by Dean | Feb 12, 2015 | General
So the arch-villain in Jane the Virgin is a woman—Rose (Bridget Regan). What a campy show this is! And what’s this about her husband getting killed by wet cement that Rose deliberately pours on top of him?
We love this show for its camp. But in the Chapter 13 episode, we also witness a fairly earnest, somewhat moving account of how a couple confronts the threat of a miscarriage. Yep, I’m talking about lovable Jane and hard-to-pin-down Rafael. Jane, you’ll recall, was artificially inseminated by mistake and wants to keep the baby. It was the mistake of a woman, Dr. Luisa: When women here aren’t making serious blunders, they’re perpetrating evil! There’s Rose but there is also Petra, albeit a sympathetic character now. Not that there’s a real problem with ALL the women, though. Jane is lovable; and so are her grandmother (Ivonne Coll) and, yes, once trampy mother (Andrea Navedo).
By the way, I have written that Yara Martinez (Luisa) has a conventional beauty and Yael Grobglas (Petra) an unconventional beauty. Bridget Regan’s is somewhere between the two.
Adios.
by Dean | Feb 10, 2015 | General
Reality Bites is trashy inanity not even worth reviewing.
Among other absurdities, we are supposed to believe that, after she loses her job at a TV station, Winona Ryder’s Lelaina, the valedictorian of her college class, can’t even handle a job selling hamburgers at a fast-food joint because she isn’t good enough at math (she must settle for working at a filling station instead). More, we are supposed to accept and condone that director Ben Stiller has Lelaina show up at a more or less respectable event wearing an elegant dress without a bra, so that of course her breasts will jiggle when she has an altercation with her boyfriend (played by Stiller himself) and angrily marches out of the building. Or maybe it was the producers who were responsible for this. Either way, it’s crass.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Feb 8, 2015 | General
Lacey Chabert plays Gwyneth—she whom God is pursuing—in Christian Mingle and is wonderful. She delights by handling comedy even more confidently than she did in Mean Girls, and she is “natural” enough for a romance picture, for the role of lovelorn professional. Her acting as varied as it should be, when she innocently declares, “I want Jesus in my life,” it is touching. Unsurprisingly, there is too much product placement in Mingle—that of ChristianMingle.com—but not too much Chabert.
I say again that religious content in Bernsen’s film is very unsubtle, but how much does this matter? Does it matter at all? Unsubtlety here might have its own fascination, particularly since the film, for all its shortcomings, avoids becoming preachy. Christian Mingle is sort of a curio.
English: American voice actress Lacey Chabert, former voice actor of Meg Griffin, a Family Guy character. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 5, 2015 | General
Jesus to His followers: “Ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.”
Well, not yet. In America, there is often something different going on. Gwyneth, the chief character in Christian Mingle (2014), signs up with Christian Mingle, an actual dating website for born-again folks, and meets regenerate Paul Wood, becoming infatuated with him. This she does despite being secular and unchurched (she just wants to meet a decent guy)—a fact she hides from her beau-to-be lest he reject her. Lest he reject her!
The pretense proceeds apace, and there are funny moments—Mingle is a low-key comedy—but Gwyneth can’t keep it up. It’s a sure thing, even so, that nature has trumped the act of refusing a devout person. Now it is time for spiritual awakening to trump nature. The movie has less to do with Gwyneth’s romantic problems than with God’s pursuit of her.
Corbin Bernsen wrote and directed this picture, and in terms of religion it is very unsubtle. Further, the denouement and the part before that are not as satisfying as what precedes them. . . I will write about the acting and more after I see Christian Mingle a second time. Wait for the next post.
by Dean | Feb 3, 2015 | General
Cover of The Seduction of Mimi
The way Communist ideology is smiled on in 1974’s The Seduction of Mimi, a film by Italy’s Lina Wertmuller, is more offensive than the clunky vulgarity here. But I disesteem them both, and I disesteem Wertmuller. That said, I must admit the film is positively riveting because it is funnily satirical as well as oddly enamored of romance—and because it stars Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. Oh, how I wish some of its satiric targets had been different! How I wish there hadn’t been so much crud! If you want to take the movie’s fascinating little trip, go ahead, but the crud is there. Thank you, Ms. Wertmuller, but for very little.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
by Dean | Jan 30, 2015 | General
I keep hearing on the radio a newish Maroon 5 song called “Animals,” which sounds a lot like earlier Maroon 5 songs (e.g. “One More Night”), but is actually inferior to them. And here’s an example of the lyrics: “But don’t deny the animal / That comes alive when I’m inside you.” How stupidly low! Can you say creative bankruptcy?
