by Dean | Nov 22, 2018 | General
Six Western stories make up the new Netflix film by Joel and Ethan Coen—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)—and in toto it is terrific. My favorite is probably the touching, beautifully acted “The Gal Who Got Rattled” starring Zoe Kazan as a nice young woman in a heap of trouble. It is rather less odd than some of the other stories but no less entertaining than the farcical title story or the one (“Near Algodones”) wherein James Franco enacts a crook consistently on the precipice of capital punishment.
The Coens’ tales are penny dreadfuls in which they often double down on Western mythology (Tim Blake Nelson‘s gunslinger, the shooting of Tom Waits‘s prospector). Mythology, yes, but violence is still violence. It abounds here: the violence that brings about death. When the film isn’t funny, it is deeply unsettling, and has a No Country for Old Men harshness. I nervously enjoyed it.
by Dean | Nov 17, 2018 | General
I have never seen the David Mamet play, Oleanna, on stage, but surely the next best thing is watching Mamet’s 1994 film of it. William H. Macy is true and affecting as a college professor accused of sexual harassment, and Debra Eisenstadt is mesmerizing as the girl who has accused him. Mamet’s directing is satisfyingly competent.
Carol, the girl, understands nothing but believes she understands everything—except the lessons presented in John’s—Macy’s—class. She is academically sinking there, almost frantic about it. But she starts to think she can read her professor, and to discern oppression. John’s easy cynicism about higher education only makes matters worse. Carol resents that John possesses power of a sort, and goes so far as to deem him a rapist (!)
Mamet’s achievement is disturbing as it concentrates on the utter failure of human communion and on Carol’s use of radical sentiment, or political correctness, to defeat John. (But is she really a radical?) Near pleadingly at one point she tells him, “I’m bad!” The utopia that Oleanna‘s title refers to is not exactly beckoning in the university. This is a sadly dark opus.
by Dean | Nov 15, 2018 | General
Cover of December Boys
Greatness in English-language cinema is so blasted rare these days and, sure enough, we don’t find it in the Australian December Boys (2006), a Rod Hardy picture about four boys from a Catholic orphanage and their seaside vacation. The flick is based on a novel by one Michael Noonan. Why did Hardy think it needed to be filmed? Or was he commissioned to film it? December Boys–the movie–is distinctly unimportant. I rather like that it’s eccentric, and it doesn’t even come close to being anti-Catholic, but as well it is sometimes silly and too incident-filled. The Australian director Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant, Black Robe) once cared about cinematic greatness, even if he didn’t always achieve it. The Aussies behind Hardy’s film, if Aussies all of them are, do not.
by Dean | Nov 11, 2018 | General
Since in the United States we will always have a welfare system, it might as well be one that is generous and efficient apropos of nursing homes. Medicaid makes it hard for lower middle-class families, unable to afford nursing home costs, to receive assistance, and continually pays the nursing homes insufficiently—when, that is, it doesn’t overpay them, and this too has been a problem.
Why not discontinue Medicaid’s health funding for the poor and simply help them through cash payments (a universal basic income)? Why not have Medicaid, if we even want it to exist, provide nursing home vouchers to citizens making less than . . . what? $80,000 a year? Sounds good to me. In fact, the vouchers could be not specifically for nursing home costs but for a life insurance policy since the money from such a policy can be used for long-term medical care.
We need to be wise with our money or medical welfarism, in itself, will shrink drastically. Yes, I desire smaller government, but even more do I desire less wayward and more compassionate government.
by Dean | Nov 9, 2018 | General
Four men should have come up with a more agreeable plot than that which exists in the Bob Hope comedy, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966), directed well enough by George Marshall. In silly ways a movie star, Didi, is used to move the plot along, but the screenwriters finally acquit themselves with Hope’s one-liners and much of the fun slapstick.
Hope plays a real estate agent who foolishly helps Didi, the sexy actress who runs away from the movie industry, all the while necessarily trying to conceal this from his wife. With Wrong Number, Hollywood produced a family film that tries for mid-60s sophistication through one person only: Elke Sommer (Didi). Though offering no surprises, she is quite good in her role, and her bare legs are good in theirs. But there is no smut; there is commercial appeal, rickety as the whole thing is. And there is funny Hope figuring that Phyllis Diller must tend to her looks with an egg beater.
