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Reviews
Barely Lethal (2015)
Pretty in Pink mashed with F egg I'm Russia With Love
Teenage angst! Amazingly amoral government programs! Deadly high school cliques! Insane teenage parties that make you wonder what happened to parental responsibility! Car chases! Car crashes! Boy bands! Boys, boys, boys! Girls, girls, girls! More boys! Did I say girls? Angst! Jessica Alba! Samuel L. Jackson! Things that go BOOM! Knives! Guns! Rejection at Homecoming! Wet dress girl fight! Kickboxing girl fight with knives!
Where does one begin? Like Bond, every secret agent really just wishes to have a normal life. Free from the tedious responsibilities of murder, mayhem, car crashes, and top-grade ordnance. Free to be dorky! Travel, adventure, exotica, Who wouldn't trade it all for Love's sweet first kiss? Who wouldn't want to trade flash-bangs for corsages, and make memories where the risk id making babies, not losing an eye, or your life?
A life without success at the prom is hardly worth living, a life without corny puns hardly worth the retelling.
I just don't know what to say, though I wouldn't recommend this movie as an aspirational movie for teenagers.
The Royal Rodeo (1939)
Wacky, weird, time capsule of the American Century
Before the Beatles, there were COWBOYS. This cross between Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the Prisoner of Zenda (leveraging, I believe, a few raw materials from The Adventures of Robin Hood) and a Jeanette McDonald-Nelson Eddy film is an experience that is hard to explain unless you've seen it. Even in 1939, this would have been what the 60's generation would call Camp. But if you like the 1960's Batman, then you'll probably like this. It has all the moral clarity an 8-year-old could ask for, with the happy ending that only could derive from true Americanism, firewood chats, and the blunt purity of men on horses, unused to reducing their habitual life of songs to the prosaic form of prosaic conversation. "Trouble must have increase when troubles are resolved with a gun." Just put on your chaps, don your wide-brimmed hat, and it's dances and songs for everyone!
Jewel Robbery (1932)
A Viennese Sachertorte
"Even though he's a robber to us, he stormed that shop like a hero!" Silly, sweet, a frothy dessert of a narrative that seems surely to be from an era before world wars. If one wonders what the genealogy of Hitchcock's gentleman jewel robber might be, this film is surely a missing link. Where Cary Grant's thief is haunted by memory, with a strain of sorrow that hides behind the charm, this film's thief is a Moriarty without malice, a thief more of hearts than of material dross-which is, after all, insured. Evidently, ladies prefer suave robbers. The marijuana cigarettes, the victory of rampant criminality over the weaker sex, the romance of civilized piracy waged against the jewelry palaces of old Europe, mark this film as a trockenbeerenauslese of a lost era.
The Green Knight (2021)
Not the poem, not a story, not a journey with a purpose.
I will not rate it a 1, because of its beautiful production values and fine acting. But these do not make up for a story that never coheres, being told, seemingly, by someone who loathes the tradition from which it draws. The fantasy sequence at the end (what if Gawain holds back his gift, and runs away) is at least more logical to the point of the original poem, in that Gawain would be a fisher-king, with the wound of the unreturned gift that cannot heal. But the ending-well done, you are a knight, and now I'll take your head anyway-makes mockery of the poem, mockery of itself? Mockery of the idea of telling a story at all, except as an enchantment to steal away a couple of hours of your life with pretty sounds and images, signifying nothing, and proposing as its affirmation to the viewer the meaningless of seeking honor, meaning, purpose, or value in life.
