Cover of Lolita

I have read only a chunk of Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, and thus cannot comment on it.  If it’s perverse, which I doubt, the 1962 Stanley Kubrick movie is not.  Sue Lyon‘s Lolita is fifteen or sixteen, not twelve, hence Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is not really a pedophile.  He is a debonair fool with whom we seldom sympathize, and it’s even slightly odd that he murders the abominable Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers).

The movie has nothing to say, whether the book does or not, although it is a human-condition tale.  And it holds our attention.  Sequences such as that in which Charlotte (Shelley Winters) perforce turns on Humbert are very sturdy.  Lolita is visually attractive and the acting is absorbing.  Mason, Winters and comically grotesque Sellers are genuine interpretive artists, and Sue Lyon is convincing as a rebellious lass willing to “love.”

Kubrick’s film is fine by me.

Without being quite perfect, Tune in for Love (2019) is a very good romantic drama—nigh wonderful, in fact. A Netflix feature made in South Korea, it concentrates on a very young woman, Mi-soo, who is regularly deprived of the opportunity to be with the young man, Hyan-woo, she is infatuated with. Often miles away from her, Hyun-woo himself has feelings for Mi-soo.

Ji-woo Jung, who directed and wrote this, cares about his characters and directs with the deepest sensitivity to the film’s content. Lyricism gathers at the margins. I don’t care for Tune‘s pop tunes, but I do like the “natural” acting of Jung Hae-In, a handsome dude, and Kim Go-eun, a delicate beauty. The movie’s last scene is sublime in a way—sublime for a small artwork.

(In Korean with English subtitles)

For the story “The Mail Lady,” author David Gates created what he perceives to be a Christian character, and the elderly Lew comes very close to being just that. Lew is enduring the effects of a terrible stroke, his wife Alice a busy caregiver by his side. Yes, a man of faith he is, but one who is now forced to aver, “If I am of use at all anymore, it can only be as an example of patient endurance.”

This trenchant tale raises the subject of what it means when a death-in-life prevails in a Christian’s, or any religious person’s, existence. By and by Lew wishes to escape this death-in-life. A certain rescue from literal death takes place in the story, but Lew simply wants spiritual not physical salvation. . . Gates’s psychological realism is absorbing. Included in the book The Wonders of the Invisible World (1999), “The Mail Lady” is probably one of the most remarkable pieces about severe disability that one could read. Too, not a religious story, it is a dark one.

It’s rather nice to have Warren Beatty back, and in a film he both directed and wrote—Rules Don’t Apply (2016)—he co-stars as a man who has long fascinated him: Howard Hughes.

Not a Hughes biopic, really, it involves two would-be lovers, Marla (Lily Collins) and Frank (Alden Ehrenreich), who gain important associations with the aging, dementia-afflicted Hughes.  Marla shows up to do a screen test for him, but, although a devout Baptist, she also loses her virginity to the weird billionaire. . . Beatty deserves credit for revealing a vast America made up of mini-worlds that are sometimes in conflict with each other.  Marla and her mother (Annette Bening) are Virginia residents spending time in secular Hollywood—and are confused and angered by what goes on there.  But conflicts are numerous:  Frank, for his part, is a business-minded and seemingly religious Methodist who eventually fights with the Marla he is smitten with.

Rules Don’t Apply is a unique and fizzy work which, by and by, comes apart at the seams.  The sequence in which Marla slowly gets drunk tells us how necessary it might be to start suspending disbelief in the plot, as indeed it is.  During the first hour the film can be entrancing, but Beatty really doesn’t understand people who are committed to God.  Rules is handsome-looking, though, and the cast is estimable.  Bening, Collins, Matthew Broderick and Martin Sheen are a delight to see.

Based on a novel, directed by Ang Lee, Ride with the Devil (1999) is a savage, engaging Civil War movie. It shows us the bloody confrontation between Missouri loyalists to the South and Union occupiers—and I do have several questions about it. For example, what do the Confederate loyalists, known as bushwhackers, do to prevent insubordination, such as that committed by the film’s main character, Jake (Tobey Maguire)? Nothing, it seems.

There is naturalism in Ride, even if not exactly enough. Anti-black racism exists but it wanes pretty easily (as, again, in Jake). Thematically the film is about the assault of war on individuals. The battle and shoot-’em-down scenes are splendidly electric, conflict, as James Bowman says, looking “real in its messiness, its confusion, its pointlessness.” The characters, moreover, grip the attention, and how quickly we lament that fierce assault on individuals I just mentioned. Though no great history lesson, Lee’s effort is close to being one of his best films.