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Reviews
Belushi (2020)
Sensational aspects of his life ignored...but what we do get is choice
Audio interviews, incredible home movies, photographs, film clips and rather superb animation propels this intimate biography of John Belushi who, in 1978, was at his peak appearing weekly on TV's late-night hit "Saturday Night Live" as well as being the star of the number-one comedy "Animal House" and one-half of The Blues Brothers, who had the number-one album. Growing up in Wheaton, IL, John Belushi was a football player also interested in drama and doing impressions. He was "special", as a classmate calls him: the Homecoming King at the senior prom who rode a motorcycle and played drums in a local rock-and-roll band. John's teenage sweetheart and future wife Judy recalls thinking he was Italian when they met, only to learn John's father was an immigrant from Albania--a moody man into cowboy movies and the proprietor of a local diner. Trying his hand at Summer Stock after high school, Belushi became smitten with improvisational comedy after seeing a performance by the Second City theater troupe. Second City eventually came calling but was a stepping stone to better things, namely National Lampoon's satirical "Lemmings" revue, which also featured Chevy Chase (and introduced cocaine into John's life). Documentary from writer-director R. J. Cutler for Showtime is well-researched, entertaining and, finally, heartbreaking. ***1/2 from ****
Supernova (2020)
"I'm becoming a passenger...this thing is taking me somewhere I don't want to go."
Celebrated British pianist has taken a leave from his work to care for his life-partner, an author and amateur astronomer struggling with early-onset dementia. Lovely actors' piece for Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci from writer-director Harry Macqueen comes unadorned with affectation or melodrama. It's a simple-yet-complicated treatise on life, on love, on selfishness versus selflessness, on the desire to never be left alone and the strength it takes to finally let go. There are a couple instances where I didn't feel the writing was up to the level of the actors (and that old "If you really love me, you'll let me do this" ploy isn't acknowledged for being the emotional blackmail tactic it is). However, for the most part, a tender and beautifully-realized human story. *** from ****
The Sessions (2012)
Unusual character piece: tender and careful yet straightforward
A touching, very careful but also unblushing, straightforward story of a 38-year-old poet in Berkeley, CA who wants to lose his virginity even though his muscles (but not his libido) have been atrophied by polio. Portraying real-life writer Mark O'Brien, actor John Hawkes is sweet but not treacly; he's an immature kid in a man's non-functioning body, and at times he's a pain. Living by day on a respirator and at night in an iron lung, Mark is asked to write a story on the sex lives of the handicapped, prompting him to hire a sex surrogate of his own. Helen Hunt's Cheryl is an unusual character, a married woman who is paid almost like a prostitute but with a difference: she's there as a sex technician. Hunt gives a brave, upfront performance without any of her TV-perfected mannerisms; she's found this character and delivers nearly flawless work. Writer-director Ben Lewin, working from O'Brien's article "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate", goes right for our heartstrings near the finish (with a voiceover that I didn't much care for--it's too calculated), but otherwise does a lovely job introducing us to some interesting and compassionate people (including William H. Macy as a neighborhood priest who turns confession into friendship). One Oscar nomination: for Hunt as Best Supporting Actress. *** from ****
August: Osage County (2013)
"I am running things now!"
After her husband walks out the door and doesn't return (only to drown), the matriarch of a large family--battling mouth cancer and hooked on pain pills--calls her kin back together at the old homestead in Oklahoma. Tracy Letts' adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play from 2007 is an actors' dream, certainly, and yet these fussin', cussin' family members merit little interest. We learn who was daddy's favorite, whose marriage is on the rocks, and who gets what in the will; in the meantime, all the laughing fits and sudden angry blow-ups are flawlessly performed by Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, and Margo Martindale in particular. The dialogue is prickly, but with theatrical "truth", and the 121mn length is self-defeating. ** from ****
Hotel Artemis (2018)
A limited idea...
