by Dean | Jul 11, 2012 | General
1963’s Seduced and Abandoned, which received a Big Apple showing in 2007, was said by someone at New York magazine to make Judd Apatow’s film, Knocked Up, look tame by comparison. That it does, and like Knocked Up, Pietro Germi’s Italian gem concerns a non-slutty female who gets pregnant outside marriage.
An adroit Stefania Sandrella stars as Agnese, the seduced and abandoned one, a Sicilian girl of 16 defiled by her sister’s fiance, Peppino (Aldo Puglisi). It’s statutory rape, even though Agnese’s father, Don Vincenzo Ascalone (an outstanding Saro Urzi) gets furious with both Peppino and Agnese. As puny as a worm, Peppino refuses to marry the violated girl because now she is no longer a virgin! It’s a matter of honor.
Acridly, hilariously satirical, Seduced exposes Honor pursued and safeguarded in the face of, and regardless of, utter hypocrisy. Superficiality prevails, while that which is DIShonorable keeps coming to the fore (Peppino’s finally agreeing to marry Agnese just to stay out of jail, Don Vincenzo’s plan to murder Peppino). What Germi’s movie displays is a healthy old-style liberalism, albeit one with a limited but genuine respect for such institutions as the Catholic church and the judicial system. No love for anarchy here. It’s just a daring dark comedy, one of the finest I’ve seen.
(The film is in Italian with English subtitles.)
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Jul 9, 2012 | General
Is Canadian Idol as rotten as American Idol? Don’t know, but one of the past contestants on the Canadian version, Carly Rae Jepsen, was handed a great pop song in 2011. It’s the energetic “Call Me Maybe,” which opens with–a pizzicato?–before providing very simple synthesizer-strings for the chorus and delivering its “love” lyric.
‘Hey, I just met you / And this is crazy,” Carly Rae sings and, to be sure, the song is not entirely positive or affirmative. It hints that perhaps the girl would be better off if she were more acquainted with Mr. Ripped Jeans. “Call me, MAYBE” is the directive. The tune is quite cheery, sure, but small wonder it grinds to an unusual halt.
Of course “Call Me Maybe” is not great in the way that, say, Jewel’s “Foolish Games” or Sheryl Crow’s “My Favorite Mistake” is great. Along with being more sophisticated, these songs are affecting. “Foolish Games” is a piano-dominated lament with a superb climax, perfect for Jewel’s voice. “My Favorite Mistake” offers a mean, creaky guitar and a solemn vocal. Here and there the words are rather weak, but the music isn’t–and, like the Jewel number, it’s movingly sung. There is higher merit here than in Jepsen’s ditty, but hooray for all three songs. They’re entertaining.
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by Dean | Jul 5, 2012 | General
Though something more than a commercial Hollywood film, People Like Us (2012) is flatly unsatisfactory. I found it hard to swallow nearly everything that goes on in it, as when a deceased father leaves his neglectful, irresponsible son a boatload of money to turn over to the half-sister he has never met. True, the picture is moving, but it’s ultimately sentimental as well.
by Dean | Jul 2, 2012 | General
Kick-Ass (2010) has the title it does because that’s what Dave (Aaron Johnson), the adolescent superhero, calls himself after he immaturely decides that costumed superheroism is what someone needs to attempt and that he might as well be the someone. So he dons a rubber wetsuit and goes off to help people, often ineptly.
I said the decision is immature, but . . . is it? Two persons observe the actions of Kick-Ass, now a media star, and they themselves are superheroes–good ones. They’re a father-and-daughter team, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), the latter only eleven years old. Big Daddy’s real name is Damon, and he is an ex-cop framed by a drug lord, Frank D’Amico, and wrongfully sent to the penitentiary. During this time Damon’s wife committed suicide. Now Damon/Big Daddy wants revenge. To be sure, D’Amico is an amazingly cruel and homicidal criminal, one of whose vile assistants Kick-Ass encounters since he, the assistant, has a girlfriend on whom Kick-Ass has a crush. The damsel wants to be free of the assistant, and the teenaged crusader appreciates this.
