Fire Maidens From Outer Space,” “Flesh Gordon” and “Ski Troop Attack,” to name but an awful few.

Of course, a lot of us were too busy in the back seat to watch the scale models of British navy ships battling the Spanish Armada in a vast movie studio tub of water representing the English Channel in the year 1588, or Christopher Lee barking the order, “Close the gun ports!” as he shoots the captain in the back in “The Devil-Ship Pirates!” “See them Plundering! Pillaging! ‘The Devil-Ship Pirates.’ They took what they wanted. And they wanted everything!”

Or come back next week to witness the gleefully sadistic “The Stranglers of Bombay” in “Strangloscope!,” or mark your calendar for “Deep Red” (“It’ll put you into deep shock!”), a film by diabolically gruesome Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, starring British actor David Hemmings (“Blow Up”) at a time when his career was going down the tubes along with buckets of blood.

Most of these previews of coming attractions are far more entertaining than the full-length films they hawk, as are the commentaries from such scarily fun-loving directors and writers as Jack Hill (“The Terror,” “Blood Bath”), Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy”), Mick Garris (“Sleepwalkers,” “Masters of Horror”), and of course the King of the B’s, Roger Corman.

The big bonus here is the full length, anamorphic widescreen presentation of Corman’s cult-fave cheapie, “The Little Shop of Horrors,” shot in 2 1/2 days in 1960 and featuring a man-eating plant named Audrey and a hilarious cameo from Jack Nicholson as a hysterically giggling, masochistic dental patient.

Here’s tons of nostalgic fun you can enjoy on your living room couch, which, no doubt, is far more comfortable than the cramped quarters of that old Ford Fairlane, especially if there’s more than two of you.

— Gene Triplett

BY DENNIS KING

Johnny Depp’s swaggering, royally daft Captain Jack Sparrow of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” voyages is certainly a quirky and theatrical scoundrel. But no one can accuse his many big-screen pirate predecessors of being shrinking violets either, and a rogue’s gallery of famous movie buccaneers offers up some outlandish scalawags that are every bit Sparrow’s equal in charming villainy.

There’s more to a good movie pirate than parrots, peg legs and eye patches, and the best of them incorporate some unique characteristics that set them apart from the scurvy crowd. For his part, Depp has said he modeled many of Sparrow’s devil-may-care mannerisms on Rolling Stone rocker Keith Richards.

So what distinguishes your favorite movie pirates?

Here are a few of our best-of-the-worst and what makes them special:

Captain Blood (“Captain Blood,” 1935) – Errol Flynn is practically synonymous with the word “swashbuckler.” In this jaunty Technicolor bit of swordplay – from director Michael Curtiz, based on the classic sea-going tale by Raphael Sabatini – Flynn’s wrongly imprisoned doctor turned Robin Hood pirate sets the standard for athletic swagger.

Long John Silver (“Treasure Island,” 1934) – Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure tale of buried pirate booty was filmed a score and more times, but no one embodied the squinty-eyed charm of the one-legged Long John Silver better than the scurvy Wallace Beery, who lead Jackie Cooper’s young Jim Hawkins astray in Victor Fleming’s classic version of the story.

Jackie Cooper, Wallace Beery

Mike Fink (“Davey Crockett and the River Pirates,” 1956) – Not all pirates ply their trade on the high seas, as the keelboat marauders of this Walt Disney frontier adventure prove. In burly Mike Fink, self-proclaimed “King of the River,” veteran actor Jeff York showed us a bullyboy pirate who could wield a cudgel as lethally as a saber.

Morgan Adams (“Cutthroat Island,” 1995) – History tells us there were plenty of real-life female pirates – from The Red Lady to Anne Bonney – but in Gina Davis’ buff and sexy Morgan Adams we got a distaff pirate for the age of women’s lib. Under the direction of her then-husband and action maven Renny Harlin, Davis gave us a buff yet distinctly feminine brand of pirate derring-do – call it “swishbuckling.”

