There is some fun available in the cast and the spy action in The Wrecking Crew (1969), a “Matt Helm” adventure, but not without the movie being sabotaged by the atrocious acting of Dean Martin (Helm) and the oddball role created for Sharon Tate, who is meant to have sidekick chemistry with Martin.  Almost everyone in Crew deserves better, even—no, especially—Elke Sommer.

The Wrecking Crew (1969 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Art lies like truth. Life, then, never quite imitates art. Still, a French baker (Fabrice Luchini) watches to see whether the life of a married English woman named Gemma Bovery, whom the baker loves and lusts after, imitates that of the fictional Emma in the novel Madame Bovary. It does not, for all the strangeness, in Anne Fontaine‘s Gemma Bovery (2014), of human experience. In fact, the strangeness is a “mundane” surrealism.

Gemma Bovery has been correctly deemed thin, but it is also flavorous. Gemma, I will point out, cheats on her husband with a fellow called Herve. It is a stunningly sensual scene when she appears in Herve’s house in a bikini and, as the two lie down and kiss, her large breast slips out. Gemma Arterton, in the title role, is likably nuanced. Fontaine, adapting here a graphic novel, is an able filmmaker.

(In French, and sometimes English, with English subtitles)

Cover of Love and Death

In Love and Death (1974), an early zany Woody Allen comedy set in 19th century Russia, the wit and humor are cold.  Allen, through his character Boris, cares about no one but himself and, I suppose, the Diane Keaton character he claims to love.  Everyone else is objectified:  it’s in keeping with this kind of megalomaniacal slapstick.  (Er, when you come down to it, Keaton’s Sonja is pretty much objectified too.  Unlikely as it is, she becomes outrageously whorish.)  Allen’s later films were actually more respectable, if less funny.

Many of the gags here, even so, are slowly getting dated, not as funny as they once were.  Because of how flat and desperate they are, others weren’t funny in the first place.  What makes it worse is all those ugly and ludicrous facial expressions Allen puts on, meant to produce a laugh but . . .  Me, they only make glum.

Showing on Netflix, A Week Away (2021) is an obtuse, unimaginative and unfunny Christian musical comedy. There are good inspirational and spiritual pop songs performed in it, but a well-written ditty about Christian life like Steven Curtis Chapman’s “The Great Adventure” deserves to be in a better flick. So does the felt Michael W. Smith ballad, “Place in this World” and, to a lesser extent, Rich Mullins’s “Awesome God.” These are all old songs, fortunately—they’re melodic—and pleasantly sung. But this movie, which is even quite unfocused, is a very rickety vehicle.

Reviews are by Dean

A woman, unnamed, travels from London to Greece to find her husband, Christopher, whom she plans to ask for a divorce. Separation inheres in A Separation (2017), a fine novel by Katie Kitamura, which has a great deal to do with vicissitudes in people’s lives. Christopher is missing; startling mystery surrounds him. The novel yields the question of how should, or must, we live, but gives no answer. It does give us material compelling and not commercial, seamless and apolitical.

Reviews are by Dean