Girl of the Port (1930)
Interesting echoes of Stevenson's South Seas Tales
Notable. This is worth seeing, in spite of sometimes poor production values and early sound stiltedness, for its unsubtle presentation of racism ("Gentlemen, to White supremacy!"), for the surprisingly interesting supporting character Duke Kahanamoku, the popularizer of surfing, is given as the menial servant Kalita, who is also a Fijian chief, by whom "Whiskey Jim" receives the final catalyst that propels him and "tabby" Josie to their fates. We are in Robert Lewis Stevenson's world of the South Seas, a world filled with brutalities, castaways, half-castes and tourists, dignity and hypocrisy, greed and cruelty, and the casual exploitation of native culture and resources in the name of a social Darwinism the film both affirms and destroys, as it's protagonists wander in a world beyond the pale of their law and culture, in more than one sense. If Stevenson might have left us with a crueler end, the story pursues something of an exploration of character, of post-traumatic stress, of worlds without safety nets for those orphaned from family and friends, and a trial by fire which one can watch with interest as one sips one's Mai Tai.
R.F.D. Greenwich Village (1969)
Experience the lifestyle of carefree cotton!
Full disclosure: this film was produced by the Cotton Producer's Institute, so it may not Ben fully objective. But this documentary reveals the wonder of a life once so easily enjoyed by those happy people in Greenwich Village who so innocently and unabashedly wore cotton. "Cotton's casual appeal is in step with carefree living," the filmmakers fearlessly proclaim. "Worldly worries are laid aside, and time is spent on the home, making repairs, minding the laundry, browsing through antique shops in search of a possible bargain, or shopping in the world-famous Bleeker Street Market." Woven for the Now Generation, cotton, in this nearly forgotten world of wonder, was "as ruggedly appealing as the great outdoors, yet sophisticatedly shaped for the modes of cosmopolitan life." And what a wondrous life it was, filled with joyful mysteries, since forgotten, of truly carefree lives of personal fulfillment and human engagement only possible with superior fabric.
Alas, though the filmmakers hubristically proclaimed that golden era was fresh as today, and eternal as tomorrow, our world is far more circumscribed today, bound in other fabrics; and we live in a world of faded glory. But look back, see for yourself, how life once was lived, and yearn again for the beneficent touch of that most carefree of fabrics. For surely, what we once had and lost, we might regain in time, with the aid of this historic record to guide our way!
The Reader (2008)
Remembrance, conscience, innocence and guilt
This is a profoundly moving film in part because it's leading character is so much a Nietzschean blonde beast. Who is Hanna? Is she a monster? Is she an innocent? We see her as both, and as neither. Michael, the teenager who falls in love with her, and is haunted by her, is the witness of both-perhaps the only witness, even including Hanna herself, who truly sees both the monster and the innocent. Hanna joins the SS, not because she was a true believer in anything, but because she simply needed to find a job that did not require her to read; her life history is a journey of diligent action, which leads her to being promoted to office jobs that require reading-the thing, from her pride, that she cannot admit she cannot do., from which she flees. She is a creature of competence, confidence, in action, in movement, but not in thinking through her actions. She no more doubts herself in action than she second-guesses breathing; what needs to be done is simple. "Did you not realize you were sending people to death," she is asked. No, of course not. "What would you have done," she says, If you simply had this task to do? Remembrance Introspection, recollection, guilt--this is simply not what she does, as she has no way of looking at her past, in cold print. She does not regret the boy, nor anything else as her focus is the present. Perhaps not until her trial, listening to one of the victims recounting her memories-reading them, as it were, from her book of memories written down, is she able to hear and recollect what she has done-in a brilliant reaction shot of Kate Winslett-and feel the past as the present, as a story read to her, with the full weight of past action and present consequences.
She is a monster-and in the trial, feels herself to be a monster, deserving of punishment--but the deepest guilt, perhaps, is the guilt of her small secret of illiteracy, of pride, of fear of being found out, that enabled her to commit a greater crime. She is put on trial, as one of the minor characters very aptly remarks, only because one of the victims wrote a book, whose presence requires the recollection of this evil, one among hundreds for which there were no survivors to write the book of recollection.
And yet, Hanna is an innocent. Did she realize what she was doing? Did she realize with the boy, whose ability to love and trust and be open with others was twisted? Did she realize with the prisoners she killed what she was doing? Because she is illiterate, it is for others to read to her the memories she cannot feel except when read to. It is for others to reveal her to herself. "What would you do," she asks, as she recounts her actions, in her voice of innocence. "What did I do," by contrast, is a thought that can occur to her fully only as she has become literate, and as she looks at thoughts and memories over time, in print, at the end of her life.