Steve the Pirate (“Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” 2004) and John Blutarsky (“Animal House,” 1978) – Delusional piracy has reared its scurvy head in a couple of movies not primarily concerned with pirates. For buccaneer buffoonery, check out Alan Tudyk’s Steve the Pirate as the only member of a ragtag dodgeball team who, through some undefined neurosis, feels compelled to dress like a pirate. And who can forget the final scenes of the classic frat house farce when John Belushi’s Neanderthal Bluto swoops in like a marauding pirate, kidnaps a sorority girl and speeds away in a Caddy convertible? Arrgh, and double arrgh!

Alan Tudyk

The Dread Pirate Roberts (“The Princess Bride,” 1987) – Cary Elwes was probably the sweetest pirate ever as the young apprentice Westley, who in Rob Reiner’s hip fairy tale film became the latest in a long line of black-clad swordsmen to inherit the mantle of the Dread Pirate Roberts. But, when he finds his true love, the precious Buttercup, and is partially paralyzed in a fall from a cliff, Westley’s pirating heroics take on some very dark and quirky aspects.

Captain Red (“Pirates,” 1986) – Walter Matthau took over the role of the gnarly Captain Red from Jack Nicholson, who ironically tried to hold up writer-director Roman Polanski for an outrageous salary to play the role. Nevertheless, Matthau comported himself quite colorfully and deviously as the mutinous old scoundrel who, along with his love-struck first mate Frog, conspires to steal a golden throne that the Spanish had plundered from the Aztecs.

Captain Yellowbeard (“Yellowbeard,” 1983) – Leading a riotous crew that features several of his Monty Python mates, Graham Chapman took up the sword as the notorious “pirate’s pirate,” Yellowbeard, known for terrorizing the high seas and “often forcing his victims to eat their own lips.” Lots of zany Pythonesque antics ensue in an adventure that features Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong as zonked-out Spanish Conquistadors and bug-eyed Marty Feldman in his final film role.

Black Louie (“Three Little Pirates,” 1946) – Being a pirate in a Three Stooges short must have been a thankless task. But journeyman actor Robert Kellard (billed as Robert Stevens) got to sport a very cool pirate name and throw knives in this typically wacky tale in which Moe, Larry and Curly play garbage scow crewmen who are castaway in time and end up in the 17th century thieves den of Black Louie, where they’re forced into a knife throwing contest to save Larry’s hide. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

“The Terror” (1963) is another Roger Corman quickie that exists only because the busy B-movie king had just finished a picture ahead of schedule and under budget (in this case “The Raven”),  the sets were still in place and one of its stars was still under contract.

With three days left to get as much additional mileage as he could out of Boris Karloff, the industrious Corman commissioned actor/screenwriter Leo Gordon and all-purpose protege Jack Hill to dash out a script and deal pages of dialogue to a quickly assembled cast that included Karloff, Jack Nicholson (another “Raven” leftover), Shirley Knight (Nicholson’s then-wife), Dorothy Neumann, Jonathan Haze, and reliable Corman regular Dick Miller.

In only his eighth big-screen role, a whiny Nicholson is amusingly unconvincing as a soldier in Napoleon’s army who becomes lost on the Baltic coast, and follows a seemingly ghostly woman (Knight) to the spooky old castle of the mysterious Baron Von Leppe (Karloff), a place which of course turns out to be a “ghastly, haunted mansion of death!”

While producer Corman took all the directing credit, B-movie lore has it that he allowed several others of his crew to take turns calling shots behind the camera, including young associate producer Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hill, Dennis Jacob, Monte Hellman (who at least got a location director credit) and even Nicholson. It’s also been written that the crew was scrambling to finish Karloff’s scenes even as the “Raven” sets were being torn down around them.

To its credit, the film does have its few moments of suspense and chills, but mainly it’s another low-budget mess that’s a hoot to watch, made when Corman was still laboring under the great old banner of American International Pictures, which almost always promised a good time when it flashed across the drive-in screens of the 1950s and ’60s.

