by Dean | Apr 2, 2017 | General
The fourth season of The Americans on DVD—I’m watching it.
Things start going wrong for Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell), the two Soviet spies with American accents in D.C., just when the Soviet Union itself is shown to be limping along (to the end of the road?). The FBI discovers that Martha (Alison Wright), one of its paper-filin’ secretaries, married, without knowing it, a KGB officer! That would be Phillip. Worse, Martha becomes a traitor. Martha’s boss (Richard Thomas) never had a clue. Our enemies, however dangerous, are not as efficient as we continually think.
Despite the straining of our credulity, the first seven episodes of Season 4 are fun and compelling. Viewers of Season 5, I’m right behind you.
by Dean | Mar 31, 2017 | General
Cover of Under the Sand
On Under the Sand (2000):
Like Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Maborosi, this French film by Francois Ozon centers on the mysteriousness of an individual death, but it is far less effective than that masterly Japanese picture. For one thing, it seems to also center on a person’s irrational, even insane, response to an individual death, a loved one’s death, and this possibility merely leaves the film obscure. More importantly, it is bland and dull—like so many other French films nowadays, distinctly un-entertaining. Art such as that in Under the Sand shouldn’t be as dry as sand.
The presence of Charlotte Rampling doesn’t help much. I like her graceful, poignant performance as well as her fetching smile and lovely hair, but she deserves a better movie. Existential mystery is poorly served by this weakling of a film.
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Mar 28, 2017 | General
Cover of Scotland, PA
In Scotland, PA (2001), director-screenwriter Billy Morrisette parodies, and transfers to 1975, Macbeth. By adapting a violent classic for a series of well-photographed scenes, Morrisette proves sort of a comic Claude Chabrol, out for fun. His film is hilarious, and the cinematography by Wally Pfister is brightly handsome when it isn’t tellingly dim.
Not only is Scotland, PA—well acted by James Le Gros, Maura Tierney, and a few others—not a tragedy, it cannot even be called a tragicomedy. Just a dark farce, with Morrisette completely indifferent to Shakespeare’s themes. And it’s a slapdash dark farce at that. Have a good time.
by Dean | Mar 26, 2017 | General
A Little Night Music (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If there are decent sets and costumes for A Little Night Music, these and the pop pleasure of Stephen Sondheim‘s songs make this 1970s musical comedy recommendable. The book by Hugh Wheeler is worthless. Granted, few books for musicals are what they ought to be, but do they have to be this bad? Wheeler’s work is “suggested” by the Ingmar Bergman film, Smiles of a Summer Night, which, the last time I saw it, disappointed me. The whole second act of the libretto is muddled and dopey; I couldn’t abide Henrik’s and Anne’s frequent running around or the Russian roulette business. In both acts of the libretto, Madame Armfeldt is as loathsome as she is in Bergman’s movie—more so, in fact.
The music, however, makes the difference. “Now,” “Every Day a Little Death” and “Send in the Clowns” are all minor gems. Not so the cheap “Remember?” but the lyrical vulgarity in the snappy “The Miller’s Son,” coming as it does from Petra the maid, is appropriate. I don’t know how long it’s been since A Little Night Music was revived on Broadway, but I give one cheer over its being revived (some years ago) in Tulsa. With limited appeal, it is a theatrical event.
(To the right, the poster for the film, not the stage show)
by Dean | Mar 22, 2017 | General
My Night at Maud’s (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Years ago, Eric Rohmer wrote the story, “My Night at Maud’s,” one of his Six Moral Tales, before he filmed it. In my opinion, the film gets boring; the written story, for all its dialogue, does not.
Seldom in his oeuvre did Rohmer make as many references to Catholic, or Christian, faith as he did in “Maud’s.” The Michelin engineer (unnamed), living in Clermont-Ferrand in France, befriends for a short time the beautiful divorcee, Maud. He also necks with her a bit despite being a Catholic who believes he is destined, or predestined, to marry a fellow Catholic named Francoise. Resistant to having sex with Maud, the engineer nevertheless makes the mistake, on a dangerously snowy night, of lying down next to Maud on her bed for an night’s ordinary sleep. Maud’s mistake is putting her arms around the man and pressing her body against his.
Still, no sex.
And then there’s Francoise. Gradually the matter of forgiveness pops up: Will the engineer forgive Francoise for a particular amatory-sexual sin? The themes that emerge in Rohmer’s story are spiritual playing-with-fire, perfidy in severe and mild forms, and the challenges to chastity. It is a successful Christian tale which I don’t believe should have been made into a movie, unlike another moral tale, “Claire’s Knee,” which is okay as a movie.
by Dean | Mar 21, 2017 | General
Cover of The Son’s Room
Nanni Moretti is a fine artist whose Italian film, The Son’s Room (2001), is a largely well done, sometimes brilliant, work about intense grief over the death of a couple’s adolescent son. The parents—Giovanni (a psychiatrist) and Paola—and their surviving daughter are in a tailspin, with Giovanni finally deciding he cannot be both disconsolate and guilt-feeling and a psychiatrist. Although the chronicle is a little thin, constantly shifting to Giovanni’s work with his patients, the film is sobering and smart (and not without humor). Plus it’s persuasively acted by Laura Morante, Moretti, et al.
