by Dean | Apr 29, 2015 | General
Dealing with Latino teenagers, Peter Sollett’s largely successful Raising Victor Vargas (2002) is a serious, casual, charitable picture with themes. The themes are the hardship of raising highly imperfect children when you, the guardian, are too demanding and a bit of a crank; the lure of young love as fearful as it is inexorable; and the odd, fascinating vicissitudes of life. For a 27-year-old director-writer, Sollett has done something indubitably impressive. Non- and semi-professionals make up the fine cast, and canny control lies behind the multiple shots. Sollett’s script is character-driven and unsentimental.
Cover of Raising Victor Vargas
by Dean | Apr 28, 2015 | General
The actors in this week’s Jane the Virgin (April 27) really get to emote. And why wouldn’t they? The episode, Chapter 20, is replete with figurative wrestling matches as well as a literal one (which, like everything else in the show, is not allowed to become boring). Petra, egregiously lying, locks horns with Jane, and there is unfortunate stuff between Xiomara and Rogelio too. Meanwhile, Magda (Priscilla Barnes) does not yet get her comeuppance since an illegal-immigrant wrinkle is tossed in to complicate matters. (Inevitable, huh?)
Speaking of emoting, it is flatly gratifying what kind of range Gina Rodriguez (Jane) exhibits in this episode. Jaime Camil, Andrea Navedo and a couple of others are able to handle the range requirement also. As a police detective, Brett Dier is surprisingly believable, and Barnes is chillingly sober.
by Dean | Apr 26, 2015 | General
The Jaume Collet-Serra movie, Run All Night (2015), held me for a long time with its rowdy drama (now that’s a car chase sequence), but then it turned into a tired Liam Neeson picture rather too much like one of the Taken flicks.
The mobster’s cruel disloyalty to a friend is an okay subject, but Liam-and-his-film-family, with their need to work things out, isn’t. Yep, there’s an estranged son. Kill me now, mobster!
by Dean | Apr 22, 2015 | General
I’ve been staying away from novels that are primarily about human relationships. I see all the relationships, mostly male-female, I need to see on the CW’s Jane the Virgin.
Episode 19 (a.k.a. Chapter 19) on Monday night, April 20th, brought us breakups: between Jane and Rafael, et al., and was an especially interesting episode. And a rich one. Now that Jane is sad and free, her ex-fiance Michael is again drawn to her—and, I might add, drawn away from his fellow police officer Nadine, who deliberately blows it in the pair’s current case. She has fears, you see: some of these people encounter some really deplorable violence. Ask Petra (still winning our sympathy). Ask Grandma Alba. (Will Magda receive her comeuppance?)
Fyi, in Episode 19 Jane skinny dips—pregnant belly not visible—and wants to lose her virginity. But doesn’t. Why would she? The show is called Jane the VIRGIN.
Enjoy.
by Dean | Apr 20, 2015 | General
The plot of the 1983 Robert Bresson film, L’Argent (“Money”) is sometimes weak, and the same old Bressonian defects emerge as well, yet none of this renders the picture unwatchable or unmemorable. Unlike, say, Mouchette, it is one of the Frenchman’s better efforts.
The plot, to use Vincent Canby’s description, is about “Yvon, a young truck driver framed by some bourgeois shopkeepers who identify him as the source of counterfeit notes.” But Yvon is not the source; he is no counterfeiter, and he loses everything. Thematically the film is about: when an ordinary person, after being abused, descends into horribly sinful crime; the deep corruption in society; and virtue and saintliness, however rare and offhanded. Over and above, regardless of the evil that men have historically done with God, L’Argent implies it is certifiable in the modern world that men follow evil paths without God.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of L’ Argent
by Dean | Apr 19, 2015 | General
He looks too old for the part, but John Cassavetes is vividly first-rate as an 18-year-old gang leader in Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (1956).
Here, a trio of punks plan to murder a working-class gent who caused a fellow street tough to be arrested. Frankie (Cassavetes), the only punk who is never reluctant about the plan, is utterly hardhearted and seemingly unreachable. Siegel’s direction is characteristically good, though screenwriter Reginald Rose creates a liberal-psychotherapeutic vision which is never distracting but a little less than realistic. Dirty Harry, another Siegel picture, this ain’t. Harry, however, is asinine. Crime in the Streets is a decent work, grounded and working on the emotions. . . Siegel’s late 40s and 50s films are often naturalistically finer and more appealing than his later, post-censorship items.
