4 Movie Reviews (1962-2012--Louise Gluck Commemorative Post?)

Working Girl (1988)

Hit movie of the late 80s featuring a lot of big names (Mike Nichols, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Melanie Griffith, even Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey appear in minor roles). I didn't see it at the time, probably because I could tell it was about yuppie baby boomers, a class of movie that I really could not abide at the time, and do not exactly love now. It is about class differences, though in a rather crude way, and I don't identify much with either of the classes represented here. Some people think highly of this though, and it made quite a bit of money. Perhaps there is a generational aspect. While I do always recoil at particularly baby boomer-ish movies, I do like some of the quirky Generation X 90s films in the Party Girl vein that people who were young in other times probably find unbearable. I did like seeing the cityscapes, cars, restaurants, etc, of late 80s New York (and Staten Island too).       

 The Exterminating Angel (1962)

I was thinking just the other day that it felt like I hadn't seen anything by Bunuel for a while. I didn't write down the date when I saw this, but it was in this calendar year, I'm sure. This is definitely the last older foreign film I've seen, which especially at my time of life is too long of an interval, but it is funny that I thought specifically of Bunuel as someone I had been missing, when I have been away from all the other greats of classic international cinema even longer.

I had seen this at least a couple of times before, but it had been 10-15 years since the last time. This may be my favorite Bunuel movie, maybe it is Viridiana, maybe someday it will be Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. I can never remember what Viridiana is about two days after seeing it, but certain images and associations from it come to mind out of nowhere, cows and sideboards and bell towers and straw covered floors. The Exterminating Angel is, as everyone knows, a fantastical meditation on the absurdity of life as perceived through the lens of an almost uncorrupted artistic consciousness. One feels satiated by the directness and purity of the vision.  

Burning Hot Summer (2011)

This modern European (French/Italian/Swiss--everything seems to be a collaboration now) domestic drama is the kind of thing I wish would turn up more on my lists under this new system. Actually I do think some contemporary foreign films have made it, they just haven't to date been easily available for me to see. I noted while watching this that "I like it, because it's how I imagine real people live (i.e. European art people and their complicated sex lives) but it's about people who are too cool for this world (literally too cool, not Jim Jarmusch style eccentric cool), so it is ultimately kind of depressing. No one has any phones or anything, so people can still go to hotels with their lovers in the middle of the day without anybody bothering them." With regard to this last point I formed a theory that the director/writer was probably someone around my age who had grown up wanting to make 1960s and 70s style French art films and determined that he not going to let technological advancements deter him from pursuing that vision, though in this I was wrong, as the director was a filmmaker named Phillippe Garrel, who was born in 1948 and has made about thirty pictures, though I don't recall seeing any of these others. This stars the celebrated Italian sex siren Monica Bellucci, who was about 46 at the time and acting alongside co-stars ten to fifteen years her junior but who still managed to produce the majority of the heat and loss of (male) sanity referenced in the film's title. 

 Les Miserables (2012)

This is the star-studded musical version, albeit mostly with Hollywood figures not noted for their singing prowess, which undoubtedly prevented a lot of people from being able to enjoy it, but I quite liked it, perhaps even mildly loved it, in spite of the inferior versions of the songs. When I saw this (back in March!), I tweeted that "the story has an emotional extravagance that I miss in this bloodless, oppressive, over measured, over controlled, emotionally dead cultural environment we seem to be trapped in now", and asked whether anybody else liked it. I felt like it got the romance that is the source of the story's claim to immortality, which surprised me, because I don't expect people in my life time to have, let alone embrace, the kinds of feelings which the story requires. The story is, or can be, so stirring. I am not an especial fan of musicals, especially modern (post-60s) ones, but I have always liked the songs from this. It is undoubtedly one of my favorites in this category.  

As I get older I am cutting down (I think), on my actress shout outs from the deep wilderness, but I have to say I loved Samantha Barks as the plucky Eponine, who was the one major performer who was brought over from the stage production. Great radiance. Eponine's happier rival in love, Cosette, was played by Amanda Seyfried, who I often think I see everywhere, especially in these literary adaptations, but I often confuse her with Rosamund Pike and Alicia Vikander, who also make frequent appearances in these types of movies going back 10-15 years. I suppose you can throw Margot Robbie in with this group of blonde, able-to-project-high-social-status actresses as well, though I can usually tell her apart from these other three. 

Tell me about it. 

I do have something of a Les Miserables origin story to tell, which perhaps influenced my experience of the movie as well. When I moved to Maine as a teenager, the stage version had just recently debuted in the United States. I had not even been aware that such a musical existed, though for some reason I had already read the book--despite being well over a 1,000 pages and dating from the middle of the 19th century, it is not difficult even for a modern teen to understand. I had a job working at a restaurant in Kennebunkport for a while, and they employed a pianist, as restaurants often did then, and perhaps nicer ones still do, though I have not been to one that does in many years. This pianist was from Brazil, and by the standards that I was accustomed to, played well the character of a suave, artistic, middle aged South American gentleman, which was an unusual sort of person to come upon in Maine at that time especially. I wonder whether he was not gay. Kennebunkport and especially the nearby town of Ogunquit having sizable gay communities, but though I was vaguely aware of that at the time, it never occurred to me to think that anybody was of that persuasion unless they screamed it out loudly to everyone they came across. I had the idea that he had a family back in Brazil, and perhaps he did, or perhaps that is what he told people, anyway, the point of the story is that this guy really liked the Les Miserables soundtrack and played a number of the songs as part of his repertoire. As I didn't know what they were but found some of the tunes to have insinuated themselves into my brain and begun to induce melancholic and other sorts of emotions I asked him one day what some of the songs were and then the next time I saw him he had made me a cassette of the entire soundtrack album. And there were several months over the fall and winter of my junior year of high school where I listened to this tape in my bedroom quite frequently, and then, I never really listened to it again. But the songs all came right back to me when I saw the movie.  

I was going to do three more movies but I think from now I am just going to make each movie have its own post. There will therefore be more of them, and I am worried that some of them will be too short. I suppose if I have nothing to say at all about something I can just leave it out. But this method isn't working for me so well. 

