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Reviews
Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990)
Notice what is around the hero
The movie is about the making of a hero. Yet we should notice, in the scenes from China and Spain, how many "little people" put so much labor into the cause, into making Bethune's vision a reality. With them in mind, the viewer can take the movie as a reflection on the interplay between a prominent individual and the masses.
It is a worthwhile movie to watch, indeed, but the scenes jump in time and place as though someone tossed script pages in the air then picked them up off the floor at random.
An article about the making of the movie in Canadian Film Encyclopedia adds lot of nuance about both Bethune and the various Canadian, Chinese, and French participants in the project.
Yin ru chen yan (2022)
Humanist movie banned by the Chinese government
The government of China killed this movie in September 2022. It removed Return to Dust from all streaming platforms, deleted comments on the Weibo social media platform, and outlawed a hashtag for the movie. Possible reasons:
* The protagonist is pretty much compelled to give his blood of a rare type in order to save a local exploiting businessman. The protagonist does not resist, but his wife tells him don't do it.
* The protagonist couple are hounded out of one home after another so that housing developers can make money on land cleared by demolishing the home.
* In a supposedly socialist country, nearly all relatives and villagers treat the protagonist - a man content to be a farmer - and his wife - a woman with medical problems leaving her unable to have a child - with contempt. This is socialist morality and culture? However, we foreign viewers do not know whether this depiction is accurate for rural China as a whole.
In short, Return to Dust shows how much capitalist scramble for riches there is in China today, despite the mouthings of the "Communist" Party of China. The protagonist couple are collateral damage as far as the government is concerned.
Return to Dust is a humanist movie. Its strength is that it puts the fate of the oppressed couple in the viewer's heart. In part this happens when the movie immerses you in the rhythm of their farm labor. The tools are primitive, the toil is backbreaking, and the cycle of seasons is immortal.
The weakness is that the only social change depicted is an onslaught of capitalist exploitation. In reality, the peasants backed the Communist Party when it fought for liberation from landlord exploitation and foreign, especially Japanese, oppression. The peasants heartily backed Communist initiatives to improve their agriculture by cooperative, egalitarian, modernizing methods from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. If you keep this real history in mind while you watch Return to Dust, it deepens the tragedy.
July Rising (2019)
Material question is at the heart of the plot but messed up at the end
At the heart of the movie is the question, can this 16-year-old make an orchard work? If her skills and determination were the deciding factors, the answer would be yes. However, inexorable events say otherwise. The ending deprives the viewer of information she needs to settle her own mind about what happened. On one hand, the girl gets a $500,000 "cut" of the sale she does not want. Pretty good start in life! On the other hand, we do not get any idea of what percentage she got.
With a decent ending, the story could have been coherent and the viewer could forgive many of the faults noted in previous reviews here. But without that ending, the whole thing collapses.
Also, homage to identity politics is offensive whether you care about identity politics or hate it. The characters who matter are all white, but the movie makes sure to include a Black and a bunch of Latinos in the scenery. The women characters have some depth; the men are basically one-dimensional jerks. The single male character with some depth turns out to be the worst jerk of all, without real grounding of why.
Miss V from Moscow (1942)
One more major fault of this potboiler
Add to the justified criticisms in the previous reviews: there is no character development. Every character is a type, sticks to type. Events do not change them.
The U. S. joined the British and French ruling classes when they put destruction of Soviet socialism above stopping Nazi barbarism. At the last moment the three elites realized they must ally with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler. This change could have been the basis for a change in a character in the movie.
Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)
What irony - Frank Langella in a film about due process
This 2005 movie took the side of due process and the free contention of different views. The enemy of these was the reactionary witch hunt for communists, which began after World War Two and by the time-setting of the movie, 1954, was in its death throes known as McCarthyism. The movie is a celebration of liberals and bourgeois democracy.
