by Dean | Aug 7, 2018 | General
When a person loses freedom in every way imaginable, he loses it for good.
This is the meaning I infer from the Robert Enrico short, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1961), a well-known French-made film from a story by Ambrose Bierce. Low-angle and overhead shots show us so many sturdy trees and so much grand river water, with perpetual bird and insect sounds, that it is almost as though the men in the film hope to compete with nature for something just as momentous. So they intend to ceremonially execute a man (Roger Jacquet) who has committed wartime crime. (The war is the American civil war.) Somehow, in truth, a lawbreaker’s loss of freedom through death matters.
I have never read Bierce’s story, but if it deserves skillful film directing, it gets it from Enrico.
by Dean | Aug 4, 2018 | General
Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (2018) is a delightful sequel to the fine Mamma Mia—er, wait a minute. Mamma Mia (of 2008) is not fine: it’s unspeakably insipid. Here We Go Again is superior to it. It is delightful. With Oliver Parker as director, the moviemakers got this one right.
Kyle Smith, who loved the picture, nevertheless opined that most of the ABBA songs proffered here are “second-raters.” I take exception. “One of Us” and “My Love, My Life” second-raters? The former is a jaunty, heartfelt, lyrically smart item, and the latter a very dulcet ballad. Both are performed moderately well. A madcap dance routine gives the pleasurable “Waterloo” a run for its money, and “The Name of the Game” is a dignified worthy. Although Lily James has little charisma, musically the movie is formidable.
The cast is fun and, along with there being breathtaking locations, Here We Go Again is awash in dancers; and, boy, do we see this when the zippy “Dancing Queen” is revived from the first film. . . MM The Sequel is not gay, as one professional critic happily considers it. It is simply fantastic (i.e. fantasy-filled) and weird. However, there does arise a lot of off-screen pagan fornication between James’s Donna and several men (Amanda Seyfried, meet your mother, Lily James), so the moviemakers decided to dilute this with a final church christening of a newborn baby. It happens during the singing of “My Love, My Life,” with its “God bless you” line. God bless you, ABBA.
by Dean | Aug 2, 2018 | General
Italy’s Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), by Vittorio De Seta (not De Sica), is about Sardinian shepherds—a man and his younger brother—and their troubles with bandits, other shepherds, and uncompassionate policemen. These two are persons of nature, working with and against nature—and against, to use a narrator’s word, “hostility.” By hostility I mean the world: everything from limited water to an unjust police official represents the world.
A classic art film, this, and a neorealistic one. I managed to find it on YouTube. I hope others will always be able to as well.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jul 31, 2018 | General
The married man in the 1979 English novel A Married Man, by the Catholic writer Piers Paul Read, is a sometime adulterer named John Strickland. A barrister and a socialist who intends to run for political office, Strickland is also an atheist married to a Catholic wife, Clare, who does not support her husband’s political ambitions. The marriage is patently rickety, especially after Strickland meets young Paula Gerrand, a wealthy leftist. A serious affair begins. Read sensibly concentrates on the interesting progress of love (illicit though it is), on the pleasures and emotional hold of a liaison, before finally bringing in the spiritual, plainly Christian, material.
Both Strickland and Clare throw themselves into an abyss. Clare, however, repents, or seems to. Strickland lacks an understanding of who he really is, thus differing from his wife who observes at one point, ” I may be a wanton woman now, but I’m still capable of feeling ashamed.” On the other hand, from Strickland we get this: “Even I might believe in God . . . if He could show me the man I really am.” Of course it is the Christian’s view that God can do this.
Of the four Read novels I have read, this is my favorite. It is well-paced, sophisticated, meaningful. If anyone were to tell me he or she wishes to read only one novel this year about male-female relationships, I’d say let it be this one.
Cover of A Married Man
by Dean | Jul 30, 2018 | General
In I Wake Up Screaming (1941) a model called Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis) gets murdered, and the investigating police department is pretty inept about the matter. It allows big Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar) to do some very shoddy police work, for he tries to pin the murder on Victor Mature‘s Frankie, a dubious suspect. He cares not a whit about other suspects. . . This flick by director Bruce Humberstone was the first film noir from Twentieth Century Fox, and though forgettable it’s watchable. Mature is paired with Betty Grable, as Vicky’s sister, with an appealing housewife’s beauty and a performance not much different from that of any other old-time Hollywood actress. It’s standard issue. She is, at any rate, interesting, unlike Carole Landis, who is interesting only in her looks.
Adapted from a novel by Steve Fisher, Screaming was well handled by screenwriter Dwight Taylor. Humberstone and his actors respect what a distinctly masculine affair it all is, and, really, nobody is even shedding tears over poor Vicky’s terrible death. For her part, Grable’s character is too busy falling in love.
by Dean | Jul 26, 2018 | General
A short silent film about a big-city poor girl, who becomes well-to-do, in Russia, A Child of the Big City (1914) was made several years before the Bolshevik revolution and the vile slaughter of the royal family.
