by Dean | Dec 5, 2018 | General
I liked Lina Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy and Swept Away, two Italian films from the Seventies, but her Seven Beauties (1975) I consider an almost unwatchable dud. The premise is good: a little Naples coxcomb who is a gangster at heart inadvertently kills a well-to-do pimp. Later he is forced to join the army (during WWII) and ends up in a German concentration camp where human evil, somewhat like his own, is magnified on a scale he has naturally never seen before; and he will do virtually anything to survive. The film is a nightmare farce that begins with a voiceover litany about the conduct of mankind, a litany as irreligious as it is cynical and assuredly not as clever as Wertmuller thinks it is. That which is clever in the movie fails to be rewarding owing to SB‘s frequent clunkiness. There are too many extreme closeups and too much inadequate pacing. The film stumbles along with its pretensions.
P.S. I recently re-watched both Love and Anarchy and Swept Away and had to change my opinion of them. I did not enjoy them.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Dec 4, 2018 | General
Serving up the French Revolution as an adventure story, Anthony Mann‘s The Black Book (1949), also called Reign of Terror, centers on a beastly Robespierre (Richard Basehart) and his missing death list.
Embed from Getty Images
Here, the brute never defends himself against the charge of wanting a dictatorship, as the real Robespierre did. No, he makes it plain that this is what he’s after, and the good guys in the film steadfastly oppose him. One of them is Charles d’Aubigny, played by Robert Cummings, who has neither the look nor the voice of an 18th century spy. Another is Arlene Dahl‘s Madelon, with Dahl as undistinguished as Cummings but lovely. Mann directed supplely and knowingly a script imparting that where there is the desire for dictatorship, there is also scorched earth violence. Oh, wretched Jacobins!
by Dean | Nov 27, 2018 | General
David in the 1951 Biblical movie David and Bathsheba, by Henry King, is not a man of much religious fervor, as the real David must have been.
The film is more serious about grief and sin and doubt than other old Hollywood movies, but it needs a major jolt of energy. It’s rather wan and slow-moving, and neither Gregory Peck nor Susan Hayward is particularly interesting in the title roles. It is a sure thing that Hollywood’s Biblical flicks provided an excuse for injecting sensuality into American film, so some of that is certainly here, courtesy of a dancing Gwen Verdon (uncredited) and to a lesser extent of Hayward. Verdon, however, is part of the padding we frequently get from this movie.
by Dean | Nov 25, 2018 | General
I like that Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014), is short and has short paragraphs. Sans a plot, it concerns the marriage and motherhood of an unnamed woman writer, and although I lack interest in what it, or any other contemporary novel, has to say about writers, the mother-and-child stuff is clever and incisive. Even better is what James Wood has observed about the book: “If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state.”
The woman’s husband has an affair and so, yes, there is distress, but a positive ending occurs as well.
“Why doesn’t she throw the bum out?” some people might ask. I don’t know; this is a novel and novels are about how human beings think and behave, and women often don’t throw the bum out, even if they should.
by Dean | Nov 22, 2018 | General
Six Western stories make up the new Netflix film by Joel and Ethan Coen—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)—and in toto it is terrific. My favorite is probably the touching, beautifully acted “The Gal Who Got Rattled” starring Zoe Kazan as a nice young woman in a heap of trouble. It is rather less odd than some of the other stories but no less entertaining than the farcical title story or the one (“Near Algodones”) wherein James Franco enacts a crook consistently on the precipice of capital punishment.
The Coens’ tales are penny dreadfuls in which they often double down on Western mythology (Tim Blake Nelson‘s gunslinger, the shooting of Tom Waits‘s prospector). Mythology, yes, but violence is still violence. It abounds here: the violence that brings about death. When the film isn’t funny, it is deeply unsettling, and has a No Country for Old Men harshness. I nervously enjoyed it.
by Dean | Nov 17, 2018 | General
I have never seen the David Mamet play, Oleanna, on stage, but surely the next best thing is watching Mamet’s 1994 film of it. William H. Macy is true and affecting as a college professor accused of sexual harassment, and Debra Eisenstadt is mesmerizing as the girl who has accused him. Mamet’s directing is satisfyingly competent.
