by Dean | Oct 18, 2012 | General
Some of the lame stuff Amy Grant has given us many moons ago is almost nonexistent on her 1991 recording, Heart in Motion, a worthy achievement. It isn’t overtly Christian except in the gospel-pop song at the end, “Hope Set High,” but implications of belief plainly abound.
“Good For Me” is a walking-on-sunshine ditty with no-nonsense percussion. “Baby Baby” is as feisty as it is pleasant. The charming “Galileo” is sort of a grade-school song with midtempo hooks (and it’s a love song: “You are starlight / I’m Galileo”). A heartfelt item with verve, “Ask Me” is not so much about the sexual abuse of a child—although it is—as spiritual deliverance through conversion.
The hit track, “Every Heartbeat”, is a good tune but vocally Grant can’t quite manage it. (She’s an imperfect singer.) Unlike “I Will Remember You,” which satisfies, “You’re Not Alone” is a bore, and a couple of others don’t cut it either. Still, this may be Amy’s best album. The finest cut on it is “That’s What Love Is For,” whose melody and harmony Gershwin and Irving Berlin would have envied. It comes on strong but not ill-fittingly so, and it boasts a decent lyric: “Sometimes I wonder if we really feel the same / Why we can be unkind.” It is only in the mind of a genuine and concerned Lover that such a thought springs up.
Heart in Motion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Oct 15, 2012 | General
The first Atlas Shrugged movie was merely good (if faulty); Atlas Shrugged Part 2 (2012) is terrific.
The word “socialism” is never uttered in the two films, but a corporation-controlling and anti-business U.S. government has emerged and is hitting hard the likes of businesswoman Dagny Taggart. In fact, it is a putatively humanitarian government which desperately tries to cure the country’s economic distress, but is no damn good at it.
The director this time is John Putch, whose sense of composition is finer than that of the first movie’s director. There is effective editing by John Gilbert, even if the lighting by cinematographer Ross Berryman sometimes mars the picture. The cast is new too, with a lovely Samantha Mathis, convincing as a CEO, now enacting Dagny. Jason Beghe has a coarse voice but is commandingly solid as Henry Reardon, the defiant owner of a steel business.
Atlas is an oddity: With its train travel and the fact that no one wears hip clothes, etc., it has one foot in the 1950s, when Ayn Rand’s novel was published, and one foot in the 21st century. Consider the fossil fuel-replacing motor! For all this, the filmmakers manage to maintain more political understanding and honesty than film critics who spurned Part 2 will ever know.
Atlas Shrugged (Photo credit: pursuethepassion)
by Dean | Oct 8, 2012 | General
Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal are thoroughly credible in 2012’s Won’t Back Down, in which two single mothers, one of them a teacher, become unlikely pro-education activists. They seek to gain school board approval to turn a miserably failing grade school into their own union-free establishment (charter?), thereby bucking appalled union officials.
The film doesn’t stint on showing us how junky public schools have become, and as one who neither fully trusts nor fully respects labor unions, including teachers’ unions, I admire the direction WBD goes in. Nevertheless, it needs to disclose more of what the local union is doing to hinder the good teachers at Adams Elementary from teaching well. It’s not as clear as it should be.
The directing and the utterly appropriate cinematography are stronger than the movie’s script, but the film is robust and interesting. And the always running working-class gal and loving mother Miss Gyllenhaal creates simply cannot be improved on.
Director and co-writer: Daniel Barnz
NEW YORK, NY – AUGUST 03: Actresses Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis attend the ‘Won’t Back Down’ screening at NYIT Auditorium on August 3, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
by Dean | Oct 4, 2012 | General
Most of the music (incidental) Felix Mendelssohn composed for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream I have not heard. But if one has enjoyed the Scherzo and the ever-famous “Wedding March”, which I have heard, even more, surely, will he or she relish the Overture the German master wrote for the play–and wrote when he was only seventeen.
