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Ben7
Reviews
Cry Macho (2021)
Hope this doesn't put him off filmmaking
When you see something is an Eastwood picture, you will usually find that it is very good. This one, IMHO, was hobbled by the script. At the beginning, Dwight Yokum gives us Eastwood's back story in an artificially jam-packed bit of "dialogue." Amateur hour. This is followed by many leaden exchanges throughout the film. The lead role is meant for a man 30 years younger. The things he does are simply implausible for a 90-year-old. The attempted seduction scene is just beyond belief. Even the love interest is young enough to be his granddaughter. Decent people who love their partners hang in when they decline. But few sincere significant others sign on for a relationship as caregiver from the outset. Was he trying to remake Grand Torino? This script is trite and offers few surprises, well-intentioned though it may be. What I don't get is how this story got Eastwood's approval...he's proven himself to be more discerning. And it having gotten past him, why didn't his people speak up? A sure-fire payday perhaps. As one who greatly admires Clint Eastwood, my hope is that he'll try again, and not let reaction to this mediocrity prompt him to throw in the towel. Not a film one would want noted as his valedictory effort.
The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008)
An Ode to Scum
As the picture begins, our heroine steals a bag containing a small dog from an out-of-towner. When she gets the parcel home and discovers the little critter, for which she has no use, she just casts it out into the hallway of her tenement to fend for itself. She has no feeling for the welfare of the animal, not to mention the grief of its owner. That was enough for me. I couldn't care less what happens to this cruel, selfish young woman, except to the extent that I hope it hurts. Had the plot been billed as animal rights vigilantes giving her what she has coming, I might have continued watching. One understands that not every protagonist can be exemplary, and that even those who are bear human imperfections. In "Gardens of the Night," Tom Arnold gives an Oscar-worthy performance as an even worse human being, who abducts children and "turns them out" as prostitutes salable to pimps. But there are complexities in the portrayal, limits to his excesses, and he displays a horrifying, yet fascinating ability to relate to his victims. In contrast, the unfeeling Eleonore just makes me angry, without being interesting.
L'homme qui aimait les femmes (1977)
This isn't love
Released just three years before the onset of AIDS, this picture captures one aspect of the interrelation between men and women in the '70's. Venerial diseases had been checked, reliable contraception measures were readily available, and the aforementioned plague had not yet been visited upon us. Sex was easy to get, but a sustained relationship much less so. This sort of hit-and-run collecting of sexual scalps was practiced by women nearly as often as by men. Either way, one dared feel emotional connection only at great risk. Being on the losing end of these transactions didn't feel good, and it's hard to muster sympathy for the protagonist, who perishes much as the road kill one sees every spring, when mating season causes hormones to trump common sense.
Un homme et une femme (1966)
Dreck aux Francais
Even considering that this picture was released in 1966, it pales in comparison to many of its contemporaries. Here we have a glamorous couple in their mid-30's, under the thrall of insanely prolonged adolescence and too absorbed with their self-indulgent careers to undertake the day-to-day responsibilities of parenthood. We see them doing their respective things as they evade the pedagogical, and it's about as interesting as watching a guy fix a drain trap under a sink. Yeah, they look good, but anyone who has lived for a while knows that is not enough to sustain a relationship. The female is pining for her dead stuntman husband, who apparently really knew how to show a girl a good time. Now she's going for another adrenaline junkie, this time a race car driver. Sadly, this is an apt observation of how people seem to find lovers sporting the same characteristics that torpedoed their previous romantic involvements. They risk their lives motoring through inclimate weather to sustain the drama of their attraction...it's just silly. One notes that the male drives a first-generation Mustang, a mediocre iconically American product. At that time, purists were up in arms over the incursion of American culture and the English language into French society, so perhaps this is some sort of commentary pertaining thereto. Things don't go too well in the bedroom, and anyone who has had a partner trip out like that at the moment of truth must applaud its observation of the tragic differences between men and women as to sexuality. The final image is very cool and tres French, but it is questionable whether it is worth the time invested getting there. Thus I must damn this picture with faint praise.
