“The Lacemaker” Is Great (But Not Accessible Enough)

by Dean | Oct 17, 2016 | General

Will the following film ever be out on DVD or Blu-Ray, and not just VHS?

Directed by Claude Goretta, the 1977 French film, The Lacemaker, offers lovely images, lovely music, lovely nude scenes (it’s true), and a compassionate script.  Its plot concerns a doomed romance between a well-to-do student and a shy working-class girl, and its theme is failure:  the failure of the young, the failure of amor, the failure of sex, even psychical failure.  Starring Isabelle Huppert and Yves Beneyton, it is, to me, Gallic art at its finest.

The Wrong Monster To Pick On: The New Movie, “Don’t Breathe”

by Dean | Oct 16, 2016 | General

In the tight thriller Don’t Breathe (2016), by Fede Alvarez, three young felons attempt to rob a lot of settlement cash from a blind veteran, but are neither competent nor superhuman enough to best him.  The dude is ridiculously powerful, and himself evil—for one thing, an atheistic quasi-rapist!  He was the wrong monster to pick on, and a body count slowly rises.  Two of the young felons deserve better.

Alvarez is a committed director, never awkward and with a talent for sobering images.  A night-vision camera (or whatever it’s called) reveals the female thief, Rocky (Jane Levy), looking vulnerable as she walks around in pitch black darkness with wide, coal black eyes.  Don’t Breathe is over the top but disturbingly palatable.  It’s a horror show without torture porn.

The Movie, “Love & Friendship,” With Lady Kate

by Dean | Oct 12, 2016 | General

Whit Stillman has a delectable film in Love & Friendship (2016), based on Jane Austen’s short novel Lady Susan.  A fascinating Kate Beckinsale knows how to play a perfectly in-control (if wicked) woman, and there are other terrific performers to boot.

Stillman has said that his aim in writing the movie’s script was to “up” the morality and the religion in Austen’s novel.  Whether this made an ultimate difference in the finished product I don’t know, but it is a work of moral resonance as well as refreshing intelligence.

Mackie’s Back In Town: The Film About R. McNamara, “The Fog of War”

by Dean | Oct 11, 2016 | General

The Fog of War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Errol Morris‘s documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), is a fancy and portentous flop (ugh—all those arty closeups and jump cuts!),  and those “eleven lessons” in the title are simply pedestrian, banal.  McNamara, LBJ’s defense secretary, claims to have learned them from his World War II days, Vietnam days, etc.  The first one is Empathize with your enemy—a therapeutic, flower-child phrase.  Does it mean the Kurds—and the French—should empathize with ISIS?  Does it mean ISIS should empathize with . . . Westerners?  Fat chance of that happening!

Another lesson is Belief and seeing are both often wrong.  How elementary can you get!  And how clumsy that phrase is!  Then there’s Get the data and Rationality will not save us.  Er, okay, but rationality certainly has a way of helping a lot; and, anyway, what’s the alternative?

As for the Vietnam conflict, it was a Vietnamese civil war within the context of the Cold War.  So McNamara apparently thinks.  I dislike our military involvement in that conflict almost as much as McNamara, but this is an inaccurate description of it.  Worse, particularly since it involves a former defense secretary, that Cold War context is more important than he seems to realize.

Not Bad: “The Illusionist” (2006)

by Dean | Oct 9, 2016 | General

Cover of The Illusionist [Blu-ray]

I got bored with Steven Millhauser’s short story, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” and so stopped reading it.  I’m glad it was transferred to the screen, however, for there is much to love in this curious movie.  Norton’s Eisenheim works as a mind-boggling illusionist in 19th-century Vienna and is in love with Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel), the aristocratic inamorata of a callous prince (Rufus Sewell).  Illusions are everywhere in the film, all performed by Eisenheim—unless the illusions are real.  Burger keeps us guessing.  What the whole of Vienna believes to be reality, in fact, turns out to be a happy falsehood.

The film uses a couple of the iris-outs so appreciated by director Francois Truffaut, and indeed The Illusionist greatly resembles Truffaut’s period pieces, e.g. The Story of Adele H., though without the customary charm.  Cinematographer Dick Pope’s lighting cannot be improved on; truly the film has a look.  Prague nicely stands in for Vienna, and the costumes of Ngila Dickson are unpretentiously agreeable.  Philip Glass’s score is respectable if sometimes shopworn.

The film is entertaining as well as marred by plenty of flaws.  For one thing, it’s a bit plebeian, and for another, I wish Jessica Biel’s acting had more sparkle, more imagination, for all her good looks.