1931-2017 (Jim Bunning Memorial Movie Post)

 The Words (2012)

When I watched this (way back on January 2nd), I paused it midway through to tweet out "This movie radiates evil. There are (admittedly, French) films about incest that are at least beautiful and more beguiling." It's awful. I guess I hate movies about writers anyway, especially straight white male writers. If all people know about them is from watching movies, it's not surprising that they hate them. It's very negative all around. There's a young guy with neither talent nor any other point of entry into the field, as a published professional, anyway, who is wasting his life in his delusions, until he finds an old manuscript in a briefcase in an antique store that happens to be a masterpiece, which he published as his own, winning hollow accolades. The character who actually wrote the masterpiece but left his briefcase on a train in Paris and lost it turned out to be still alive, bitter and unfulfilled. Though too old I guess to covet the literary glory that should have been his in the prime of life, he least emerges to privately torment the fraudulent author. These two gentlemen were actually themselves the fictional creations of the type of obnoxious successful writer who appeals to Hollywood screenwriters, and who has a luxurious (and oddly under-furnished) apartment in New York City with a plate glass window view of the skyline, holds such a dominant position over critics and readers that he can sneer at and insult them with impunity, and routinely has beautiful and ambitious younger women coming onto him. This movie manages to make even this guy's life seem kind of gross and unappealing. The theme of the grasping mediocrity finding success by appropriating to himself other peoples' obviously superior work is echoed in the movie Yesterday, which is about a struggling musician who after some kind of cosmic event finds himself apparently the only person in the world who can remember the Beatles. Evidently this imposter syndrome is especially rampant in our current environment. Also notable to me about this film is the seeming absence of any kind of organic literary culture or society even for the writers who have some talent. All of these people are working as it were on their own islands and don't appear to know anyone else even the slightest bit like themselves, let alone at a comparable level of development or status or age or in their artistic sympathies or anything. It is so uninspiring and depressing.  

Bonjour Tristesse (1958)

Film version of the popular-in-its-time novel which I read last summer. Directed by the prolific but usually disappointing Otto Preminger and starring David Niven, Jean Seberg, and Deborah Kerr, who was seemingly in everything in the late 50s. I would rather this had been a French movie--it isn't as if that country was hampered by a deficiency of moviemaking talent at the time. I didn't do a ton of research on it beforehand (obviously) and I had the idea that it was in French, with a French cast and so on, so I was surprised and disappointed when this turned out not to be the case. It looks at least like it was filmed in part in the Riviera, though I am not 100% sure of that either. It is passable, and some of the locales and clothes and colors and those sorts of things are pleasant enough to look at but for the most part it is flat and lacking in pizazz. Like Deborah Kerr, David Niven was a big name and pretty ubiquitous at this time, and not unlikeable, though whenever I see him I always feel that he was either miscast or that he played his role in a way that must have been appealing at the time but that comes over now as rather treacly. He was by all accounts quite debonair in his civilian life, but at least in the mainstream movies I've seen him in he always seems to be trying to come across as more of an everyman, and it always seems a little off. Although the subject of the movie (and the book) is the ennui and aimlessness of the postwar upper middle classes, the background against which all this happens, the casinos and cafes and restaurants full of well-dressed, reasonably intelligent people dancing to live music and so on, empty though I suppose it is, looks like it should be a lot of fun even in pretty large doses. The well-developed human spirit seeks more though.

Arrowsmith (1931)

Another near contemporary adaptation of a book I've read in the past few years. Directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes and a very young Myrna Loy, this is an extremely polished film by the standard of 1931, with an unusually sophisticated script, beautiful sets (particularly the McGurk medical research institute in New York City) and a much more modern sensibility than is found in most movies from this period. As a narrative it's decent enough, however it leaves out large sections of the book, which obviously is necessary in such instances, but in the more successful adaptations this is done in a way that manages to distill something of the essence of the best parts, which did not happen here, as what were to me many of the most interesting parts of what I thought was an excellent (and presently somewhat undervalued) novel, such as Arrowsmith's entire childhood and college career, his time living with the Pickerbaughs as a public health official in Iowa, and so on, are passed over entirely. So I did not find the movie as altogether satisfying as I might have.

Insidious (2010)

This is the kind of movie that turns up on my list from time to time and I feel obligated to give it a try. It's about a family that moves into an old house that is inhabited by demons, one of whom manages to entirely drain one of the children of his soul, or animating spirit, or whatever you want to call it, for its own use. I don't really get too into these types of plots. In fact after watching about 27 minutes I stopped it and said OK, that's enough. However--the mother of this family is a character (30ish, college educated, moderately cultured middle class mom who likes restoring old houses) that is just my type, played by an actress, whose name is Rose Byrne, who is also evidently just my type, so the next evening, when I sat down to watch my little bit of a movie before bedtime, I confessed that I wanted to see a little more of Rose Byrne, so I ended up watching the rest of the movie, and it was kind of worth it. This was no fluke either--I'd only seen her one other time, as Briseis in Troy (2004), which I did not realize until after I finished this movie, but when I wrote my blog review of that movie in May 2014 I made note of her as well, writing that "the actors are very good-looking, have incredible bodies (assuming they are real), to the point that it would be ridiculous if they did not have sex with each other all the time, which they do." After going on a bit about Diane Kruger, who played Helen, I noted that there was a "similarly smoldering Briseis, who holds a knife to Achilles, played by a supernaturally buff Brad Pitt. Needless to say he does not panic, but smiles devilishly and begins to massage her sensitive areas, and pretty quickly the knife falls harmlessly to the floor. After all this sex, in marked contrast to modern life, the women are wiped out and look as if they won't be able to rise from the bed in any kind of functional state for several days, while the men are up at the break of dawn as fresh as newly laid eggs ready for a full day of ancient warfare in open arid terrain in 90 degree heat..", etc. So anyway, the takeaway here is that I really like Rose Byrne. She's 41 now. She's originally from Australia. She doesn't seem to be on Twitter. 

A Cure For Wellness (2017)

This got mixed reviews. Visually, it is pretty spectacular, albeit in a frigid way, but the point of it is unclear and the story fails to be moving. It takes place in an opulent, exquisitely styled sanitarium in Switzerland catering to the Western .01% class which no one, having arrived, ever leaves. It is inspired in part by The Magic Mountain, which I have actually never read (most of the really famous early 20th European novels of this type I feel like I have read through at least at this point). Maybe I would have more feeling for it if I had. It has a weird and kind of inscrutable ethos. At times I felt like this was a missive from some kind of Anglo-Germanic-Celtic blue-eyed overclass, if such a conglomeration even exists, that has detached itself with its billions from everyone else, letting us know spiritually where they are, a dark and sinister but fantastically stylized place where the masses can't join them. However I will tie myself up in knots trying to explain what I imagine this movie is about, and I didn't really like or think it worth spending a lot of time on. 

