by Dean | Aug 14, 2015 | General
I was very hard last year on Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) but, believing it just might be a well-made guilty pleasure (if not something better), I decided to give it another chance.
I was naive—except that the first ten minutes of the film are indeed artistically interesting and should be commented on. It opens with agreeable shots of a pregnant girl dressed in white pensively sitting on the bank of a pond which a number of ducks have found inviting. Minutes later, a Mexican land baron sincerely calls for the head of the girl’s seducer to be delivered to him, after which shots of cars and planes taking men to Mexican cities appear. This engenders the idea that the violent ways of a Central American rural locale stuck in the past are also the violent ways of the present-day city.
Following this inspired moviemaking, however, is trash. Footage proving that the main actress has beautiful zoomers does not exactly conduce to either art or artistry. Too, it is not irrelevant to Alfredo‘s sexism. . . The only Peckinpah picture I’VE seen that can be called a guilty pleasure is Straw Dogs.
Cover of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
by Dean | Aug 12, 2015 | General
Not bad but not all that good either, I’ll See You In My Dreams (2015) focuses on a widow and retired teacher, Carol Petersen (Blythe Danner). A new film by Brett Haley, it presents the Unexpected, in various forms, intruding into the life of an aging person, but without being particularly memorable.
I have a problem with the gifted Danner in that she seems to be acting like a very old, nearly decrepit woman instead of the barely old senior that Carol in fact is (Danner must have been a mere 70 or 71 when the film began to be made). There are a few scenes of grief which are nicely done by both Danner and director Haley, and the dialogue can be intelligent. Other people, though, have liked this movie better than I have—it could use more character exploration—and yet, as I said, it’s not bad.
by Dean | Aug 10, 2015 | General
Cover of Man on the Train (L’Homme du Train)
In 2004’s Man on the Train, Jean Rochefort plays Manesquier, a bachelor who offers lodging to, and befriends, a middle-aged bank robber named Milan (Johnny Hallyday). Friendless and lonely, Manesquier finds himself secretly longing for the kind of gutsiness and abandon he sees in Milan, who, for his part, warms to the quiet conventionality that the old bachelor is beginning to hate. Each man nigh unconsciously slips into behaving a bit as the other man does. A kind of desperate role-playing, this, while the routine danger of death abides (Manesquier has health problems). However, both men go to their individual fates—in screenwriter Claude Klotz’s almost nihilistic vision of the world.
Ingenious for its characterization, dialogue, direction (by Patrice Leconte) and cinematography, Man on the Train is nonetheless, sadly, a failure. James Bowman has rightly commented on the film’s “willingness to romanticize criminals,” i.e. Milan. Watch the film from beginning to end and you’ll see what Bowman means. That’s bad enough, but another thought provoked is that of whether an aging intellectual would ever really envy an outlaw’s life. Yet whether he would or wouldn’t, the matter ought to be examined with a more acceptable climax and denouement than Klotz has purveyed in this movie. That denouement is all that keeps Train from out-and-out nihilism, and it’s lousy. Over and above, the film is thin and rather talky, not unlike Ingmar Bergman at his worse.
Leconte’s direction is tasteful and painstaking. Klotz’s screenplay leaves much to be desired, but at any rate his dialogue is terrific. No admirer of the music of Schumann, Manesquier nevertheless says he likes Schumann because he “appeals to my love of failure.” In another sequence Milan, substituting for Manesquier in the tutelage of a boy, praises a fictional character, Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, because she waits and waits for her fiance’s return. Says the bank robber, “I think she’s magnificent. People nowadays don’t have that kind of patience.”
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Aug 7, 2015 | General
For the first hour and 15 minutes, Forbidden Planet (1956) holds up well as science fiction, then falls apart with its Id-as-monster plot device. Oh well. It is still a curious entertainment proffering a familiar-looking robot and those electronic tonalities on the soundtrack. Sets are still often impressive when they are not, like the idyllic backyard woods, strikingly quaint. Plus FP has Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis. Oddly, it respects religion and it respects leggy females (that is, Miss Francis). More ambitious than Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is nonetheless a lesser film, although . . . I wish I had seen it when in opened in Cinemascope.
Screenshot of Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis from the trailer for the film Forbidden Planet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 5, 2015 | General
Again there is an absurd plot, but at least it’s fairly interesting. However, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) succeeds on the strength of its utterly captivating adventure set pieces. A terrorist mastermind’s silly overkill in an opera-house assassination scheme creates some mesmerizing human doings. A motorcycle chase is long-and-winding exhilaration.
Participating here, and elsewhere, is of course Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, but also newcomer Rebecca Ferguson, a Swedish actress using an imperfect British accent, who is practically the star of the movie. (But not quite, Tom.) A real action heroine she is, and she somehow looks like a secret agent. She has a noirish look. The acting in Rogue Nation, such as that of Simon Pegg,is winningly successful.
Christopher McQuarrie’s film knows how to cast a spell.
Have fun.