Now it’s available from HD Cinema Classics and Cultra in a Blu-ray + DVD combo pack for reliving drive-in memories at home or, if you’re not all that old, checking out what kind of weirdness your parents or grandparents weren’t really watching while they were making out in daddy’s T-Bird with the window speaker turned off.

- Gene Triplett

NEW YORK – Owen Wilson – with his fractured nose, crooked smile, twinkly blue eyes and tousled blond hair – is every girl’s dream date and every guy’s ideal frat brother.

Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon

Just ask his co-stars in “How Do You Know,” the James L. Brooks romantic comedy in which the laidback Texas native plays a free-spirited, womanizing professional baseball player for the Washington Nationals. They got a unique sample of Wilson’s pixyish charm when they showed up in Washington, D.C. for shooting – literally!

Jack Nicholson, himself a notorious rounder in his day, said he was immediately taken aback by Wilson’s guileless playfulness.

“Well, I didn’t get to do any scenes with Owen, who kills me anyway,” said Nicholson during press interviews, “but the only contact that I had with him was that he called me up when I first got there and he said, ‘Hey, do you want to go out and shoot machine guns?’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, all these guys think that I’m adventurous.’”

Witherspoon chimed in, “He invited me, too. It’s kind of awesome.”

“The man is charming,” Nicholson said with a rascally shrug of his shoulders.

Wilson, sitting nearby with a Cheshire cat’s grin on his face, confirmed the story.

“I actually did (go out shooting machine guns),” he said. “It was like a friend knew somebody at one of the embassies that had a tennis court. And then when they let us on to play tennis, we found out that they had a machine gun range underneath the embassy, and they took us to shoot on it.”

- Dennis King

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Flanked by a trio of the freshest young actors in contemporary film, Jack Nicholson seems to relish his status as Hollywood’s resident lovable rogue.

Since his heyday as counterculture radical in landmark movies such as “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Nicholson has lived a high-profile playboy’s life and settled into a kind of elder rebel-emeritus status on screen, burnished by the patina of his bad-boy past and his three acting Oscars.

Jack Nicholson

If there’s a mischievous twinkle in his eyes when he talks about his latest role as a “cuddly shark” in writer-director James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know,” it is masked by his ubiquitous, signature shades. But when Nicholson talks about working again with Brooks or hanging out and acting with co-stars Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, there’s a weathered warmth in his voice that belies his hipster cool.

“It’s a privilege to work with Jim. He’s probably one of the best screenwriters in the world, and you just get great material and he can always cast wonderful actors. Just look at us all,” Nicholson said, gesturing grandly to his young co-stars during a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park hosted by Columbia Pictures.

With Brooks on one side and Witherspoon, Wilson and Rudd on the other, Nicholson held court in a sense as he talked about Brooks’ new romantic comedy. In it, he plays a deeply flawed father and sharky business mogul trying to balance his love for his son with his instincts for self-preservation. Nicholson’s bond with Brooks goes way back to his Oscar-winning performances in “Terms of Endearment” and “As Good As It Gets,” sandwiched between a memorable turn in “Broadcast News.” (Nicholson’s other Oscar, his first, came for Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1976.)

In “How Do You Know,” Nicholson is essentially in a supporting role – but one that fits him like a tailored suit. He plays Charles, an oily industrialist whose company is under federal investigation for fraud. Unfortunately, blame for Charles’ shady shenanigans falls on his decent but clueless son, George (Rudd), who recently took the corporate reins. As George’s life is falling apart, he stumbles into a romantic triangle with Witherspoon’s Lisa, an Olympic softball player in crisis at the end of her career, and Wilson’s Matty, a playboy pitcher for the Washington Nationals.

For his part, Nicholson’s charmingly caddish Charles occupies a subplot in which he hopes to help his son out of his legal jam while avoiding a lengthy, and well-deserved, prison sentence for himself.

