by Dean | Feb 22, 2017 | General
Cover of Medium Cool
In the 1969 picture, Medium Cool, Robert Forster skillfully purveys a TV photographer’s calm extroversion and no-nonsense defiance. He is true, and Peter Bonerz, as the sound man, is even truer. Verna Bloom (as Forster’s love interest) does everything possible to create a complex character, and shines with authenticity and poise.
There. I comment on the acting because, seemingly, far less has been opined about it than about everything else in this Haskell Wexler film. Highly topical in ’69, it is partly about social agitation and, especially, violence in what used to be present-day America. Its flaws have been well explained by critics like William Pechter, which flaws, I believe, sink Medium Cool. Though very imaginative, it’s a New Lefty political film which goes almost completely awry.
It is set in Chicago, indeed the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Talk about violence. Consider today’s violence in Chicago, New Lefties. Murder on top of murder.
by Dean | Feb 20, 2017 | General
Cover of Elf (Infinifilm Edition)
Plenty of belly laughs are to be had from Jon Favreau‘s Elf (2003), but this holiday picture is not very smoothly and sensibly scripted. Favreau proves he can direct comedy, and Will Ferrell is nothing less than marvelous as an oversized elf . . . er, I mean a human raised by elves and who believes himself to be an elf. The chap’s unceasing childlikeness, though, began to wear on me, and that’s only the beginning of problems. Today’s Hollywood is poor at concocting comic stories, not even as adept as the inadequate Neil Simon. Elf is still worth seeing, but inspires hope no more than it does Christmas cheer.
And another thing: it’s a sad day when a scriptwriter (in this case, David Berenbaum) does not know that the ungrammatical phrase, “less and less people believe in Santa Claus” ought to be rendered “fewer and fewer people believe in Santa Claus.”
by Dean | Feb 19, 2017 | General
Cover of Alice Adams
Alice Adams (1935), directed by George Stevens, is about unambitious husbands, vexed, money-emphasizing wives and optimistic girls with an instinct for social climbing. The tone isn’t properly fixed, but Katharine Hepburn is fetchingly youthful as the optimistic girl, Alice Adams. Stevens’s directing is fine, although since AA was released as a silent film in 1923, one is justified in asking should it have been remade had Hepburn’s celebrated performance not been an element here.
by Dean | Feb 14, 2017 | General
A French Catholic writer named Julian Green wrote a novel, set in America, about an evangelical young man who sees Catholics as idolaters. He is also too puritanical for his own intellectual and perhaps spiritual good (he believes his friend David, a sturdy Christian, is engaged to be married so he can fulfill the lusts of the flesh). But the young man, Joseph Day by name, has a problem with his own flesh.
The novel is Moira (1951), and the title character is the beguiling daughter of Joseph’s landlady. Though she has but a small part in the book, Moira represents for Joseph the temptation to sex just as a fellow student called Praileau—Joseph goes to a university—represents the temptation to violence, to physical conflict. Joseph is a Christian who is building his house not on a rock but on sand.
A peculiar, straightforwardly written novel, Moira is more interesting than artistically successful. The climax doesn’t come off, and it looks like the character of Joseph is going to be sufficiently worked out but it really isn’t. Religious feeling exists in the book, and it is occasionally funny, but Green wanted too much to write a disturbing tragedy, however Christian.
by Dean | Feb 12, 2017 | General
Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, Goodbye First Love (2012), from France, should have been titled by the U.S. “Young Love” (the correct translation of the French title). But at least it was distributed to the U.S., for it’s a good film.
Fifteen-year-old Camille, played by Lola Creton, is (I’m sorry to say) well acquainted with sex, although she genuinely loves her boyfriend-bedmate, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He loves her too, or thinks he does, but he goes on an eight-month trip to South America and admits in a letter to Camille that he’s been kissing some girls. Camille slowly gives up on him. —Is there love on Sullivan’s part?— Now older, the girl becomes involved with her architecture instructor, eventually two-timing him, though, after she runs into Sullivan. The two get together (and get naked) since Camille still loves the young man. And Sullivan declares his love for Camille, and yet . . .
About these relationships questions are raised. Whether or not there is love on Sullivan’s part, there is more to his liaison with Camille than sex. But how much more? And what is the more? It seems Camille, for her part, moves from being a lover-in-love (with Sullivan) to being . . . what? Just a plain lover?
Goodbye First Love does not have the power of such contemporary French films as The Dreamlife of Angels or Skirt Day, but it is personal and lyrical and fresh in its details. Unlike Clair and Truffaut and Rohmer, Hansen-Love lacks an original style, but this will not prevent her from becoming an important director-scenarist if she persists in fulfilling her promise. She is pleasingly gifted with both form and content.
(In French with English subtitles)
