by Dean | Apr 29, 2015 | General
Dealing with Latino teenagers, Peter Sollett’s largely successful Raising Victor Vargas (2002) is a serious, casual, charitable picture with themes. The themes are the hardship of raising highly imperfect children when you, the guardian, are too demanding and a bit of a crank; the lure of young love as fearful as it is inexorable; and the odd, fascinating vicissitudes of life. For a 27-year-old director-writer, Sollett has done something indubitably impressive. Non- and semi-professionals make up the fine cast, and canny control lies behind the multiple shots. Sollett’s script is character-driven and unsentimental.
Cover of Raising Victor Vargas
by Dean | Apr 28, 2015 | General
The actors in this week’s Jane the Virgin (April 27) really get to emote. And why wouldn’t they? The episode, Chapter 20, is replete with figurative wrestling matches as well as a literal one (which, like everything else in the show, is not allowed to become boring). Petra, egregiously lying, locks horns with Jane, and there is unfortunate stuff between Xiomara and Rogelio too. Meanwhile, Magda (Priscilla Barnes) does not yet get her comeuppance since an illegal-immigrant wrinkle is tossed in to complicate matters. (Inevitable, huh?)
Speaking of emoting, it is flatly gratifying what kind of range Gina Rodriguez (Jane) exhibits in this episode. Jaime Camil, Andrea Navedo and a couple of others are able to handle the range requirement also. As a police detective, Brett Dier is surprisingly believable, and Barnes is chillingly sober.
by Dean | Apr 26, 2015 | General
The Jaume Collet-Serra movie, Run All Night (2015), held me for a long time with its rowdy drama (now that’s a car chase sequence), but then it turned into a tired Liam Neeson picture rather too much like one of the Taken flicks.
The mobster’s cruel disloyalty to a friend is an okay subject, but Liam-and-his-film-family, with their need to work things out, isn’t. Yep, there’s an estranged son. Kill me now, mobster!
by Dean | Apr 22, 2015 | General
I’ve been staying away from novels that are primarily about human relationships. I see all the relationships, mostly male-female, I need to see on the CW’s Jane the Virgin.
Episode 19 (a.k.a. Chapter 19) on Monday night, April 20th, brought us breakups: between Jane and Rafael, et al., and was an especially interesting episode. And a rich one. Now that Jane is sad and free, her ex-fiance Michael is again drawn to her—and, I might add, drawn away from his fellow police officer Nadine, who deliberately blows it in the pair’s current case. She has fears, you see: some of these people encounter some really deplorable violence. Ask Petra (still winning our sympathy). Ask Grandma Alba. (Will Magda receive her comeuppance?)
Fyi, in Episode 19 Jane skinny dips—pregnant belly not visible—and wants to lose her virginity. But doesn’t. Why would she? The show is called Jane the VIRGIN.
Enjoy.
by Dean | Apr 20, 2015 | General
The plot of the 1983 Robert Bresson film, L’Argent (“Money”) is sometimes weak, and the same old Bressonian defects emerge as well, yet none of this renders the picture unwatchable or unmemorable. Unlike, say, Mouchette, it is one of the Frenchman’s better efforts.
The plot, to use Vincent Canby’s description, is about “Yvon, a young truck driver framed by some bourgeois shopkeepers who identify him as the source of counterfeit notes.” But Yvon is not the source; he is no counterfeiter, and he loses everything. Thematically the film is about: when an ordinary person, after being abused, descends into horribly sinful crime; the deep corruption in society; and virtue and saintliness, however rare and offhanded. Over and above, regardless of the evil that men have historically done with God, L’Argent implies it is certifiable in the modern world that men follow evil paths without God.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of L’ Argent
by Dean | Apr 19, 2015 | General
He looks too old for the part, but John Cassavetes is vividly first-rate as an 18-year-old gang leader in Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (1956).