In riot-strewn Los Angeles 2028, a gray-haired, persnickety nurse, haunted by the death of her son and now an agoraphobic, runs a members-only hotel for the criminal element. Shot up? Near death? This lady has all the right drugs to ensure a quick recovery. Writer-director Drew Pearce doesn't get very far with his limited idea, and making Jodie Foster look old and baggy wasn't good for the movie--nor for the actress (most people will just think she's lost her looks). In his directorial debut, Pearce gives us an interesting (if by now familiar) dystopian L. A., and some of his touches--such as the rules of the hotel, its history and the naming the crooks after famous cities or locations--are original, though none of these characters merit much interest. * from ****
Le streghe (1967)
Hit-and-miss quintet
Italian-French co-production from Dino De Laurentiis is a hit-and-miss (mostly miss) quintet of female portraits from five different directors, each featuring Silvana Mangano in the lead. As Gloria in the lengthy opener from director Luchino Visconti, Mangano is an Italian movie star who is less than the sum of her parts. In the amusing second story from Mauro Bolognini, she's a "Lady in a Hurry" who uses an accident victim as a way to get through afternoon traffic, while in Pier Paolo Pasolini's wonderfully odd third episode, Mangano plays a deaf-mute picked to be the wife of an eccentric widower and his son (all with cartoony hair). This section of the movie is the highlight, and almost makes the rest of it worth-seeing (although the star is terrific in all five stories). Mod Italian cinema--distributed Stateside in a dubbed print by Lopert Pictures--is more arty than incisive, though it does feature a young Clint Eastwood in the final tale from Vittorio De Sica, looking somewhat uncomfortable while dancing down a runway. ** from ****
Right of Way (1983)
First-time teaming of Bette Davis and James Stewart--and just in time!
Bette Davis and James Stewart play a devoted, long-time married couple with a dilemma in this adaptation by Richard Lees from his play. Seems Bette has a fatal allergy to her own blood, while Jimmy--a caring, gentle, go-along kind of hubby--refuses to live without her. Enter grown daughter Melinda Dillon, the type of movie daughter who excitedly answers the phone when her elderly father phones her; she can't understand why her folks want to kill themselves and so alerts the authorities. Well-acted treatise on the problems of aging from HBO Premiere Films, but stagy, glum, and at times irritating. Three CableACE nominations; Best Actor (Stewart), Best Actress (Davis), Best Drama Special. ** from ****
La femme écarlate (1969)
Vitti is quite a presence, but film is just eye-candy...
French-Italian co-production (in French with subtitles) stars Monica Vitti as a perfume factory owner in Paris who loses everything to her scheming lover and commercial manager. She contemplates suicide before deciding killing him might be more satisfying. A featherbrained piece of fluff from director Jean Valère, sexy at times and great eye-candy, but nothing more. Vitti--who, from some angles, resembles Barbra Streisand in a blonde wig--is charming picking up a strange man on the street and telling him her plans over lunch at the Eiffel Tower; however, her sojourns with members of a rock group (dancing and getting high) are silly and just take up time on the clock. ** from ****
Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976)
In-between "Nashville" and "3 Women", Altman gave us...this.
Revered but erratic filmmaker Robert Altman bombed with this turkey which he also co-wrote with protégé Alan Rudolph ("suggested by" the 1968 play "Indians" by Arthur Kopit, which star Paul Newman reportedly optioned in 1970). In 1880s Wyoming, a Wild West show starring William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and his friends runs into trouble after antagonism between Cody and biographer Ned Buntline, and between Cody and a reluctant Chief Sitting Bull. The screenplay is just an outline, and the impressive roster of performers are not given actual characters but instead are identified by their titles (The Star, The Producer, The President, etc.). At first, Paul Lohmann's red-tinted cinematography is lovely, but the darker it gets for the interiors, the uglier it gets. Newman later claimed this was one of his personal favorites of his films--maybe it was the goatee or the costumes or the horse he rides? Or maybe it was the fun he had on-set pranking Altman? In any case, a long list of talents are wasted, including Burt Lancaster as Buntline (who makes grand soliloquies as if he were the last man standing); Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley (she's focused at first, then temperamental, then an embarrassment); Joel Grey as the producer and announcer (another M. C.?); Harvey Keitel as the bookkeeper (very green); and Shelley Duvall in a wordless cameo as Grover Cleveland's wife (how do you manage to lose Duvall?). The opening Indian attack on the settlers is, of course, revealed to be B. S., but one of the actors is trampled fatally by a horse and the troupe gives him a hell-with-it burial; if Altman and Rudolph intended this to be irreverent humor, they misjudged their own indifference and fell victim to their own heightened self-importance. Winning the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, Altman rejected the honor, claiming the Dino De Laurentiis Company edited the picture against Altman's wishes. At an agonizing 123mns, I don't think De Laurentiis took out enough. NO STARS from ****
The Other Side of Midnight (1977)
Talent behind the camera if not in front of it...