Karma Police (2008)
Picks up in the last act
There are just too many movies made to see them all, and plot is the factor I most often use in triage. This picture does present an interesting premise. Actually, the technicals are o.k. Dialog is weak at some junctures and the acting in some major roles is spotty. I want to single out for particular abuse the lead actress. She's drop-dead gorgeous, knows it, and speaks in that dreadful Valley Girl patois that dictates guttural emission of the final words of every sentence. That and an intonation absolutely suffused with feline smugness. There is a minor character upon whom the lead actor has a crush early in the film, even more spectacularly beautiful, and a better actress. Don't know why they didn't cast her in the female lead. I don't think I heard a word of profanity in the picture...makes you wonder how all these grownups can be so squeaky clean...is it a Church pic? No, they didn't sell the one-way-to-heaven product. Karma Police gets better in the last act and delivers an o.k., if predictable finish.
Waitress (2007)
Mate, Then Eat the Male
It's been nearly a century now that the so-called emancipation of women has been underway. Patriarchy is by definition unjust, and the resentments harbored by women forced to live under such a social arrangement have been brilliantly exploited by capitol. As women entered the workplace, prices rose, ultimately resulting in an economy that provides two workers for the price of one. Few families can get by on just dad's paycheck these days. Cynical unsupervised children are left unattended to do who-knows what while the role of the father is passed on to putative "new families" of peers. Mom and dad, if dad is indeed in the house, come home too tired to really participate in their children's lives, and in any event, there are myriad electronic distractions to pass the time apart while under the same roof. Just as a heterosexual romance written by a gay or lesbian writer is the product of imagination and supposition, this New York intellectual's vision of the lives of bumpkins prone to violence and double negatives also misses the mark. As an earlier user comment notes, feminism, though spawned from excesses of the past, has shot right through equality into a battle of the sexes. Look at the male characters. Andy Griffith plays a sexually harmless grouch who has the good grace to die at a convenient point in the narrative and leave our heroine a quarter mil in hard cash. Served his purpose. Earl, the abusive husband, is just a shade better portrayed than utterly two-dimensional, although even he was necessary to provide the seed for mama's little girl. The boss at the diner admits to having no ambition beyond the momentary, and serves as a studly cipher for the cause of getting Cheryl Hines' ashes hauled. Neither Hines' character nor Russel's would touch the goofy but earnest guy who wins the heart of the goofy waitress with a 10-foot pole, but what the heck? He's good enough for her, ha ha ha. Forget the ethics, professional and personal, the doc was about to do the right thing by Russel's character when a biological imperative wrenched the moment from their hands. Russel said he was her best friend, but she's willing to jettison that rare connection with little thought once she has foaled a new female to mold into a man-hating Amazon. The gentle, loving way melted goop was stirred in the fabrication of pies, accompanied by gentle, loving, politically correct "women's music," also grated upon this rough old coot. But that's a minor annoyance alongside this picture's marginalization of half the human race.
The Talent Given Us (2004)
An easy look at hard truths
Most films have protagonists between the ages of 25 and 45. In childhood and adolescence, one identifies with them as grownups. As the years pass, the view becomes as contemporaries. I've only gotten as far as late middle age, but at this point, while I can be lulled into a sort of suspension of disbelief and view characters 15 years my junior at eye level, more and more, I identify with their parents. This is abetted as the boomer generation ages, and many people now long in the tooth formed their adult identities during and after the values shift of the 1960's.
That said, when you look at the Wagners' relationship from the vantage point of a certain age, one can understand why two people bonded by parenthood and hard experience through the years might persist in a union where romantic love is a distant memory. Familiarity, trust, recollection of how much worse other potential mates were during one's dating years, and fear of going it alone make their presence felt. In your 50's or your 70's, one wonders "Who would want me now?"
For most of us, this is as happy an ending as we're going to get, like it or not. There comes a time when one is too tired, too sick, and/or too set in one's ways to start over yet again. Successfully rearing a child has its rewards, and as libido wanes, sometimes that's enough. One's acrimonious relationship with one's mate can be a shelter without alternative.
This film takes an unflinching look at these realities...what is, as opposed as to what "should be," to borrow a distinction often made by Lenny Bruce. Acceptance is the last of the seven stages of grief. Or to quote an old Country/Western song title, "It's not love...but it's not bad."
Forty Shades of Blue (2005)
A Literary Milestone
Not the movie, but rather this review.
Dorothy Kilgallin once famously wrote the shortest review on record of a Broadway play: "The House Beautiful" is the play lousy.
I'm going to top her in brevity:
"Fourty Shades of Blue" blew.
My friends, it was an endless soap opera wherein well-dressed characters with a clean place to sleep and full bellies, along with servants to do the sh*t work and apparent good health, mope around and screw up their lives.
Nobody appreciates what the others have done for them, nor their blessings from On High. They're bored, as was I attempting to stay awake watching them.
