by Dean | Mar 12, 2015 | General
Something terrible this way comes: comes to a woman living in rural China in the 1920s. She becomes the slave wife—a purchased spouse—of an old man who savagely beats her when she cannot bear him a male heir. Unbeknownst to him, the fault is his, not hers. In despair of her life, she seduces the old man’s adopted nephew, who fornicates with and comes to love her (and she him). But Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s pessimism kicks in; Ju Dou, his 1990 film, ends unhappily. It isn’t just the old man who is oppressive; it is society, this society. It is despotism.
In the title part, Gong Li is unerring as sufferer and seducer. Zhang is an enormously gifted tragedian with all the right camera moves. No, not moves; placement.
by Dean | Mar 9, 2015 | General
The new high school comedy, The DUFF (2015), is entertaining, but very frequently it does not ring true. Mae Whitman nearly overacts but (oh well) this is a comedy, so in truth she is amusingly watchable, pleasantly straightforward.
Although a crummy self-esteem message concludes the film, a Slate.com writer has sincerely praised The DUFF for “offering the most realistic, interesting depiction of cyberbullying we’ve ever seen.” Doubtless this is true, and is one of the film’s few virtues.
by Dean | Mar 8, 2015 | General
There is no excuse for the Nick Roeg movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), constantly making no sense. What’s more, this arty sci-fi product based on Walter Tevis’s novel is a nudie show with too much sex: David Bowie, whose acting is undistinguished, eventually exposes his offputting phallus. If Candy Clark (of American Graffiti fame) was underused by Hollywood after this film, it may be because it didn’t care for her unspectacular naked body. Roeg’s film, then, is a rather homely nudie show.
It is, in fact, another mid-Seventies piece of cinematic rottenness, like The Last Woman, That Obscure Object of Desire and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Mar 5, 2015 | General
Russian Dolls (2005), a Cedric Klapisch picture from France, is the perfect sequel to his hokey L’Auberge Espagnole because it itself is not hokey and is acceptably written. All it does, really, is catch up with Xavier and a few others five years after their Barcelona experiences, but provides some laughs and a certain air of sadness while avoiding the European Union dopiness of L’Auberge. Typically, Klapisch’s directing is fancy and childlike, the beguiling credit sequence setting the tone. The acting, even that of Audrey Tautou, pleases mightily. Romain Duris loses himself in the Xavier part and gets completely naked for Klapisch. I mean literally, of course.
Russian Dolls is French bounty.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of Russian Dolls
by Dean | Mar 3, 2015 | General
Atlantic City (1981), directed by Louis Malle and written by John Guare, shows us an old mobster of sorts who finds the beloved casinos of Atlantic City, N.J. too wholesome. Curiously, he himself, a big believer in Protecting The Women with whom he associates, is basically a coward (and not the killer he says he is). One of these women is a food-service worker, Sally, who dreams of becoming a croupier and thus desires—and here she resembles Lou, the mobster—a higher status for herself than she has ever had. It is Lou’s desire to prove he is tough enough to withstand the punks. In THIS exists something that is not too wholesome, but what small ambitions people consistently have!
Although Burt Lancaster is slightly miscast as a criminal and shows little depth, he is passable. Better are Susan Sarandon (Sally) and Kate Reid, both solid and pleb-realistic. Guare’s screenplay is unusual without being genuinely strange; it is clear-cut and faintly menacing. The film as a whole has “a lovely fizziness,” Pauline Kael said.
by Dean | Mar 1, 2015 | General
I hated the first Hunger Games movie and never saw the second one. As for the third film, Mockingjay, Part I (2014) . . . I got tired of the idol worship heaped by the people of District 13 on Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and was glad the boring Julianne Moore character, the District 13 leader, wasn’t on screen more than she was. When the gun-less rebels charge the armed soldiers of the heinous Capitol in order to leave several trunks full of explosives that will blow up a dam, why didn’t they fashion some explosives that would blow up the soldiers? It would have saved some rebels’ lives if they had. And would the vicious President Snow (Donald Sutherland) really use a brainwashed Peeta as a weapon solely meant to bring down Katniss?
Also, Natalie Dormer should have been allowed to use her native British accent instead of an American one.