Two optimistic girls in the late 1930s--an ambitious-but-untrained secretary in Chicago and a French lass who has fallen deeply in love with a fickle American flyer for the Royal Canadian Air Force--learn to survive using their feminine instincts (if not wiles) at the start of World War II. Told in flashback from behind the steel bars of a Greek prison, this adaptation of Sidney Sheldon's bestseller is loaded with talent behind the camera if not in front of it. Co-written by seasoned movie veterans Herman Raucher and Daniel Taradash, produced by Frank Yablans and Howard W. Koch, and directed by Charles Jarrott, "Midnight" looks to be the perfect dramatic/nostalgic "woman's picture", but mostly all we're offered is soapy hysteria. There's also an awful lot of Marie-France Pisier, an actress of the French New Wave who possesses minimal screen chemistry. Eventually, the paths of the two women overlap, with the same "dishy" guy figuring in both their love lives. This may be the best performance granite-jawed John Beck ever gave (which isn't saying much), and Susan Sarandon adds a touch of spirit when she's not making the gaga eyes which would become her early trademark. Jarrott knows his way around a romantic montage, but he doesn't seem to be in the salacious spirit of Sidney Sheldon. His picture often plays like mid-range Sydney Pollack, with Michel Legrand's '40s score blanketing much of the dialogue (actually a blessing). Something violent looms on the horizon for these doomed lovers, and that may be enough to keep viewers watching, but you'll shame yourself in the morning. Irene Sharaff received the film's sole Oscar nomination for her costumes. *1/2 from ****
Leave the World Behind (2023)
It's the end of the world as we know it...and nobody feels fine
Symbolism-heavy doomsday melodrama has two disparate families on Long Island--one white, one black--facing a nationwide crisis together: a cyberattack on the United States has left the country without TV, internet or phone service. Why this happened (or who is responsible) isn't readily apparent in writer-director Sam Esmail's slant on the material, adapted from Rumaan Alam's novel. There are large-scale CGI effects--a plane loses control in the sky, an oil tanker runs aground right on the beach, flamingos end up in the swimming pool--but Esmail is far more intrigued by the racial tensions brewing in the house that the two families are sharing. This is fine as a starting point, but Esmail beats all his plot-points to a pulp; even the T-shirts the characters wear are like signs to clue us in. Julia Roberts (playing a people-hater) is appropriately pinched and unhappy, while Mahershala Ali is kept so mysterious and enigmatic that a real character never quite emerges (he's here to give ominous speeches meant to unsettle us). The effects are uneven: the self-driving cars going awry is effective, but the animals--ominously gathering to perhaps warn humans of impending disaster--doesn't come off. Even worse are the three sullen, trash-talking kids in the house, meant to represent America's Youth. I'll stick with the Brady Bunch. Roberts also served as one of the film's producers for Netflix; Barack and Michelle Obama were two of the executive producers. * from ****
Whip It (2009)
Smoothly-engineered and engaging, but not dynamic...
