by Dean | Apr 5, 2015 | General
Directed and co-written by John Slattery, who plays Roger on Mad Men, God’s Pocket (2014) is about city crime, violence and despair in a past decade. Some of what happens is so crazily grotesque that it has elements of comedy, and yet the film ends up being a mite too dark and gloomy. It is also less honest than it thinks it is, being short here and there on necessary verisimilitude. (Why does Jeanie tolerate the smitten newspaper columnist? Why does the truck driver run a red light merely because a frantic schlub is running down the street toward him?)
Slattery does imbue the film with personal vision, though, and such actors as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Richard Jenkins are superb.
by Dean | Apr 2, 2015 | General
The 1959 Douglas Sirk film, Imitation of Life, is being shown for a while in New York City and was called by Charles Taylor in The Village Voice an “American masterpiece.”
To me, not quite. The movie’s flaws, such as Annie’s overwrought death scene, are glaring. But it is an absorbing and still provocative work about skin color and aspiration: it’s the one where the light-skinned girl who considers herself white (Susan Kohner’s Sarah Jane) is ashamed of Annie, her black mother. Indeed, it focuses on a black woman’s having to live a mere “imitation of life,” i.e. a life in which she constantly feels unloved. In this she resembles the Sandra Dee character, Susie. For Annie, though, the burden is greater.
Imitation is a remake of a 1934 film, but was directed by a man who truly cares about the material. The two actors complimented by Taylor—Kohner and Juanita Moore (Annie) —are the best, but Sandra Dee is typically endearing. That she died in 2005 at age 62 brings a painful sigh.
Cover of Imitation of Life
by Dean | Mar 31, 2015 | General
The good words about freedom, not slavery, and the pop-song romantic ardor of Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) for Moses (Charleton Heston) make The Ten Commandments (1956) seem more modern than ancient and possibly imply that God is alive at all times.
A strikingly long movie, De Mille’s epic properly has its characters wait a long time for divine deliverance, but when it comes, talk about an upstaging of the Egyptian gods and the Egyptians themselves! Yet the latter manage to keep their dignity: people of all nations can self-composedly endure.
For all its artificiality, TTC is knowingly, skillfully directed with a fun-to-watch cast (Edward G. Robinson is still vigorously credible, Anne Baxter is wonderfully moony, etc.) There is a lot of good dialogue too: Yvonne De Carlo’s Sephora tells Moses that no one can look upon the Lord’s face and live, whereupon Moses says, “How many of my people have died because He turned His face away?” Granted, the dialogue has been called portentous, but in the midst of all the distress and God-given dark prophecy here, what else would it be?
The artist’s rendering of Charlton Heston as Moses was bulked up to modern physique standards when the DVD was released (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Mar 29, 2015 | General
Robert Mitchum pursues a fellow serviceman who stole a lot of Army funds lest he himself be arrested for the crime in Don Siegel’s The Big Steal (1949).
Director Siegel generally pushed for as much plain realism as he could get in his studio-system entertainments, which accounts for the stark aggression and use of very little music in Steal. It’s a palatable chase movie, albeit not without improbabilities (Mitchum goes to the trouble of driving numerous sheep into the road in order to block the car of a man who’s tailing him, the Jane Greer character [Joan by name] fails to keep her crook of a fiance from snatching away her pistol).
All the same, the script is likable, the action fun, the ending a charmer. And, as in many other Siegel movies, the casting is beyond satisfactory. Siegel made man-pleasing movies which are also meant to please women, as witness Greer’s strong, feminine Joan.
by Dean | Mar 26, 2015 | General
One of the songs on the soundtrack of Frances Ha (reviewed above) is David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”
In its review of Frances Ha, the evangelical Christian website Movieguide.org affirms that the song’s lyrics seem to “slightly mock religion and confession while advocating putting trust in man over God.”
Er, wrong. The lyrics tell us that modern love is missing a spiritual aspect, and the line “puts my trust in God and man” has nothing to do with people being more trustworthy than the Deity. Not at all.
