by Dean | Apr 20, 2016 | General
The recent Saturday Night Live skit satirizing Christians who resist honoring same-sex marriage with wedding cakes, wedding planning, floral arrangements, etc. also poked fun at gay couples.
Even so, with the Christian baker’s announcement to the law firm, “I want to deny basic goods and services to gay people,” we discover that the skit can be accurately described as just more SNL bullshit. No such denial is what Christians are after. . . Describe the skit also as less than clever and you’d be right.
by Dean | Apr 19, 2016 | General
I no longer care much for Citizen Kane, because of the screenplay. I actually like Aaron Sorkin‘s screenplay for Steve Jobs (2015), in which Steve Jobs is the Citizen Kane of the 80s and 90s, better, for all the factual nonsense there is supposed to be. Sorkin’s Steve is an egotist and a blabbermouth (to me, laughable) as well as a profoundly reluctant—unwilling—father, grippingly played by Michael Fassbinder. It’s a wonder the film ends on a heartening note.
The direction by Danny Boyle is fanciful but clear-eyed. Additional bravura acting emanates from Kate Winslet, Michael Stuhlberg and Katherine Waterston.
by Dean | Apr 17, 2016 | General
Wanda (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Wanda (1971)—written, directed and acted in by Barbara Loden—is one of the truly good American films of the Seventies.
The newly unemployed, soon-to-be-divorced Wanda (Loden) ignorantly takes up with a robber (Michael Higgins) who is unstable and tyrannical. Theirs is a pathetic (occasionally funny) relationship, but Wanda never has to assist the robber in his stealing until he finally insists on it apropos of a bank.
The cannily written film has to do with what the lives of working-class people—Wanda, not the robber—sometimes become, and with the slow, harmful creep of irresponsibility. The movie concludes with a freeze-frame shot of Wanda sitting in a tavern and at a dead end, not enjoying the conviviality of the strangers who have invited her to drink with them. With her deep performance, Loden proves she understands the character she is playing; likewise with Higgins.
Loden, by the way, was married to Elia Kazan. One wishes she could have made at least one more film before she came down with a fatal cancer in 1978.
by Dean | Apr 14, 2016 | General
Cover of Funny Face
With savvy and imagination Stanley Donen directed the musical, Funny Face (1957), wherein a book store clerk (Audrey Hepburn) is rapidly turned into a fashion model.
Early on, the movie’s appeal is perfectly evident: Hepburn passably sings a pop masterpiece, “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” by George and Ira Gershwin. After that, well, it’s strange to see the young Hepburn fall in love with the middle-aged Fred Astaire, and Hepburn’s dancing is sheerly mechanical in the café scene, but the good stuff keeps rolling nonetheless. Astaire charms us with another top-notch Gershwin song from the Twenties (terpsichore included)—“Let’s Kiss and Make Up.” And, yes, even though Hepburn’s singing voice is sometimes less than passable, her acting is gracefully decent, properly amusing.
by Dean | Apr 13, 2016 | General
Edvard Munch (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From Germany in 1976 came a biopic and dramatized quasi-documentary on the life of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, and though seriously flawed, it is also fascinating and felt.
Peter Watkins directed and, in collaboration with the cast, wrote the script for Edvard Munch, which concentrates on the man’s art and very humanity with equal effectiveness. Where it goes wrong, I believe, is in permitting the crosscutting between shots of Munch as a sick child and those of Munch as an aspiring and suffering adult to produce a certain blatancy, an overexplicitness. For, after all, there are also shots of Munch’s sister Sophie as a sick child, necessary as it is to demonstrate that Munch’s attitude toward life was formed in part by the household illnesses he grew up with. Blatancy, however, is blatancy. Sometimes the film grips too hard.
Also, notwithstanding he resembles Munch, Geir Westby is too stolid in his portrayal of the gifted painter. But I repeat: the film is fascinating (and essentially unhappy).
