by Dean | Apr 17, 2011 | General
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I’m not quite sure why French author Michel Houellebecq put a lot of sex in his novel, The Elementary Particles (2000) except that the book does impart the familiar message that no salvation lies in either sex or science. Houellebecq’s two main characters are Michel, a scientist, and Bruno, a hedonist. The author has no faith in liberalism or humanism either. As for religion . . . well, he’s not without a certain respect for it (he gives Michel the insight that “materialism, having destroyed the religious faiths of previous centuries, had itself been destroyed by recent advances in physics”), but neither can he embrace thoroughgoing belief.
Mr. H.’s plotless novel is highly intelligent and occasionally funny but, all things considered, not one I can finally accept. I’m rooting for him, though.
by Dean | Apr 10, 2011 | General
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![Cover of "Bruce Almighty [Blu-ray]"](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2B3NQFLYqL._SL300_.jpg)
In 2003’s Bruce Almighty, God, played by Morgan Freeman, explains to Jim Carrey that if only people realized that not only God but they too possess power, they wouldn’t need to pray as much as they do and everything would be . . . whatever. Never mind Bruce‘s theology: it’s a big zero. As is the hilarious but atrocious writing from Steven Koren, Mark O’Keefe and Steve Oedekerk.
A Buffalo, New York TV reporter, Bruce (Carrey) yammers about God and all the misfortune he faces until the Almighty, fed up, decides to endue Bruce with His own miracle might and see what kind of job he does as Supreme Ruler. What he does for self-gratification is a howl, but it isn’t long before illogic and desultoriness stain the story. So does sentimentality: Bruce is the most syrupy comedy since Patch Adams (1998), both of which films were directed by the same man, Tom Shadyac.
Bruce Almighty raked in the almighty dollar when it was released, despite being a foolish wreck.
by Dean | Mar 27, 2011 | General
Cover of I Served the King of England
Czech filmmaker Jiri Menzel adapted, in 2008, yet another novel by Bohumil Hrabal–this time, I Served the King of England (with English subtitles). Though I haven’t read the book, I find it impossible to doubt that it’s a very good film version, one for which a talented man is responsible. Dark satire is here but no contempt for the characters, and a fun-loving style springs up, even to the point of exhibiting a peculiar, silent-movie mode for an early sequence.
Menzel’s hero, Jan Diti, initially sells hot dogs in Prague but aspires to become a millionaire; and moreover, working as a waiter for years, he does everything right. Nothing is too challenging for him; he even brings ecstasy to the prostitute he beds. But things go wrong, patently, after Jan meets Liza, a Hitler-loving German girl, with the hideous merger of Nazi-blessed religion and clinical science taking place. And things go wrong after Jan finally makes his millions and Communists enter the picture.
Ah, well. As a misanthropic, 60-year-old Czech professor tells Jan, “Man is the progeny of Evil [by “Evil” he does not mean God]–criminal and stupid.” Indeed, the situation is “worse than that,” he says, because–and this is interesting–“all philosophers and prophets exclude Jesus Christ.” Assuredly the film is about the (often efficient) enemies of civilization.
Plenty of artistic prowess is here. In one scene, rich old men, while dining, gaze at a half-naked girl lying on a revolving platform. Afterwards she quietly strips for head waiter Jan so the two plebs can have their own funtime. Another bit of footage offers a shot of Jan and Liza sleeping in bed after lovemaking–the Czech fellow fully surrenders to the German woman–before the soundtrack produces a solemn radio announcement about Czechoslovakia’s late-Thirties surrender to Hitler. And then there’s Menzel’s success at getting expert comic performances from his actors. Ivan Barnev is buoyant and unself-conscious as a young Jan, Oldrich Kaiser is convincingly subdued as an aging Jan. Julia Jentsch, as Liza, is a perfect political fanatic, listening without conscience to prophets who exclude Jesus Christ.
It will probably be a long time before I see another tragicomedy as palatable as the absorbing I Served the King of England.
by Dean | Mar 21, 2011 | General
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Released recently (March 2011), Battle: Los Angeles is a fairly decent war movie, or war actioner (whatever it is), wherein a platoon of brave Marines take on murderous extraterrestrial beings that are unexpectedly invading various countries. Aaron Eckhart never makes a false move in his role as a military man, viz. Sgt. Nantz, and the movie’s special effects are, I think, just what they should be. Battle has been criticized for its shaky-cam, but shaky-cam or not the action footage seldom disappoints. One potent scene, for example, has Nantz rush out to put several children on an ascending helicopter, only to witness the helicopter get horrifically blasted by the space aliens before it can re-land for the children.
One might object that the characters are made of cardboard, but there is no real place for individual human complexity in battlefield sequences.
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, Battle: Los Angeles is not a great entertainment, but there is fun to be had. It is hardly free of banality, but it means business. Too, it sincerely honors the Marine Corps.
by Dean | Mar 14, 2011 | General
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I don’t find Noel Coward’s comic play, Hay Fever–performed in Tulsa in 2011–very funny, but I do enjoy and respect it. It’s rollicky, inventive and properly, indeed brilliantly, structured. It would be nice if there were at least one really honorable character in it, but the barbed satire can be appreciated. Among these well-to-do English people of the 1920s, there is false emotion, narcissism, and caddishness.
Good show. Kudos to costume designer Claremarie Verheyen.