Yep, there are a lotta things I don’t like about this movie, but it is fairly gripping. And it’s effectively dark. In large measure the world depicted is no different from a world of ISIS brutality and North Korean vileness. All the same, it’s very possible I won’t be seeing Mockingjay, Part II.
The Hunger Games (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 26, 2015 | General
A smart swipe at the Communist system in Hungary, before the fall of that system, issues from Love, one of the finest films of the Seventies. A jailed political dissident provides moviemaker Karoly Makk with a fulcrum for exploring the theme of marital and family love. That is, we witness love as an attitude, love as an emotion, love when it refuses to collapse.
The two main figures are the dissident’s wife and his aging mother, the latter of whom is semi-bitchy but still pitiable. She dies before the Hungarian government releases her hapless son, who must now return to loving his hapless wife (sophisticatedly played by Mari Torocsik). Talented Makk directed with prodigious imagination.
(In Hungarian with English subtitles)
by Dean | Feb 22, 2015 | General
In House of Sand and Fog (2003), Jennifer Connelly plays Kathy, a discontent ex-boozer evicted by mistake from the house her father left her.
Ben Kingsley plays Colonel Behrani, once in the Iranian army and now an American citizen, who buys the seized house, orders a bit of remodeling, and then puts it on the market at an outrageous price. The county refuses to buy it back for such a sum despite its incompetent conduct toward Kathy, and she, poor lass, must remain homeless. A helper, Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard), comes to her aid, even starting a love affair with the evictee, but is another woman’s husband. His vigilante actions only make matters worse. Kathy, to be sure, fights for her property but, although she gains some sympathy from Behrani and his family, feels helpless and suicidal.
‘Tis a world out of joint, with all its lost souls, in Vadim Perelman’s film. The 1999 book by Andre Dubus III, of which this is an adaptation, is yet another novel I have not read, but I hope it is more convincing than the last one-third of this movie. House becomes unwieldy, loses its way. The other two-thirds, however, are extraordinarily good: a true, effective American film for adults. It moves at a perfect speed and exhibits an interesting verisimilitude. It is sad without being depressing. Neither the sex nor the brief nudity is gratuitous.
For Connelly’s first-rate performance—she is equal parts fragility and fed-up bluntness—and for the first hour and a half of the picture, I recommend House of Sand and Fog—really, a potential masterpiece.
Cover of House of Sand and Fog
by Dean | Feb 18, 2015 | General
Flirting with Disaster (2010) is a likable Christian novel for young people written by Sandra Byrd, the author of The Secret Keeper, which I reviewed on this site. Keeper is mainly for adults, Disaster can be enjoyed by adults as it chronicles the actions of Savvy Smith, an American girl in London who is 15 years old and fits right in among her English peers.
Ordinary in many ways, Savvy is also devoted to Christ, facing the challenge of paying no mind to what others believe about luck and horoscopes, even when something good happens after a chain-text message is passed on. Sending such a message is “flirting with disaster”—a hackneyed title for this book—since God is forever sovereign over “fortune.” Savvy need not believe in an impersonal force like fortune when she is always surrounded by personal ones, of whom God, the object of her faith, is the most prominent.
Hackneyed title or not, Byrd’s novel is clever and genial. It belongs to a series called London Confidential and, although I likely will not read the other three books in the series, that in no way means the reader of this review should not.
English: mobile phone text message (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 16, 2015 | General
In the 1930s, people had the Marx Brothers for their dose of wild farce. In the early 2000s, they have SpongeBob Squarepants, considerably weirder and even crazier than Groucho and Co. One look at that female squirrel in her Treedome under the sea and you realize that. But this particular wild farce isn’t for everyone: it’s animated—and now on a movie screen, not a TV screen, for the second time.
2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water serves up a plot too fanciful to keep up with and a bad-guy pirate (who runs his ship on Auto Pirate) acted by Antonio Banderas. The cartoon farce rolls on until it is joined by a comparatively tame live action sequence on the beach, and then by some pallid “superhero” action. So the movie isn’t perfect, but it is utterly, delightfully mirthful. And it has a sweetly fey hero in . . . an underwater sponge.
SpongeBob SquarePants (character) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