Vincent and Theo (1990)

I hadn't seen this before, though it is right from my prime era of indie movie theatergoing (ca. 1989-95).  I don't know what I would have thought of it then, but my sensibility, such as it is, was formed during this time, so I think of this as what art movies are supposed to be like. I felt a little like I had come home, especially after The Cure For Wellness, which not only didn't feel like a continuation of the same art form, but whose human characters and society didn't feel much like a continuation of those that inhabited the world I grew up in either. I wondered if it wasn't undervalued for being one of the lesser, or at least less celebrated, works of a famous director (Robert Altman). To me it compares favorably with what is being made today but was more typical perhaps of this era, especially the European movies. Though directed by Altman, this was a European production, originally planned for television, and there is a 200 minute version of this made for television, though I saw the shorter movie version, which is the one that got released in America. 

One is struck in watching this by how leisurely and unfrenetic the pace is. Scenes are allowed to play out at length, the viewer has time to take note of some of the artistic touches. Altman is famous for his attentiveness to sound, of course, and there is one scene where some characters are sitting in the front parlor of a gallery in Paris and you can hear the clopping of horses and other sounds emanating from the street, which is never shown, an effect that is usually neglected in period films. At least I haven't noticed it before. Also when Theo's wife is about to go into labor they show her on her hands and knees fanatically scrubbing the kitchen floor, which is very typical behavior--my wife was doing such things at the last minute with all of our children, and it would have counterproductive to try to persuade her not to--but again I have rarely seen it depicted so authentically and kind of matter-of-factly on film. Of course as in all biographical films, even good ones, I don't suppose that the historical figures being depicted were anything like their movie versions. As my wife, who did not watch this with me though I am going to try to get her to, as I think she would like it, once said of another movie--whether it was Amadeus or Ivan the Terrible I can't remember right off hand--"If these guys could see the movies that were made about them." 

I was twenty years old in 1990, and the three years from 1989-91, I assume because I was very alert and perceptive to impressions during those, always seem to me now when I see them in movies to have a definite "look"--the color and texture of the sky, the trees, the situation of dust and mud puddles on the ground, the progression and quality of rust on fences--all seems very specific to that time, and those things do not look exactly the same way now. I'm not sure whether this can be true, or if it is merely an effect of the type of film that was commonly used at the time and that is actually what I am remembering, but I do have this impression a lot when I see movies from that time.  

I Guess I'll Continue on With More Movie Reviews (Almost Caught Up!)

Willard (2003)


Remake of a 1971 movie, starring professional eccentric Crispin Glover as a sort of proto-incel who lives in a nice Victorian house he has, at least temporarily, inherited from his parents which gets taken over by especially vindictive rats. It's pretty terrible and disgusting. The non-rat parts of it, the character's inability to function in the workplace or the modern world in general, and his anachronistic house, held my interest briefly, but they were minor aspects of the plot. At the end of this movie I determined that it wasn't necessary for me to watch anything that wasn't a widely renowned classic all the way through any more if I didn't want to. Some stuff is really irredeemable, but it took me a long time to come to the point where I felt myself entitled/qualified to say so.

Casino (1995)


Famously interminable Scorcese movie about the mob in Las Vegas. Everything that happens in this is completely morally repugnant, with no redeeming qualities. You probably knew that, but there are films with similar overarching themes that manage to be more interesting. Sharon Stone's performance in this was pilloried at the time and marked at least the beginning of the end for her as a headlining star, but I have to say her acting did not stand out to me as any worse than anyone else's did. I know I am not differing much from consensus opinion on this movie. My recent belief, or at least curiosity, garnered mainly from reading the movie blogs of very clever film fans, is that there are infinite delights to be mined from films that are comparatively uncelebrated by the critical consensus. Doubtless there are many instances where this is the case, however my somewhat random approach to trying to find examples has hit a cold streak lately.

Vampyr (1932)


The first sound movie from the great Danish-born, but really pan-European director Carl Theodor Dreyer, made in France but with dialogue primarily in German. The style decidedly shares characteristics with the scary German expressionist movement that was coming to its final culmination at the time. With this at least I had the comfort of knowing I was watching a real European classic of impressive age from a master artist. The dialogue, such as it is, is minimal, and it is a little difficult to follow and sleep-inducing to watch at home. The most memorable scene is shot from the point of view of a corpse looking out through the window of his coffin at the sky, branches, steeples, etc, as he is being carried to his burial. That is what stands out to me about this film.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2013)


For reasons that I am still trying to tease out, because the plot and the characters don't have any particularly outstanding appeal in themselves, and in fact are rather depressing, I quite liked this at the time that I saw it. Annoying and neurotic and over-privileged as most of the characters are, the general level of intelligence, cultural references, topics of conversation and so on which permeates the atmosphere of the picture is in the range where it holds my interest, which is something you know is increasingly lacking in my regular life. Most of the people in this movie belong to the higher end of the academic/well-traveled/urban liberal class, which is the class I certainly for better or for worse identify with, mainly because my IQ and general education level are commensurate with the average for this group I think, though I don't really belong to it, especially in the judgment of its actual members. Of course that none of these people are happy, their relationships are all disasters and they are inevitably professionally unfulfilled and disappointed, albeit their failures occur at a higher level than mine do. This is all true. There is nonetheless a relief in being in the company of people with mental outlooks and experiences that one can somewhat relate to.

The Vanishing (1988)


Oh boy. They (actually, my wife) told me not to watch it, but naturally I said, 'it's a 5-star movie. I have to watch it.' I'm not sorry I watched it--the chance to revisit the scenes and pastimes of late 80s France alone make it worthwhile for me (this is the Dutch version, not the Hollywood remake that came out a few years later and apparently was not very good)--but the ending is definitely a downer. While I realize now that the movie is full of all kinds of creepy foreshadowing, it has the kind of languid pace and pointed, unfrenetic construction that I like when I see it, though if too many movies were made in that way I would grow tired of it. And as noted above, the atmosphere is congenial to me.

The General (1926)


As someone who at least went through a phase a few years back where I really went in for silent movies, with the works of Buster Keaton (naturally) prominent among my favorites from that period, I was anticipating this, considered by many to be his masterpiece and which I had never seen before, with considerable excitement; however my attempts--for I made two--to watch this and absorb something of the frisson that often accompanies a viewing of such a universally-acclaimed classic, were failures on this occasion. As with so many similar experiences of late, I am chalking it up in part to where I am currently in life, in which my constitution as well as my brain are undergoing another transitional period with regard to how they process and respond to things like art. I have at present no other time to see movies but in the evening--my family doesn't allow me to get through so much as a football game when they are awake--and I simply cannot stay awake, at home anyway, for something like this at that hour, with the only sound being repetitive silent movie music. Besides this though, any resemblance of the old thrill that I would at times feel when confronted with a film of this class and stature was lacking entirely. At no point was I pulled in in any aspect. Perhaps (hopefully) this phase of my sensibility will pass and a future version of myself will be able to encounter this again and be moved by it in the way that its acclaim promises is possible. It has happened before.

