by Dean | Oct 5, 2018 | General
The border separations of children from their illegal-immigrant parents are infinitely sad. The makers of Law and Order: SVU are probably very proud of last night’s episode dealing with the matter, but they need not be.
Regarding certain individuals, such as a federal agent whom Liv (Mariska Hargitay) orders to be arrested, it was highly unlikely, and it emitted the usual sentimentality. Annoyingly, the show used Hargitay for liberal agitprop—fatal for fiction—and I am prompted to opine something about the scriptwriters: they are blithely unaware that the family separations problem is not a simple issue. This is owing to Trump’s responsibility to uphold federal law and to the weak policy of catch-the-illegal, release-the-illegal. These things were not mentioned in the SVU episode.
by Dean | Oct 4, 2018 | General
Image via Wikipedia
The search for spiritual discovery needs a more sophisticated treatment than it gets from Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007), very interesting though the film is for about an hour. The title refers to a “poshly anachronistic Indian train” (Ross Douthat) carrying three American brothers whose minds are far from sanguine. The first sixty minutes are nearly enough to make you gleeful, especially since they’re oddly divided into two disparate parts. But after that, Limited is muddled. It makes the not uncommon mistake of simultaneously glorifying temple-filled India and amounting to nothing philosophically.
The Sixties’ rock on the soundtrack doesn’t help.
Sixties’ rock?
by Dean | Sep 29, 2018 | General
The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise are crummy TV programs, as is The Bachelorette; they’re offensive and phony. However, they do offer something to the male ego when they confirm that women still want to be loved (with eros) by men. And they offer something to the female ego when they show how it pleases a man to win a woman’s heart and that even he can get weepy when he fails to do so.
Weepy: a problem exists in that we don’t know how phony these programs are in their creation of drama. Did Kamil in Bachelor in Paradise (2018) feel pressured to reject Annaliese so the show could end more dramatically, more stimulatingly, then it would have otherwise? I hope not, but who knows? Me, I’d rather see this televised junk produce happy couples than ones who weep via fraudulent drama.
by Dean | Sep 25, 2018 | General
For a long time the noir item, Scarlet Street (1945), is to me interestingly artificial and almost quaint as it focuses on an innocent played by Edward G. Robinson who falls in love with an alluring slugabed (Joan Bennett). Er, well, she’s not just an alluring slugabed: she’s doing the will of a reprehensible con artist (Dan Duryea). By and by the flick, directed by Fritz Lang, grows much less artificial (or stylized) and its almost-quaintness disappears.
SS is based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, itself based on a novel, and it is as sexy, nice-looking and perceptively cast as it is unoriginal. Robinson knew how to enact an innocent—one who is foolish and finally miserable. Duryea is never false with his two-faced character, not even when he abuses his glamorous girlfriend, Bennett. The powerfully feminine Joan, with fine range, is the best thing about the film.
by Dean | Sep 23, 2018 | General
Directed by Josh Schwartz, Fun Size (2012) is a sex comedy for teenagers. Not a good idea.
It’s “envelope-pushing” crud, and I put envelope-pushing in quotes because that’s merely what the moviemakers believe it to be. In truth it’s just a naughty nonentity. A teens-in-trouble romp, it’s incompetently written and not much better directed: I wasn’t always sure where the camera was taking me.
Yes, there are laughs in Fun Size, but a giant plastic chicken on top of a restaurant falling on a car and appearing to copulate with it is smutty silliness. Just as offputting is a toad of a young boy, Albert, with his immature scatology. The movie stars Victoria Justice, who is lovely but bland, and several others who are better.
Those primarily responsible for this thing may be accurately described as big boobs.
(The photo is of Victoria Justice.)
Victoria Justice Image (Photo credit: jake.auzzie)