This is not an easy film, and no one is saved. Who knew? Everyone knew. "How could you have let this happen," one of Michael's peers rhetorically asks the older generation that did such things, "and why didn't you kill yourself when you found out?" As an innocent blonde beast, become herself a reader, a creature of reason and remembrance, Hanna takes on the burden of acceptance for a nation of denial.
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
Expressionistic passion: the sensibility of pride and prejudice.
This film version has grown on me over time. It's not exactly Austin, in that Austin is of the age of reason, and there are many aspects of the story conveyed purely cinematically-and on occasion, perhaps too intrusively so, scenes are moved around, expanded, contracted. But this film is Byronesque, romantic, and it will not be stopped by your quibbles. Joe Wright's direction brings out the aspects of the story of love across class and power that evoke a Brontë sensibility in the characters, increasing the tension between Elizabeth's reason and passion, and bringing to Darcy a Heathcliff-like quality, especially happily realized in the transposition of the drawing room confession of a socially and rationally inappropriate passion to an outdoor Greek pavilion, with the romantic couple literally soaked in the sturm und drang weather of conflicting passions, and with a truly exquisite use of music to convey tones of emotion and interactions never fully conveyed in words. Kiera Knightly stands out as particularly superb, though the entire cast, assisted by a director who uses reaction shots excellently, highlights emotive depth. And the scenes of walking over misty fields, the very outdoor nature of this otherwise indoor story, literally opens it up, and lends the film to the full the forces of nature to overcome the bonds and strictures of society, to create a world of its own.
It's a Bikini World (1967)
Just don't
I think of all the worthy silent films that have probably disappeared forever, and wonder if we could arrange for some sort of hostage deal with the malevolent deity that fostered this object's presence in the world.
Cats (2019)
Let your memory lead you, open up, enter in...
Evidently most reviewers are dog people. What is a Jellicoe cat? Who knows, exactly-except that to be such a thing is at least to be interesting, and to inspire the interest of others. The whole thing hinges, ultimately, on the evanescence of life-cat's lives, in the movie's premise, and on the ability, it seems, of a Jellicoe cat to throw itself absolutely sincerely into life and experience, to see and to live it, and to be alive in the moment. Perhaps it helps to be old enough to see autumn leaves at your feet to SEE it. It is right that the choice is Old Deuteronomy, as I doubt the too young can even see the story. Hate it or like it, but you can't deny these actors fully invest themselves into the roles they play, and the actions they do-catching and eating dancing cockroaches, for example-with as little evident self-consciousness as if they were the cats they play, in a world where there are dancing cockroaches and mice in bands. If you are able to step out of the awareness that these are humans in cat suits, then the idea of the briefness of life, and of empathy for others' experience of life, might have appeal. Turn on subtitles, so you catch all the words, The plot is simple enough: one cat's life experience is so emotive to other cats that the oldest among them selects that cat as worthy to live another life. The song "Memories" serves the plot beautifully. Every actor gives the story's actions their all, and the plot is clear as one could ask, if you accept that these are creatures with paws, twitching tails and ears that happen to dance gracefully and sing beautifully, and believe in a weird religion. (It's a movie; you can't imagine, really?! You should need no interpreter...) If you can enter this other world, and if you see them and hear them as they are, then you might just be a little bit of a Jellicoe cat yourself.
Tombstone (1993)
Val Kilmer-superstar
The film speaks for itself. It may be the best film for most actors in it. But for Val Kilmer, as Doc Holiday, it is immortality. The magnificence of his character, and his portrayal, cannot be effaced by time. The film is adventurous, but becomes more more profound with repeat viewings.
All in all, easily in the top 5 westerns of its decade, and in the top 100 (in a very, very competitive genre) of all time.
