Joss Whedon filmed, with a contemporary setting, Much Ado About Nothing, a 2013 release.

In writing about a stage production of Shakespeare’s comedy, John Simon averred that “Much Ado is a shrewd play in which comedy and near-tragedy chase each other like a kitten and its tail until they are revealed to be the same organism: the scheme of things as they are.”  This organism is not perfectly created by Whedon; the scheme is not quite communicated.  It would have helped had he refrained from using a good deal of rueful music, although this alone would have been insufficient.

Even so, the movie is meritorious, with a shrewdness of its own (but just not a thorough shrewdness).  Up to a point it’s Shakespeare as a 1960s art film, shot in black and white, and an unforced, unself-conscious Shakespeare it is.  It is frequently funny and, thanks to Whedon, not over-sensual.  Alexis Denisof, dignified without arrogance, is exactly right for Benedick, and Amy Acker is an intelligent Beatrice with some skill in physical comedy.  Both are impeccable, as are Nathan Fillion (Dogberry) and indeed most of the other histrions.  Much Ado is an alloyed, but not sorely alloyed, treat.

To Denys Arcand, the American empire must be a North American empire, which is to say Canada and the United States (not Mexico).  His film, The Fall of the American Empire (2018), after all, is set in Montreal, where there is as much hunger for ill-gotten money as in Chicago or Houston.

This movie doesn’t cut it, though.  For most of its running time it isn’t dull, but Arcand is an unsatisfying writer, The Barbarian Invasions notwithstanding.  It’s politically insignificant and artistically paltry.

(In French with English subtitles)

The Phil Spector in the HBO film, Phil Spector (2013), written and directed by David Mamet, is probably not guilty of even second-degree murder.  Mamet, indeed, has clearly imparted that his film is NOT “based on a true story”—period.  Spector here is a rich, drugged-out freak whom people want to be undisciplined enough to have taken the life of the hapless Lana Clarkson.  Mamet produces the implication that a society in which Ted Kennedy can get away with causing the drowning death of a young woman is just as easily one in which an offensive but innocent-of-murder eccentric can get hanged.

As ever, the artist’s dialogue impresses.  It’s intelligent and so is the direction.  Phil Spector is a good movie and Al Pacino, as Spector, is a great actor.  A remarkable Helen Mirren plays the record producer’s defense attorney, giving the character saltiness and smarts.

David Mamet at the premiere of Red Belt at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are too many entertainment films these days (as, really, there were in the past) but the situation would be better if more of them resembled the 1968 thriller, Pretty Poison.  It offers the subject of mental illness without boring or confusing us, and is uncomfortably convincing about violence and characterization.  Lorenzo Semple Jr. was perspicacious in writing the book-derived script, and Noel Black directed tastefully and unpretentiously.

As a mentally disturbed young man, Tony Perkins does not provide the distinction he did as the mentally disturbed dude in Psycho; but his performance passes.  As his peculiar girlfriend, the “pretty poison,” Tuesday Weld is intriguing and subtle.  A chemistry exists between them.  The chemistry that makes up Miss Weld is very pretty.  The film can be seen temporarily rent-free on Prime Video.

River’s Edge, a 1987 film directed by Tim Hunter and scripted by Neal Jiminez, is a mankind-bashing drama which borrows its subject from an incident in Milpitas, California in 1981.  A teen boy has just strangled his girlfriend and left her naked body on a riverbank.  All but one of his teen buddies keep mum about it, and to be sure the adults in the film hardly inspire confidence regarding the disclosure of such information. . . A bitterly tragicomic concoction, this, but one whose plot is very rickety and essentially unsatisfying—and whose musical score is intrusively bad.  It’s fine that Jiminez hits the adults as hard as the kids, but this doesn’t mean the adults are represented intelligently.  They aren’t.

Pauline Kael was right that River’s Edge is “a slack mixture of ‘important’ and mediocre.”

Seal of Milpitas, California (Photo credit: Wikipedia)