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Last Woman on Earth (1960)
It's not easy to make a movie like this
Two men and one woman happen to be scuba diving when for some unexplained reason all the oxygen is sucked out of the air and everyone dies except them. They manage to survive with their air tanks until, also unexplained, oxygen returns. But they are the last three people on earth, or so we must assume. (The one woman is the last of her kind on Earth. Get it?). The rest of the film follows the fraught relationship of the two men vis a vis the woman - who, it turns out, is married to one of the men but fancies the other. It's the old story - two men, one woman. The remarkable thing about this film is that essentially *nothing* happens. That's hard to accomplish. Even by Roger Corman standards this one is a dud. It's not a gem of a dud. It's not so bad it's good, it's just bad. A waste of good celluloid. It makes good background noise if you're trying to concentrate on something important because it won't distract you from any actual thought process. It rates a 2 instead of a 1 because the actors manage to keep a straight face throughout.
Marcus Welby, M.D.: The Other Side of the Chart (1970)
It's hard to know where to start
There is so much wrong here, too much to chalk up to the ("less enlightened") times. A male patient repeatedly abuses a female doctor physically and with unwanted advances. In the end they're getting along like old friends and there are implications of further romantic involvement. It's preposterous. In fact, this patient - "Dutch" - is, plain and simple, a world class a.h. And the least sympathetic sympathetic character imaginable. One finds oneself hoping it's stomach cancer. Meanwhile, a nurse comes on to Dr Kiley who sees nothing inconsistent with accepted standards of medical ethics and professional conduct - on either of their parts. And he's even encouraging of Dutch's sadistically boorish personality. This isn't an episode that attempts to shine a light on the ills of society, lending a cautionary tale about human behaviour. It ignores the ills of society completely and makes light of them. Dr. Welby, who can usually be counted on to provide a heavy slug of reality, blithely seems to think it's all kinda cute. This is a real low point in an otherwise good series.
Rosenstrasse (2003)
Weak and ultimately silly
This was disappointing. It started well enough but as it went on and lost every opportunity to soar, it fell flat. Maria Schrader's acting is dreadful, never seeming to mean what she says, or even knowing what she says until she says it. She showed no genuine emotion at all, not for her beloved goy, or her mother's story. When with Lena she seemed to have little more than an academic interest in Lena's story. There never seemed to be a real relationship between Lena and her mother except her mother seemed to be having a good time at the wedding, which isn't much. The supposed parallel between Hannah's "mixed" romance and her mother's relationship with her father was as cliché as they come, and failed miserably anyway. The wedding was completely unconvincing and a dumb finish. The climax of the protest was uninspiring, and no matter what Lena had or had not done to influence the outcome, she would surely have shown some complexity of feeling at the time, a haunted look, an inexplicable ambivalence. In fact, none of the characters in the film had any depth or spark. It was very hard to care about any of them, even little Ruth. Everything with Luis was a distraction. (Why did she dis him so when on the phone from the hotel? There was no context or explanation whatever for that.) If every reference to him was removed it wouldn't be noticed.
A simple story made confusing by poor character development (who was whose mother, again??) weak acting, and directing that made everyone look like they were acting. You could almost hear "quiet on the set!...." I started thinking this was worthy of a 7, but as the film went on it dropped rapidly to a 4, then earning a 3 after the silliness of the wedding scene. This was about as cold and sterile a movie as I have seen. A terrible waste of a good story.