Notting Hill (1999)
Creating the Green World
Romantic comedy is, at its essence, the creation of a new couple, and literally, a new community a new society, out of refugees from dysfunctional social orders. Very commonly, it is a narrative of different social orders, of high culture and low culture, rich and poor, this culture and that culture. It is the creation of a dream world of possiblilities created in opposition to a real world of limitations and cruel, casual savagery. To make a good romantic comedy, you need to show realistic worlds of experience. You need to treat them realistically, with all of their depth and pain and logic. And you need your actors and authoring principals to commit to the Green World of possibility with all of their sincere hopes and dreams, and personal experience, coupled with their professional abilities
If you can obtain all of that-which is a rare attainment in an era of irony and unearned cynicism-then a film such as this may result. The screenwriter, Richard Curtis is a little dismissive of his own efforts, and commonly people who like Curtis's films like Four WedDings and a Funeral, and dismiss Notting Hill as a simpler, more derivative film. But the focus on the romantic leads is fuller in Notting Hill, and in a comedy in which the hidden world of interior journeys is essential, I think this helps. The film is easily Julia Roberts' best. The range of vulnerability and longing her Anna Scott projects, followed by cynicism and brittleness in the next moment, amusement, pain, callousness, fear, a range of complexity from moment to moment as her character progresses through the narrative, is as fine a work as any actress in comedy ever has achieved, in my opinion. Why she did not receive more professional acclaim for this role is a mystery to me, unless it were that she seemed to be playing herself. Hugh Grant's William Thacker is more the sounding board for Roberts' Anna, though his wistful, neurotic passiveness, mixed with a depth of reticent knowledge and unexpressed feeling is precisely the alternative to the narcissistic aggressiveness and expressiveness of Anna Scott's peers. Together, they balance in a centered life is shared experience that, in the film's world, neither can find separately in their own social world.
There are other great romantic comedies. There are other touching dramas, and films and television worth watching. But there are few great romantic comedies that sincerely present feelings, and that suggest that love means sharing the self one can never become without a partner. This is one of those few.
Get Low (2009)
A humbling film
Get Low is an unusual film It is perhaps the most uncinematic film I have seen: It is uncinematic not because the filmmaking is incompetent--it is very well done--but that the point of the film is that you are shown people and things, but that you will never be able to understand, let alone truly empathize, with the people or events that you see. At one point, the lead character, Felix Bush, says that you can see a dog dreaming, and you can guess he is chasing a rabbit, but (and this is contrary to the whole ideal of cinema, dating back to the montage theory--this is the anti-montage theory film) you'll never get into that dog's mind, and you will never know what it is thinking or feeling. As with dogs, the film says, so even more so with people. At the beginning of the film, we see blurry images of an event, and at the end of the film, we see an explanation of that event--a humbling apology (the "get low" idea, along with being buried) that is deliberately distanced from us: We know that this apology is meaningful for Bush, and for another character there, though perhaps for different reasons. But we are outside--and forced to be outside by the camera shots--of the experience we can see this event affords for the characters. Similarly, in another scene, a sympathetic character is the victim of a robbery--but we only see what he saw, which does not include the things that happened to him. We see a church, and are told that maybe Bush's soul is expressed in this church--but we do not see, nor are we told that we can ever understand, how the character who tells us this can know these things...if he does. Characters in this film are a mystery, to each other, and to the audience; and the filmmaker forces us to be kept out of the mystery. The audience, too, is made to "get low"--to give up its arrogant assumption that we are going to be told anything other than superficially who these characters are, why they do what they do, and even what we have been shown. But what we do see is involving and draws your mind back to the mystery that is other people. In that sense, it is very much like the atrocious There Will Be Blood; only where that movie promised to show you who its protagonist really was, but never did, Get Low promises you nothing, and tells you flat out that you're being presumptuous and shallow even to expect that you can find out, truly, about this character, or anyone else. It merely opens the character up to you, as a vehicle for your own introspection.
All in all, a very interesting, intellectually stimulating, and assertively humbling movie.