by Dean | Mar 8, 2017 | General
Cover via Amazon
Presenting debauchery and distress apropos of booze and sex, Leaving Las Vegas (1995) is Mike Figgis‘s candid but pretentious story of short-term love between a drunk (Nicolas Cage) and a hooker (Elizabeth Shue). Cage no longer has a wife or a job and wants to drink himself to death in the Las Vegas to which he travels. Shue gets knocked about by her pimp who eventually tells her to get lost before he is blown away by mobsters. Oddly, Shue remarks to Cage that she is happy; I fail to see how she could be. But if she is, it doesn’t last: By the picture’s end, she becomes as much of a veritable loser as Cage.
Another detail I don’t understand is why someone as beautiful as Shue has to settle for being a prostitute. How did she get into this profession? Couldn’t she have become a model or a dancer or an actress? Or was she too lazy?
LLV‘s pretentiousness lies in its artiness. The use of slow motion is matched in frequency only by the use of cinematic snippets fading to black. The soundtrack is egregiously fancy, although the often mellow musical score, written by Figgis himself, is pleasant. As for the acting, Cage is not exactly uninteresting, but neither does he have sufficient personality for an important leading role like this. Hence he has to resort to being somewhat mannered. Shue, on the other hand, is as haughty, sensitive, friendly-flirty, and pathetic as Sera the hooker was meant to be. She is not that well developed a character, but this is screenwriter Figgis’s fault; what Figgis required Shue provided. It’s just about the only asset in this critically acclaimed failure of a film.
by Dean | Mar 5, 2017 | General
In the film Nebraska (2013), it is driven home to David Grant (Will Forte) that two people he is expected to love—and must love—have always had feet of clay: his elderly parents. No, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his scrappy wife (June Squibb) are not like such nice elderly people in the film as Peg Bender and the Westendorfs. David decides to spend time with Woody by taking a road trip with him which lacks an actual goal (the goal is imaginary; Woody thinks he has won a million dollars from an outfit in Lincoln, Nebraska). What a confused old man anticipates will not be coming to pass, but it is a positive occurrence when David is charitable to his father by buying him a truck and permitting him to retain his dignity in the town where Woody grew up.
I found the movie, directed by Alexander Payne, technically impeccable. There is nothing wrong with how it was shot, full of nifty medium shots and cutting, and this even includes the screen “wipes” for scene transitions. Though photographed in monochrome, Nebraska sometimes has a Five Easy Pieces flavor, and a fairly well written screenplay by Bob Nelson. Not the best from Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) but still a success.
by Dean | Mar 1, 2017 | General
Cover of The Letter
It’s rather too bad that countless American movies of the Thirties and Forties (and up) had to have literary sources, but how agreeable it is that director William Wyler knew how to handle an author’s theatrical drama, as witness his film version of The Letter (1940). A play by Somerset Maugham becomes a solid piece of cinema, especially with Howard Koch supplying a satisfying script.
Bette Davis responds well to Wyler’s perfectionism in her part as a married woman who shoots to death the lover she loves. A legal drama follows, and Davis’s defense attorney must purchase a letter that will incriminate Davis. The wrinkle is that money from Davis’s unsuspecting husband is used for this!
It’s an involving film serving up the theme of wickedness and the response of retaliation, not to mention that of when death beckons the guilty soul. Inevitably, we’re just as grateful for the literary source as for what Wyler and his fine actors have done.
by Dean | Feb 26, 2017 | General
Cover of Red (Three Colors Trilogy)
Cover of White (Three Colors Trilogy)
Cover of Blue (Three Colors Trilogy)
The late Krzysztof Kieslowski of Poland directed and co-wrote in the early Nineties a film trilogy named after the three colors of the French flag—blue, white and red—which was intended to express something about the virtue-ideals represented by those colors.
Blue, dealing with liberty, was so atrocious I can’t believe any critic could like it, but of course there were critics who did; and if they liked that, they would most certainly like White, concerned with equality, which was better. The only thing I liked about White was some of its humor; all else was ridiculous. That a loser of a husband wants to show his thoughtless ex-wife that he can achieve equality of a kind with other men was a good premise, but how fatuously and awkwardly it was presented.
Slightly more pleasing, but still not acceptable, was Red, about the nicest virtue-ideal of them all: fraternity. Regarding this one, I can at least say there is more than just one quality about it I like, but it is hardly cheering to see customary absurdity in plotting. Red is even more effectively filmed than, and just as nonsensical as, White.
In what lies the fraternity? Here is what I enjoy most about Red: it lies in a friendship between a 20-odd-year-old female model and a 60-odd-year-old retired male judge, which friendship is just that—a friendship—there is nothing sexual about it. They simply take an interest in one another, and rightly so from a cosmic perspective. The model, you see, is destined to hook up with a man who thoroughly resembles the judge when he was young, but this is the film’s biggest groaner. Last I checked, life doesn’t work like that.
With his dignified face and quiet manner, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the judge, and with her friendly face and mature-young-lady manner, Irene Jacob plays the model; both are palatable. So is Kieslowski’s supple direction. His scripts did a disservice to his moviemaking.
by Dean | Feb 23, 2017 | General
Sky High (2005 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Re Sky High (2005):
The teen son of a world-saving husband and wife not unlike the animated couple in The Incredibles begins attending a secondary school for kids with superhuman powers. There, the enrollees are assigned the place of either hero or sidekick depending on the utilitarian value of their power; hence an unfortunate caste system exists.
The couple’s son, Will, discovers that his power is the same as his dad’s—extraordinary physical strength—certifiably not a sidekick gift. It is a hero’s, even though modest Will has made friends with sidekicks. In fact, his best friend, hippy girl Layla, is a sidekick by choice. Layla has a mighty crush on Will, who, however, has the hots only for toothsome Gwen, another hero. He obtains a foe in a truculent firestarter hero named Warren because Will’s father put Warren’s father, a scoundrel, behind bars. Fire Boy eventually wises up, however, and other anti-Will enemies take his place.
Sky High is neither great nor perfect pop cinema. It’s merely terrific. The story’s not quite a groaner, and it coheres. There is something fey about the movie, and it’s wildly goofy. Warren’s full name is Warren Peace! All a shape-shaping girl can change herself into is a guinea pig! And on and on. The teenagers often remind me of teenagers one meets at church; I like them. Michael Angarano plays Will with comic appeal, and he and his young co-performers outact Kelly Preston (as Will’s mom). Kurt Russell cartoonishly convinces as Will’s dad. Both the pretty Danielle Panabaker (Layla) and the very pretty Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Gwen) fill the bill, with the very pretty girl getting the harder role. The good director is Mike Mitchell.
