Nifty Art: The Film “Crazed Fruit” (1956)

by Dean | May 11, 2014 | General

Crazed Fruit is a Japanese film about young people living in Japan at the time the picture was made: the mid-1950s.

Predictably, the kids here distrust their elders and are cynical about their country.  Rather than being instruments of the change they think there ought to be, however, they merely do what is ordinary in every young person’s life:  they fall in love.  That is to say, Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) falls for perfidious 20-year-old Eri (Mie Kitahara), who is all but stolen from him by Haruji’s older brother Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara), and it all goes very badly.  The fruit of all this love is crazed; hence the film’s title.

Vigorous and disturbing, CF was directed, not always conventionally, by Ko Nakahira and written by Shintaro Ishihara.  The direction produces a film which is just as much a work of art as Rashomon or Tokyo Story.  Its images are as steely as a bayonet.

(In Japanese with English subtitles)

“Going Places” Simply Nose Dives

by Dean | May 8, 2014 | General

The notorious French film about two overgrown boys, worthless, who would rather steal than work and whose toys are women, Going Places (1974) has something to say about the spiritual and emotional  malnourishment whose results are degradation and drift.  But in addition to having a precarious screenplay, the film has a writer-director, Bertrand Blier, who can’t quite hide his basic misogyny any more than he wishes to hide footage of objectionable excess.

Blier is excessive about three things:  female stupidity, sex, and—remember the French actress Miou-Miou, who’s in this movie?—showing Miou-Miou’s naked breasts.  It’s an early Seventies film, all right.

(The photo is of Bertrand and Miou-Miou)

Cliffhangers Again In The “24” Reboot

by Dean | May 7, 2014 | General

Jack Bauer is back—because the Fox program, 24, is back—still hard to take but meaning well.

The first of twelve 2014 episodes is set in London, where Chloe is virtually hanging out with the Clockwork Orange bunch and, withal, must be rescued from torture by Jack.  The authorities, you see, have it in for both Jack and Chloe (again Bauer is in hiding), but no matter:  Jack has a POTUS to save on British soil.  And then some.

Keifer Sutherland doesn’t seem to have his heart in this episode, but maybe that will change.  In any event, the same old suspense and implacable drama (not always involving action) are there.  The characters hold us too.  A real go-getter of a female agent (Yvonne Strahovski) is nearly frantic to arrest “culprit” Jack.  Let’s hope the acceptable fun continues.

Jack Bauer (Photo credit: Victor Bracco)

Hitch In ’46: “Notorious”

by Dean | May 4, 2014 | General

In the 1946 Hitchcock picture, Notorious, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is a woman of scandalous character whose German father gets his comeuppance for treason.  Then she is recruited by the U.S. government agent (Cary Grant) who will fall in love with her for the mission of discovering what her father’s Nazi associates are up to in Rio de Janeiro.

The free-floating romance between Alicia and Devlin, the agent, no longer holds up (if it ever did) in Ben Hecht’s highly unlikely plot.  Devlin behaves like a fool over Alicia’s fake relationship with once-smitten Nazi, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), one of her father’s associates.  One would think he’d be grateful to her.  All the same, Bergman and Grant do have chemistry, and as usual with Hitchcock, Notorious is deftly, splendidly shot.  Plus it’s nearly as engaging as, say, Shadow of a Doubt.

Cover of Notorious

A Word About Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1996)

by Dean | May 2, 2014 | General

For all his talent, Anthony Hopkins’s—and Oliver Stone’s—Richard Nixon in 1996’s Nixon is simply weird, naught but a man with his demons.  The film itself has its stylistic demons to boot, what with all its flashiness and now-color, now-monochrome silliness.  Yes, there are a few strong scenes and some bright dialogue, but . . . well, to have Nixon discuss policy and procedures while his cabinet men frequently look as though they’re baffled and suspicious is deeply stupid.  I didn’t buy it for a second.

Of course this is not the Nixon of history, but who is he, really?  Only another unscrupulous but unfortunate, semi-tragic figure.  And he is used for a movie with basically inconsequential meaning.

Nixon (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dispensing With The Old “Wuthering Heights” Movie

by Dean | Apr 30, 2014 | General

In the William Wyler film version of Wuthering Heights (1939), starring Laurence Olivier, gone is the slow working out of Heathcliff’s ugly revenge and his final casting-off of it.  Gone is the focus on death following error and disillusionment.  Gone are the countervailing values of Catherine’s daughter, Cathy Linton, and Hareton; there are no Cathy Linton and Hareton in this film.  Gone is most of the novel’s morality.  This is not what Emily Bronte intended.  One could never get any idea of the brilliance she demonstrated in Wuthering Heights from watching this inadequate film.

Cover of Wuthering Heights

There Are Good Things To Say About “Heaven Is For Real”, The Film

by Dean | Apr 27, 2014 | General

During surgery for a ruptured appendix, young Colton Burpo reportedly had a near-death experience.  He maintains that he went to Heaven and, according to his preacher father Tod, there are things that strongly corroborate the report.  And even confirm it:  e.g., Colton’s claim that he met the sister his mother sadly miscarried years ago when the boy’s parents had never mentioned to him the miscarriage.  What the Burpos encountered has been translated to the movie screen, though first it was a book, in Randall Wallace’s Heaven Is For Real (2014), and whether the story is true or not I have no idea.  Neither do I much care.

What matters is that the film is a lively and very charitable achievement which is wholly on the side of Jesus Christ and yet resistant to various kinds of Christian teaching.  For example, there is no bona fide “prosperity” message here.  Tod Burpo (Greg Kinnear) and his wife Sonja (Kelly Reilly) are born-again believers, with two children, who continually suffer financial problems despite Tod’s job as a pastor and sundry other occupations.  Additional difficulties come along as well.

Example #2 is that the film seems to prefer universalism to the traditional concept of the damnation of the majority.  Hell is not quite for real in Heaven Is For Real, even though the real-life Colton has apparently said that only people who believe in Jesus are in Heaven.  I agree with that, but also hold that ALL people will believe in Jesus in the distant future, which accounts for everything from Jeremiah 3:17 to John 12:32.

To me this is refreshing stuff and Wallace’s film is recommendable, but in its second half it disappoints.  It becomes confused and confusing.  Still . . . wonderfully honest and persuasive are the financial-struggle scenes.  And the picture can be genuinely moving.  In addition, it is willing to show Christian Sonja getting sexy-seductive with her husband.  Reilly is sapid and energetic in her part, but even more convincing and natural is Kinnear.

Ain’t Exactly Legendary: “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas”

by Dean | Apr 17, 2014 | General

I suppose children over the years have enjoyed the animated Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003) but I, an adult, grew tired of it.

The moral story is not that bad, but midway the disaster action gets too hokey, in my view, for grownups—something a big-screen animator really ought to avoid.  Its unexpected raciness hardly matters; Cowboy Bebop: The Movie it ain’t.

It’s rather fun watching Sinbad, voiced by Brad Pitt, sparring with Miranda, voiced by Catherine Zeta-Jones, as though the two were in a 1930s screwball comedy.  Mark Steyn of the British Spectator (formerly) is right, though:  there are too many Wonder Women in today’s action movies.  That’s what Miranda is.  Why isn’t Sinbad the hero of this thing?

Cover via Amazon