by Dean | Nov 22, 2015 | General
The only good thing about this poorly written remake of a 2009 Argentine film is most of the acting. Chiwetel Ejiofor overplays his part, but Alfred Molina is still a delight to watch, even in a small role. Julia Roberts is trenchant, moving, and convincingly tomboyish, while Nicole Kidman supplies her assistant-DA character with all the smarts and gravity—and proper voice—she needs. The only problem is you have to watch this asinine movie to observe all this.
by Dean | Nov 20, 2015 | General
Children of Paradise (1945) is the classic 190-minute film by director Marcel Carne and scenarist Jacques Prevert. The paradise of the title is not 19th century Paris, the movie’s setting, but rather the personal paradise in some of the characters’ minds. The “children” are mostly theatre actors; one who is not is an aristocratic, misanthropic criminal (Marcel Herrand)—often a fumbler of his crimes. People with paradise in their minds want what they want, and invariably it involves the self more than other people. Significantly, there is a sequence in which a man named Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), as he tries to catch up with the elegant woman Garance (Arletty), disappears in a big crowd of merrymakers in the street. A self now made anonymous seems to exist here.
(In French with English subtitles)
Children of Paradise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Nov 17, 2015 | General
I don’t understand the meaning of the strange Iranian film, Gabbeh (1996).
Its protagonist is a girl who yearns to wed a man who howls exactly like a wolf but doesn’t seem to be one. He’s a man. A lot happens, even so—a mystifying lot—before the couple elope on horseback. Love, resentment, birth, old age, death—the film poetically touches on all these matters. I haven’t seen any of director Mohsen Makhmalbaf‘s other pictures, but they’re supposed to be political. This one isn’t. It appears to have something to do with existential truth, but is as figurative as it is visually entrancing. I take Makhmalbaf to be an ambitious artist.
Postscript: I have seen the director’s 2001 film, Kandahar, and was much impressed by it.
Gabbeh (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Nov 15, 2015 | General
Brian Moore‘s novel, The Colour of Blood, was published in 1987, before the fall of Communism in the Soviet bloc. Its engaging action occurs in an unnamed Eastern European country, and the leader of the Catholic church there, Cardinal Bem, is a man honorable and peaceable and not at all fanatically anti-government.
However, as in his novel Black Robe, Moore, clearly lapsed, attempts to present the Catholic church as morally unworthy—unworthy in a way Cardinal Bem is not. For there exists in this church a politically extremist faction which manages to kidnap Bem with the aim of blaming it on the Communist government. False blame, then, will fall upon the Reds, but honest blame belongs to the Catholics.
Moore understands the far-reaching complexity in countries where there is tension between totalitarians and religious institutions, but he refuses to side with Catholic institutions. Indeed, he tacitly deems the Church philosophically suspect since even the silence-of-God idea springs up before the novel’s last sentence—“The silence of God: would it change at the moment of his death?” To tell the truth, it is no wonder Moore was Graham Greene‘s favorite living novelist. Both men are unsuitable intellectual guides.
by Dean | Nov 13, 2015 | General
Aldo Ray is a mere marionette of an actor in Jacques Tourneur‘s Nightfall (1957) and Anne Bancroft provides little personality in her role. But the film itself is a knockout, finely directed and savvily adapted from a novel by screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. It tells of a free-lance artist (Ray) erroneously believed by murderers—and a possible policeman—to have made off with the evildoers’ loot.
There is nothing of a marionette in Brian Keith; he is disturbingly human, engrossingly true as John, one of the killer-crooks. His character leaves the impression that he should have been a good man. Thanks to Tourneur, there is a nifty scene inside and outside a shack which emphasizes John’s estrangement, all firearms raised, from his fellow murderer (slimy and played by Rudy Bond).
Nightfall (1957 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
