by Dean | Aug 8, 2016 | General
Cover of The Prince of Darkness (Plantagenet 4)
Was King John of England, who died in 1216, an evil king? Jean Plaidy wrote about him in her 1978 novel, The Prince of Darkness, and to her the answer is certainly yes. It is not long before the book ends that John is forced to sign Magna Carta; before this he demonstrates not only how famously hot-tempered he is but also how infernally cruel, feckless, lustful and selfish.
The novel’s England can barely withstand the royal immorality here, and near the end the nation hits the skids, though not hopelessly. The Prince of Darkness is gripping and engrossing, even if sometimes Plaidy nearly loses control of her sentences. I don’t think there’s a shortage of historical accuracy either.
by Dean | Aug 4, 2016 | General
A 64-minute silent film, Hell’s Hinges (1916) is a Western released only a couple of decades after the Old West had faded away.
A Protestant preacher, accompanied by his Protestant sister, is sent to a western town to start a church. The many reprobate men there resist this church-planting and hope to discredit the preacher, not a very hard task since Parson Henley is probably the weakest Christian on the face of the earth. But gunslinger Blaze Tracy (William S. Hart) ain’t weak. This evil fellow falls in love with the preacher’s sister and, possibly blessed with God working on him, wants to reform. And does, though not without literally fighting fire with fire.
This Charles Swickard-directed short can be exciting and, in some ways, lovable. Tragic too.
It is perhaps only via the DVD set called Treasures From American Film Archives that Hell’s Hinges can be seen on disc.
by Dean | Aug 3, 2016 | General
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Re the writing by John August, Tim Burton‘s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) is not much of a movie version of Roald Dahl’s humanity-scolding book. The final few minutes go nowhere, and Charlie (Freddie Highmore) is a somewhat hollow character. Burton’s imagination exceeds his intelligence, yet . . . we love him anyway, right? His Charlie is spellbinding, with perfect razzle dazzle and effective humor. And Johnny Depp playing Willie Wonka as a solitary, sadly neurotic freak. His acting is more curious than strong, but it is curious, even enticing.
A bratty girl is carried to a garbage chute by industrious squirrels, a candy bar techno-magically replaces the monolith in a shown copy of 2001, an Indian palace made of naught but chocolate melts in the sun—Burton presents it all with expert direction. My enthusiasm is limited—the film lacks the moral import of the weaker Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, from 1971—but Charlie is boyish poetry.
by Dean | Aug 2, 2016 | General
Cover of The Lemon Drop Kid
A talented Bob Hope stars in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and although much of it is funny, I don’t consider it a successful movie.
Hope’s character is a chiseling skunk who is only a little less than a chiseling skunk at the flick’s end. Naturally he has a girlfriend but the actress who plays her, Marilyn Maxwell, is charmless. . . The movie lacks what marked a lot of American screen farces of the Thirties and early Forties: likable characters and, whether the narratives were any good or not, likable scripts. The script for It’s a Gift is indifferently plotted but still likable, still palatable. Those words don’t describe the script for The Lemon Drop Kid.
by Dean | Aug 1, 2016 | General
We could use a fiction film about sharks that’s better, more consequential really, than Jaws. Despite its preposterousness, The Shallows (2016) is it.
Following some Blue Crush pop crud, Blake Lively escapes a shark by climbing onto the back of a dead whale, but is soon perched on an islet destined to be covered by the tide. Nancy, Blake’s character, is competent and aware she has to be brave—why, she’s even brave enough to try to eat a tiny dead crab (which she perforce spits out)—but she’s bleeding from a shark-created gash in her leg and the odious big fish is still swimming around. . . The Shallows is a good feat of directing and editing (by Jaume Collet-Serra and Joel Negron, respectively); and, granted, there is CGI but “the vistas . . . are staggering” (Glenn Kenny). Ocean shots are even more beautiful than Lively’s smile. As for Blake’s acting, she does a lot of yelling and, carrying the film, is spot-on.
by Dean | Jul 27, 2016 | General
A Coast Guard boat attempts to rescue the men on a ruined oil tanker in Craig Gillespie‘s based-on-fact Disney film, The Finest Hours (2015), and when nature isn’t unpleasant in one way (a sea storm) it’s unpleasant in another (a blizzard).
Re the blizzard, it’s no holiday for Holliday—Holliday Grainger—when she’s out driving in it, worrying about her man, Joe Coast Guard (Chris Pine), out on the waves. Here, the movie owes a trifle too much to The Perfect Storm (remember Diane Lane and Mark Wahlberg?), a lesser work, but at any rate there is a dab of visual poetry when the small boat shining a searchlight on the dark tanker is followed by a shot of Grainger’s car as the snowflakes fall. Mostly, though, there is entertainment to be had.
by Dean | Jul 25, 2016 | General
George Templeton‘s The Sundowners (1950) leaves the sense that there are blanks in the film needing to be filled, but it is also very involving. Written by Alan Le May, the flick is a Western in which a man accepts the help of his criminal brother (Robert Preston) to fight the cattle rustling of a rival rancher. Alas, the brother is a murderer; he represents an immorality greater than what is evident elsewhere.
