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)
by Dean | Aug 21, 2013 | General
Most of the critics have been slamming Kick-Ass 2. Check out rottentomatoes.com. As usual, though, they find it difficult to explain their opposition. They think the film is gratuitous—or something. Largely the reviews are interchangeable and thus boring. Also, as usual, there is no true criticism here since the reviewers do the reader’s thinking for him or her instead of stimulating thinking. Too bad.
by Dean | Aug 19, 2013 | General
In Kick-Ass 2 (2013), a frightfully masculine Jim Carrey plays a superhero called Colonel Stars and Stripes, who is as violent as he is humanitarian, and is ostensibly born-again.
It’s an encouraging fact: Never does Jeff Wadlow’s sequel to Kick-Ass disparage the born-again Christian label, any more than it scoffs at the crimefighting gay guy who has been bullied in his life. This rowdy pop movie is as inclusive as it is illiberal, as anti-criminal as it is comical.
Again there is Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Dave/Kick-Ass and Chloe Grace Moretz’s Mindy/Hit-Girl, who are good friends now. The latter is hitting puberty, with a quickly beating heart over the sight of TV heartthrobs and of Dave’s bare chest. I can do without the teenage queen bee cliches—Mindy confronts the high school skanks—but it’s nice to see Hit-Girl’s vulnerable side and a few affecting moments. It isn’t long, however, before she’s in hair-raising peril and starts cracking skulls.
Like the first Kick-Ass pic, Kick-Ass 2 is politically incorrect to a minimal extent (Dave, posing as a pimp: “I’m the whitest pimp in the world”). Mostly it’s just edgy, and forceful. It’s sort of the cinematic equivalent of a pleasant hard rock song: Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box,” say.
Hit Girl is my new favourite character. (Photo credit: Melina.)
by Dean | Aug 16, 2013 | General
In the early Seventies, French director Louis Malle made a film about adolescents which deliberately went in a transgressive direction. This is Murmur of the Heart (1971), not merely a transgressive opus but, more seriously, a vile one as well. The three teenage boys at the center, especially the dominant Laurent (Benoit Ferreux), no one in his right mind would tolerate, but naturally the adults around them do until the story builds to an act of tender incest between Laurent and his freewheeling mother (Lea Massari). It’s nearly the last thing that happens in the film and—transgressively—it’s never censured. It’s condoned.
Whatever its pretensions are, Murmur is basically anti-bourgeois, an easygoing act of rebellion. What’s more, it implicitly believes that the most important thing that goes on between a man and a woman is sexual intercourse. It isn’t. But this absolutely accounts for the incest.
Lest I sound smug, let me put it profanely: Murmur of the Heart is a piece of shit.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Aug 14, 2013 | General
I doubt that the Christian film Courageous (2012) speaks to very many nonbelievers since it is overflowing with evangelical spirituality and is not at all subtle. Alex Kendrick did a lot of work here—he directed, stars in, and co-wrote the flick with his brother Stephen—but the finished product is neither art nor admirable craft. It concerns fatherhood, and Christian living for fathers, and although I agree with the religious and pro-family propaganda, propaganda is what it is and so does not belong in fictional cinema.
The Kendricks’ previous film, Fireproof, was somewhat better. For all its weaknesses, it fascinates—and its drama is relevant to subject and theme. That’s not always the case with the un-fascinating Courageous.
Courageous (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 11, 2013 | General
Would that Woody Allen were a major film artist. It would be good to have some artistically successful American comedies about how we live now, and that is not what Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, from 1986, is.
To begin with, it takes a long time for any of the movie’s humor to make us laugh (to make ME laugh, anyway, but I can’t imagine anyone finding the first 45 minutes of this film funny). Further, Allen is pathetically sloppy at writing dialogue, which is often thin and banal. And not all of the acting is good: Mia Farrow and Max von Sydow are dull, Allen himself dreadful. Finally, the film, though a comedy, is unpersuasively and even ludicrously optimistic. Michael Caine stops obsessing over and pursuing Barbara Hershey, and an infertile Allen actually impregnates Dianne Wiest!
Hannah and Her Sisters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
