Seriously Cheeky: The Movie, “A Serious Man”

by Dean | May 7, 2017 | General

A film by the Coen Brothers, A Serious Man (2009) begins with a prologue, set many decades ago, in which a Jewish peasant woman believes the man her husband has been speaking with is a ghost.  After he comes to the couple’s home, the woman coldly stabs him, expecting the man to be unharmed; but he isn’t.  Seemingly he starts bleeding from the wound, inducing the husband to assert that now the couple are “ruined.”  Are they?  Is the man not a ghost?  Has terrible fortune descended?

Then the movie jumps ahead to the mid-Sixties and concentrates on Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), another Jewish man, a physics teacher living in a prosperous America.  But he starts living unhappily.  Pains and burdens are mounting, and just as serious questions were raised by the prologue, they are raised by the footage of Larry’s experiences.  What is the cosmic purpose for his suffering?  Is he not morally good enough to be happy?  Problems arise for Larry’s family too, though they’re not as intense as those for Larry.  The entire family, like other characters in the film, are markedly Jewish, for the Jews, the Coens impart, are people with problems.  Are there multiple ghosts who have cursed them?

A Serious Man jeers at people and has no trust in Life or Fate.  Regrettably, it is a trifle too cheeky and mocking to be wholly appealing; but it’s a funny and involving tragic farce all the same.  Its cast is sophisticated, with a Stuhlbarg who’s very good at befuddlement and, well, everything else.

The Homage To “The Maltese Falcon”: “Chinatown”

by Dean | May 3, 2017 | General

Chinatown (1974 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In The Maltese Falcon, Bogart’s Sam Spade is blunt and mildly neurotic but also self-confident.  In Chinatown (1974), an homage to Falcon, private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is ordinary, straightforward, coarse but also respectful, and rather fragile in a way Spade is not.

Roman Polanski directed Chinatown as he should have:  conventionally and magisterially.  He received from Faye Dunaway one of her best, most sophisticated performances.

I have already written about the film’s “grim and ugly” ending—i.e., an ending that follows the dark doings in film noir to what may be considered a different plane:  the horrors of reality.  These are horrors sexual, psychological, existential.  Anyone would recoil from what is done to women in the movie—patently, today’s feminists would—yet it isn’t a misogynistic work.  It is a harshly radical pop picture about death, which befalls here both women and men.

Huston’s First: “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)

by Dean | May 2, 2017 | General

The Maltese Falcon (1941 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have never desired to see the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon, but only John Huston‘s acclaimed 1941 version.  This is because Huston had the ability to make any movie a Big Deal, an event, without pretentiousness but certainly not without artistry, as is the case with  Maltese.  He had a capital Sam Spade in Bogart and didn’t sanitize the character.  Indecent in many ways, Spade looks quasi-angelic next to the sneaky felons played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, both fascinating.   

Love And Mass Murder: The New Movie, “The Promise”

by Dean | Apr 30, 2017 | General

The Promise (2017), by Terry George, is a film about love and mass murder in the Ottoman Empire in 1914.  An Armenian medical student, Michael (Oscar Isaac), is engaged to be married but drifts into an easy love for another man’s sweetheart, Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), also Armenian.  That these two are Armenian inescapably makes them targets for a stronger power—the Turks—who start destroying those of this particular ethnic group.

The movie is often beautiful and always transporting, a big-screen treat.  (I have no desire to see it on the small screen.)  But it is not the cinematic epic Hollywood should have given us, except for its dealing with the Armenian genocide.  Director George and Robin Swicord have penned a highly predictable and often trite screenplay.  Trite: after Michael and Ana make love one night, the film cuts to Michael still in bed, looking at a fully dressed Ana as she dutifully puts up her hair. . . Also, there is nonsense.  An Armenian captive prefers having a bullet lodged under his facial skin to its being taken out.  (Hey, it isn’t fatal yet.)  And why do the Turks permit the Armenians to carry crates of explosives when the Turks themselves are at risk?

After reading Read’s Scarpia, I am dumbfounded by how inadequate a period piece The Promise is.  I don’t regret, even so, seeing it in a theatre, and you may not either.  How disappointment can be kept at bay, though, I do not know.

Cinderella Fella

by Dean | Apr 27, 2017 | General

Cover of Cinderella Man [HD DVD]

On the caricature side, in this chronicle of the early-adult life of boxer James Braddock (Russell Crowe), there is 1) a repulsive Max Baer and 2) a dismal fat cat who revokes Braddock’s license to box after Braddock fails to put on a good show.  Then there’s Braddock’s wife Mae (Rene Zellweger), more a cliché than a caricature; she dislikes her husband’s profession, his being “a punching bag.”  She visits Braddock’s manager to protest.  Gad!

Cinderella Man is watchable, though, because it’s captivatingly honest enough about poverty, and the boxing scenes are exciting, supplely executed, and perfectly edited.  The poverty is that of the Great Depression, during which Braddock makes very little money since he is unable to fight.  But a second ascent for this nice Catholic man finally begins.  Howard’s film doesn’t stick in the gray matter, but it is inspirational.  And far superior to A Beautiful Mind.

Spurning “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”

by Dean | Apr 23, 2017 | General

Cover of McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) does appear to be far more truthful about the American West than other Westerns (i.e., mythological Westerns).  However, I don’t know which is more ill-written—the movie’s Leonard Cohen songs or the Altman-Brian McKay script.  Er . . . it has to be the script.

Warren Beatty enacts a profane cynic who becomes a dominating businessman in a frontier town, and gradually he begins a relationship with a brothel madam (Julie Christie) which is pretty hazy.  The film is boringly and laughably anti-capitalist and has a lot of lame, dopey dialogue.  Although it isn’t Beatty’s fault, he doesn’t really know what kind of man he is portraying, and yet his acting is assuredly superior to that of Christie and Rene Auberjonois, who are merely going through the motions.

The costumes and production design are exactly what a non-mythological Western should have.  Even so, I said the Beatty character, John McCabe, is a profane cynic; hence it comes as no surprise that Altman’s film is an offputting, foul-mouthed (and unfocused) mess.