Moretti is unsympathetic to clergymen, though. Or is Bert Cardullo right that the director-writer looks askance at the thinking of people in “a post-religious age”? The conclusion of The Son’s Room does seem ambiguous, not about life’s continuum which causes Giovanni and Paola to laugh, but about a salutary acceptance of death in the secular-minded.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
by Dean | Mar 19, 2017 | General
Military pride and victory, battlefield suffering, religious conviction, and death in all its pervasiveness all meet in the Julien Duvivier film, La Bandera (The Flag, 1935), whose gritty screenplay Duvivier and co-scenarist Charles Spaak adapted from a novel.
The picture concerns a Frenchman called Gilieth who murders a man in Paris (“a piece of crap” he calls him) and then runs away to Barcelona, where he is unemployed and hungry. In order to survive, he joins the Spanish Foreign Legion, though not without a clandestine Spanish detective on his trail. All the legionnaires, Gilieth included, volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and an agonizing, disastrous experience it is. Can there be—is there—the acquisition of honor in this?
The French actress Annabella, who was married to Tyrone Power, has top billing in this film (she plays an Arab girl whom Gilieth marries), but she is not the star. Jean Gabin is, satisfyingly cast as the one-time murderer. . . La Bandera is now creaky and obstreperous, but also vivid and candid. I would say that at first its attitude is misanthropic, but eventually it does see Gilieth as acquiring honor as it puts a measure of faith in men on the battlefield, as it necessarily respects human risk and endurance. At least the Spanish detective seems to see Gilieth as acquiring honor (or expiation).
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Mar 16, 2017 | General
Cover of The Shawl
There are politically correct people who would yammer about the Jewish woman, Rosa Lublin—in Cynthia Ozick‘s novella, The Shawl—yelling “Sodom!” when she sees two male lovers lying naked on the beach. They would foolishly suspect Ozick of being “homophobic.” But such people understand nothing about war or brutality or trauma—at least the trauma of others. Rosa was in a German concentration camp, and the Nazis murdered her infant daughter, Magda: the shawl of the story’s title was used in swaddling the child.
Living in Florida, Rosa behaves as though Magda were still alive, for only the past has any substance for her. The present is dead, incomprehensible. It is necessary to ask, though, whether Rosa is mad, to which I respond that I think Ozick is presenting her as traumatized. Not mad, but eccentric and impractical through trauma.
A mother with a single child who is dead can easily be a “crazy woman” (a phrase of Rosa’s). On the last page of The Shawl, however, Rosa manages to demonstrate a patent sanity, an encouraging note in this strong, excellently written 1988 fiction.
by Dean | Mar 13, 2017 | General
Rene Clair‘s 1931 film, A Nous la Liberte, ends (almost) with a comically ironic look at the replacement of man with machine in the factory—before it was known that society would weather this storm—and it induces us to wonder how relevant this matter is to our own time. In any case, what is actually central to the film is that an escaped convict, Louis (Raymond Cordy), is hungry for freedom but, after becoming a wealthy manufacturer, leads men into forms of captivity. He means no harm, though, and finally he loses his business and is free only in the way he was after escaping from prison. He hits the open road.
Liberte is such a weird little flick it is not exactly my favorite Rene Clair. Again, statements are put to music and the plot is bulging. It is as artificial as it is satirical (more so). But uniqueness is uniqueness; Clair is cannily and charmingly daring. And Liberte does succeed at making you think.
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Mar 12, 2017 | General
So far I have seen six episodes of the TV series, The Affair, Season 2, on DVD, and I’m considerably impressed by it.
Noah (Dominic West) has left his wife Helen (Maura Tierney) for a former nurse, Alison (Ruth Wilson), and has also been arrested—the plot just has to be enriched—for the murder of a cad who impregnated Noah’s daughter.
Many of the scenes with Helen are powerful (and one, alas, which is artsy), as when she tells her strident mother to leave her house. The show examines the ties with other people that cannot quite be severed as well as those that are severed all too easily. It is intelligent enough, in one episode, to have Alison talk the way the black hero in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man talks: she complains of her own invisibility, that people never see her, Alison the person.
I hope I am not repulsed by anything in The Affair and wish to stop watching it. So far it’s been riveting, and I’d like to write about the remaining episodes.
