by Dean | Sep 17, 2015 | General
The Great McGinty (1940) is not a great movie but it’s pure Preston Sturges, which means it’s fanciful and personal. “It has mainly to do with the rise through city politics from soup line to Governor’s mansion of a toughie (Brian Donlevy) who learns very fast” (Otis Ferguson, who describes the premise better than I could). The film tells us a number of things: 1) if crooked people in a democracy want political power, they will get it; 2) cynicism is rife enough in American politics to crowd out idealism; and 3) unscrupulous men are frequently tamed by marriage and family.
Written, of course, by Sturges, as well as his first directorial effort, what McGinty is is Ring Lardner with heart and a bit of slapstick. Not much heart, though, because the film is darkly acerbic. Yet, too, it is “quite a lot of fun” (Ferguson again).
The Great McGinty (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 15, 2015 | General
On Gabrielle (2006):
From France, this Patrice Chereau picture borrows Joseph Conrad’s fine 1897 story, “The Return,” for cinematic treatment. A wife, Gabrielle, leaves her home to run off with a recent lover, but abruptly changes her mind and returns to her husband. It does Jean the spouse no good at all. Self-confidence goes; the expected confusion and wrath arrive. The film has to do with desiccated lives and not merely a desiccated marriage. What happens when marriage is the only thing a person can fall back on? Nothing.
Isabelle Huppert plays Gabrielle in a performance perfect and great: the core of a person, of a broken aristocrat, is captured. Equally powerful, emotionally wrenching, is Pascal Greggory as Jean. The actors are superior to the director’s style, what with the occasional unnecessary music and the transitions from color to black-and-white. Even worse are the arty intertitles. But Gabrielle is no letdown, searing and meaningful as it is. Huppert and Greggory are not its only strengths.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of Gabrielle
by Dean | Sep 9, 2015 | General
The only good thing about No Escape (2015) is that it is wildly suspenseful. Critics who have called it trashy—trashy in the sense of sloppily dumb—are right. The film stars Owen Wilson and Lake Bell (acceptable). Sterling Jerins, the young girl who plays one of their daughters, is a talented cutie, but the two brothers who made this thing are talented exploiters.
by Dean | Sep 8, 2015 | General
The German movie Phoenix (2015), by Christian Petzold, brought certain thoughts to mind.
First, if people will not behave humanely during wartime, when will they behave humanely? Second, the film concerns ordinary people living in a defeated Germany after WWII, and their actions are mundane, unheroic, sometimes scheming. At the same time, they are often rising from the ashes (the book Phoenix is based on is titled Return from the Ashes): such is the case with Nelly (Nina Hoss), a concentration camp survivor.
Though overrated, the film is a good one, finely directed and photographed. One of its few flaws is that it peters out instead of actually concluding. But listen, Hoss: your acting is marvelous, as is that of Ronald Zehrfeld. That is, Hoss is marvelous playing a woman with a broken spirit, one who seems normally sensitive and deeply appreciative of a man’s love but is also capable of rebuilding strength and initiative when necessary. Zehrfeld pulls off a smart working-class dude, the husband of Nelly who does not recognize her.
(In German with English subtitles)
by Dean | Sep 3, 2015 | General
Auggie Wren, a smoke shop owner; Paul Benjamin, a novelist; Rashid, a black teenage boy; Cyrus Cole, a one-armed black filling station owner; Ruby, Auggie’s one-eyed former girlfriend—these make up much of the dramatis personae of the intelligent and absorbing 1995 American film, Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang and written by novelist Paul Auster. Somebody in the film complains it is only a matter of time before society outlaws smoking, wanting it to vanish as surely as the smoke of every lighted cigarette does. At least for the present, though, smoking is one of the few pleasures the characters here enjoy, particularly Auggie and Paul. Tobacco has its evanescence, and so does happiness; the characters know what it’s like to look smoke in the eye, as it were.
Auggie once shoplifted for Ruby and was given by a judge the choice between jail and the military. Opting for the latter, serving his time, he was abandoned by thoughtless Ruby for another man. What light there was in Auggie’s life was evanescent: smoke. Ruby herself (played by Stockard Channing with astonishing control and pleasant force) has a grown, cocaine-addicted, foul-mouthed daughter who excoriates her. Paul has experienced a writer’s block ever since his wife and unborn child were accidentally gunned down in the street. Cyrus lost his arm after drunkenly crashing his car and consequently killing his wife (God, he says, took away that particular limb to remind him of what “a bad, stupid, selfish man” he is), which woman happens to have been Rashid’s mother (Cyrus is his father). Rashid grew up without either of his parents since Cyrus forsook him years ago the way Ruby forsook Auggie. Now he is running from thieving thugs.
Not that there isn’t any hope here; a bit of uplift results merely from the idea of slowing down now and then, taking one’s time, for the sake of personal equilibrium. At least one critic has indicated that having a smoke requires slowing down. Further, there are some virtuous deeds done, though never mind the stupid phrase “random acts of kindness” that one magazine review in particular used to describe them. Random acts of kindness do not exist, random meaning without purpose or design. The various acts of kindness here are all purposeful.
Smoke is a healthy, even edifying, achievement.
Cover of Smoke