Texas girl in her 20s, a waitress and pageant rebel, finds her secret niche on Austin roller derby team, a perennial second-place finisher. Flip, affectionate comedy, adapted by Shauna Cross from her young adult novel, has fresh performances and a smooth direction by Drew Barrymore (who also co-stars); but what the picture lacks is a high-voltage narrative. Barrymore shows a flair for visual composition and a keen sense of how scenes should be played, but just because the characters are feisty doesn't mean they're interesting. Well-paced, if overlong, "Whip It" features the kind of colorfully brash, in-your-face sense of humor which can be an acquired taste. Still, Ellen Page strikes just the right note of youthful angst borne of indifferent passivity that almost transcends the character, a true-blue factory town girl and graduate of the John Hughes Handbook. ** from ****
That Certain Feeling (1956)
Limp quips...
The cartoonist for the daily comic Snips and Runty is getting too stuffy, so his secretary/fiancée recommends another animator to "ghost write" the strip and bring back its heart--her first husband. Take a Broadway play, "The King of Hearts", from two playwrights (Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke) and adapt it for the movies using four screenwriters (William Altman, I. A. L. Diamond, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama), two producers (Frank and Panama) and two directors (the same) and you get this absolute piece of piffle. Bob Hope trades limp quips with ex Eva Marie Saint--and even worse ones with his psychiatrist, who shrugs off an overdue bill for $400. Better than the central action are the trimmings: Pearl Bailey as a singing maid and Jerry Mathers as an adopted child; however, George Sanders, giving an uncharacteristic lemme-outta-here performance, is like an anchor on these treacly proceedings. * from ****
Beefcake (1998)
The kind of boys you can't forget!
Cleverly-assembled but rather sad documentary inspired by Valentine Hooven's book looks back at the muscle magazines, photographers and models of the 1950s, many of whom got caught up in the legalities of the McCarthy era. This resulted in shut-downs on obscenity charges, also a court case to determine if muscle photographer Bob Mizer was using his stable of hunks as a front for prostitution. Archival footage is smoothly integrated with reenactments of the action, fleshed out (no pun intended) with sit-down interviews with a few of the survivors (Jack LaLanne is the most amusing). Was all this naked posturing just good all-American fun? Some of it, maybe, for awhile...but as with anything happening first, time has a way of pushing the envelope and tainting the process. There was indeed gay sex happening behind-the-scenes, though most of the models were heterosexual--and those who were tended to believe there was nothing at all dirty about giving young men of the era something to aspire to. ** from ****
Brats (2024)
Healing the past person-by-person...
Engaging documentary from actor Andrew McCarthy on the participants in the popular teen movies of the 1980s--actors who are now pushing 60--and how the label "Brat Pack" (taken from the headline in a 1985 New York Magazine article by David Blum, who is interviewed) was possibly a brand, a stigma, a curse, or maybe something special, something that other actors of the time aspired to be a part of. McCarthy, once a pseudo-self-conscious, aloof and somewhat constipated young movie star, took the inspiration for this project from his autobiography, "Brat: An '80s Story"; his feeling for the past 30 years that the term "Brat Pack" was a scathing slap at a certain group of young Hollywood talent circa 1985 isn't unjustified, but his personal wounds--and the sometimes mixed feelings of his contemporaries--are put into perspective here in quickie-therapeutic fashion (aided in its presentation by a bevy of vintage TV clips and interviews). One of the first questions posed is: who was actually in the Brat Pack? I always felt it pertained to select members of the cast of 1985's "St. Elmo's Fire" (not everyone, of course; there's no mention of Mare Winningham, for instance). There's also some suspense in McCarthy's rounding up of interviewees, particularly reluctant stars Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson (both of whom decline the invitation). "Brats" isn't investigative journalism; McCarthy is out to heal personal and professional wounds, and he wants perspective in his journey from Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Jon Cryer, Ally Sheedy, Lea Thompson, Timothy Hutton, writers, producers and directors. McCarthy insists he is not sentimental and he is not nostalgic--but "we" are, and the general catharsis is almost real. **1/2 from ****
Dare to Be Different (2017)
A documentary about a now-defunct FM radio station in Long Island, New York?
