by Dean | Feb 5, 2017 | General
Catchy or not, are the songs in the 2016 movie musical, La La Land, interesting? I would say yes, almost all of them are—and they’re catchy besides. Which means they are pretty good, contrary to what some of the critics think.
Well directed by Damien Chazelle, the movie’s story nevertheless should have been better, not so dull and flimsy. (Why does Mia believe her one-woman show will be a success?) Until the climax, Chazelle stops taking chances with his song-and-dance numbers in order to let this bland story flow. What’s more, I don’t always like the film’s dim lighting. I do like the acting of Ryan Gosling and, especially, Emma Stone, though. Gosling is solid, Stone is marvelously solid.
Go see La La Land for the music and the acting.
by Dean | Feb 2, 2017 | General
Cover of Metropolitan – Criterion Collection
The characters in Whit Stillman‘s first film, Metropolitan (1990), are socially adept preppies (is that redundant?) who prove how much they’ve learned from and delighted in the prodigious world of ideas. Politics, social decline, literature, their own generation—all these are discussed as extensively as the bright boys and girls can manage it. Religion is, too, though not much. Nobody is living religion any more than he or she is living anything else, members of the “untitled aristocracy” as they are, except for Tom, who tries to abide by the moral principles of socialism as he sees them. A certain stagnation prevails.
The social scene is all most of these people have for sustenance. If the world of ideas is having any influence at all, it must be on sensitive Audrey, lover of Jane Austen and Mansfield Park, who may be imitating Mansfield‘s Fanny Price by affectionately longing for socialist Tom the way Fanny affectionately longs for Edmund. And perhaps it is significant that the man Fanny loves is a clergyman whereas the one Audrey loves is in truth not even much good at abiding by socialism’s moral principles.
But at least Audrey wants love for sustenance, as do the other girls in the film, eventually. For all the stagnation, change is as inevitable in these preppies’ lives as it is in The Cherry Orchard, and who knows? Maybe religion is around the corner. Nobody knows just where the language of theology and morality will take a person. In one particularly funny scene, someone calls a handsome chap named Nick a hypocrite for sleeping with a slut (to find out why he is called this, you’ll have to see the film) to which Nick responds, “It’s not hypocrisy . . . it’s sin.” And although the slut, Cynthia by name, immediately and confidently murmurs, “It’s hardly that,” the peculiar statement remains in the air, its weight undeniable. When it isn’t fatuous, language here does have weight, not least because it is witty. And, yes, fatuity gets spoken, as it does by all of us, but intellects here are not fully cultivated, not completely mature. Will they mature? What is this maturity? How likely the members of an untitled aristocracy are to find out I don’t know.
by Dean | Jan 31, 2017 | General
In August of 1939, German SS men attacked one of their country’s radio stations at Gleiwitz on the German-Polish border with the aim of blaming the attack on the targeted Poles. Thus a pretext would exist for declaring war on Poland.
Distributed by a company called Icestorm is a DVD of the 1961 The Gleitwitz Case, a German film by Gerhard Klein having to do with this scandalous plot. Unfairly criticized and neglected in the GDR, the film is unreservedly welcome in the U.S., even on disk. Written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Gunther Rucker, it is, according to the DVD case, mostly “based on statements by the [German] commanding officer to British military personnel.” It documents but is not a work of documentary realism; rather it aestheticizes the Gleiwitz case. Klein is an artist, interested in geometric composition, closeups and forceful montage, the last of which evokes heady romanticism at a time of implacable deception and ruthlessness. Although not without filler, the film is compelling and imaginative, boasting a marvelous if occasionally too light score by Kurt Schwaen. Almost everything about The Gleiwitz Case clicks.
by Dean | Jan 29, 2017 | General
Cover of Equus
1977 was a bad year for cinema. Sidney Lumet‘s film version of the Peter Shaffer play, Equus, didn’t make it any better.
In Equus, we witness what amounts to a religious passion, for a nonexistent horse-god, and the morose psychiatrist (in the film, Richard Burton) who cures this passion. But John Simon was right when he complained that the work “falls into that category of worn-out whimsy wherein we are told that insanity is more desirable, admirable, or just saner than sanity.”
The movie is dramatically underwhelming in a way the play, bad as it is, is not. This fits in with how dismal it all is: a nudity-filled, finally bloody piece of balderdash, this. And if Simon was correct that it’s possible to read Equus as “a thinly veiled paean to pederasty,” it does not surprise me. The most important character is a boy, and heterosexuality is not the most fulfilling thing in the world here.
by Dean | Jan 26, 2017 | General
Cover of The Palm Beach Story
Born into a rich family, director Preston Sturges was inspired to supply in The Palm Beach Story (1942) some generous millionaires and billionaires who help a financially pinched married couple, Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert). So pinched are they, in fact, that Gerry sees herself as a financial albatross (and inadequate wife) for Tom and flees to Palm Beach for a divorce. Really, though, the two love each other and so Tom pursues his misguided wife, only to find she now has a rich suitor (Rudy Vallee), led to believe that Tom is Gerry’s brother.
Colbert is charming and grounded in this unusual farce (whereas McCrea is strictly by-the-numbers) wherein Sturges again exhibits his love of slapstick. Not only that: he loves it when amusing lies are conjoined with heartwarming—or amusing—truth-telling. Possibly this is because he knows there is consistent lying in fiction’s representations of romance; The Palm Beach Story is a romantic comedy. What is also clearly true is that Mr. Preston knows how to lie like truth, which he does not do all the time but it is pleasing that he does do it.
