by Dean | Jan 3, 2019 | General
The Ida Lupino film, The Bigamist (1953), turns Edmond O’Brien into a romantic. Director Lupino co-stars in the piece and, like scriptwriter Collier Young, is in a romantic mood; albeit, to be sure, O’Brien’s character is a bigamist. He is married to both Lupino and Joan Fontaine (unknown to each other), but is almost an angel in his liaisons with them. A true lover of both.
Lupino once remarked that as a director she was “the poor man’s Don Siegel.” (Remember The Hitchhiker?) Not exactly. Not with a film like The Bigamist, which is sober and character-driven. In the 1950s Europeans were making movies meant for adults not youngsters, but few Hollywood products had such an aim. Lupino’s film, although it’s no Le Amiche, is rather different. It won’t offend anybody but it will bore the kids. It has a grown-up gravity. I like it.
by Dean | Dec 29, 2018 | General
A Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) team member carries his Colt Commando assault rifle through the woods during a field training exercise. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lone Survivor (2014) is an excellently wrought war movie that lets us know just how long a severely wounded human body can last. The wounds keep coming to the four Navy SEALs entrusted to a failed operation amid the forest trees of Afghanistan (and the SEALs give as good as they get). Another film based on a true story, though at long last it gets rather tiresome, it is incontestably powerful and has a mostly good momentum.
The dialogue is lousy—coarse—and apparently LS is not always journalistically accurate. But I agree with James Bowman that director Peter Berg’s “great achievement . . . is to take away the media’s political filter and show us war as men actually experience it, albeit at an unusually high level of intensity.” Too, it has a bigness about it that other contemporary war flicks lack.
by Dean | Dec 27, 2018 | General
William Wellman directed many serious films (The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Nothing Sacred) as well as superficial but pleasurable pop pictures like Yellow Sky, a 1948 Western wherein a band of thieves muscles in to take advantage of someone else’s gold claim. The someone else is Anne Baxter‘s “Mike” (a nickname for a very pretty tomboy) and her grandfather (James Barton), certainly not a match for six armed lawbreakers.
Wellman’s wild bunch, filmed in long shots on parched earth, snub and pound each other until real schisms develop. Gregory Peck is somewhat miscast as an outlaw, but at least his character grows in nobility. He gives the same dad-gum performance, though, that he gave in every movie. Lamar Trotti’s script is colorful and integrated. All the same, it is hardly edifying that the film implies that what will set a young woman on the right path is being tackled and smooched, yea, even by a thief. We’re grateful the smoocher is not a rapist.
by Dean | Dec 24, 2018 | General
The interesting plot of God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (2018) has Pastor Dave (David A.R. White) harriedly fighting an eminent domain plan pursued by fictitious Hadleigh University against Dave’s long-standing church. The church is located on the university’s campus, but owns the land it was built on. Wanting the land for itself, Hadleigh, a state institution, considers the church a bad P.R. entity for several reasons. One is that Pastor Dave just got out of jail for properly refusing to have his sermons evaluated by the local government. Another is that an act of vandalism against the church has led to the accidental death of a newly hired co-pastor.
The vandal is an ordinary young man and lost soul (Mike C. Manning) who is frustrated by his doubting Christian girlfriend’s resistance to unreligious living. The film tells us that in New Century America any kind of assault on Christian people is possible, perhaps inevitable. But America is complex, so we are also told that sometimes a move against a church is merely practical, not persecutory; as witness what the university does.
I have never seen a faith-based, Evangelical movie depict as much human anguish as A Light in Darkness does. Not only do many things take their toll on Pastor Dave, but Keaton (Samantha Boscarino), the vandal’s girlfriend, and the boyfriend himself go through arrant hardship. It isn’t quite clear, however, what the Faith situation for Keaton is.
If this is a flaw, it isn’t much of one compared with the sentimental unlikelihood with which the film concludes. It is a message of anti-polarization in society. Good luck with that.
Another observation: White and John Corbett (as Dave’s lawyer brother) deepen the film and are never false.
It was directed and co-written by Michael Mason.
by Dean | Dec 22, 2018 | General
Roma (2018), written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is a social film, akin to a social novel, but one set circa 1970.
Roma is a Mexico City neighborhood where a nanny, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), and the family she works for live. Cleo is a hard-working if imperfect employee, and doesn’t deserve to be hotly scolded by her otherwise nice employer, Sofia (Marina de Tavira). Both ladies, however, have wretched problems, for by and by the driven men in their lives forsake them. . . Life here is full of free-floating vicissitudes and disasters, and we are shown that even an incomplete family is still a family, an indispensable entity.
