by Dean | Dec 22, 2017 | General
Cover of Romeo & Juliet
The famous 1968 Romeo and Juliet, by Franco Zeffirelli, tries too hard in its cinematic realization. Much is overdone, such as the loathsome performance of John McEnery as Mercutio; and, withal, too much of the text is cut. The killing of Paris, for example.
I agree with Philip T. Hartung about “the terrific fight between Romeo and Tybalt,” and—except for Juliet’s distracting cleavage in the balcony scene— the film’s sensuality works quite well. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey play the classic lovers and they’re not bad, but they’re defeated by something: the film lacks tragic anguish, true tragic darkness. We don’t feel the wound. The movie is too noisy, too busy, and too commercial for tragedy to force its way through. I said it tries too hard, but with tragic anguish it doesn’t try hard enough.
by Dean | Dec 19, 2017 | General
There is excellent work from actors Laurie Metcalf, Lois Smith (as a nun) and Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig‘s movie, Lady Bird (2017), and pretty appealing work from Gerwig as well. Ronan enacts “Lady Bird,” or Christine, McPherson, an adolescent girl who attends a Catholic high school and who frequently fights with her intolerant if concerned mother (Metcalf).
Director Gerwig wrote the intelligent screenplay, never lapsing, unlike other small-film scenarists, into smug pseudo-intellectualism. Up to a point, even so, her writing is schematic: Lady Bird drifts away from her best buddy and befriends a cool beauty, who disappoints her. Chastened, she then returns to her best buddy with customary sentimentality resulting. A letdown, this. Also, the film could use more psychological believability, as when the defensive Lady Bird literally pleads with her mother to be reasonable about her going to an Eastern college.
But many jewels are glittering in Lady Bird. It presents interesting characters and dialogue, and it boasts a lovely ending involving a church and a phone call. It is, I think, a film that believes in God, along with being respectful of its few devoutly Catholic figures.
by Dean | Dec 18, 2017 | General
Boys’ Night Out (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A top-notch comedy, Boys’ Night Out (1962) proffers three corrupt married men who want an out-of-town pad where they can be serviced by a willing girl. Under protest, a bachelor friend played by James Garner finds for the men both the pad and the girl (Kim Novak), who is not what she seems. Instead of a floozy, Novak is a sociology student intending to study the suburban gents. Falling for her and pitching his woo, Garner is confused, for he doesn’t understand the masquerading girl’s personality. Naturally, after the wives of the corrupt men learn of their husbands’ adultery, there is zany pandemonium.
The film was deftly directed by Michael Gordon, who fashioned Pillow Talk. Scripted by Ira Wallach (adapting it from a story), it’s mildly charming and moderately funny, which means it’s funnier than most of the old black-and-white screwball comedies, good as they are. The restrained farcical acting of the cast is proper, although none of it is too restrained. Kim Novak is more feminine than Doris Day but has less personality, and yet she is credible. Tony Randall and Fred Clark make a splash.
Boys’ Night Out tells us that the sex drive, though men obey it, is not all that strong, really. It says this while being decent enough to maintain a respectable attitude toward Novak’s lovely non-sexpot and, more or less, the other women in the film as well.
A sapid romp. –
by Dean | Dec 14, 2017 | General
Film poster for The Brown Bunny – Copyright 2004, Wellspring Media (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In The Brown Bunny (2005), a film he wrote, directed, edited, etc., Vincent Gallo stars as a motorcycle racer whose amatory attachment is to Chloe Sevigny‘s Daisy. The pair being separated, the racer tracks Daisy down in Los Angeles after purposefully abandoning three female strangers with whom he might have gotten intimate. The two lovers are messed-up people, one more messed-up than the other. This is Daisy, a doper and possible tramp. . . The film is evocatively directed—it evokes human isolation—and there are certainly people who do not find it monotonous. But I do. And that’s not all.
Gallo considers himself a conservative and, for sure, no sexual liberalism exists in this movie. And yet it was made, finally, in a pornographic spirit. A scene of fellatio goes on forever. It’s distasteful. Is Gallo trying to say that love and tramp-y, non-marital sex do not go together? I rather doubt it, but there is no way to know.
by Dean | Dec 12, 2017 | General
1968: a public high school in Philadelphia.
This is what Frederick Wiseman, America’s most famous documentary maker, trained his camera on 50 years ago, in High School. A dandy film, it reveals perfectly the unkillable regimentation in modern schools, although the classrooms in this particular, predominately white school do not drive us to the kind of despair that dysfunctional schools in 2017 do. Still, there are problems, regimentation or no. Bad behavior runs its course, albeit we don’t see any violence or cussing out of teachers. There is some fluff in the instruction: one teacher guides her students to appreciate the “poetry” of Paul Simon. She reads aloud the lyrics to “The Dangling Conversation,” then plays a tape of the song. And clinical lectures about sex just might have run counter to the moral values of many of the kids’ 1968 parents.
On the other hand, a Spanish-language teacher inculcates what seems to be the Spanish for “existentialist philosopher.” Nope: this is not a 2017 public school.
