by Dean | Jan 28, 2015 | General
The Two Faces of January (2014) is an old-style thriller, or Technicolor film noir, set in 1962 and dealing with an elegant swindler who unknowingly digs a deep hole for himself and his wife.
Original screenplays usually don’t tell a story this meritorious, and sure enough the flick is an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (directed by Hossein Amini). With locations of Crete and Athens, it is a gorgeous, humorless Beat the Devil, a classy near-potboiler.
Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac are humanizingly true as unscrupulous men, but Kirsten Dunst is not as effective as she has been in the recent past. Although she certainly looks like an early 60s glamour puss, her acting is too routine, too ordinary.
I wish to add January to my list of Honorable Mention movies for 2014. Critics who have yammered about it are the kind who would give a pass to old, better-known Hollywood thrillers with the same “defects.”
by Dean | Jan 26, 2015 | General
The Fantasticks ran in New York from 1960 to 2001, and has been revived there of late.
This Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical has a certain artistic purity—not just merit but purity—to complement the lovely ballads and nice love story. It’s small but endearing. Not unserious either, although all those Big Apple audiences might not have cared about that. It has to do with love’s protectiveness when the surrounding world is harsh. The libretto can be hokey, but it is also literate. Satisfying enough to be more than literate are such songs as “Try to Remember,” “Much More” and “It Depends On What You Pay,” wherein the last of which the repeated word rape never means more than abduction.
The Fantasticks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jan 25, 2015 | General
The Iraq War was disturbing; it is so in American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood and scripted by Jason Hall. It was also a war where jihadist savages needed, for more reasons than one, to be killed, and the American sniper of the movie, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), snuffs out well over a hundred of them. Though a mere two-dimensional character, Kyle at any rate can be as stressed as he is strong, as finally shaken as he is patriotic. Sniper is an interesting war movie, stark and stirring and bloody and anti-jihadist. One wishes there was someone like Kyle to take out the members of ISIS.
For the most part the screenplay is expertly written, and plenty of good work issues from Eastwood. I’d like to see the film again before I comment on the acting.
It is now known that over 3,000 chemical weapons were found by coalition soldiers in Iraq (Karl Rove chose to communicate nothing about them). Men like Kyle did not fight in this disturbing war in vain.
English: Clint Eastwood at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jan 22, 2015 | General
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the Frank Capra picture, is a strange work of art. Perhaps never has sentimentality been so smartly and lovingly filmed, never has facile optimism been so impressively crafted.
Patently the film is faulty. Indeed, it’s stupid about money lending practices, i.e. those of the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) is callous, but he’s right to say, “It isn’t fair to the little people to encourage them to live beyond their means.” Still, it is the humane family man, George Bailey (James Stewart), and not Potter, who must triumph, who—in truth—must be on his way to being as content as his father was. It’s an enticing trip—with images as lovely as those in The Magnificent Ambersons. I’m not sure it’s one of Capra’s best movies, however, although it is clearly more personal than, say, It Happened One Night.
It’s a Wonderful Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jan 20, 2015 | General
The criminal activity in Jane the Virgin is getting complicated—for me, anyway—but it’s good to see something other than the working-out of human relationships (Jane’s still working it out with Rafael).
The stakes never seem very high here, but I guess that’s what you get from a soapy comedy. The Norman Conquests this ain’t. It’s still sometimes funny, though—check out what the girl who has seen Titanic has to say in the Chapter 10 episode—and still fun.
Recently Gina Rodriguez won a Golden Globe award. (A what? Huh?) With not only her facial play but also her movement, with her energy and wholesome allure, she nails the character.
by Dean | Jan 18, 2015 | General
In Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, a 1960 example of cinema as the free exercise of imagination (complete with jokes), a man has a blighted past because of what happened to his wife and now a blighted present because of his crooked brother.
The film begins with the brother frantically running from fellow thieves until, after stumbling and falling, he is assisted by a stranger who immediately starts talking about his relationship with his wife. Incongruous, this, but true to form: Truffaut wastes no time bringing up one of his favorite subjects: women. Women mean a lot to him, in an entranced, are-women-magical? way far removed from animal sex.
Shoot the Piano Player alternates between the main character’s—Charlie Kohler’s—involvement with women and his involvement with the crooks his brother knows. The result is a personal, quite sad pulp fiction, though with a disappointing finis. (Why’d you have to knock off Marie Dubois?) Should have been more moving, for one thing.
Shoot the Piano Player (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(In French with English subtitles)