Commendably photographed by Cuaron, Roma is a post-censorship, black and white art film reminiscent of something by De Sica or Olmi. The heavy avoidance of closeups, even so, causes the film to be less precise and effective than Umberto D. or Il Posto. And, further, Cuaron (Gravity) is not the greatest of storytellers. Again in a movie there is a scene—in the streets—of politically motivated protest and massacre. Cleo’s boyfriend proves to be a two-dimensional villain, nothing more. This is second-rate material, but don’t worry. Greater imagination and honesty are available elsewhere in Roma. To me it is an absorbing non-commercial work, by a poet of modest but real power. And as the critics have said, it is moving. (In Spanish with English subtitles, and it is currently streaming on Netflix.)
by Dean | Dec 20, 2018 | General
In the 1945 musical comedy, Bring on the Girls, actor Eddie Bracken is okay, Sonny Tufts is not. He is practically the leading man in the film and he has no charisma.
Ah, but bring on the girls! Veronica Lake, unlike contemporary actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Margot Robbie, exhibits a unique presence with her slender figure, sardonic, lazy voice and magnetic face. Marjorie Reynolds is a real beauty of a supporting actress, likable and versatile. Both women’s acting is inoffensively serviceable. Not so the efforts of those who put together a routine near the end involving Spike Jones and his band, a routine more silly than funny. But other sequences in this movie about sailors and dames are entertaining: e.g. the tap dancing bits and the comedy with the two deplorable doctors. Girls should have been a more respectable lark, with a slightly more respectable cast—uh, then I think about Veronica Lake and I understand the compensation. Hiring Lake: now that was a respectable move.
by Dean | Dec 18, 2018 | General
Critic David Edelstein has called the new flick, Mary Poppins Returns, which I probably will not see, “a bit of a dud.” I see the original Mary Poppins (1964) the same way, except for the songs. The agreeable score deserves a better, tighter story. Again, what Edelstein wrote about the new Poppins is true of the old one: “the plot is ungainly.” Wasn’t the first time a Disney film was ungainly.
by Dean | Dec 15, 2018 | General
Lida Baarova, a Czechoslovakian movie star of yesteryear, goes from being the mistress of a German actor to being the mistress of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ propaganda minister, in The Devil’s Mistress (2016). Directed by Filip Renc, the film is clearly marred by heavy-handed music, which Renc may think befitting of a semi-soap opera like this. But it would be better without it, notwithstanding the film is deeply enjoyable, an uncomplicated triumph for screenwriter Ivan Hubac.
Someone was bound to film this true story about Baarova’s illicit romance with a reprehensible anti-Semite. Man is a sorry creature. While the Nazis in the picture are, naturally, major pigs, the Czechoslovakian people can be minor pigs. (This excludes Baarova.) Beautiful Tatiana Pauhofava is well cast as a European star with unsurprising sophistication. Even better is Karl Markovics as Goebbels. Both costumes and cinematography are winning. There is a memorable scene in which Baarova lets an adoring stranger, a much-needed deliverer, stroke her breasts without the use of nudity or even explicitness, and yet the scene is truly erotic.
The Devil’s Mistress—the original title, Lida Baarova, is preferable to the banal one—is available on Netflix, with subtitles.
by Dean | Dec 11, 2018 | General
For the third year in a row, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined, mainly because of drug overdoses. Probably a further decline will occur in the years ahead as people commit suicide out of fear of Alzheimer’s. To be specific, the fear of being in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s and 1) not having any children to check on them, and 2) not having sufficient means for paying the bill. Medicaid money? I doubt it: Medicaid will be broke. (What kind of welfare state should we have when there’s an insanely high federal deficit?) But even if it isn’t broke, the fear of neglect and of loss of autonomy will run rampant, will be as great as the fear of pain that leads to fatal opioid use.
by Dean | Dec 9, 2018 | General
Australia’s Bruce Beresford did a perfect job of filming Don’s Party (1976), a play by David Williamson, and of guiding his actors to a sound representation of a message—that marriage and hedonism do not mix.
An Australian political race between the liberal Labor Party and the conservative Liberal Party is coming to an end, and a party of drink and naughtiness is taking place. Don (John Hargreaves), the married host, and the other men here hold on to politics as their “intellectual” pursuit and sex as their toy and refuge. The former will stimulate them for a while—and most of them are unthinking Labor voters—but it’s the latter that REALLY stimulates them. (Another message: Australians are morally unworthy of their democracy.) And how vulgar they are! Indeed, how vulgar—and hedonistic—the women can be!
Rated a hard R, the film is frank and rueful and humorous and harsh toward its characters. It ain’t Claude Goretta. Such actors as Ray Barrett (Mal), Pat Bishop (Jenny) and Clare Binney (Susan) understand the satire and have wonderful instincts. But then all the actors are natural and knowing. Bravo!