Far and Away (1992)


I have not been averse to certain of Ron Howard's crowd-pleasing films, namely Cocoon and A Beautiful Mind, and thought at the least that this mini-saga about Irish immigrants in America might share some similarly comforting qualities, but I found it to be emotionally flat and distant on top of a story that was oddly un-engaging and pedestrian. I've never been enamored of Tom Cruise in any movie that I've seen; his longtime stardom, even accounting for his handsomeness, is a mystery to me. Nicole Kidman I never generally liked either, though once she stopped appearing in so many movies with Tom Cruise and occasionally wore her hair in an appealing style, she grew on me, a little. My opinion of this duo has further doubtless been colored by a wild story about them told to me by a woman I worked with back in the 90s who had gone on a vacation to a resort where, she said, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were also staying and that it was "known to all the other guests" that Nicole went to bed every night in her trainer's room while Tom was shacking up with a younger gentleman friend. Of course I completely believe this. Anyway this movie was a dud. It had top end Hollywood production values and a reasonably competent team working on it, but it never picked up or came alive.

Movie Reviews End of November 2018

Silent House (2011)


Director: Chris Kentis & Laura Lau


Notable Stars: None, although Elizabeth Olsen is a sister of the once-famous child actors the Olsen twins. She was cute.


Did I like it?: No. It was boring.


What I remember about it: Not much. It was a remake of a Uruguayan movie, of all things, which I'm sure was awesome. For some reason which was never clear to me the titular house that was being remodeled had no electricity and the windows were all boarded up with boards that were effectively impossible to wrench off so that if you misplaced your flashlight you were in complete darkness. I have no recollection of what happened in the movie.


I associate this with: The third movie in this set, maybe, but really nothing.

King of the Ants (2003)


Director: Stuart Gordon


Notable Stars: George Wendt; late-80s era MTV bimbo Kari Wuhrer


Did I like it?: In spite of the excessive violence, I am going to say yes. It held my interest.


What I remember: There is an interesting dynamic going in that this starts out like a 90s era Generation X slacker movie--aimless guy sleeping on a futon looking for odd jobs, the presence of at least the 2 actors named above in an apparent indie movie--and then it transitions rather abruptly into the more sinister, ruthless, dystopian cinematic world that has been familiar to audiences since around this time. The George Wendt character is introduced as the kind of schlumpfy, house painter type guy that you would expect a 90s era George Wendt character to be, but he turns out to be a brutal, sadistic administer of violence, and a good one. He also wears t-shirts and shorts throughout so you can see how enormous he is, which is considerably more so than I had realized previously. I don't like Kari Wuhrer even though I find her alluring, which is unusual with me. She radiates bitchiness, which in itself of course is not an admissible criticism anymore in itself, but she doesn't compensate for this by ever being witty or incisive or any fun at all, so what's the point?


I associate this with: Some combination of Quentin Tarantino meets Kevin Smith meets Traffic meets whoever the big 21st century nihilists are in a dystopian California.

The Others (2001)


Director: Alejandro Amenabar


Notable Stars: Nicole Kidman. Christopher Eccleston, who has appeared in a couple of things that have been written up on this blog.


Did I like it? No. It's another movie full of scary weird people or people-like entities who obviously have something off about them. Not my type of film.


What I remember: The house is very nice. It's set in Britain in the 1940s, but since the children who live in it cannot be exposed to sunlight this is another movie that takes place largely in the dark, which having just seen Silent House was a plot device I was already weary of. This was a good example of how I have a hard time discerning by the style of filmmaking or theme in what year many movies since around 2000 were made, especially period pieces that don't give themselves away by what technology the characters have. By the time it came in the mail I had forgotten it was on the list or what year it was from, and I thought it was a relatively new movie. As such I found myself thinking throughout that Nicole Kidman, who I believe is older than I am (she is--she is 51 now, which would have made her 33 at the time this was filmed), looked remarkably good, and that the 1940s era hairstyle she was sporting really worked for her compared to the usual way of she wears her hair. It did not occur to me that the movie was actually 20 years old until I looked it up.


I associate this with: Everything wrong with modern movies. The production values are lush and beautiful, but the result is lifeless and unsatisfying.

Imitation of Life (1959)

Director: Douglas Sirk

Notable Stars: Lana Turner; Sandra Dee; Mahalia Jackson. Juanita Moore, who played Lana Turner's black maid, is much lauded for her role in this, for which she received an Oscar nomination. I have to admit I had never heard of her before this, though.

Did I like it? I think I like All That Heaven Allows better among the Douglas Sirk oeuvre, but compared to all the more recent stuff I've been making myself watch, this was like cultural oxygen.

What I remember: Personally I found it somewhat uneven and clunky. Sirk has come back in fashion  to a certain degree, but I don't always find that whatever it is people like about him overcomes his well-documented shortcomings, such as the extreme artificiality and heavy-handedness of his movies. This film is an adaptation of a novel by Fannie Hurst, a book which I have not read, though I did read another of her novels, Back Street, which is one of the most relentlessly depressing books I can recollect reading, though one which admittedly tackles some often overlooked subject matter. I wrote about it on my other blog. This story has a similar unsentimental and pessimistic underpinning though proximate to and in this instance even achieving a certain degree of worldly success. The most memorable storyline involves Juanita Moore's mulatto daughter who wants to pass as white once she becomes a teenager and is consequently resentful of her mother and wants nothing to do with her, though the mother has devoted her entire life to her. I have always been rather cold to my own mother in a similar way over the years, and have always wanted nothing more than to get away from her, because of my various unhappinesses with regard to my own social status and popularity and education level. I don't exactly believe that my failures in these areas were her fault, but she would never acknowledge, or more probably had no idea how serious and angry I was about them, and in any event she was incapable of doing anything that might improve my relative standing in any of these areas. Most people would say that at this point of my life I would have been able to move past this but no, I haven't, or at least do not want to. I may have come to some amount of peace with who I am now, but I have not been able to do the same with what I was in the important, formative years of my life. Anyway I have gotten away from the movie. The appearance of Mahalia Jackson was a highlight, and a surprise.    

I associate this with: Nothing, really. It doesn't specifically remind me of anything else.

