by Dean | Apr 22, 2015 | General
I’ve been staying away from novels that are primarily about human relationships. I see all the relationships, mostly male-female, I need to see on the CW’s Jane the Virgin.
Episode 19 (a.k.a. Chapter 19) on Monday night, April 20th, brought us breakups: between Jane and Rafael, et al., and was an especially interesting episode. And a rich one. Now that Jane is sad and free, her ex-fiance Michael is again drawn to her—and, I might add, drawn away from his fellow police officer Nadine, who deliberately blows it in the pair’s current case. She has fears, you see: some of these people encounter some really deplorable violence. Ask Petra (still winning our sympathy). Ask Grandma Alba. (Will Magda receive her comeuppance?)
Fyi, in Episode 19 Jane skinny dips—pregnant belly not visible—and wants to lose her virginity. But doesn’t. Why would she? The show is called Jane the VIRGIN.
Enjoy.
by Dean | Apr 20, 2015 | General
The plot of the 1983 Robert Bresson film, L’Argent (“Money”) is sometimes weak, and the same old Bressonian defects emerge as well, yet none of this renders the picture unwatchable or unmemorable. Unlike, say, Mouchette, it is one of the Frenchman’s better efforts.
The plot, to use Vincent Canby’s description, is about “Yvon, a young truck driver framed by some bourgeois shopkeepers who identify him as the source of counterfeit notes.” But Yvon is not the source; he is no counterfeiter, and he loses everything. Thematically the film is about: when an ordinary person, after being abused, descends into horribly sinful crime; the deep corruption in society; and virtue and saintliness, however rare and offhanded. Over and above, regardless of the evil that men have historically done with God, L’Argent implies it is certifiable in the modern world that men follow evil paths without God.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of L’ Argent
by Dean | Apr 19, 2015 | General
He looks too old for the part, but John Cassavetes is vividly first-rate as an 18-year-old gang leader in Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (1956).
Here, a trio of punks plan to murder a working-class gent who caused a fellow street tough to be arrested. Frankie (Cassavetes), the only punk who is never reluctant about the plan, is utterly hardhearted and seemingly unreachable. Siegel’s direction is characteristically good, though screenwriter Reginald Rose creates a liberal-psychotherapeutic vision which is never distracting but a little less than realistic. Dirty Harry, another Siegel picture, this ain’t. Harry, however, is asinine. Crime in the Streets is a decent work, grounded and working on the emotions. . . Siegel’s late 40s and 50s films are often naturalistically finer and more appealing than his later, post-censorship items.
by Dean | Apr 13, 2015 | General
1. Okay, so we see the ultimate that a movie can do with cars—in Furious 7 (2015), the seventh The Fast and the Furious pic—when five sleek autos drive out of a plane and drop by parachute to the mountain road below. Subsequently, of course, the drivers zoom them away. Talk about durability.
Don’t think the parachute drop is the stupidest thing in the movie. It’s just the most visually fun, in a concoction with a lot of amusement-park visuals.
2. Furious 7 brought me back to my natural appreciation for dark-skinned young women in the form of Ramsey, the computer hacker played by black-and-British Nathalie Emmanuel. Nice to see you nudged out of the way, Michelle Rodriguez (Letty). Emmanuel is before us, good looks, sensitive face and all. And, yes, after all the life-threatening peril, her character is pleased to slip into a bikini for a while. What’s more, she’s too good for that boring imbecile enacted by Tyrese Gibson.
3. Cold reality, man: Paul Walker (Brian) died in a horrifying car wreck. The movie is dedicated to him. Paul, you will be missed.
by Dean | Apr 12, 2015 | General
Sullivan’s Travels (1941) produces an appreciable number of laughs, especially in its big slapstick sequence, before being deprived of its comedic tone. It’s a Preston Sturges picture, less successful than The Palm Beach Story and The Great McGinty but still engaging and unique, still the opus of a recherche artist.
Joel McCrea is not bad as a Hollywood director, but Veronica Lake, without nuance or charm, is not good as an aspiring actress. A shame.
Sturges’s film is a comedy (for the most part) that tells us there is something to be said for comedy. Also that there is much to be said for wealth, wherever it exists, over against poverty. Sure ’nuff.
Cover via Amazon