It is extraordinary music. Eleven minutes long, it is all youthful elan as it darts and gallops. Now comic, now majestic and perfect in structure, this, and offering a most gratifying return to theme. I have heard the Berlin Philharmonic performance, on CD, many times.
Cover of Felix Mendelssohn
by Dean | Sep 25, 2012 | General
On The Savages (2007):
A feckless father is now an aging creature of spleen and mental brokenness. He has dementia, and his grownup offspring, Jon Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his sister Wendy (Laura Linney), must locate an acceptable nursing home for him. They themselves have made little personal progress, though; albeit without spleen, they themselves are feckless. Example: the primary character here, 39-year-old Wendy is rightly chided by Jon for stealing from the federal government after applying for, and getting, FEMA money owing to 9/11 (all her temp jobs were close to Ground Zero, you see). Moreover, she is carrying on with a married man who wants her only for physical intimacy.
Still, Jon and Wendy know they are morally required to be humane to their father. Constantly they feel the tug of selfishness and the tug of responsibility. In a more sympathetic light, they try to preserve happiness and sanity as well as they can and are not wholly successful. At the end of this Tamara Jenkins film, there is no resolution regarding Wendy’s frequent lying and other moral flaws. Jenkins’s people do not change, which is too bad. The Savages would be stronger if at least one of them did.
Not surprisingly, the Savages are involved with the arts, with drama. No doubt they themselves are artists. A drama professor, Jon is working on a biography of Bertolt Brecht (he, too, was a savage), and Wendy is an aspiring playwright. All this probably reflects, on Jenkins’s part, a fondness for art and a desire to create it. And, yes, her movie is an artwork. Minor but still art. Not Brecht but still art. Support the arts and see it.
The Savages (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 20, 2012 | General
Most of the finest were written a couple of decades (or more) ago.
For instance, “A Strange Way to Save the World,” by the Christian group 4Him, came out during the ’80s. Here, the singer marvels that God has chosen lowly Mary, a manger, etc. as a means to establishing the greatest thing the world could ever receive. The lead vocal is likable and mild-mannered, the music spare in parts and lovely, while the lyrics are intelligent. “Strange Way” is considered a Christmas song but it’s no more or less than a Christian song, and a great one at that.
The Twila Paris number, “We Bow Down,” also from the ’80s, is one of the most melodic worship songs to come down the pike. Impossible to tell which is more delicate—Paris’s voice or the music. . . A quasi-rock song—plenty of synthesizer here—Petra’s “Love” is a shimmering delight. John Schlitt’s singing is carefree and upper register-friendly. As for the words, they’re only fair but the melody shines.
The heartfelt ballad, “Just Because You Are,” by Phillip Sandifer, is nigh beautiful. It’s about the believer’s duty to love & worship God simply because HE IS. The tune never builds into anything schmaltzy or overripe, and the vocals are down-to-earth and enticing. Good show. . . Like the 4Him song, Chris Rice’s “Smile” is a small masterpiece, released during the Aughts. Bongos introduce the song and there’s a slow tempo until the happy chorus. Nothing original is being said–Chris is waiting to see Christ’s smile in Heaven–but something catchy and meaningful obtains.
For all the pop-ditty limitations, this is music of light. It can all be heard on YouTube.
The members of Petra before the band retired in 2006 (l-r): Paul Simmons, John Schlitt, Bob Hartman, Greg Bailey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 13, 2012 | General
The other night I saw the 1946 Orson Welles film, The Stranger, about the tracking down of a Nazi war criminal in a small American town. It’s a seriously flawed picture, but one which ought to be seen for the same reason The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, and Othello ought to be seen (never mind Touch of Evil)–it was made by Orson Welles.
Whatever their defects, these films remind us of Welles’ concern about the distinction between art and craft in cinema. They show us what style, however flamboyant, in old-time moviemaking really means, and how much Welles cared about the sorrow and gravity of dramatic tragedy. Just like Citizen Kane, of course.