It presents pre-Soviet Russia, with urban activity and individual longings, and the impoverished chief character, Mary (Elena P. Smirnova), marries into wealth but proves to be a terrible human being. She brings to the marriage, you see, some deplorable demotic ways, and her naive husband (Viktor Krawzow) is made miserable. Sometimes it is only the thought of Mary’s earlier romantic affection that keeps him from shooting himself.
It is a sad (and apolitical) film crafted by the gifted Russian director, Yevgeni Bauer, whose execution is certifiably interesting and innovative despite some too-long scene takes. Those takes are in themselves interesting, though.
by Dean | Jul 24, 2018 | General
2011’s Melancholia is the silliest pessimistic film I’ve ever seen.
That a stray planet is heading for a collision with the earth is acceptable—it’s merely the movie’s creator, Lars von Trier, lying like truth—but almost everything else in Melancholia is laughably crass. Much of it is tedious too. The film’s dialogue, which usually seems improvised, is terrible, and pretentiousness prevails as well.
Lead actor Kirsten Dunst agreed to get naked for this wreck, even if, happily, her acting is more effective than it has been in the past. She’s plainly made the grade.
That multiple critics praised von Trier’s movie tells you something about the current state of film criticism.
Melancholia (2011 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jul 21, 2018 | General
The new Mexican movie, Lo mas sencille es complicarlo todo (2018) features English subtitles but not an English title. Netflix, which picked it up, translates it as “The Simplest Thing Is To Complicate Everything”—not the simplest title. No wonder the Spanish title was retained.
In its essence this comic item respects the honorable idea that teenagers and sexual intercourse don’t mix. Then again, there is no intercourse in Sencille, not even between adults: it’s largely a family film. A conniving adolescent, Renata, is played by a stunning girl, Danna Paola; and she can act. We sympathize with Renata because of her youth but that’s the only reason. Not only does she subvert the love relationship between a beautiful blonde and the man Renata is crazy about, but she also insults people in her private speech. She gets exactly what she deserves.
Goofy in its whimsicality, the film can be disappointingly hokey. And it failed to make me laugh much. Director Rene Bueno is not much of a scriptwriter. Still, this would-be crowd pleaser works as a middlebrow, pop-arty entertainment. It’s sprightly; it’s like The Bachelor on speed, except it’s sweet. You could do worse with a Netflix film.
(In Spanish with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jul 18, 2018 | General
A July 12 article for The Federalist website is titled, “How Expanding Medicaid To Able-Bodied Adults Is Stripping Care For Disabled People.” Penned by Charlie Katebi, it informs us that “When a state expands Medicaid, the federal government covers 95 percent of the cost of treating every able-bodied patient. However, the federal government only covers 30 to 50 percent of the cost of treating Medicaid’s sicker patient populations.”
In large measure the federal government is a disgrace, and Medicaid ought to be abolished. This is true even if Katebi’s information is false, and I have no reason to hold that it is. Medicare, as I’ve written, insolvent by 2026? When will Medicaid be insolvent? “Not for a very long time,” a supporter might say. Oh? Well, I guess that’s true if only 30 to 50 percent of the care costs for the very sick are being covered. But perhaps it isn’t true.
Surely the provision of a Universal Basic Income (a phrase I dislike) would be better than this, as long as Medicaid was phased out slowly. And it would still be necessary to have government inspections of nursing homes and hospice centers. Anyone who says regarding today’s welfare programs, “It ain’t broke so don’t fix it,” doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t mind insolvency being laid on waste and inefficiency.
by Dean | Jul 11, 2018 | General
Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a philosophy professor married to another philosophy professor (Andre Marcon), and this is yet another film about a husband who blandly leaves his wife for another woman. Nathalie takes it . . . philosophically, which does not mean she never weeps. She does, but she also moves on and encounters life’s common problems, challenges, and comforts. This is what happens in the Mia Hansen-Love picture, Things to Come (L’avenir, 2016), a French opus even more imaginative and subtle than Hansen-Love’s Goodbye, First Love.
It is useful to mention Peter Rainer’s comment that “Huppert never loses sight of the fact that Nathalie’s wounded heart often overrules her steel-trap mind.” It is also true, however, that Nathalie is not much of a creature of desire, or so it seems, which may be moving her away from the “will” that the philosopher Schopenhauer (referenced in the film) said is the cause of our suffering. How much suffering does the woman go through? On the other hand, critic Ella Taylor has a point when she writes that “[Nathalie’s] moving on, but to what?”
Let me indicate one more thing: Hansen-Love does a meaningful job of capturing Natalie’s state of mind when she is alone and having to endure a relative’s sudden death. It’s a strong scene. The solitude makes all the difference.
(In French with English subtitles)