“There are always different things that make parts difficult,” Nicholson said of his raffish character. “I’ve played a lot of bad or semi-bad people and you always have to be on the character’s side. I didn’t have any problem analyzing this character. It wasn’t really the tough part of it for me. I liked playing the father even though he’s not a great father, but I think you can see that he really does care even though he chooses business over his own son. He really didn’t think that he was doing that much wrong. I was a little worried about that myself since I feel like I am a loveable shark. Those are the kinds of things that you have to finesse.”

Brooks said he wrote the character as a personification of a certain kind of predator afoot in America’s financial jungles.

“Everything that’s been going on (in the economy) has been an attack on our personhoods. That shark that you’re talking about is representative of a certain kind of American businessman. I think he’s typical,” Brooks said.

“I am someone who’s obsessive about specifics and detail and I couldn’t pick a business to put up front,” the director continued. “Then I realized that Jack’s character is representative of the whole breed. And also, I realized that so much has gone wrong, and our trust has been eroded to such an extent by the absence of real role models anyplace in our lives, that the last holdout is people needing each other and holding hands and taking it on together. I sort of felt that when I wrote this.”

Nicholson, 73, said Brooks is the kind of director that makes him excited to keep making movies.

“With Jim you have to remember that he writes comedies like nobody else,” the actor said. “I mean, you’re dealing with life, death, business crime, fatherhood, motherhood, all these very serious topics and everything is funny at the same time. It has truth and it’s funny, but what he attacks to begin with is where it’s really distinct if you reviewed it – cancer, news, all this kind of thing. And I know it’s the goal he sets himself. He sets himself very interesting goals.

“Like, I remember the one that I particularly liked was in ‘As Good As It Gets.’ He says, ‘Number one, I want to write a part for the dog.’ He said, ‘I also want (the dog) to get a specific laugh based on language.’ So I mean he just picks out really hard things to do and then it’s supposed to look easy, kind of like Fred Astaire, but where he starts is always amazing to me.”

After a stellar career that has featured the above-mention films as well as era-defining movies such as “The Shining,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” “A Few Good Men,” “The Departed” and “The Bucket List,” Nicholson said he really doesn’t have anything left to prove. So he picks the roles he does take on very carefully.

“I’m kind of a guy that likes to prove things and all my life when I’ve said, ‘I’m so sick of (working),” and everyone always said, ‘Oh, God, man. You couldn’t not work.’ Well, I’m kind of proving them wrong. I read a lot of scripts and so I feel like I do a lot of movies and stuff, but they’re all the same. I like not working. I know that’s hideous, blasphemous, but I really do. I think I’ve started to infect others, young guys. I had a conversation with Leo (DiCaprio) and he said, ‘I love not working.’ I said, ‘See what I mean?’ I don’t really want to infect him.”

So, what does he do when he’s not working?

“It’s a press conference and I like to give great answers, but I just like getting up sometimes between eleven and one,” he said hesitantly. “It’s not movie hours unless you’re doing night movies. I play golf. I have a couple of kids in college and so I’m on the phone a lot. I see my pals. Various women around. Talk to my congressman. Go to funerals.”

What about rooting for his beloved Los Angeles Lakers?

“That’s more of a job,” Nicholson said with that patented bad-boy grin. “I have to be there (at courtside).”

But what is it that he still loves about making movies?

“Travel. Beautiful women. Excellent compatriots. Drinking pals. It’s very exciting. It’s just an exciting business,” Nicholson said. “We’ve all been doing it a while. I think we all get nervous, we get wild and that should be all I say, I think.”

The cosmic question at the heart of James L. Brooks’ latest, appealingly quirky romantic comedy is “How Do You Know.”

Owen Wilson

Although the writer-director of such grown-up comedies as “Broadcast News,” “As Good As It Gets” and “Spanglish” fails to punctuate his latest properly (something to do with an old Hollywood superstition about an ill fate for movies with question marks in their titles), he does offer up some pointed and poignant inquiries into the nature of love, romantic fate and commitment.

