by Dean | Jan 14, 2015 | General
The objection has been made that in 2008’s Fireproof, rediscovering harmony in marriage requires salvific grace from Jesus Christ instead of just efforts to mend the marriage. But the moviemakers were not going to leave firefighter Caleb (Kirk Cameron), a non-Christian, thinking he was a genuinely good man when, to use the Bible phrase, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Caleb needs to change his thinking, and does, while God does him the favor of using the love dare strategy to salvage the man’s marriage.
Fireproof is more interesting than good, but interesting it certainly is. As surely as it engages us to see the unhappy decline of George Hurstwood in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, it engages us to see the spiritual ascent of Caleb (it works both ways)—after watching the unhappy decline of his marriage. The death of this marriage is hardly inevitable, though. Obviously the Kendricks’s film can be considered a conservative, though not political, one. It should never be considered a disreputable one.
Cover of Fireproof
by Dean | Jan 12, 2015 | General
If you want it, you got it. A surfeit of sex jokes, that is. Maybe adolescents want it, for this Ivan Reitman turkey, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), IS an adolescent film. (It also moves at a rather leaden pace.) In fact, the two principal females, played by Uma Thurman and Anna Faris, are easy lays. That’s right, both of them. We have something scurrilously demented here.
Cover of My Super Ex-Girlfriend
by Dean | Jan 9, 2015 | General
This is the one that borrows the plot of An American Tragedy, the Theodore Dreiser novel.
George Eastman (Montgomery Clift, more interesting here than in I Confess), a poor man with rich relations, courts a blue-collar girl named Alice (Shelley Winters) and is desirous enough, early on, to kiss her relentlessly. Before long, he gets her pregnant, but unexpectedly George meets and begins to love the beautiful socialite, Angela Vickers, acted by Elizabeth Taylor. Since the love is reciprocated, George grows desperate to break away from Alice but cannot bring himself to fulfill his intention of murdering her. As it happens, however, he is charged with the said offense and a trial gets underway.
Happily, A Place in the Sun (1951) is a powerful Hollywood film, though much of that power resides in the dark nature of the work. It is as convincing about George’s increasing affliction as, say, the Chilean Gloria is about Gloria’s affliction. Thus it is practically an uncommercial work, but not quite. Directed by George Stevens, Place features many memorable touches, from George’s departure from Alice’s modest house as soon as night segues into dawn to Angela fainting in her bedroom after hearing of George’s arrest. Then there’s the laid-back dude who, while standing in the woods, calmly but firmly informs George that he’s under arrest. Somehow it’s an inspired moment.
Stevens is an Old Hollywood master, and such films as A Place in the Sun and Shane are proof of it.
Cover of A Place in the Sun
by Dean | Jan 6, 2015 | General
Montgomery Clift is painfully dull as a priest accused of murder in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953). It is believed he did it to protect the gaga Anne Baxter from a blackmailer, but we know who the real killer is—a ludicrous nerd. . . Come to think of it, there’s something rather nerdy about Dimitri Tiomkin’s inappropriate music for the film.
Despite some exemplary directing by Hitchcock, I Confess is a lame entertainment. Kudos, even so, to Baxter, Karl Malden and a couple of others for their acting.
Cover of I Confess
by Dean | Jan 5, 2015 | General
I haven’t seen any 2014 films released in the last several weeks of the year, so my best-of list might have to be added to.
Gloria, Gone Girl, Ida, Capt. America: The Winter Soldier, Blue Ruin, and God Help the Girl are the best of those I viewed.
Honorable mention goes to John Wick, Gimme Shelter, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Labor Day, Hercules, and—a guilty pleasure because I live in Tulsa—Home, James. I gave some praise to Birdman and Heaven Is For Real, but don’t believe either one of them deserves honorable mention.
