by Dean | Apr 18, 2017 | General
I finished watching on DVD the fourth season of The Americans.
Like so many other Communists, from Lenin to Mao, from Beria to Che Guevara, Elizabeth and Philip are murderers. Out of self-protection, they kill people. It’s pretty gripping when the distraught black woman insists that she and Elizabeth confess (not to spying but to another crime) to the police, and this prompts Liz to kill her.
Pastor Tim (Kelly AuCoin) gets spared, though, albeit his wife Alice (Suzy Jane Hunt) hotly and frantically accuses Elizabeth and Philip of having had the dude rubbed out in Ethiopia. Mom and Dad really appreciate your telling Pastor Tim that they’re Russian spies, Paige.
Oh, well. Be that as it may, 15-year-old Paige (Holly Taylor) is a pleasant girl. Indeed, we all thought she was a Christian, but . . . is she?
Also: sorry to see good-looking Annet Mahendru (Nina) go.
by Dean | Apr 16, 2017 | General
A woman, Leslie Strobel, converts to Christianity in the new Pure Flix film The Case for Christ (2017) and, wisely, it is depicted with subtlety. Her husband Lee also converts (at the end of the film), but by then subtlety is gone. The unbelievers in the audience squirm. The Case for Christ is ALMOST squirm-proof, however, as it proffers some interesting material about a busy atheist and his uncommon marriage.
Lee and Leslie are real-life persons, Lee being a former Chicago journalist. Selfish and loutish, he cannot accept Leslie as a Christian and he tries to discredit the faith through interviewing skeptics and Bible experts about the Resurrection. The info in the interviews supporting the Resurrection we have long been familiar with, but Lee Strobel in the late 1970s was not familiar with it. To be sure, it isn’t quite as intellectually strong as screenwriter Brian Bird and director Jon Gunn think it is, but it is strong. All the same, Kevin McLenithan is right that “Brian Bird’s great contribution [to the film] is to make Strobel’s marriage, rather than his investigation, the centerpiece of the story.” It is this that is interesting. Leslie tells a frustrated Lee that now that she has found Jesus Christ, she loves her husband even more than she did previously, and it rings true. The very thing, this, that no atheist or agnostic can possibly, truly understand.
As Lee and Leslie, Mike Vogel and Erika Christensen are splendidly persuasive, and effective also are Alfie Davis and Robert Forster. The movie has a knowing, talented cinematographer in Brian Shanley.
Onward, Pure Flix, and next time, more subtlety!
by Dean | Apr 10, 2017 | General
Cover of The Collector
I stopped reading John Fowles’s absorbing novel, The Collector, once it seemed to be getting philosophically dark; my own philosophy of life is not dark.
The book’s plot concerns an English art student, female, who is held prisoner by an unstable English bank clerk who claims to love her. Released in 1965 was a William Wyler film version—an intelligent quasi-Hitchcock version starring Terence Stamp as the bank clerk (and collector of dead butterflies) and Samantha Eggar as the student.
As usual, Wyler knew how to direct the film—notwithstanding there is too much of Maurice Jarre‘s music on the soundtrack—and the Stanley Mann-John Kohn screenplay, though dark, is without philosophical despair. It never reaches a philosophical plateau; but, yes, it is dark. As John Simon informed us, evil here prospers in the end. Certain people in society have an appetite for violation. Those on whom the appetite is turned may not survive.
Stamp and Eggar are just about the only actors in The Collector, and what a job they do! Eggar, incidentally, later commented that Stamp had a “nasty attitude” toward her. If this is true, I’m sorry Stamp didn’t believe in gallantry. Up to a point, the disturbed guy he’s playing does.
by Dean | Apr 9, 2017 | General
There is stale armed rebellion stuff (the rebellion is justified) in the recent Star Wars pic, Rogue One (2016), but the film is typically pleasantly energetic and photographically flawless, with smart lighting, etc.
To my mind, its jabba-the-hutt creepies do not make Rogue One rich enough. Felicity Jones, however, provides femininity and okay acting as Jyn Erso, a survivor-warrior; and there’s an enjoyable robot, or droid.
Directed by Gareth Edwards.
by Dean | Apr 5, 2017 | General
Cover of Counsellor-at-Law
I don’t quite understand what the film Counsellor at Law (1933), derived from a play by Elmer Rice, is about, but it certainly holds the viewer. This is thanks mostly to director William Wyler and his actors.
John Barrymore carries the film beautifully, with force and despair, and the women here are nigh enthralling. A successful New York lawyer (Barrymore) becomes imperiled in more ways than one as Wyler’s camera captures the unceasing contacts and interaction in this particular law firm. Regarding his direction, Wyler said, “No critic ever wrote that [the movie] was just a photographed stage play.” No, indeed. The play has been thoroughly cinematized. Indeed, Wyler’s directing is so astute and sensitive we can forgive the film’s irritatingly pat conclusion.