If all this sounds insane, it is. Kick-Ass is an insane pop film, in addition to being gutsy, amusing, exciting, violent, deserving of its R rating and, to a minimal extent, politically incorrect. I loved every minute of it. Especially insane is the slaughter of all the bad guys which Hit Girl manages to achieve. With her purple wig and sometimes foul mouth, she seems to embody a troubling notion: that ours is such an evil world, even to its children, we would be better off with a youngster this powerful, if she existed, than we are without her. Hit Girl (real name: Mindy) “lives by a simple code that says evil loses,” writes John Nolte on the Big Hollywood website.
Britain’s Matthew Vaughn ably directed and, with Jane Goldman, penned the movie’s screenplay, which is based on a graphic novel whose plot may well be as uneven as the one here. Some stale stuff about Dave’s normal sexual longings arises, but in any case it adds to the movie’s general spiciness. . . Initially Aaron Johnson overacts; then he settles down and does a palatable job. Cage, usually mediocre, is engaging and earnest and virile enough as Damon/Big Daddy. Moretz is lovable in spite of everything, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse enacts D’Amico’s naughty son, masquerading as a superhero called Red Mist, effectually.
Cover of Kick-Ass
by Dean | Jun 18, 2012 | General
Much of the dialogue in Nicholas Stoller’s The Five Year Engagement (2012) is strictly for adolescents. It’s childishly raunchy. Also, it’s a movie other people have found funnier than I have.
And yet . . . it’s not bad.
Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, and Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology grad student, are forced into a five-year engagement–as they incur various problems–after Tom proposes marriage. Besides some agreeable details in the script (by Stoller and Segel), what interests us is that this is one romantic comedy that takes romantic love seriously. Such love truly exists between Tom and Violet, and the chemistry between Segel and Blunt is palpably good. Blunt, by the way, is excellent; Segel passable.
The writing doesn’t always hold up, as when Tom all but loses it over Violet’s admission that a psych professor forced a kiss on her one night. But Engagement, smutty as it is, has its charms. And it has quite a cast–hooray for Alison Brie, but let’s see more David Paymer, please.
NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 18: Actor Jason Segel walks the red carpet at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at the Ziegfeld Theatre on April 18, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
by Dean | Jun 11, 2012 | General
The overrated Richard Linklater has a good film in Bernie (2012), which is based on a true story. He collaborated on the movie’s screenplay with Skip Hollandsworth, author of a 1998 magazine article about one Bernie Tiede of Carthage, Texas.
Acted by Jack Black, Bernie is a very nice, very benevolent Christian employed as a funeral director. He befriends the elderly, wealthy Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) after her husband dies and accompanies her to all kinds of places, only to find out how selfish and monstrously controlling Marjorie is. Vexed, he finally shoots her to death and is astonished at what he’s done. After hiding the body, Bernie goes on with his life and, as critic Peter Rainer has indicated, remains an upstanding citizen in Carthage. Before long, however, the truth is discovered.
Actual townspeople comment on the popular Bernie throughout the film (by no means did they like Marjorie). To Linklater, Bernie Tiede is a basically good man, notwithstanding he snapped. It prompts a question: Why must human goodness, wherever it’s found, be interrupted, temporarily upended? Correlatively, why does human badness, such as that of Marjorie, simply continue?
I am motivated to raise another matter as well. It may be that Christian Bernie was wrong to spend so much of his time with a pronouncedly unworthy nonbeliever, especially when he started living the high life with her. He was right to love her, as a friend, but not to hang out with her. Food for thought.
Though its predictability keeps it from being great, Black’s performance is nevertheless smart and magnetic. McLaine’s acting is perfectly knowing, never false. Bernie is a meaningful comic tragedy, far superior to such Linklater films as Dazed and Confused.
English: I took photo in Carthage, TX, with Canon camera. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jun 4, 2012 | General
The potboilers continue, this time in anime and with bioterrorism. I’m talking about 2002’s Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.