“How Do You Know,” like most of Brooks’ so-called “dramadies,” features decent but flawed characters and a messy, loose-ends plotline that aptly reflects modern life with all its funny and heartbreaking imperfections.

Paul Rudd

The unspoken extension of the film’s title query is: how do you know when you’re really, truly in love?

And Brooks employs a well-scrubbed trio of highly likable, dazzlingly photogenic and apparently expensive stars (reported payroll: $50 million) to pursue that question through a thoughtful and complex if meandering narrative.

It all starts as we meet Lisa (Reese Witherspoon, dithering but sexy), an Olympic-caliber softball player who, at 27, is unceremoniously cut from the U.S. national team. Uncertain about her future, and equally uncertain about her romantic fling with playboy Washington Nationals pitcher Matty (Owen Wilson, a charming rascal), Lisa agrees to a quicky blind date with businessman George (Paul Rudd, a likable everyman).

George has just received word that he’s about to be indicted for fraud for some dubious doings at the corporation whose head job he’s just inherited from his wheeler-dealer father Charles (Jack Nicholson playing, well, Jack Nicholson).

Reese Witherspoon

Naturally, the date between these two distracted young people is a disaster. But, something about George’s vulnerability and decency sticks with Lisa. And something about Matty’s guileless honesty and womanizing past leaves her with deep doubts about their relationship. And so an offbeat love triangle develops – Lisa slightly indifferent to prospects of love; Matty willing to settle down with Lisa despite the bounties of his single life; George gently viewing Lisa as a lifeline to sanity.

Meanwhile, in a pithy subplot, George’s morally slippery father struggles to come to grips with his guilt, his horror at going to prison and his love for his clueless and innocent son.

Certainly, Brooks knows how to create memorable, offbeat characters and place them in stories that deliver plenty of smart laughs, along with an undercurrent of social timeliness and heart-tugging drama. As a writer, director and producer, Brooks has won three Oscars (for “Terms of Endearment”) and 18 Emmy Awards (for his work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Taxi” “The Tracey Ullman Show” and “The Simpsons”) essentially doing just that.

But his stories are hard to categorize because they don’t quite fit the standard romantic comedy mold. Their characters are too idiosyncratic, their plot turns too unpredictable, their conclusions too open-ended. In other words, as he does in “How do You Know,” Brooks turns formula upside down and shakes out something original and true.

How do you know when you’ve seen a James L. Brooks movie? You’re left thinking about it and marveling at its wondrous foibles long after you’ve left the theater.

- Dennis King

“How Do You Know”

PG-13
1:56
3 stars
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Kathryn Hahn
(sexual content and some strong language)

Taken at face value, Casey Affleck’s “I’m Still Here” would seem to be a torturous, train-wreck documentary on actor Joaquin Phoenix’s bizarre career meltdown and year-long descent into self-destructive celebrity hell.

Rapper Joaquin Phoenix

When the film was first released in September it generated a critical tsunami of speculation: Is it real? Is it an elaborate put-on? Is it a mockumentary? What’s the point (a poke in the eye of an incessantly intrusive media, a deconstruction of movie-star persona, a meta-examination of indulgent celebrity culture)?

Even before Affleck admitted that the whole thing was an carefully staged hoax, a prolonged piece of snarky performance art, any savvy moviegoer would have taken the film with what the famously malaprop-prone Sam Goldwyn would characterize as “a dose of the salts.” The whole enterprise smelled very fishy.

The scenario is now oh-so-obviously familiar to most pop-culture watchers: A shambling, doughy, wildly bearded Joaquin Phoenix, Oscar nominated for “Gladiator” and “Walk the Line,” shows up on David Letterman’s TV show and mumbles something about forsaking his acting career and becoming a hip-hop recording star.