Wilderness (2006)

Director: Michael J. Bassett

Notable stars: No one I am familiar with.

Did I like it? No. It's a British movie, and I think they have an even more dystopian view of life in the 21st century than we do.

What I remember: It's about a bunch of juvenile delinquents sent to a remote island which is already inhabited by other criminals, and in the ensuing conflict almost everyone dies by some kind of extreme violence. The dialogue does not share any lineage with the fizzy British stage  tradition either. I remember people being killed every few minutes, ambushes, things being burned, 2 girls being on the island among about 20 or 30 guys and one of them having sex, which I think was sort of consensual, in that she seems to picked a favorite out of the crowd, though abstinence probably would not have been a option. I was not into this. I am watching more of these modern movies to try to get a more nuanced understanding of what's going on in the present day world of my own adulthood. They are by and large not helping me.

I associate this with: Fish Tank, modern British crime shows emphasizing the psychological and physical hellscape that apparently a lot of people think England has become.

We're a long way from Stolen Kisses.

The Train (1964)

Director: John Frankenheimer

Notable Stars: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau. Now these are movie stars.

Did I like it? Of course. I cheated a little here, since I watched this and wrote about it for the blog back around 2010-11, and I have a policy generally about not repeating myself. However as I had watched it on VHS on that earlier occasion, and as it came available after sitting in my "saved" Netflix queue for the better part of a decade I took advantage of the opportunity to see it again. It does feature Nazis and there are firing squads and bullets to the head and crowds sprayed with machine gun fire and all of the well worn associations of the 2nd World War, so to criticize the other movies for their fixation on murder and blood while enjoying the wartime body count in this one because I find it more aesthetically to my taste seems not wholly consistent. The 1964 take on World War II does nod at least to the former existence of a fairly advanced civilization and the continued existence of individual people who have some such idea as a reference point, which saves films of this type from just being pointless demonstrations of depraved man's savage butchery without any redeeming higher qualities, which is how I experience these more modern movies.

What I remember: As I noted before, I love all of the old European railroad stuff, the stations, the yards, the iron and steel and grinding wheels, the little offices with their wooden file cabinets and their coffeepots. This was filmed in France and while my memory of that country is that much of the railroading scene had been modernized and suburbanized by the 90s, the aesthetic in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, et al, was still similar to that depicted in this movie. The France presented here, while still somewhat romanticized, is nonetheless done so in a grimier and more elemental way than it is usually presented, especially by Americans. I even like Jeanne Moreau here, who in her immortal ur-French art movie roles is usually a little too complicated and lofty for me to appreciate.

I associate this with: Closely Watched Trains (for the railroad connection). I have not seen a lot of the classic World War II action movies that were ubiquitous in this era, to which family I imagine this movie belongs somewhat. They must not be rated very high.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

Director: Chris Columbus     

Notable Stars: You probably know.

Did I like it? Maybe it is because I have children and have been overexposed to them, but it seems that, in part because of the popularity of this series, there are so many movies like this now, and to me this didn't stand out from any of the other hundreds of kids' fantasy movies that have been released during the last 20 years. Ho hum. But obviously it is beloved by people of a certain age.

What I remember: There is a school story, and traditionally I have liked school stories. Maybe it is a generation gap problem, but the characters in this world do not grab me. Nor do I have any interest in the problems they face. The story isn't beautiful, or poignant, or profound, that I can see, and an air of self-satisfaction and arch runs through it that I find annoying.

I associate this with: Every carefully formulated kids' series of the last 20 years.





Movies--Many Movies

I've fallen way behind on my movie notes. I have a list of thirty-seven that I haven't recorded here yet! I hardly remember a lot of them, naturally. I will go seven at a time, and put down any impressions that have stayed with me. I should also note that around the time these new lists start I tweaked my system to allow more recent movies to be included, since the main book I was relying on ceased publication in 2007. I don't generally like the more recent movies but I'm not quite ready yet to give up everything current and escape into the past at every possible chance. I am now extra excited when an oldie comes up though.


Ironweed (1987)


I wouldn't have chosen to see this if it hadn't come up via the System, mostly because it stars 80s era Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep as alcoholic vagrants in depression era Albany, the idea of which, probably because of my age relative to them, has not traditionally appealed to me. It wasn't bad I guess, though it wasn't great either. Its depiction of how dreary being homeless in the long, dark, cold nights of the American Northeast would be was pretty accurate. Jack Nicholson, whom I found annoying most of my life, inhabits the role here well, I think. We all know about Meryl Streep and how remarkable she is. Her character dies in this (spoiler alert, sorry) and she has to play dead on screen for around five minutes, and I don't know that I have ever seen a more convincing portrayal of a dead person. It also illustrates an observation I have made elsewhere, the uncanny ability Meryl Streep has to always command your attention upon whatever awesome thing she is doing. Here she is just lying down, on a carpet I think playing dead, and all I can think about is her technique in portraying this dead person, whose character however I had forgotten about.


Tom Waits was in this too, perhaps not surprisingly as a fellow vagrant. I had not thought about him in years, though in this era he was something of a cultural touchstone, making several forays into acting. I found him mildly annoying at the time too because he was supposed to be cool, though you would only get that if you were a certain kind of person, which I was not. But now that he's been kind of forgotten and no one talks about him anymore I like him. He takes me back to that era.

Serpico (1973)


I had never seen this before--again, in my youth the themes would not have appealed--and while it has always had a decent reputation, I think seeing it now that it holds up really well. It has the whole gritty-New-York-in-the-70s vibe that was scary to live through but looks great on television 45 years later, but the story, about a policeman with a conscience taking on corruption in the NYPD that was apparently based on a true story that did not resolve in the exaltation of the honest cop and the disgrace of the crooked, seems daring to me. I don't feel like I have seen anything recent where some evil force in society that has not as yet been taken down has been confronted so directly and the exact nature of their crimes identified and demonstrated so clearly. This was directed by Sidney Lumet, who did not necessarily make the most lovable movies, but whose work I usually find to contain admirable aspects, even if I do so grudgingly.


There is a great scene shot on a hill overlooking the old Yankee Stadium from beyond center field, where the train tracks are. If you follow baseball at all of course you've seen the view looking out that direction from the stadium, but I had never seen it from that outside vantage, where in 1972-3 at least there was still a decent amount going on as far as traffic and street life. This would have been filmed before the 1974-75 renovation of the classic stadium too, which we still see intact.


