In Revanche (2009), from Austria, an ex-con named Alex (Johannes Krisch) works for a scurvy pimp and is secretly in love, and in a sexual relationship, with one of the pimp’s prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko).  Both wish to get away from the pimp and raise enough money to pay the drug-addicted Tamara’s debts, so Alex devises a plan.  He’ll rob a bank for some short-term cash, the two will flee Vienna for Ibiza where Alex has a chance of co-owning a bar.  During the execution of the plan, however, Tamara gets killed by a policeman, Robert (Andreas Lust), who is thereafter obsessed with what he’s done.  He doesn’t know exactly how the killing took place and his inner turmoil affects both his work and his marriage to Susanne (Ursula Strauss).  To Alex the shooting was murder (he’s wrong) and he doesn’t want Robert to go on living.  Early in the film, the pimp asserts that Alex believes he’s a tough guy but really isn’t.  While living with his grandfather in a rural area, where coincidentally Robert and Susanne also live, will Alex turn into a tough guy and avenge himself by killing the policeman?

Even viewing it on DVD, I can see that Gotz Spielmann’s film, which never played in Tulsa, is a terrific work of art.

The effect of being deprived of a lover and thereafter alone is staggering.  The scenes of city life in Vienna and then of doings in the countryside are equally compelling.  Except for Alex’s grandfather, the people in Revanche are incomplete, stunted, because of the lure of ill-gotten gain, because of drug addiction, because of childlessness (in the case of Robert and Susanne).  They face their own failure:  Alex himself gets Tamara killed, Robert wishes he hadn’t killed her.  Indeed, if the policeman did anything truly wrong, he eventually receives a comeuppance by being cuckolded.  He is a pitiable man, and so, in a way, is Alex.

The film is Austrian, the title is French.  “Revanche” is “revenge” in French.  Spielmann may have given it this title because in France romantic notions about revenge, as about so many other things, were generated over the years.  Even revenge against a policeman in the twentieth century–in French Algeria, perhaps?–could be considered as legitimate as revenge against the royal family during the Revolution.  Yet Spielmann, I think, rejects such romanticism for his Austrian milieu.  It never arises.

(This is a foreign film with English subtitles.)

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For a book published in 1977, Lewis Patten’s The Trial at Apache Junction might seem like a pretty tired Western.  But how tired, really, is such a novel when its story makes sense and its action passages are fairly imaginative?  It concerns a sheriff who knows the scoundrel he’s supposed to execute did not get a proper trial, and it’s fun despite a few stale details.  Throw in a perfidious deputy and a career-ending murder, and you just might end up with a notable entertainment.

Does the book have anything to say?  Nope.   It’s neither philosophical nor religious nor political.  It’s the usual trinket.  Have fun.

Sunset, 3/9/08, near Apache Junction, Arizona (Photo credit: gwilmore)

I think it’s only a matter of time before Fatal Attraction (1987) starts aging poorly in a way an entertainment movie such as Hitchcock’s Psycho has not.  Psycho, after all, is better written than FA.  Director Adrian Lyne had better material with his remakes of Lolita and the Chabrol picture The Unfaithful Wife.

Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) is an arrantly insane career woman whose evil is sometimes baffling.  All the same, her shenanigans are filmed by Lyne in some strikingly well-done suspense scenes, such as the one with the rabbit.  The directing is nearly as impressive as Close’s penetrating performance.  Fatal Attraction is entertaining without being truly good.

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English: Actor Matthew McConaughey at the 83rd Academy Awards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not everything in the  Civil War movie, The Free State of Jones (2016), makes sense, but it is a worthwhile product.  Lifted from history, it focuses on Confederate army deserters and runaway slaves, led by Matthew McConaughey‘s Newton Knight, who live for a long while in a swamp.

That self-serving Confederate soldiers intent on stealing a Southern woman’s hogs never return to her house after Newt and four females, armed with rifles, hold them off is one of the nonsensical items here.  And yet there is a nice historical scope to Jones, and it is rich and transportingly presented.

Set, of course, in a Christian sphere, the story proffers a gent who is—and, in history, was—a pseudo-Christian activist.  He is properly anti-slavery but also parts from his wife (Keri Russell) without divorcing her and starts living with ex-slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).  (In history, he had a bunch of children with her.)  This is Newt Knight.  Can’t deny he is interesting.

Cover of Marathon Man

John Schlesinger‘s Marathon Man (1976) is a mediocre thriller—paranoid, rambling, even silly.  Thus it is devoid of the economy and sensible content of the American crime movies of the Forties and Fifties.  Yes, those movies were usually based on novels, but so is Marathon Man.

Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider are wholly remarkable here.  They don’t belong in a wholly unremarkable film.