Then there’s Taylor Swift, whose “Blank Space” is just as catchy as her “Shake It Off” but is a better song. The words are better (her femme fatale says, ‘I can make the bad guys good for a weekend”), the music more memorable. Her best ditties are the pop versions of “Love Story,” “Tears on my Guitar,” ”Fifteen,” ”I Knew You Were Trouble,” and, yes, probably ”Blank Space” (the pop version being the only version of this one).
Cover of Taylor Swift
by Dean | Jan 28, 2015 | General
The Two Faces of January (2014) is an old-style thriller, or Technicolor film noir, set in 1962 and dealing with an elegant swindler who unknowingly digs a deep hole for himself and his wife.
Original screenplays usually don’t tell a story this meritorious, and sure enough the flick is an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (directed by Hossein Amini). With locations of Crete and Athens, it is a gorgeous, humorless Beat the Devil, a classy near-potboiler.
Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac are humanizingly true as unscrupulous men, but Kirsten Dunst is not as effective as she has been in the recent past. Although she certainly looks like an early 60s glamour puss, her acting is too routine, too ordinary.
I wish to add January to my list of Honorable Mention movies for 2014. Critics who have yammered about it are the kind who would give a pass to old, better-known Hollywood thrillers with the same “defects.”
by Dean | Jan 26, 2015 | General
The Fantasticks ran in New York from 1960 to 2001, and has been revived there of late.
This Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical has a certain artistic purity—not just merit but purity—to complement the lovely ballads and nice love story. It’s small but endearing. Not unserious either, although all those Big Apple audiences might not have cared about that. It has to do with love’s protectiveness when the surrounding world is harsh. The libretto can be hokey, but it is also literate. Satisfying enough to be more than literate are such songs as “Try to Remember,” “Much More” and “It Depends On What You Pay,” wherein the last of which the repeated word rape never means more than abduction.
The Fantasticks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jan 25, 2015 | General
The Iraq War was disturbing; it is so in American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood and scripted by Jason Hall. It was also a war where jihadist savages needed, for more reasons than one, to be killed, and the American sniper of the movie, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), snuffs out well over a hundred of them. Though a mere two-dimensional character, Kyle at any rate can be as stressed as he is strong, as finally shaken as he is patriotic. Sniper is an interesting war movie, stark and stirring and bloody and anti-jihadist. One wishes there was someone like Kyle to take out the members of ISIS.
For the most part the screenplay is expertly written, and plenty of good work issues from Eastwood. I’d like to see the film again before I comment on the acting.
It is now known that over 3,000 chemical weapons were found by coalition soldiers in Iraq (Karl Rove chose to communicate nothing about them). Men like Kyle did not fight in this disturbing war in vain.
English: Clint Eastwood at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jan 22, 2015 | General
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the Frank Capra picture, is a strange work of art. Perhaps never has sentimentality been so smartly and lovingly filmed, never has facile optimism been so impressively crafted.
Patently the film is faulty. Indeed, it’s stupid about money lending practices, i.e. those of the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) is callous, but he’s right to say, “It isn’t fair to the little people to encourage them to live beyond their means.” Still, it is the humane family man, George Bailey (James Stewart), and not Potter, who must triumph, who—in truth—must be on his way to being as content as his father was. It’s an enticing trip—with images as lovely as those in The Magnificent Ambersons. I’m not sure it’s one of Capra’s best movies, however, although it is clearly more personal than, say, It Happened One Night.
It’s a Wonderful Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