Al Pacino's look in this was very early Springsteen-esque, which I have to assume was characteristic of the time. I at least don't see many people who look like that anymore. When I was a child I thought the era I lived in (this one) was nasty and terrible, and longed even then for some unknown past, but now of course I find I miss some of what has been lost since then--animated conversation, normal people and what seem to me normal business enterprises in cities come immediately to mind as examples from this movie.

Around the World in Eighty Days (2004)

This version starring Jackie Chan in the Passepartout role came up in my revised system because I had read the book (which I enjoyed), though the 1956 version, itself often maligned though it did win the Oscar for best picture, did not. This illustrates the risks of the open system, since I don't remember anything about that that was worth seeing. I had the impression that Jackie Chan was a mixture of comedian and action hero, but not here. Dreadful. Waste of money.

Read the book.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

Written by Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and set in a 1930s New York version of the same magic universe--there is a hoity-toity American counterpart to Hogwarts, naturally--I actually liked this better than the Harry Potter movies I have seen. I'm sure this is because of the highly stylized retro setting, which apparently is supposed to be 1926, but it looked and felt more like the 30s to me. I remember thinking the women actresses in it were pleasantly attractive enough without being gratuitously 'hot', though you probably aren't supposed to remark on that. The plots of all these fantasy movies with their incredibly violent final battles don't make much of an impression on me, but this was engaging enough as a nostalgia piece.

L'Auberge Espanole (2002)

A French-Spanish joint production made during the heady days just after the introduction of the Euro and the true realization of the dream of the free movement of Europeans, especially young and relatively good-looking and educated ones, throughout the zone. The title refers to an apartment in Barcelona that is shared by about eight different post-graduate 20-somethings, all from different (Western) European countries. Seriously, there is a Frenchman, an English girl, a Dane, an Italian, a Spanish woman, probably a German. I didn't particularly like any of the characters in the house, all of whom spoke English with the arrogance peculiar to their particular nationality, but I enjoyed the movie because it was made not long after my own time being there and it was familiar to me. If I were dropped into this movie I would be able to function and get along very well right away. My children like to watch the TV show The Amazing Race and when the contestants are in these foreign cities everything seems so different now. People are doing everything with their phones of course, even buying metro tickets, and everything everywhere looks so crowded and expensive. In this movie eight people in an apartment are still sharing one telephone hung on a wall, and this is only sixteen years ago! (though I feel like some of the characters had cell phones). Third world immigrants are barely a presence at all in this film, apart from Africans getting Phds in economics. There are no Muslims at all, nor does there seem to be much consciousness of them. Relatively average looking young people are still a real threat to have sex, or try to have sex, if they have too much to drink or otherwise find themselves in a bawdy mood, which is an element that seems to be missing from more recent movies, where everyone is too interested in maintaining control, or at least the appearance of it. The movie spawned two sequels featuring several of the same characters, Russian Dolls (2005) and Chinese Puzzle (2013), which I have not seen, though I would be interested to see how they have incorporated the changes in the European scene into the newer films, since the early 2000s time capsule quality of the original is the most interesting thing about it to me.

I liked this chick the best. She didn't live in the house.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

We do make it back in this set to a couple of old classics. Here of course we have the impressive lineup of Frank Capra directing and Cary Grant and Peter Lorre among others, including Raymond Massey. The story is implausible to say the least--the implausibility level is about the same as something like I Married a Witch, actually, but as you know I almost never watch movies for the story anymore. According to Wikipedia this was filmed way back in 1941, but was held back from release until the popular stage show from which it was adapted finished its run. Either way it has a good 40s ambience, good sets, etc. I like both the indoor and outdoor scenes, which are supposed to being taking place in Brooklyn, but which look like they belong in Connecticut, though the outdoor scenes have what is supposed to be the Manhattan skyline in the background. Somehow it works though. It's a nice little movie if you are into that kind of thing (basically a 1940s mainstream American idea of wackiness).

Hey Priscilla Lane. I liked her in this (romantically). Haven't seen her in much else.

I Love You Again (1940)

The first half hour of this screwball-esque comedy starring the classic Thin Man duo of William Powell and the ubiquitous Myrna Loy I thought was great, the best movie I had seen since maybe Rebecca. It couldn't keep up that torrid early pace, which was disappointing, but I still think it merits a high rating. The subject is one that I have seen in other old movies and that never fails to hold my attention, doubtless because I often fantasize about something of the sort happening to myself. A sententious, risk-averse, teetotaling prig, played by Powell, receives a blow to the head while on a cruise ship and wakes up with a completely different personality, roguish, witty, vigorous, and so on. His wife Myrna Loy, here still in her sexy 30-something persona, to be distinguished from the handsome, dignified, almost arch 40-something persona which she later inhabited, was bored out of her mind and in the process of drawing up the divorce papers before the accident, but needless to say gradually backed off from these legal activities as her husband's transformation into a completely irresponsible and even amoral person began to become apparent. In the end a minor favorite, especially in its genre.

   

Playing Some Catch Up

Needless to say I've fallen way behind on recording the movies I've seen. Some of these go back to the beginning of the year. I've got twenty-five of them that I haven't written about. I'll be keeping these very short, hopefully honest, which shouldn't  much of a challenge since I won't have remembered many details by this time.




The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)

I am prejudiced in favor of almost anything halfway decent from this time, so I enjoyed it as far as that goes. It was produced by Merian Cooper of King Kong fame. Cooper was a dynamic man of action more than an aesthete, and the film takes on this general character. In the credits it claims to be "inspired by" the famous Bulwer-Lytton novel, which I have not read, though apparently it has a completely different plot. While I believe the book features some early Christians as major characters, this movie is set mostly during the time of Christ, which of course pre-dated the famous Vesuvius eruption by about 50 years, tying the stories together by having a man who encountered Jesus while young be settled as a rich old man in Pompeii at the time of the disaster. As a production the movie is a little clunky and forced anyway, and all of this rather fantastic far-fetchedness is not done in a way that holds together. The always entertaining Basil Rathbone appears here as Pontius Pilate.
Good enough for fans of 1930s Hollywood, but I would not call it a classic.

Rebecca (1940)


It won the Oscar for best picture, the only movie directed by Alf Hitchcock (in I believe his first Hollywood effort) to do so, featuring a comparatively young Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, though all of this is incidental. It is famously not a typical Hitchcock picture--he was under some restraint by the studio at this time--and while a well-regarded classic, it seems to be ranked outside his most essential films by the experts, and the same critique is often applied to Olivier too. I had never seen it before, but it has all of the kinds of things I like with regard to dialogue, setting, faces, sensibility, general intelligence, etc, which I recognized within about five minutes. It's easily my favorite movie since Stolen Kisses.

