Movies, books, music and TV

Author: EarlD Page 61 of 316

Take A Film Like This: “Take a Girl Like You”

The satirizing of men and women in modern England in the 1970 film Take a Girl Like You is hardly strong or memorable. The insights are few and the laughs are zero. There are men who are horndogs and Hayley Mills‘s Jenny refusing to lose her virginity.

A Kingsley Amis book is the source novel here. The movie was directed by the late Jonathan Miller, a British theatre director who may or may not have been an artist; I can’t say. To me, Take a Girl Like You is tame, insignificant non-art. It is worth seeing, though—I’ll make the concession—for the charm and good looks of Miss Mills.

I Watch Nicole Weep, “Before I Go to Sleep”

Rowan Joffe‘s direction of Before I Go To Sleep (2014), from a novel by S.J. Watson, is pleasantly sensitive to the film’s eerie material. His screenplay is suitably penned. Mystery lies atop mystery for a woman (Nicole Kidman) so abused she is temporarily brain-damaged.

Kidman knows how to be anguished, is never false. Colin Firth is richly effective. There are too many mentions of adultery in the tale, but the small Sleep is a scary pleasure. To the critics who dislike it I have a ho-hum reaction.

The Canny Barbara Loden: “Wanda”

Wanda (film)

Wanda (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wanda (1971)—written, directed and acted in by Barbara Loden—is one of the truly good American films of the Seventies.

The newly unemployed, soon-to-be-divorced Wanda (Loden) ignorantly takes up with a robber (Michael Higgins) who is unstable and tyrannical.  Theirs is a pathetic (occasionally funny) relationship, but Wanda never has to assist the robber in his stealing until he finally insists on it apropos of a bank.

The cannily written film has to do with what the lives of working-class people—Wanda, not the robber—sometimes become, and with the slow, harmful creep of irresponsibility.  The movie concludes with a freeze-frame shot of Wanda sitting in a tavern and at a dead end, not enjoying the conviviality of the strangers who have invited her to drink with them.  With her deep performance, Loden proves she understands the character she is playing; likewise with Higgins.

Loden, by the way, was married to Elia Kazan.  One wishes she could have made at least one more film before she came down with a fatal cancer in 1978.

Ugh! “The View”

Any sensible gun owners who caught ABC’s The View the other day were probably infuriated by the words of Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar about the Indiana man who shot down the mall assassin. Hostin dissed the gent, Eli Dicken, because he took a gun into a mall that prohibited them; and both she and Behar opined that Dicken was simply “lucky” that he killed the assassin. Are they not glad that Dicken tried his luck?

The usual smugness was there. The View is a nauseating, plebeian piece of shit. I use the profane word because the show deserves it.

“Bone Tomahawk” Taking A Swipe

How many Westerns present a woman doctor having sex with her nice-guy husband? Bone Tomahawk (2015) does; it’s different—as well as one of the best Westerns I’ve seen.

The kind of R-rated adult Western that The Wild Bunch is, S. Craig Zahler‘s movie is as shocking as the Peckinpah classic was in 1969. As I indicated in an earlier review, it is “grungy” and “gory” as it relates the tale of the abduction of three people by brutal, cannibalistic primitives. It conveys, I think, a message about men and women who work to maintain a society sometimes being forced to encounter the ultra-criminal, the ultra-violent, even the “anti-social” types like David Arquette‘s Purvis who deserve to die. Ah, but do they deserve to die at the hands of the primitives?—a necessary question.

Page 61 of 316

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