Here, a trio of punks plan to murder a working-class gent who caused a fellow street tough to be arrested. Frankie (Cassavetes), the only punk who is never reluctant about the plan, is utterly hardhearted and seemingly unreachable. Siegel’s direction is characteristically good, though screenwriter Reginald Rose creates a liberal-psychotherapeutic vision which is never distracting but a little less than realistic. Dirty Harry, another Siegel picture, this ain’t. Harry, however, is asinine. Crime in the Streets is a decent work, grounded and working on the emotions. . . Siegel’s late 40s and 50s films are often naturalistically finer and more appealing than his later, post-censorship items.
by Dean | Apr 13, 2015 | General
1. Okay, so we see the ultimate that a movie can do with cars—in Furious 7 (2015), the seventh The Fast and the Furious pic—when five sleek autos drive out of a plane and drop by parachute to the mountain road below. Subsequently, of course, the drivers zoom them away. Talk about durability.
Don’t think the parachute drop is the stupidest thing in the movie. It’s just the most visually fun, in a concoction with a lot of amusement-park visuals.
2. Furious 7 brought me back to my natural appreciation for dark-skinned young women in the form of Ramsey, the computer hacker played by black-and-British Nathalie Emmanuel. Nice to see you nudged out of the way, Michelle Rodriguez (Letty). Emmanuel is before us, good looks, sensitive face and all. And, yes, after all the life-threatening peril, her character is pleased to slip into a bikini for a while. What’s more, she’s too good for that boring imbecile enacted by Tyrese Gibson.
3. Cold reality, man: Paul Walker (Brian) died in a horrifying car wreck. The movie is dedicated to him. Paul, you will be missed.
by Dean | Apr 12, 2015 | General
Sullivan’s Travels (1941) produces an appreciable number of laughs, especially in its big slapstick sequence, before being deprived of its comedic tone. It’s a Preston Sturges picture, less successful than The Palm Beach Story and The Great McGinty but still engaging and unique, still the opus of a recherche artist.
Joel McCrea is not bad as a Hollywood director, but Veronica Lake, without nuance or charm, is not good as an aspiring actress. A shame.
Sturges’s film is a comedy (for the most part) that tells us there is something to be said for comedy. Also that there is much to be said for wealth, wherever it exists, over against poverty. Sure ’nuff.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Apr 9, 2015 | General
The 1971 film Such Good Friends, by Otto Preminger, is like a comic An Unmarried Woman with a sick and dying husband. The wife of this husband, Julie (Dyan Cannon), firmly and understandably sees her marriage to Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) as a good one. But then his health starts failing badly before Julie’s obsession with his welfare is supplanted by anguish over the relationship per se. At first—and at later moments too—the film is a sex comedy, presently turning into a comedy plain and simple: one with pathos.
The script is by Elaine May (using the pseudonym of Esther Dale), adapting a novel by Lois Gould, and there are trenchant, witty lines. Occasionally, however, the flick is distasteful: I don’t want to see James Coco in his underwear waiting to be fellated. Friends, further, can be preposterous. . . Dyan Cannon does not flesh out her character memorably, as do Coco and Ken Howard. The music, too, sometimes fails to cut it. I disagree with the internet reviewer who found the film dull, but it is my opinion that, in spite of its several pleasures, Such Good Friends is forgettable.
by Dean | Apr 7, 2015 | General
Hilary Mantel’s two novels about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII have been transferred to television with the title of Wolf Hall, and the first episode (on PBS) was—is—tastefully and intelligently presented. At present Cromwell (Mark Rylance) is secretary to Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce, and great) and although the corrupt clergyman likes him, hardly anyone else does. A stand-offish Protestant, smart and willful, he will, I assume from what history exposes, turn ruthless.
Mantel’s books are not for me, but I’m looking forward to seeing further episodes of Wolf Hall. Probably it will be just as, or more, enjoyable than the Showtime series, The Tudors, and less sensationalistic. The first episode, in fact, has the touch of art.