WLIR, founded in 1959, was the first FM radio station in Long Island, broadcasting mainly showtunes and jazz-pop. In the '70s, WLIR changed their format to Southern and progressive rock, but in 1982 became an underground phenomenon by being the first radio station in the country to play New Wave (mostly coming out of the UK) and post-punk music (in other words, exchanging the Allman Brothers and Blue Öyster Cult for Duran Duran and U2). Thumbing their nose at US record labels--who usually dictated to radio stations what they should be playing--the station became home to a lot of European music acts who were big in their home countries but brand new to Americans. In the days before the internet, radio "found" the new music/tomorrow's hits (for instance, WLIR broke Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" six months before the rest of the US heard it), and the gratitude from the musicians--many of whom are interviewed here--is genuine and joyous. Something different, to be sure, and very entertaining for music buffs. *** from ****
Baxter! (1973)
Early scenes best, but the performances nearly sell it...
Light UK drama concerns precocious young American boy named Roger Baxter, living in London with his squabbling parents, who sees a speech therapist for his impediment (he pronounces his R's as W's). His doctor later comes to his aid after Baxter's parents intend to divorce and he suffers an emotional breakdown. Reginald Rose's cheeky screenplay, adapted from Kin Platt's book "The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear", opens with so much fast patter that the later switch to melodrama is almost hard to swallow (particularly after Patricia Neal's doctor takes a whack at Lynn Carlin's hysterical mother, who is busy screeching at her catatonic son like a banshee). In the lead, talented Scott Jacoby seems a bit over-rehearsed here--I didn't quite buy his Wobert Wedford's--but he's a fearless child actor, his youthful excitement nicely undercut by a sarcastic incredulousness. Neal is very fine (as always) and Sally Thomsett is cute as a teenage neighbor who uses a telescope to spy on Baxter, who disrobes for her and does muscleman poses out on his balcony (such were the times). ** from ****
The Greatest Night in Pop (2024)
"We got white people helping black people but no black people helping black people!"
Engaging, revealing documentary for Netflix on the recording of 1985's #1 hit charity song "We Are the World" by USA For Africa, a response to the famine devastating Ethiopia. With 10 days to go before the American Music Awards in late January--wherein the celebrity singers would be wrangled for an after-awards all-night recording session--Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson still haven't come up with a song (Stevie Wonder was Richie's first choice as songwriting partner, but Wonder failed to return Richie's phone messages for three weeks). Richie (surprisingly frank and affable) recounts the chaos at Jackson's house with his menagerie of pets interrupting the songwriting process; also, Richie was hosting the awards show and planning a tour for his album. Producer-arranger Quincy Jones, who got Jackson involved, loved what the duo came up with, yet there's no mention the song they created sounded a bit cheesy--less its UK-counterpart "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and more "It's a Small World (After All)" (Bruce Springsteen says upon first hearing the demo that he thought it was "broad."). However, even if you are not a fan of the song--at least not after the first 100 times you heard it--this document of its gestation period and realization is quite entertaining. Many of the participants are here for interviews and, as history proved, the product was met with adulation and some $80M in famine relief. It was a night to remember, as they say...and don't forget, when you're singing with a group on risers, "Groove from your knees and not from your feet." *** from ****
The Fall Guy (2024)
Not the playful mise en scène one hopes it'll be--just an excuse for Hollywood insiders to "poke fun at themselves"...