Raging Bull (1980)


I had seen this a couple of times before, though I'm pretty sure the last time was when I was in college, which was a long time ago, so it seemed like a good opportunity to revisit it when it came up. I'm not a huge Scorcese fan, mainly for reasons that have little to do with the quality of his movies, the better of which I usually concede are decent enough. His characters tend to be completely unrelatable to me, to the point of striking me as probably having advanced forms of various mental illnesses, a pattern which runs through movie after movie after movie. The other reason is that he turns up on a lot of these DVDs I get on the commentary track or some other of the special features, and I don't enjoy him or find what he has to say particularly interesting. He goes on too much for my taste about the lens being used or the panning and so on, a little bit of which is informative, but there is no humor or sense of mischief such as I like to leaven the technical presentation.


But this has nothing to do specifically with Raging Bull, which I think holds up pretty well as a work of cinema art. As far as deriving a thought exercise from the movie, I suppose the obvious question is, What are we supposed to think of LaMotta? He is possessed of a kind of demonic force that is relatively rare even among the more violent subcultures in America, which is the entire source of interest in him. Early on he is able to at least temporarily impose enough discipline on himself to become a top ranked prizefighter, yet he seems to give up even on this as he gets older, and has more need of it. He demonstrates an obnoxiously low level of intelligence, however I think we are supposed to feel a little sorry for him for this as such things are not ultimately one's one fault. He causes an awful lot of havoc however, and the people around him don't really seem to get much in return.

California Solo (2012)


I've adopted a new system for picking movies which is not completely an improvement, though it allows more opportunity for more recent films and others that may not have attained the highest rankings. For every title generated by the new system, which is a much more random process, I match it with one attained via the old system, to ensure that I still have a steady supply of the classics that I like.


California Solo, a recent production of modest distinction, is thus one of the first movies of this "new" type to appear in my lists. It features the actor Robert Carlyle, who appeared in the late 90s indie hits Trainspotting and The Full Monty. Here he is playing a former minor member of a moderately acclaimed 80s era British rock band who now lives in California doing agricultural labor, making music-related podcasts, and drinking a lot. He's also divorced and has a teenage American daughter whom he barely knows; and he is also facing deportation back to the U.K. because he gets arrested for drunk driving. While he has a certain amount of British rocker charm, his life is in the mess it's in because he drinks so much that no one can really help him. I suppose that is the most interesting part of the movie, I have rarely seen a depiction of alcoholism that is so thorough and illustrative of the pitiful state that it reduces a man to. A lot of movies that are supposed to feature the bleak side of alcoholism still induce me to want to join in and imagine that I could carry off that lifestyle if I put my mind to it. But this character I knew was beyond anything I would be able to pull off at this point of my life. I can't go that far, not that I want to obviously, but some people have compulsions to be so extreme in everything, their souls are so volatile. My soul seems to be entirely bland in that regard.
I think there was supposed to be a message for us about immigrants here because it's a fairly relatable Scotsman who is being put through the grinder with police, lawyers, and all the rest of it, and perhaps we'll be sympathetic to his desire to stay and equate that with the plights of people who aren't white and/or English-speaking and move or fortify our personal take on this issue. I tend to be of the mindset that seemed to me to be prevalent when I was growing up that if any individual country decided that they didn't want any particular foreign national camping out on their territory indefinitely that there was always a risk of deportation. Obviously the sentient part of the world has moved on from this way of thinking about the matter.

The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978)


Italian epic from the heroic era of European filmmaking. I had seen this a few years back on a poor quality VHS tape and written a post about it. In addition to the dark print on the much smaller television I had at that time, I seem to have been distracted on that occasion and not taken much away from the viewing. In the meantime I kept the movie saved in my Netflix queue along with about thirty other DVDs whose statuses are perpetually "availability unknown". However, as occasionally happens, one of these elusive discs will suddenly become available and turn up in my mailbox, in this instance the Criterion Collection release. So I had to see it again.


Of course my experience was much better this second time. I was evidently in a more relaxed state of mind, which helped, and the bigger screen and clearer print brought out much more of its grandeur and depth than I had been able to perceive the first time. There is a very well known scene in which a pig is slaughtered, and there was another episode again involving an animal, a diseased cow that has to be put down. As this cow is the only one that the family, who was exceptionally poor, owned, and they cannot sell the meat or anything due to its being diseased, it represents years worth of financial devastation. It would be hard to concoct a "pitch" of this movie describing what it's about, it's an accumulation of small incidents or strokes of ill or good luck that given the narrowness and rigidity of this world determine the courses or nature of people's lives. One boy is identified by the local priest as intelligent and is given the opportunity to go to school. A woman's husband dies and she has to take in laundry to support herself. Meanwhile the local lord of course has access to books and newspapers and even a record player on which he listens to recordings of Caruso while his peasants lead the same lives their forbears have led for hundreds of years, and this all taking place, as I noted in the earlier post, perhaps within the lifetime of the filmmakers themselves, or at least their parents, as the director (Ermanno Olmi) was born in 1931. He is still alive, by the way.

   


The Red Shoes (1948)
Much-loved Powell and Pressburger film about a ballet troupe and the artistic process intended as an infusion of beauty and color into a still dreary postwar England. There is a lot about it that I like, though I did not have the same response to it as I did to the earlier The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by the same duo, which I thought was pretty much a masterpiece. However this does star favorite of this blog (and of Powell and Pressburger) Anton Walbrook as the ultra sophisticated and exacting director of the ballet company, and an English redhead (seemingly another P & P staple), Moira Shearer, who, I had not realized, was a real ballerina of some renown, as the unknown dancer who persuades the master Walbrook that she has what it take to dance the lead in his company. There are some pretty hard observations on the demands and sacrifices necessary to lead the life of the true artist, though these probably apply almost equally to being a true businessman, or a true scientist, or true tech innovator, or ace high school student, or almost anything requiring true excellence. Whether true art still occupies an elevated position relative to these in anyone's mind I am not sure.


There is of course the incongruity of the brilliant young composer and the brilliant young dancer in the film both being standard issue born and bred English people, given that these are arts in the English are not traditionally recognized as having a culture of greatness in, and even the English composers who have achieved some degree of fame (Britten, Vaughn Williams, Walton) I tend to think of as somewhat stodgy, respectable establishment types--sort of like the professor at the beginning of the Red Shoes who cribs from his student's work for his new composition--rather than the more fiery, intense younger men identified with this art on the continent. However, I find the optimism expressed by attributing the possibility of attaining great and noble heights where they have not traditionally been considered to have been reached to one's own people, as the phrase goes, to be admirable. This particular sort of confidence is not consistent with most peoples across the ages.

