The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon’s  2011 documentary about Sarah Palin, begins with footage of familiar people speaking about Palin in words ranging from insulting to disgusting.

Sarah Palin is not Hitler; she is not a monster.  The loutish haters treat her as though she were.  Bannon’s film is wholly in favor of her, using for voiceover parts of the Going Rogue audiobook and featuring people who used to work with Palin as they talk about her accomplishments.  It’s also a film about Alaska and the oil industry, which became the esteemed governor’s opponent.  (It’s not so much about the John McCain presidential campaign.)

The Undefeated is propaganda, though.  It should have been more intelligently searching.  Bannon still could have shown he was on Palin’s side had he focused on any sensible questions that have been raised about her decisions, her governance, etc.  For example, was her governance in Alaska always conservative—probably not–and if not, why?  Such a thing hardly would have hurt her standing as a right-winger.  Palin’s respect for conservative values has long been evident.

Bannon’s film is technically well-made, but a more incisive pro-Sarah doc would have been a stronger doc.

Image via Wikipedia

In The House of Mirth (2001), a Terrence Davies film, Gillian Anderson offers no real surprises as Lily Bart.  But she does offer skill, having an almost childlike quality and the capacity to move us.  Eric Stoltz, as Laurence Seldon, does nothing either particularly right or particularly wrong, but Laura Linney, as Bertha Dorset, is true and wonderfully self-confident.  She and Anderson are the best actors here.  Add to this the spot-on costumes and production design and you have . . . well, not quite the Edith Wharton novel from which this commendable movie was adapted.  It makes me ambivalent in a way the great novel never could.

This is the one about the woman who, without being shallow, wants to marry a man with money, but does not do so.  Instead she suffers and ultimately dies, doing so as a tragic heroine more than as a victim–something Terrence Davies fails to understand.  Thus he has Lily Bart not so much living as simply going downhill.  Moreover, the Lily of the novel rightly appreciates the finer things in life, certainly including material things, but the film never points this up.  It knows Miss Bart isn’t shallow but that’s about it.  She might as well be a thoroughgoing stock heroine.

Yes, Anderson tries to rescue Lily but she can’t–can’t rescue her from what Davies has done.  Though the film has its virtues, it does not understand the novel’s virtues.

Cover of The House of Mirth

China’s Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less.  These films are gripping successes, whereas the ’04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong fare.

It’s ingeniously made, visually spellbinding, but Zhang should not have gone the Crouching Tiger route.  Purveyed is a sagging story about the female member of a rebel group, the House of Flying Daggers, and the guardian captain who is in fact a government agent.  A flatly superficial period piece, it belongs to a genre which isn’t big enough for Zhang.  Lovely women, particularly Ziyi Zhang, are too Amazon-like, as physically superhuman as the men, and we wonder how it can be that both men and women here are even destructible.  Their martial arts are god-like, you see.  The climax is as nicely, darkly tragic as the climaxes of many other Zhang films, but it hardly prevents Daggers from being a bold nonentity.

House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

In addition to being very foul-mouthed, Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set (1997) is an obvious, not always credible, and eminently unfunny satire on the squalid thinking we’ve witnessed for years in the television industry.  In many ways it’s the poor man’s–no, the loser’s–Idiocracy.

Cover of The TV Set