Filmed in color in Texas, the movie is unremittingly outdoorsy, a properly Big Country Western, as they should all be. Too, it avoids the soft artificiality of so many Hollywood Westerns before it (e.g. Dodge City), but is not as good as multiple oaters, such as Shane, that followed it into the Fifties and Sixties. It’s a rather unambitious affair, but no matter.
by Dean | Jul 20, 2016 | General
Cover via Amazon
In the 1977 Luis Bunuel picture, That Obscure Object of Desire, fifty-something Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is crazy about, and forever frustrated by, a much younger woman, Conchita (alternately played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina).
It has been declared, and might be widely believed, that this film concerns the uselessness of logic in our lives. I rather doubt it, for if that is the meaning, Object is a poor film for demonstrating such a thing. Consider the scene where Mathieu sees a woman holding in a baby’s blanket not an infant but a piglet! To my mind, what Bunuel is giving us is faulty absurdism and no-account surrealism.
The film’s action is punctuated by deadly terrorist acts, and here there could be a grave “message” about how people inescapably want sex and get death, especially in our absurd and agitated times. It is less digestible, though, that women in That Obscure Object of Desire are flat-out weird—Conchita is, and so is her mother—even psychotically so.
Refusing to sleep with Mathieu, Conchita nevertheless strips for him, the result being that both Bouquet and Molina expose their beautiful breasts. They do so rather excessively, but then Bunuel is a creep in this film.
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jul 19, 2016 | General
Cover of Arguing the World
Joseph Dorman‘s Arguing the World (1998) is a dandy documentary about those who constitute what we universally call the New York Intellectuals, who reached adulthood during the early years of the 20th century. The men featured are Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol.
Because their families were poor, these four gents could and did receive a free education at New York’s City College, albeit they primarily educated themselves there since so many of the profs were mediocre. A politically radical quartet they became: they were Jews at a time when, the film explains, young Jews were frequently attracted to socialism. But, except for Howe, they didn’t stay radical. Their fondness for socialism could not translate into the pro-Communism and even pro-Stalinism that other lefty intellectuals were espousing. Dorman traces the responses and attitudes of the men to such successive events as the McCarthy hearings, the rise of the New Left, and the Vietnam War protests.
The Partisan Review crowd—this is what they were; they wrote articles for that particular liberal publication. Diana Trilling appears in the film and says the members of this crowd didn’t know how to behave—“they knew how to think, not how to behave”—but to their credit Bell, et al. found they could not wholly disdain the thinking of the “vulgar” Joe McCarthy.
For his part, Irving Howe calls McCarthy a thug. A socialist to the end, Howe was also an excellent literary critic, a fact which doesn’t interest Dorman. What does interest him is that in the Fifties Howe criticized the other Intellectuals for making peace with the status quo, for “conformity,” for renouncing social radicalism. Irving Kristol wants to know whether Howe was accusing him of “conforming” to the commonly held view that America is a good country, for, after all, Kristol had always had that opinion.
A few years ago I discovered that Kristol commented in a mid-1970s essay of his on how liberalism inevitably makes “a mess of things” before the people vote it out. Clearly the former radical became anti-Left, and, in point of fact, a conservative. All four of the men, however, had to encounter the anti-anti-Communism of student rebels of the 1960s, since all four were professors. Nathan Glazer thought the students were “wrecking the university,” and Bell saw Tom Hayden as “the Richard Nixon of the Left.” They deplored the New Left’s intellectual superficiality, although in fairness they were offended by the thinking of inexperienced young people, folks no blinder, perhaps, than the Intellectuals themselves when they were young. Even so, something necessary goes on here. Dorman interviews the radical Hayden and Todd Gitlin, now middle-aged, and as James Bowman has written, “[Both] those gentlemen together with others of their persuasion are brought before the camera to display for us those endearing qualities which have done so much to create the present state of intellectual totalitarianism that prevails in American academic and intellectual life” (JamesBowman.net). Yep, that’s today’s academic life for you. Not nearly as worthy as this documentary.
by Dean | Jul 18, 2016 | General
The letters in the subdued religious film, The Letters (2015), by William Rieard, are those of Mother Teresa, and they incite a discussion between Teresa’s spiritual director and a priest from the Vatican. Coinciding with this is a dramatization of the nun’s work with the impoverished of Calcutta and her efforts to establish a new Catholic congregation, the Missionaries of Charity.
Mother Teresa eventually believed that God was not “in” her, that He had in fact abandoned her. Judging from what’s in this film—how accurate is it?—it is impossible to maintain that she did not know, and experience, God. And yet . . . what is the truth? Celeste van Exem, the spiritual director (played by Max von Sydow), suggests that the distress Teresa felt was an essential element in her ministry, but is this really true? . . . In any case, it must be admitted that van Exem’s words are an example of the movie’s unexceptional dialogue. It is pleasant, though, to watch the acting of von Sydow and Juliet Stevenson (Teresa)—among others, for sure—but aesthetically unworthy that, as one Serena Donadoni put it, “What’s missing is [Teresa’s] own anguished voice from the letters.”
