How many a cappella pop songs exist in the world I don’t know, but “Easter Song” by Glad is likely to be one of the best. The lead singer is enthrallingly good, both sober and cheerful, while collective vocals fill the bill superbly. (This on the studio recording.) A certain restraint is here but so is utter passion, summoned, of course, by the Resurrection. Too, you’d better believe the song has hooks.
Edifying.
Peter Yates’s police drama Bullitt (1968) is poorly written in several ways but is engrossing nonetheless. It has to do with killers and witness protection, and it contains enjoyable action, but it’s a mostly quiet film. Proceedings are quiet, as they frequently are in life. Only now and then do people get noisy. Correlatively, the hero—Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt—is a loner.
Also, it’s a profoundly American film. The manly loner lives in a place of obvious, nonstop manufacturing, of urban construction and extensive roads. He has an English girlfriend, however, played by Jacqueline Bisset, whose celebrated beauty is another reason Bullitt is worth seeing.
It beats me why Frank Bullitt isn’t a better protector of his witness, but this movie is fun and interesting in spite of itself.
Bullitt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Woody Allen’s musical comedy, Everyone Says I Love You (1996), is a catastrophe. Frequently it is not very funny because comedy and undistinguished dialogue don’t exactly go together unless the comedy is physical. The movie features songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, among others; and they are butchered by the bad voices of Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore and Allen himself. The only tolerable number is the first one, “Just You, Just Me,” because Edward Norton’s singing is more or less acceptable and the routine does not require much liveliness. Any time a routine does require liveliness, you can forget about Allen providing it. I can’t judge the choreography of Graciela Daniele, but it seems quite pleasant within this framework.
The film’s title derives from a Marx Brothers flick, and I wish Allen was as good a writer as those the Marx Brothers had. The musical’s “book” can be obnoxiously stupid, as witness the tomfoolery involving Barrymore and Tim Roth. Is it possible that when writing it Allen said to himself, “Oh well. The books for those old musicals weren’t very good either”? Damned if I know.
Cover of Woody Allen
However many improbabilities arise in Jack Reacher (2012), it’s a vigorous, reasonably intelligent, engaging crime thriller starring Tom Cruise. It works because I assume its source material, a Lee Child novel titled One Shot, is well-crafted. (Am I wrong?) Jack Reacher (Cruise) is a drifting ex-military cop who wishes to mete out justice to a sniper he knows, only to find out he needs to pursue a different offender, the true sniper. Cruise and Rosamund Pike, playing a defense attorney, make a good team; both have energy and project smarts. Christopher McQuarrie has directed and scripted the film with savvy, and nowhere is either the violence or the profanity excessive.
Jack Reacher is almost as good a crime drama as The LineUp and Bullitt. Check it out.
Cover of Red Eye
Both truthful and nonsensical, the Wes Craven thriller Red Eye (2005) is solid entertainment. Rachel McAdams is more than suitable as Lisa, a hotel manager needed by Jackson Rippner, acted by a nuanced Cillian Murphy, for a cruel assignment: assistance in murdering the deputy secretary of Homeland Security. If Lisa refuses the enlistment, Rippner will see to it that her father (Brian Cox) is killed. Not much personal vision comes through, but this is a fundamentally conservative movie, one which any liberal can enjoy. This despite the opinion in The Village Voice that, owing to the depiction of rude airline customers, “Red Eye could even be called anti-American.” Well, that’s one view.
Lisa becomes heroic but is not a superwoman, not a feminist heroine. She needs help from her dad. The deputy secretary is hardly a dunce or a bully. An assassination attempt by terrorists is quite silly, but at any rate it shows how murderous the fanatics are. I repeat: truthful. Fundamentally conservative, but actually more entertaining than conservative.