  

Iron Man 3 (2013)


Another selection by my new system, I figured that these movies were hits so they must have some kind of appeal, or fun to them, so I wasn't opposed to seeing it. I couldn't understand this at all, it made absolutely no sense to me. All the technology and machines that were constantly introduced were way over my head, explained in an impenetrable foreign language. I lost the plot about fifteen minutes in, around the point at which any resemblance to life on Planet Earth as I have always experienced it departed from the movie. If this is at all representative the mental world the mass of the population comfortably inhabits nowadays it no wonder I am so isolated and incapable of understanding anybody. Good God. Look at the cast they got for this thing. Gwyneth Paltrow? Not that I ever liked her particularly, but I thought she wanted to be a snob. Don Cheadle is in this too. I know, money, money, money. Not too many people in America can win a real following doing the kinds of movies I like, But some can.

Return to Nothing

Not much time left before the election. Like so many people nowadays, I feel, between the fate of the Republic being possibly at stake and my own special place in society due to various superiorities of my person, personally obligated to make at least one concluding statement about it. But I am not going to do that tonight, because I am so far behind on my movie notes that I have to take a couple of posts just to bring those semi-current.


Anna Christie (1930)
Adaptation of one of Eugene O'Neill's plays, early talking picture, starring Greta Garbo in the title role in what her first appearance in a sound film. Reminiscent of German expressionism, and in fact, the DVD included a German language version of the movie that must have been made concurrently, as it also stars Greta Garbo (though the other actors are all different), and the sets and scenes are more or less identical. I have read the play, but not seen it on the stage. This seems to me a more or less satisfactory adaptation. Apart from being Swedish (Annie Christie is a 1st generation Swedish-American), the glamorous Garbo does not at first seem an obvious choice to play a hard-drinking sailor's daughter who has had a hard time of it in life herself. The characters are still well on the outside of mainstream American society, certainly the respectable part of it. As with many O'Neill plays, the characters are drawn from the rougher laboring classes, and the obstacles they face, with the emphasis in this being on the woman Anna, to make their way through life with any degree of stability and respectability are largely particular to those ranks of society. The movie achieves a grittiness that is suited to the source, an ability that was lost as the 30s went on, largely doubtless as a result of the Code, which facilitated the trend towards 'overstatement' that became dominant as the decade went on,  though I also suspect that due to the inevitable improvements in production values that something of this effect would have happened anyway.

The film was directed by Clarence Brown (active. 1916-1952), who had a solid, if not quite spectacular career. He also directed the film version of the fine O'Neill comedy, Ah Wilderness! (1935) which I have not seen. Others of his movies that I have seen are The Yearling (1946), which had good points about it but was not gripping, and the 1951 version of Angels in the Outfield, a light picture about baseball, Roman Catholics and lady sportswriters, which I once watched with my two older children and they seemed to enjoy it, so I am positively inclined towards it for this and many other reasons particular to myself.


The King and I (1956)


Classic, or once-classic, musical, and the third version of the Anna story which I watched after reading the book earlier this year. While I am often pretty enthusiastic about what is now perceived as popular art from this time period, a lot of the stuff that achieved blockbuster-level success in that era has not aged so well. I would include most of the film versions of the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals in this category (I do think that The Sound of Music, itself much maligned nowadays, holds up better than the others). They do not contain a lot of things that excite me at this point in my life. There is only really one song in The King and I that I like ("Getting to Know You"). I like Deborah Kerr, mainly in her 1940s British movies, and she is likable here, but it feels at times like the production is somehow not in sync with what she has to bring to it. Yul Brynner is so famous as the King and devoted the better part of his life to the role and I respect that, though I think I actually prefer Rex Harrison in the 1946 non-musical version. Even when he is humorous, Brynner comes off as being rather serious and mannered, while Deborah Kerr I think was not that way by nature, but a lot of her roles in the 50s especially took place in movies that had these kind of restraints built into them against which I feel like she was frequently mismatched.

On the whole I like the 1946 adaptation better, not that it was itself a great movie, but it is closer to the feeling of the Margaret Landon book, to which none of the movie versions in my opinion really add anything.


Safe Haven (2013)


Once in a while some odd thing like this, an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, will manage to land on my list of movies. I will watch them to make sure I am not missing anything worth noting (usually not) and to get an idea of what kinds of things people are into nowadays and how they live or aspire to live or perceive themselves as living. Nicholas Sparks is something of the Thomas Kinkade of literature, and there is nothing in the movie that would be of interest to a sentient person, with the exception of the circumstances that: (1) there is not a single person in the entire movie who is not white. Indeed there is not a single character who is not an American, or at least who identifiably speaks non-American accented English. (2) there are also no people who present as identifying as remotely gay, let alone trans or any of those other in-between genders that most people still need to be brought up to speed on. (3) This is not quite as important, but the present day southern town in which this movie was set was not only devoid of people of color, foreigners and homosexuals, but any sign of recognizable national franchises or even brands. (4) It made quite a lot of money at the box office, over 97 million dollars (it cost 28 million dollars to make), and was the #3 movie in the country on its opening weekend, and not very far behind #s 1 and 2. It's obviously mostly women, and very white ones, and not, I think, particularly old ones, who have to be consuming this slobber. Probably a lot around my age. Probably not terribly intellectual, but suffering from varieties of the same discontents and quiet desperations that afflict their more intellectual sisters, channeled in different streams of frustration, and perhaps not always as consciously apparent, even to themselves...

Given all the seeming brouhaha about the lack of representation of multicultural people in Hollywood, which nearly everyone in the industry publicly at least seems to agree with, I wonder how the actors and other professionals who work on movies like this that are blatantly and aggressively exclusive of non-white people are treated by the good progressives who as far as publicity goes dominate the scene. The star was the admittedly strikingly pretty and very Aryan Julianne Hough, native of Utah, where her father was the chairman of the state Republican party, country music singer, and two-time winner on the Dancing With the Stars television show. She has not appeared in many movies, but she gets some work, most recently in Dirty Grandpa, which just came out this year (and made about the same money as Safe Haven, though Hough was not the star). The male lead, Josh Duhamel, has been in number of productions, most notably the Transformers movies, and appears to be somewhat established as a second or third tier star. He was a fashion model, and is apparently what frustrated 30-something Middle American women envision as an ideal lover/husband. He is originally from North Dakota...


Will stop here. But there is more, much more, to come.