In recent years, moviegoers have benefited from an obsession with pace by directors, resulting in many good scenes sacrificed on the altar of retaining viewer interest. Some appear on Deleted Scenes reels once the DVD comes out.
This depressing tear-fest just ambles along self-indulgently, ending not far from where it began, and robbing the viewer of an hour and 47 minutes of his or her life in the process.
If you get the DVD from your library (don't even think of wasting good money renting it), you'll be "treated" to a companion short by the same director, wherein an arrogant codger wheels and deals from his hotel bed in Russia, while apparently getting a little young artist 'tang on the side. I dunno. I watched the thing three times, but couldn't pay attention to it. The Beatle-coiffed sexagenarian was following a leggy pianist through the subway, and he might have scored. He looked happy enough the next day.
Inside Désirée Cousteau (1979)
Funny, some of it intentional
I had the flu one day in 1981, and no cable. Even in LA, there isn't always anything good on free TV. So I dragged myself out of bed and rented this title, along with the Lenny Bruce Performance Film. At a time when the cheapest VCR still cost $600 in 1981 bucks, I'd recently purchased two used VCRs with different things wrong with them for a total of $150. They worked when connected together, and weighed as much as small refrigerator.
I got the idea that Cousteu wasn't Desiree's real last name, even without the help of IMDB, because she pronounces it differently in different scenes.
Late in the film, there's a scene where she "does" a gent well into middle age. I assume a producer or pal of one of the filmakers, as he didn't have a porno physique. Desiree gives it up, but you can see she's definately not into it. The mature gent enjoys himself; there are no weird angles to expose the old in-n-out. "Good for him," I thought, though I am only now reaching his age.
In this age of implants, one has a tendency to take a jaundiced look at spectacular bodies. I wasn't hip to this in '81, when the process was much less common in any event. So I don't know how I'd react now. But she was a real beauty, or so it seemed at the time.
What Planet Are You From? (2000)
I love this picture!
No faint praise here. On my fourth viewing, I was still howling with laughter.
Garry Shandling is virtually unique in his ability to deliver an earthy joke with a light, even elegant, touch.
Even this pic's defenders allow that it's not high art. Maybe not. But then again, just maybe.
Fatso (1980)
Funny and endearing
I'm delighted to see this picture so well-appreciated among IMBD commenters a generation after its release. It never got the respect it deserved when it was new.
Someone has already noted the scene where Dom and his putative saviors discuss food as many men would discuss women. This film manages to be very funny, while remaining warm and insightful.
It's so good, one is tempted to wonder if Ms. Bancroft's husband Mel Brooks had an uncredited hand in its creation...though I hasten to add that I have no evidence to that effect whatsoever. In my humble opinion, she deserved the chance to direct other pictures.
And if you want to know how the picture really ends, watch the end credits all the way through for a shocker.
Ordet (1955)
Not only brilliant, but truly engaging
Others have reviewed this picture in a more scholarly and contextual manner than I can, so I will only endeavor to add the following:
I have a particular interest in the nature of faith, and undertook to view Ordet as something "good for me," but probably arduous. Wrong! I also grew up in an area heavily populated by Scandinavians, and knew immigrants who were contemporaries of the oldest characters in the picture.
Ordet, set in 1925, is a dead-on take of old-school Scandinavian culture, suffused with both the most intense dramatic elements imaginable and moments of comic relief as well. The action moves right along without help of special effects or a distracting musical score.
This picture at least alludes to the seldom-asked question, "Why do people believe?" Is it merely for the rewards of faithfulness, or something more?
The final scene, utterly devoid of effects or music, has a dramatic power unexcelled in the ensuing 47 years of cinema to date. It is very long, but uses its duration in service of the tension of the story. Nobody is yelling, fighting or firing weapons, despite the fact they are enduring emotional torment that is as painful as it gets.
In an oblique way, the scene reminded me of the part of Jim Jarmusch's "Down By Law" where Tom Waits and Co. are sitting in the clink in real time, and time passes glacially in one very long scene, illustrating the sheer boredom of incarcerated life. Here real time is used to illustrate the unrelenting nature of grief. In both cases we see what happens long after the scene would have changed in nearly any other picture. The pace conforms plausibly with real life, and in so doing serves the dramatic tension.
One negative review alludes to the final shot and the expression in a character's eyes. I would defend that as an insight that no blessing is unmixed.
As others have noted, one needn't hold a Christian point of view to enjoy this film and be given much to ponder. See it.