The place is Mars, the year 2071. A “cowboy” is a bounty hunter, Bebop the name of the spaceship; hence we watch a team of said hunters fly the Bebop in pursuit of those bioterrorists. This is my first taste of Cowboy Bebop, which is a dubbed Japanese TV series which used to be on the Cartoon Network. Despite its imperfections the dubbed movie is cool and unassuming, far better than the ludicrous anime, Metropolis (2001). At its best it is haunting, insidious, in one scene darkly erotic.
The plot is a mess but I didn’t care, having too much fun as I did with flavorous characters and animation. The director is Shinichiro Watanabe, the animation director, a busy dude, is Toshihiro Kawamoto. Rated R, it is not a family film, but it should satisfy potboiler devotees if they don’t mind cartoon formats.
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jun 1, 2012 | General
Universal salvation, or universal reconciliation–in which, in my review of A Woman of the Pharisees, I said I believe–is considered heresy by most Christians. I am one Christian who doesn’t consider it that.
It is widely argued that the Greek word aionios, rather than meaning “everlasting,” refers to limited time, while kolasis (“punishment” in the KJV) means chastisement meant to correct a person. If this is true, the wicked, the “goats,” in Matthew 25:46 undergo corrective chastisement which occurs for a limited time, not for an eternity. Indeed, it may occur in the form of a second death (Rev. 21).
I said “if this is true,” but it’s difficult to see why it wouldn’t be true in the face of many things the Bible tells us. Jesus declared, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32). Will all people be drawn to Him after being corrected (as well as redeemed)? Does this not mean they will be drawn to Him for salvation?
In Jeremiah 3:17 we read, “At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the Lord, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts” (NIV). All nations? Sure, and why can’t this refer to all the people of all nations? All people drawn to Jesus, all people honoring the name of the Lord–and free from their evil hearts. Surely there is a nexus between the Jeremiah verse and what John points out in his first epistle: “And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (4:14). Gee, I thought He was simply the Savior of the elect–and, yes, those who are born again at the present time were elected–but John uses the phrase “Savior of the world.” Something universal seems to be on the horizon.
Do I not believe in Hell, then? No, I believe in divine judgment and in the second death (whatever it is).
King James Bible (Photo credit: Joybot)
by Dean | May 29, 2012 | General
A confection of a costume drama by Alan Taylor, The Emperor’s New Clothes (2002) is about a make-believe scheme to get the imprisoned Napoleon Bonaparte off the island of St. Helena and back in Gallic power. Taylor’s moviemaking team–Andrea Crisanti on production design, Rachel Portman on music, etc.–quit themselves honorably, and the acting is a joy. Will there ever be a better Bonaparte than Ian Holm, the epitome of variety? And the Dutch actress Iben Hjejle, speaking English, is warmly true. How come I never see her anymore?
The Emperor's New Clothes (2001 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | May 22, 2012 | General
Krystal Meyers is a Christian rock (not pop) artist, and a number of her songs has convinced me she made a pretty good showing during the Aughts. Her 2006 CD, Dying for a Heart, is only half-impressive, but at least it’s that. Too often only about 10% of merit emerges on Christian, and secular, albums. The cut called “Together” has a wonderful, nuanced guitar and is excitingly tuneful. “The Beauty of Grace” starts like a ballad but speeds up with a very attractive chorus to bestow. . . Okay, “Elvis is dead / But my King is alive” is not much of a lyric; still, “Only You Make Me Happy” (the “You” is God) turns out to be an ingratiating rocker.
Meyers has a fine voice, now winningly tomboyish, now nicely feminine, as in 2008’s “Up to You”–the feminine, I mean–which is an effective relationship song. . . I’ve never heard her first, self-titled CD but one of its tracks, “The Way to Begin,” is melodically interesting, forceful, saucy.
Spiritually-themed rock seldom gets much better than these five songs. Go and ahead and purchase Dying for a Heart. Or, if not, I sincerely believe Meyers has a place on your iPod.
Cover of Dying for a Heart
