by Dean | Feb 7, 2016 | General
“You can’t compare yourself to God.”
“Am I not God’s image in your eyes? Is it not to me that you owe your taste for a certain kind of perfection?”
This exchange of words does not take place except in the imagination of Dr. Paul Courreges, the main figure in the Francois Mauriac novel The Desert of Love (1925), which exchange is between Courreges and the woman he has long been passionate about (and it ain’t his wife): Maria Cross. Doubtless Maria is the kind of woman to see “God’s image” in a man she falls for, but Courreges, it turns out, is not that man. Yet the doctor still loves Maria, whereas she gradually falls for Courreges’s son Raymond. What the novel directs us to is, on the one hand, the deep secularization of French society and, on the other, “the desert of love” one encounters after connections are made with the desired person.
Very little is working out for these characters, and not a one of them adheres, as Mauriac did, to any particular religion. The Desert of Love is very solemn and even tragic, though with Christian overtones. Although God is seldom mentioned in the book, when He is, the references are not only sobering but also encouraging. Example: “There could be no hope for either of them, for father or for son, unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself Who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning, bitter tide.”
To think that God would summon from a person a burning, bitter tide! I was prompted to use the word “encouraging” for a reason.
Cover of The Desert of Love
by Dean | Feb 4, 2016 | General
The disco club at the center of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) is, in a way, fading or perishing—there is ill-gotten gain there—but much in the lives of the characters is fading or perishing as well. This is true despite all the young-professional effort, all the industriousness, going on, which certainly counts for something but will not necessarily make Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) or Tom (Robert Sean Leonard) a better person. As always, however, Stillman believes he can afford to be optimistic. It is the optimism of at least one kind of philosophical conservative, one who appreciates “the old world order” (Eric Hynes) and Christianity; and, yes, although the characters in Disco do not genuinely embrace Christianity, maybe an “amazing grace”—sung by Charlotte—will sooner or later embrace them.
(This, by the way, is my second review of the film.)
The Last Days of Disco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 3, 2016 | General
Edward G. Robinson is the chief member of a likable cast in 1955’s Illegal, a gripping crime drama until it falls apart in its last 15 minutes. Attorney Victor Scott (Robinson) is not much of a character, really; there is little examination of him, even though the machinations that involve him are pleasurably fresh. Jayne Mansfield has little to do, but she too is likable and looks even better than Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle.
All the major actors here deserve a better movie.
Illegal (1955 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 2, 2016 | General
FYI: A couple of weeks ago I quoted a line in the 2012 graphic novel, Kick Ass 2 Prelude: Hit Girl, about “Obama’s record f–king deficit.” Some people may think that, because the federal deficit has been in decline for six years, this line is out-of-date, irrelevant. It isn’t. The deficit is rising again. Hit Girl might need to blame House Republicans as well as Obama, but you’d better believe there’s no irrelevance here—and won’t be any time soon.
by Dean | Jan 28, 2016 | General
It is a campaign-enriching axiom that Eisenhower “got us out of Korea and kept us out of Vietnam.” This is what a movie like Pork Chop Hill (1959), starring Gregory Peck, very much wanted.
Peace talks in the Korean War have gotten underway, but Pork Chop Hill needs to be taken from the Chinese—and everything goes wrong until the end. The film laments the upending of military strategy, the myopia, that turns soldiers into sitting ducks. Is it antiwar? Practically so, but not quite. As John Simon has explained, a movie is not really antiwar unless it shows that both battling sides, not just one, have more or less lost the conflict, and this is not the case with Pork Chop Hill.
Cover of Pork Chop Hill
