by Dean | Sep 15, 2013 | General
The recent The Spectacular Now (2013) is an adaptation of what is perhaps a fine novel by Tim Tharp, for the movie itself is agreeable. It deals honestly with young love, with primary characters Sutter and Aimee. The former is a friendly boy who drinks too much and is distinctly uneager to encounter the future. The latter, a very kind, bookish lass, becomes his girlfriend. It transpires that at bottom Sutter is self-rejecting, maybe self-loathing, which is why he denies Aimee’s words that she loves him. The secrets, the secret understandings, that bring tears; the now which leads people to disregard the future; the way people in love inexorably influence each other (as Sutter influences Aimee regarding liquor)—these are among the picture’s themes.
It’s a romantic film which never gets embarrassing or sentimental. Miles Teller enacts Sutter and knows exactly how to be a likable extrovert (maybe he is one). Plus his acting is not without depth. Shailene Woodley, as Aimee, has what John Simon said Joanna Shimkus has: “simple naturalness.” And charm. Not playing the same kind of girl she portrayed in The Descendants, Woodley is certifiably very talented. Despite a glossing-over here and there, The Spectacular Now is winning, directed wisely by Jon Ponsoldt.
English: Shailene Woodley at the Toronto International Film Festival 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 12, 2013 | General
Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975) is the one about George (Warren Beatty, co-writer and producer of the film), a self-absorbed hairdresser who fornicates with a lot of women, including the wife, the daughter and the mistress of an unsuspecting millionaire (Jack Warden)!
A seriocomic, less than credible loser is what this is, since, for one thing, who knows why the women acted by Julie Christie, Lee Grant and Goldie Hawn are so gaga over handsome but dull George? For another, the film has a political dimension, but Beatty and Ashby understand nothing about . . . well, politics. Here, sexual hedonists, especially prosperous ones, allowed Richard Nixon to gain the White House in 1968, or saw to it that he did. That is, they were less concerned about the country than about their own pleasure and satisfaction and material privilege.
A fatuous message.
Cover of Shampoo
by Dean | Sep 10, 2013 | General
No doubt about it: South Korea’s Chunhyang wins the award for Best Depiction of Connubial Love in 2000 and even preceding years. Adoration, sexual play, and sexual lovemaking between husband and wife—Chunhyang and Mongryong—are all over the first hour, as is a Korean singer’s partial narration of the film’s tale in song (and it’s sung before a modern-day audience shown in the movie).
Figures of the 18th century, Chunhyang is a courtesan’s daughter and Mongryong a governor’s son, and they marry anyway. The narrative is not that interesting, although it isn’t boring either. The life of the film is in the visuals, in Im Kwon Taek’s directorial choices. For instance, when the married pair have to part for a long while, Mongryong, ready to leave, gazes in a closeup at his cherished wife. But instead of getting the expected closeup of Chunhyang, the camera simply cuts to a medium shot with the cherished wife still in the background, and she shows Mongryong the skirt, or whatever it’s called, on which he once wrote a pledge of fidelity. A smart move, this.
The exquisite Chunhyang also offers such shots as that of a single pink rose in a pond of sparse lily pads and that of Chunhyang swinging back and forth among forest trees in a scene Watteau would have envied. Moreover, there is a honeymoon sequence with Mongryong removing layers of timid Chunhyang’s clothes in what plays like a calisthenics of nigh amusing sensuality. And the nudity isn’t gratuitous. The first Korean film I saw, Im Kwon Taek’s achievement is one of the few cinematic gems of 2000.
(In Korean with English subtitles.)
Chunhyang (2000 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 8, 2013 | General
I think it’s only a matter of time before Fatal Attraction (1987) starts aging poorly in a way an entertainment movie such as Hitchcock’s Psycho has not. Psycho, after all, is better written than FA. Director Adrian Lyne had better material with his remakes of Lolita and the Chabrol picture The Unfaithful Wife.
Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) is an arrantly insane career woman whose evil is sometimes baffling. All the same, her shenanigans are filmed by Lyne in some strikingly well-done suspense scenes, such as the one with the rabbit. The directing is nearly as impressive as Close’s penetrating performance. Fatal Attraction is entertaining without being truly good.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Sep 5, 2013 | General
Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) provides us with various levels of content. First, it is the story of a dissatisfied, certainly unloved prostitute (Giulietta Masina, masterly). Second, it is an unprofound but appealing portrait of life in 1950s Italy. Third, it presents Fellini inching toward what is to me religious or transcendent truth, albeit it is inconclusive about it.
Truth to tell, however, any religious theme in Cabiria is not quite as interesting as the prostitute’s being victimized by the diverse appetites, not always sexual, of men. But there is a remarkable contrast between these self-seeking men and the peregrine gent who helps destitute individuals living in caves (life in 1950s Italy?) That is, not all the men in the film are scoundrels.