Frank Langella has a considerable supporting role as William Paley, the boss of CBS. Now in 2022 Langella's name and career have been destroyed by cancel culture. He was at work shooting scenes in a film adaptation of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe. An actress playing the part of his wife complained about an alleged transgression on a set, in front of the crew, in a scene the two did fully clothed - he touched her leg! The corporation, Netflix, fired the 84-year-old Langella with no due process, with no sense of proportion between the alleged offense and the destruction of his career. George Clooney made a movie against McCarthyism. Cancel culture is the new McCarthyism.
Jian guo da ye (2009)
Good to see a piece of history not often recalled in the U.S. However, ...
The movie has big weaknesses.
* Mao Zedong is portrayed as almost childish at times and as leaving most of the work to Zhou Enlai and others. In fact, he worked hard on a mountain of issues.
* Areas where Mao worked hard were the military campaigns (with Zhu De) and land reform in the newly liberated areas. Yet the movie gives most of its time to maneuvering among the "democratic parties" of the capitalists and intellectuals; the CPC; and the KMT. We hardly see peasants.
These faults in this 2009 movie are a result of Deng Xiaoping's turn to capitalism, reversing the socialist line of Mao Zedong.
(I posted these remarks as a comment on the Youtube page for the movie. They disappeared overnight. Whenever it can, the Chinese government uses the same instant-censorship apparatus around the world that it uses within its borders.)
Dead Silence (1997)
How do hostage response experts work? Good narrative about this question
John Potter, the James Garner character, must resolve a situation in which three violent criminals have taken a schoolbus load of children and adults hostage. They are holed up in an abandoned building. Potter arrives and firms up the perimeter. Does he aim to apprehend or kill the three criminals in order to bring their rampages to an end? Does he take the risk of letting them try to escape in the hope of getting the hostages out alive? The movie explores the moral issues and works a good deal of the technique of hostage response teams into an engaging story.
The final twenty minutes of plot twists are ridiculous.
Le dernier métro (1980)
A denigration of the French Resistance
Right from the beginning, the movie sets itself in the conflict between the French people and the Nazi occupiers. It is explored in the problems of a Paris theatre that a Jew had run before the German conquest. The viewer anticipates terrible events, especially if she wonders how the title, The Last Metro, will show up.
Yet bit by bit, personal relationships move to the center, taking precedence over the conflict of the time, displacing it from the heart of the film.
The actors are excellent. The quick dialog displays French bourgeois thought at its height - logical, witty, and presuming that everyone is civilized. "The Last Metro" is accomplished art that is fundamentally anti-political just when everyone needs to orient herself to the biggest questions of right and wrong and what to do about it.
I compagni (1963)
A historical drama to learn from
The Organizer (The Comrades) is a historical drama, whether you also take it as comedy or not. The story happens in 1890s Italy when it had a newborn proletariat, not one as experienced as Germany or Britain. On the other hand, Italy did not have Bolshevik leaders as "backward" Russia would a decade later. The strengths and weaknesses of the professor, as well as of the proletarians of Turin, are true to the setting, which makes The Organizer an excellent realist movie. With the historical place in mind, the viewer gets a lot of insight into the key problem: how can the working class win? Not every battle, but the war.
Sheng si jie (2005)
A very political film encouraging intellectuals to have disdain for ordinary folks
This movie has a basic problem - a disconnect between the facts of the story it tells and the tone it takes. The man Muyu is a dastardly character, no doubt about it, but consider that he works quite hard living with the main female character, that he makes little money from his horrible swindle. He remains a struggling ex-villager who is now a worker.
Yet the tone is that the woman with intellectuals for parents has been deeply wronged, no matter how much her emotional blindness and stupid moves contribute to her fate. In one scene he tells her of his disdain for the educated and smugly observes how he, a lowly guy, has swindled her. The message of the film, and it certainly has a message, is that intellectuals should beware and dislike ordinary working folks. The character type of the latter is this womanizing, swindling guy. (Incidentally, the art-film style guarantees that intellectuals more than most folks will be the viewers of Stolen Life.)
This is a very political film, a product of the reaction to the storms of the 1960s. It is a film encouraging elitism, teaching disdain for the people in the basement.