English: Screenshot of Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai trailer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Sep 10, 2012 | General
John Hillcoat’s Lawless (2012), written by Nick Cave, is little more than an entertainment, but entertain it does. It’s about backwoods bootleggers during the Prohibition era and unscrupulous law officers who desire a piece of the action. Cave, however, is not much of a screenwriter. Sometimes the script gets flimsy (why do those thugs who cut Tom Hardy’s throat remain for a while on his property instead of fleeing?) and the film is too brutal (Tom Hardy’s character in particular is too brutal). Also, characterization here is poor, although that’s usually the case in this kind of film nowadays.
The look of the film is superb; it’s a transportingly made period piece. There are several strong scenes, such as one in a Mennonite church during a foot-washing.
See Lawless if you wish. It’s highly imperfect, but it does have some merits.
Tom Hardy (Photo credit: honeyfitz)
by Dean | Sep 4, 2012 | General
Ghost World (2001), by Terry Zwigoff, based on the underground comix of Daniel Clowes, mainly has to do with Enid (Thora Birch), a reserved, near-misanthropic adolescent just out of high school and, like her friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), a misfit.
Both girls decline to go to college but whereas Rebecca gets a lasting job, Enid does not. She blows it with her employers, and also innocently spoils her chance to enroll in an art school. After playing a cruel joke on a nerdy man called Seymour (Steve Buscemi), also a misfit, Enid sympathetically befriends him and tries to find him a girlfriend. By and by she beds him, but Seymour’s not the man for her. Enid is increasingly dissatisfied, still friends with Rebecca in spite of a probable shriveling of their relationship in the future. The misfit is isolated–and possibly just as “clueless” as at first she believes Seymour to be.
The movie caustically satirizes sentimental blather and pretentious attitudes toward art, both of which Enid and Rebecca hate. Enid’s summer-school art teacher embodies the latter. A “ghost world” may well be one where things are insubstantial, and, to be sure, sentimental blather and pretentiousness are that. It is also, perhaps, a world where people long to make a connection with other people but do not do so, quite. This describes Seymour’s liaison with the girlfriend he finally obtains, and even his liaison with Enid. In fact, what Zwigoff and Clowes show us are people longing to make this connection without particularly liking other people. Example: Enid.
Ghost World discards political correctness. For instance, a silly twisted clothes-hanger sculpture is said by the student who made it to express a belief in a woman’s right to choose. We may infer from this film that those in our day who wish to politicize everything could never rely on politics to remake the world Enid and Seymour live in. Nor does it help that sardonic Enid loses much of whatever stature, whatever appeal, she has for us at the movie’s beginning. At one point she informs an old gent named Norman that the bus line where he daily waits for a bus has been discontinued. Norman replies, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” How true! This 18-year-old girl, we discover, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Or, rather, sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t. Then again, she’s only 18 years old.
The conclusion is a bit of a surreal cheat, and I’m not sure Seymour would have flat-out dismissed the pretty real-estate agent he is dating. Oh well: Ghost World is smart, funny and unusual. The first time I saw it I liked it a lot; the second time, though, it waned on me. Then the third time I saw it, it returned to its former plateau. (Yea!) Birch is flawless (attractive too) as Enid, Johansson is okay–in this film. In other films she is simply lackluster. Buscemi is the opposite of lackluster.
Ghost World (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 30, 2012 | General
An Indian film (with English subtitles) directed by Anurag Basu, Kites (2009) may be the most romantic lovers-on-the-lam movie ever made.
Not that the romance doesn’t become tedious, however, although an amorous scene in the attic of an empty house, with J. and Natasha in their wedding clothes, is moving.
J. (Hrithik Roshan) is a con man from India, Natasha (Barbara Mori) a Mexican seduced away from a Vegas reprobate. The style is too blatant and garish, but there is fun to be had. In its non-tedious action scenes, for example, Kites has a few things in common with that little Susan Sarandon-Geena Davis movie of the early ’90s, but Thelma and Louise it ain’t.
It’s probably better, for all the mistakes Basu made. I mean it.
Kites (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