Cabiria on the streets. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 3, 2013 | General
One Woody Allen movie after another displeases me, but not the latest one: Blue Jasmine (2013) is a triumph. A minor, imperfect triumph, but a triumph nonetheless.
Its power lies in its tragic elements, its dolorous drama. Here, to lose one’s money and a spouse’s fidelity, as Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine does, is to lose emotional stability. Happiness is fragile; this is owing not only to the follies of others but to Jasmine’s folly as well. Yet the mildly bright cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe—there are dollops of humor in the film too—suggests that life is not all bad or distressing.
The film revolves around “what Mr. Allen imagines to be the American class-divide,” as critic James Bowman put it. Those are my italics: some of what Allen exhibits is merely his imagination, nothing more. Blue Jasmine, even so, is dramatically sobering and Allen has gotten better at penning dialogue. Blanchett is brilliant at showing us a woman who is fighting for her sanity, sometimes repellent but clinging to her dignity. Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale purvey the most lived-in elan, while Sally Hawkins is fascinatingly animated and cute as Jasmine’s sister.
English: Actress Cate Blanchett at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 30, 2013 | General
When do the tastes of other people dictate too much? Director-scenarist-actor Agnes Jaoui and scenarist-actor Jean-Pierre Bacri, in The Taste of Others (2000), have some idea. When they’re not expressing this idea, they are at any rate contemplating when the tastes of others dictate a great deal.
The subject of taste is extensively covered in this French production, and included is the amatory taste in, or for, people: the desire of others. A married businessman desires his English-language tutor, a 40-year-old stage actress named Clara. The tastes of his interior decorator wife, who has arranged that the couple live in a “candy dish” home, leave the businessman cold. Beau-less Clara refuses to reciprocate but, not getting any younger for her audiences, is gradually tempted. There is a hole at the center of her existence. Likewise with a chauffeur called Bruno, who is discarded by his faraway girlfriend on whom he has cheated, anyway. Tastes at cross purposes.
The married businessman’s bodyguard, Frank, falls for a pretty barmaid with a taste for both selling and using illegal drugs and for fornication. Ex-policeman Frank will accept the latter but not the former. The thought of conventional married life appeals to the pair, but do they really have a taste for it? We know what demands Frank will be making of the barmaid.
The film has much to do with transience. Because of the taste of others, transience arises. Clara’s acting career is slowly evaporating. The businessman’s marriage gets upended. And so on. Life with its transience, however, must go on. To the self-centered interior decorator, Bruno mutters, “The world is what it is,” and since this woman insists on wearing blinders—notice how indifferent she is to owning a dog that nips at people—Bruno adds that she ought to go live in Disneyland. Disneyland is the equivalent of a candy-dish home.
I was delighted that this acclaimed comedy-drama arrived and did relatively well in Tulsa . . .
![Cover of "The Taste of Others [Region 2]&...](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PTX2255AL._SL300_.jpg "Cover of \"The Taste of Others [Region 2]&...")
Cover of The Taste of Others [Region 2]
by Dean | Aug 28, 2013 | General
The old screwball comedies were not always funny, but were still worth watching for their interesting plots. Such is the case with a late screwball comedy—Pillow Talk (1959)—except for the happy fact that this Doris Day-Rock Hudson effort manages to become funny as it goes along.
Assuredly hormones get secreted in the film, and watch out for the free-floating corruption! (Hudson plays a horndog and Thelma Ritter plays a lush.)
Cover of Pillow Talk
by Dean | Aug 26, 2013 | General
In a World . . . (2013), a new comic film by a woman named Lake Bell, is frequently droll and honest (with some atypical humor), but finally too soft and tame for my taste. The love interest for main character Carol (Bell)—an amiable, none-too-virile bore (Demetri Martin)—is the kind of man who perfectly confirms this softness. It’s good, then, when hairy Fred Melamed appears on screen to shake things up.
The main action and a subplot involving Carol’s sister Dani and her husband do not gel, and visually the film is too dark. I couldn’t get a handle on the faces of Bell and Michaela Watkins. Yes, for a long time In a World . . . has a strange appeal, the appeal of what seems like a rara avis. And the acting is delicious. Even so . . . this Bell isn’t ringing for me.
English: Lake Bell at the 2011 Comic Con in San Diego (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 23, 2013 | General
A Hard Day’s Night, directed by Richard Lester, is the Beatles’ best movie, which is not saying much. What says significantly more is that it is probably the finest screen comedy of 1964 (to me, it ain’t Dr. Strangelove). Alun Owen’s script is funny and witty, literate in a way the Beatles’ early-60s songs are not. But those songs—“And I Love Her”, “I Should Have Known Better”, etc.—make for a very engaging jukebox musical, with no missteps made in Lester’s smart “staging.”
I’ve seen this thoroughly English movie on both the big screen and DVD and, oddly, it has a way of making London seem small. So be it. A Hard Day’s Night is just for entertainment, and the Beatles themselves are not diminished.
A Hard Day’s Night poster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