When Hollywood filmmakers do a behind-the-scenes deal, often what we get are spoiled, trendy, too-cute adults running around like foolishly self-important children--so where's the ironic twist in a movie like "The Fall Guy"? The L. A. dolts are once again present, both in front of and behind the camera, and the condescension towards the paying audience is enough to suck the air from the room. Ostensibly a big-screen version of the '80s TV hit "The Fall Guy", this boy-girl tale in La La Land is about as far from a good ol' boy romp as you can get. Everything is hyped-up, sped up, jammed together and fast-forwarded through, maybe so we'll not pay attention to the plot. After breaking his back in an on-set accident, once-cocky movie stuntman Ryan Gosling has gone into hiding; he's now humiliating himself nightly by parking cars for rich a-holes and has left his love affair with camera operator Emily Blunt to wither on the vine. Flash ahead one year and Blunt is now directing her first movie, with absolutely no idea that her producer has lured Gosling out of retirement to do the heavy stunt work (Blunt finds this out after one stunt has already been filmed and wants Gosling fired, but she's told, "There's nobody else!"). Slick, stupid, overtly commercial action-comedy, perhaps inspired by the Brad Pitt plot in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood...", but without Quentin Tarantino's intrinsic smarts and flashy style. Is there anything worth savoring in "The Fall Guy"? Blunt doing karaoke to Phil Collins is fun until we get a dumb cutaway to a secondary character who whispers to his date in a noisy bar, "I love this song!" NO STARS from ****
Let Them All Talk (2020)
What did all the unemployed screenwriters in Hollywood think of this?
From its title to the characters to the "story", "Let Them All Talk" is so forgettable, your mind flushes it away before the damn thing has even finished. With a handful of scenes actually scripted by Deborah Eisenberg--and a basic plot conceived by director Steven Soderbergh--Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen are encouraged to wing it for almost 2hrs--the movie is 70% improvisational. So, what we get from these talented actresses is a lot of stammering and stuttering...the movie plays like Woody Allen on Valium. Streep is a pompous, self-absorbed Pulitzer Prize-winning author sailing to the UK on the Queen Mary 2 to accept an award; she's been granted three guest tickets by her publisher, and has invited her nephew plus two estranged girlfriends from her college days--two women whom she hasn't had much contact with in 50 years. Wiest is a down-to-earth straight-shooter while Bergen has an axe to grind; seems Streep used Bergen's life story for one of her most celebrated novels without asking her friend's permission. There are compensations here for the overall lack of drive and energy: the movie (a video-on-demand release) was actually filmed at sea, with paying guests used as extras; Streep and Bergen have one terrific scene together near the end; and Wiest has lost none of her intrinsic savvy. What was Soderbergh trying to capture here? A character portrait so raw and "real" that the actors themselves make up the movie's trajectory? ** from ****
The Hours (2002)
Literary or cinematic conceits? Sometimes both...
In 1923 England, writer Virginia Woolf is completing her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" while, in 1950s Los Angeles, a reader of that novel--a rather hapless pregnant housewife--is slowly unraveling in front of her husband and child (the latter of whom looks at her with a witness's eyes). A third story, and probably the strongest of the three, concerns a bisexual woman in New York City having difficulty pulling her emotions together to host a party for her ex, a writer, who is also bisexual and grappling with AIDS. Can a film be literate and intellectually stimulating but also uninvolving? I'm still not certain whether "The Hours", a UK-US co-production adapted from Michael Cunningham's novel, is filled with literary conceits or cinematic ones (it's nearly both when detailing the earliest activities of these women: when one lady looks into a mirror, another looks into a mirror--but not all three at the same time, that might be too much!). This trio of stories compliment each other in the most facetious ways; we're meant to stop and think, "Ah yes, I see the currents of time at work!" In the second plot, Julianne Moore becomes movie-frazzled over the baking of a birthday cake and had me grinding my teeth in exasperation (Moore's not-quite-there expression was beginning to seem like a rerun in 2002; the actress had worked through her repertoire of tender feelings and, I believe, cancelled out her own chances of winning an Oscar for "Far From Heaven"--she lost to Nicole Kidman, unrecognizable as Virginia Woolf in this picture). "The Hours" is about messy lives, but everything on-screen is clean and tidy; the tone is sedate, the arguments polite. Movies like this give good taste a bad name. *1/2 from ****
La femme et le pantin (1958)
Brigitte Bardot--tantalizing, teasing and torturing the opposite sex!
