by Dean | Mar 11, 2018 | General
True to Hollywood’s mixed genre tendency, Game Night (2018) is an arrant comedy-adventure starring Jason Bateman and Rachel MacAdams. Although the action of the adventure is stronger than the zippy comedy, some of the jokes are quite amusing. Others, though, are desperate or boringly vulgar (stuff about penis size) or not as witty or intelligent as the filmmakers think, as when Bateman wants his unborn child to eventually learn Mandarin because “China is the future.” This last one, in fact, isn’t even funny.
Game Night is solidly, sometimes scintillatingly (Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons) acted. I consider it a bit too playful and cheeky for its own good, but it is a fun piece of harmlessness. And how can the directorial work miss? The flick has two of them—directors, that is.
by Dean | Mar 7, 2018 | General
Though overlong, the French film Populaire (2013) is an entertaining homage to American movie comedies of the Fifties, taking place in 1959. Deborah Francois plays an appallingly incompetent secretary who nevertheless has an amazing knack for typing, while Romain Duris enacts her boss, an insurance man, intent on coaching her in ten-finger (instead of two-finger) typing for several lauded speed-typing contests. Eventually romance blooms, for, after all, the boss is a young man essentially deprived of love and the secretary is a small-town girl in Lisieux who has no beau and is probably a virgin.
Populaire is a seriocomic Doris & Rock-like movie with brief mild nudity thrown in. It understands that an item like Pillow Talk contains strong hints of sexual desire while it readily respects the mores of the time. The same respect exists in this current film directed by Regis Roinsard even as sexual desire is realistically more than hinted at. Really, the movie is in love with pop culture, nostalgically so. Even the pink typewriter necessarily becomes a pop culture element. The film is not as funny as the Fifties’ American comedies (even Hawks’s Monkey Business) but it is rich and buoyant. It has a fine cast too, although Duris does not even come close to declaring his love for the typist convincingly.
No bete noire is Populaire.
English: Screenshot from Linux software KTouch. An image of the Home Row keys for touch typing. Suomi: Kymmensormijärjestelmän sormien paikat. ???????: ??????????????? ?????? ????? ?????? ????????????? ????????? KTouch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 28, 2018 | General
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
After seeing Judd Apatow‘s The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) again, I was surprised to discover how frequently boring it actually is (e.g., the nightclub sequence). It tries to be engaging through highly sexual talk and very daring sight gags. With the latter it sometimes succeeds, as in the speed-dating footage. The successes that are there manage to be funny, but to me the movie in toto is not funny enough, and is overlong. Worse, it is insanely and relentlessly adolescent. Er. . . boredom, anyone?
by Dean | Feb 22, 2018 | General
The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, a 1969 novel by Gordon M. Williams, is about the cold and violent impulses of the plebes in rural England. It inspired the making of the Peckinpah film, Straw Dogs, a good picture but not very faithful to Williams’s novel. As in the film, even so, an American man married to an English wife is forced to violate his humanitarian conscience when some Brit bullies besiege his home. They demand that the “Yank” turn over to them a man even more morally repulsive—he murders little girls—than they are. But the man is puny and not in his right mind, and George, the Yank, refuses to yield to the chaps, whose scorn is decidedly for a child-killer and an American.
The novel is also about what being a man means apropos of having a wife—specifically, a very flawed one.
Close to being a mere potboiler, Siege is nevertheless splendidly exciting and sharply uncompromising. With its palatable plot, it itself would make a good movie.
by Dean | Feb 14, 2018 | General
Cover of Dark Passage (Keepcase)
A 1947 Delmer Daves picture, Dark Passage, has Humphrey Bogart (character name: Vincent Parry) as an alleged wife killer running from the law. “Alleged” is as far as it goes: a woman called Irene (Lauren Bacall) knows he is innocent, hides him and supplies him with money. Wanting a new face, Parry uses the money for makeover plastic surgery, but what happens later? For one thing, someone aims to blackmail Irene for concealing a fugitive.
What happens, therefore, is that even the plastic surgery fails to prevent life’s contingencies from arising. Parry’s identity is known regardless, by people who, unlike Parry, are up to no good. Enemies keep filing in. There is craziness in the plot here, but it’s also one to make you think a bit. And the hard-working cast enables you to admire the acting. In its late 40s way, furthermore, DP entertains not with sex but, unabashedly, with violence A rowdy ride.