What’s to be done if a Christian website can err so badly about such a matter?
by Dean | Mar 25, 2015 | General
On Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2013):
A close friendship ceases to be what it was previously. The dream of becoming a professional dancer all but deflates. The friendship and the dream belong to Frances Halliday (Greta Gerwig), she who becomes acquainted with transience.
Up to a point the film is a simulacrum of an old New Wave picture, for it was made in black and white and throws in some music Georges Delerue wrote for Truffaut. Baumbach knows this to be a good mode for 1) showing us free-spiritedness (that of Frances) and 2) reminding us of the desultory nature of life. In addition, the film can be seen as an homage to Truffaut.
Frances Ha is thin and almost undramatic—far from great. I’m not sure it belongs in a movie theatre; DVD is fine. It is, nevertheless, a small and canny work of art.
by Dean | Mar 23, 2015 | General
It is remarkable how advanced cinematography and production design are these days, and how much beauty can be put into costumes. Go see Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella (2015) and you’ll agree with me.
Better, the film is as innocent as it is enchanting, leaving irony alone and driving home its moral meaning (“Have courage and be kind”) but without getting moralistic. Lily James is pleasingly sweet and never mushy as Cinderella. Derek Jacobi is ever the professional, ever the artist, with grace and poise, in the role of a king.
Cinderella is a Disney film and, notwithstanding critic Joe Morgenstern liked it, he also opined that “it’s no replacement for the studio’s 1950 animated classic.” If that’s true, I am eager to see the said classic since I decidedly esteem the current movie.
by Dean | Mar 22, 2015 | General
Peter Lawford is an inadequate singer but a spirited performer in the 1947 version of the movie musical, Good News, which co-stars June Allyson with her husky charm and splendid voice. A show about college life, the flick is emphatically social with fine ensemble work, although, to be honest, I didn’t catch the melody in Joan McCracken’s “Pass the Peace Pipe” number. Maybe I need to see it again. (McCracken, by the way, is a commanding singer-dancer.) Such songs as “Varsity Drag” and “Lucky in Love”, however, are solid show tunes, and there is some agreeable dancing. There: that’s the good news about Good News.
Cover of Good News
by Dean | Mar 19, 2015 | General
In Old West mythology–and not, perhaps, in the actual Old West—it is necessary for a greenhorn to learn how to shoot a gun. The greenhorn in Hannie Caulder (1971) is a woman (Raquel Welch’s Hannie Caulder) who is expertly taught by a bounty hunter played by Robert Culp. This goes on after Beauty meets the beasts: Hannie’s husband is murdered by three wicked thieves who in turn rape her and burn down her house. Hence a revenge story gets underway.
The gun fights are riveting, even if Burt Kennedy’s film is highly imperfect, including directorially. But, although Raquel is too much the nonactress, she is so easy on the eyes it is almost uncanny. The characters are not exactly bland, and there is even a man of sheer mystery thrown in. Re Westerns, in ’71 ’tweren’t dead yet: Hannie Caulder has a real vitality.
Cover of Hannie Caulder (1971)
by Dean | Mar 16, 2015 | General
A Danish man of God, Absalon (Thorkild Roose), allows an unrepentant practitioner of the dark arts to be executed on the stake despite his having rescued his young wife Anne’s witchcraft-practicing mother from the same fate. The year is 1623; the film is Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) , which reveals by and by just how disturbed Absalon is over his refusal to save the now slain woman. There is, however, a kind of punishment that befalls him through the actions of his wife (Lisbeth Movin) and his son (Preben Lordorff Rye), for they embark on an adulterous affair.
In Day of Wrath, adapted from a play called Anne Pedersdotter, people commit sin because it means something to them; it means a lot. It shouldn’t, but it does. Dominant here is a not-my-soul-but-my-body stance: The witch-woman (superbly acted by Anna Svierkier) is uninterested in repenting and converting, but is terrified of a physical snuffing-out. Absalon’s wife Anne refuses to renounce physical love with Martin the son. . . The religious Absalon dies without being willing and, subsequently, able to produce a resolution for these matters. Everyone in the film is standing empty-handed before God.
Dreyer’s masterpiece is the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Day of Wrath is a lesser work, but still a classic full of powerful meaning.
(In Danish with English subtitles)