Lively but stupid French-Italian co-production in French and Spanish has a wealthy gentleman in Spain possibly looking for a mistress after his wife becomes paralyzed, but getting more than he bargained for after falling madly in love with a shapely village girl who treats him indifferently. Story of a woman's power over a smitten man is an unhappy venture from start to finish. Bardot, freed from her marriage to Roger Vadim by this point, seems to be repeating herself (she dances a fiery Flamenco and gets to show off her ample figure, and that's about it). Spotty adaptation of Pierre Louÿs's novel (previously filmed in 1935 with Marlene Dietrich as "The Devil is a Woman" and reworked in 1977 as "That Obscure Object of Desire") has been left stretched and beleaguered by its four screenwriters, including director Julien Duvivier, with whom Bardot had an unhappy working relationship. * from ****
The Miracle Worker (1979)
1961 remake for TV with Patty Duke Astin graduating from the role of Helen Keller to teacher Anne Sullivan
One may wonder why this redo was necessary, but in 1979 we were still a few years away from videocassette rentals and Turner Classic Movies. In order to see Arthur Penn's version of "The Miracle Worker", one had to wait until a local television station picked it up for airing. That being said, this color adaptation of William Gibson's play by the author doesn't draw viewers in like the original did. The performances aren't luminous, there's nothing for us to discover for ourselves--it's too straightforward, too "television". The location of the Kellers' Southern home seems wrong, the color photography is ugly (save for the opening scene, which has a nice look), and the movie drags its feet for the first 20mns or so. The family asides with Captain Keller, his wife and son, housekeeper and newborn baby were the weakest link in Arthur Penn's original, and the characters fare no better here. Duke Astin, as well, takes some time adjusting to her role; her Irish brogue is odd, her look is disheveled and, at times, she seems to be doing an impersonation of Anne Bancroft! "Little House on the Prairie" star Melissa Gilbert initiated the project, with herself cast as a very lanky Helen Keller; she's fine, and she helps makes the finale work, but there's no real reason to watch this version when the original is now readily available. Five Emmy nominations with three wins, in what must have been a slow year. ** from ****
The Violation of Sarah McDavid (1981)
Easy to see why Astin picked this script...but do we really want to see Patty Duke in this part?
With a title that practically screams "Television Movie!", we see substitute-turned-full-time teacher Patty Duke Astin climbing the steps of the local high school on her first big day (it's just an ordinary-seeming high school, yet she exclaims to the custodian, "It's really something, isn't it?"). What Astin's Sarah McDavid doesn't know is, the school has a high crime rate--with all incidents gone unreported once the fat-cat Dean (Ned Beatty) manages to sweep every bit of scandal under the proverbial rug. This happens to Sarah too, after she's beaten and raped by an outsider during Open House (she rings her classroom's alarm several times, with no answer). Written by committee (or, in this case, Lois Peyser and Arnold Peyser from a treatment by the Peysers and Joan Maeks), nothing in "Violation" feels true. Not Sarah's hesitancy in coming forward, not her sudden shift towards "wave-maker", not the school's handling of the event, and certainly not Sarah's press conference at the finale. The Dean tells Sarah after she makes her impassioned plea for school security, "This is going to take money away from getting new textbooks!" There is no follow-up to Sarah's visit to the police station--and apparently no chance of ever catching the creep who raped her. The goal here was to get Patty Duke Astin up on a soapbox, possibly to qualify her for an Emmy nomination. But any actress could have played this part...and do we really want to see Patty Duke play it?
Contracorriente (2009)
A gem!
Spanish-language romantic drama with a fantasy element from writer-director Javier Fuentes-León about a married fisherman--popular in his seaside town along with his wife, who is expecting their first child--who has a secret gay lover: a local photographer/painter who is looked down upon by the gossiping villagers for being "that way". Acclaimed Colombian-Peruvian-French-German co-production won several awards upon its release. What threatens to become a romp--a role-reversal "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands", perhaps--quickly changes gears and blossoms into something much more lasting: a gay ghost story about finality, responsibility, loyalty, and putting everything at risk in order to do what's right. Quite an amazing achievement, with beautiful photography and excellent performances. ***1/2 from ****