There follows a series of increasingly wacko public pronouncements and behaviors that clearly suggest Phoenix is undergoing a serious nervous breakdown. With Affleck (respected actor and husband of Joaquin’s sister, Summer) tagging along with camera crew in tow, “I’m Still Here” presents a series of queasy episodes in which Phoenix appears to throw away a brilliant acting career and slide down a rabbit hole of sex-and-drug addled celebrity megalomania.

There’s the Letterman debacle; there are wink-wink celebrity encounters with Sean Penn, Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson, Danny Glover and obvious co-conspirator Ben Stiller; there are bouts of childish bad behavior (berating members of his entourage, snorting cocaine off a hooker’s naked breasts, toking up joint after joint); there are geeky rap performances at various nightclubs in front of clearly confused audiences; there is a session in which he regales/tortures producer Sean “Diddy” Combs with some truly inane and amateurish rapping tracks.

With the hoax made public, it’s clear that Affleck and Phoenix were attempting a trek through deadpan spoof territory that was pioneered by far more serious and deft pranksters such as Andy Kaufman, Christopher Guest and Sacha Baron Cohen. If a surreal, unsettling goof on the essential absurdity of celebrity was their intention, Affleck and Phoenix succeed – sporadically and on a purely theoretical level. Their hoax cum documentary is indeed surreal and unsettling.

But it’s also puzzling and painful to sit through – a confounding conspiratorial effort to prop up some fairly obvious conclusions. In the end, it seems merely a sophomoric exercise in celebrity navel gazing; Joaquin Phoenix’s twisted spin on the burden of being rich, famous, talented and pathologically self-aware.

After all the sly, elaborate effort to construct a philosophical rationale for “I’m Still Here,” the most obvious rational response seems to be, so what?

- Dennis King

“I’m Still Here”

Not rated
1:46
1 1/2 stars
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix
(Copious sex, drugs, profanity, nudity)

Leonard Maltin

BY DENNIS KING

Movie critics, who see scores if not hundreds of movies each year, are often asked by acquaintances headed for the video store or their Netflix queue, “What movie should I rent this weekend?”

Since that’s always a matter of mood and personal taste, it can be a thorny question. People are usually fishing not just for the latest star-driven blockbuster but for some hidden gem or eye-opening sleeper that’s somehow escaped popular notice. Still, it’s a loaded question.

So for we movie wonks who don’t want to get crossways with our friends by  some weird, obscure or dicey film recommendation, Leonard Maltin comes to the rescue. That man of encyclopedic knowledge and 17,000 movies has a new book called “Leonard Maltin’s 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen” (HarperStudio, $16.99).

It’s filled with offbeat recommendations of both forgotten classic movies and underappreciated contemporary films.

For instance:

“Lady for a Day,” Frank Capra’s 1933 charmer about a poor bag lady (Mary Robson) who sells apples in Times Square yet leads her far-away daughter to believe that she’s a wealthy dowager. Capra remade the story with a bigger budget and more publicity in the 1960s under the title “Pocketful of Miracles,” with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford.

“The Pledge,” a 2001 drama directed by actor Sean Penn and featuring an all-star cast led by Jack Nicholson as a retiring Reno police officer who gets drawn into the case of a brutal attack on a young neighborhood girl. Despite an amazing ensemble featuring Patricia Clarkson, Aaron Eckhart, Mickey Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren, Penn’s third directing effort apparently fell through the box-office cracks and was largely overlooked.

A few other regrettably ignored titles on Maltin’s list are “The Ballad of Little Jo” (1993) with Suzy Amis as a gal passing as a rough-hewn cowboy; “In the Shadow of the Moon” (2007), a candid, intimate documentary about the astronauts of America’s Apollo space program; “The Whole Wide World” (1996), a real-life drama about a prim Texas school teacher (Rene Zellweger) and her relationship with troubled comic-book creator Richard E. Howard (Vincent D’Onofrio), and “The Weather Man” (2005), with Nicolas Cage as a Chicago weather forecaster struggling with maturity, family and ambition.

So next time someone corners you at a party and asks you to pull a brilliant movie recommendation out of your hat, just let Leonard do it.