Carol, the girl, understands nothing but believes she understands everything—except the lessons presented in John’s—Macy’s—class. She is academically sinking there, almost frantic about it. But she starts to think she can read her professor, and to discern oppression. John’s easy cynicism about higher education only makes matters worse. Carol resents that John possesses power of a sort, and goes so far as to deem him a rapist (!)
Mamet’s achievement is disturbing as it concentrates on the utter failure of human communion and on Carol’s use of radical sentiment, or political correctness, to defeat John. (But is she really a radical?) Near pleadingly at one point she tells him, “I’m bad!” The utopia that Oleanna‘s title refers to is not exactly beckoning in the university. This is a sadly dark opus.
by Dean | Nov 15, 2018 | General
Cover of December Boys
Greatness in English-language cinema is so blasted rare these days and, sure enough, we don’t find it in the Australian December Boys (2006), a Rod Hardy picture about four boys from a Catholic orphanage and their seaside vacation. The flick is based on a novel by one Michael Noonan. Why did Hardy think it needed to be filmed? Or was he commissioned to film it? December Boys–the movie–is distinctly unimportant. I rather like that it’s eccentric, and it doesn’t even come close to being anti-Catholic, but as well it is sometimes silly and too incident-filled. The Australian director Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant, Black Robe) once cared about cinematic greatness, even if he didn’t always achieve it. The Aussies behind Hardy’s film, if Aussies all of them are, do not.
by Dean | Nov 11, 2018 | General
Since in the United States we will always have a welfare system, it might as well be one that is generous and efficient apropos of nursing homes. Medicaid makes it hard for lower middle-class families, unable to afford nursing home costs, to receive assistance, and continually pays the nursing homes insufficiently—when, that is, it doesn’t overpay them, and this too has been a problem.
Why not discontinue Medicaid’s health funding for the poor and simply help them through cash payments (a universal basic income)? Why not have Medicaid, if we even want it to exist, provide nursing home vouchers to citizens making less than . . . what? $80,000 a year? Sounds good to me. In fact, the vouchers could be not specifically for nursing home costs but for a life insurance policy since the money from such a policy can be used for long-term medical care.
We need to be wise with our money or medical welfarism, in itself, will shrink drastically. Yes, I desire smaller government, but even more do I desire less wayward and more compassionate government.
by Dean | Nov 9, 2018 | General
Four men should have come up with a more agreeable plot than that which exists in the Bob Hope comedy, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966), directed well enough by George Marshall. In silly ways a movie star, Didi, is used to move the plot along, but the screenwriters finally acquit themselves with Hope’s one-liners and much of the fun slapstick.
Hope plays a real estate agent who foolishly helps Didi, the sexy actress who runs away from the movie industry, all the while necessarily trying to conceal this from his wife. With Wrong Number, Hollywood produced a family film that tries for mid-60s sophistication through one person only: Elke Sommer (Didi). Though offering no surprises, she is quite good in her role, and her bare legs are good in theirs. But there is no smut; there is commercial appeal, rickety as the whole thing is. And there is funny Hope figuring that Phyllis Diller must tend to her looks with an egg beater.
by Dean | Nov 4, 2018 | General
The 2018 film Chappaquiddick treats Senator Ted Kennedy as though he were a very unscrupulous tragic hero save he doesn’t die at the end, which is significant. Kennedy goes on living, after dopily getting together with Mary Jo Kopechne and driving her to her doom: oxygen deprivation in a car underwater. “Kopechne died because Kennedy dithered” (Daniel Oliver), and after this, a true tragic hero would have died, perhaps by suicide.
This is not to say that John Curran‘s film isn’t a good one; it is. Sympathy goes to Kopechne—how could it not?—but even more of it goes to Kennedy, and one may be in high dudgeon over this. Yet it should be remembered that by consorting with Kennedy poor Mary Jo was going off with a married man. It was a grave mistake.
Jason Clarke, though, portrays Kennedy not only as a tragic hero but also as a fool, in a nicely subdued performance. I suspect that director Curran did not work that thoroughly with his actors—they don’t always own their roles—but there’s no problem with Clancy Brown, who shows intelligent fire as Robert MacNamara, or a palatable Ed Helms. It’s about time someone made a movie about the Liberal Lion of the Senate’s failure to be charitable to a doomed girl.
