1.  It pleases me to report I was able to see a filmed production of Neil LaBute‘s play, Reasons to be Pretty (2008), on YouTube.  It was mounted by the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute.
2. The plot purveys for us the hurt Steph, a young woman whose lover, Greg, remarked to another person that Steph has a regular face (not a pretty one).  This news finds its way to Steph, and she is infuriated.  She walks out on Greg, but two married friends begin to have even worse troubles—the fellow likes a hottie—with residual vexations thrown upon Greg.
3. This is meant to be a serious play, but Reasons to be Pretty is annoyingly slight in its meaning and content.  What it says about physical appearance is not very important and quite predictable.  Even so, it is one of LaBute’s few palatable artworks.  Although it despises the proclivities of young men, it throws darts at those of both sexes, but without misanthropy.  Properly structured, it is incessantly engaging, and free of the subpar characterizations in The Shape of Things and the lousy film Your Friends and Neighbors.  To me it’s plebeian fun, albeit it should be more than that.  Re the acting in the filmed production, I particularly enjoyed Paul Rush and Zoe Sidney (Steph).

When a person loses freedom in every way imaginable, he loses it for good.

This is the meaning I infer from the Robert Enrico short, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1961), a well-known French-made film from a story by Ambrose Bierce.  Low-angle and overhead shots show us so many sturdy trees and so much grand river water, with perpetual bird and insect sounds, that it is almost as though the men in the film hope to compete with nature for something just as momentous.  So they intend to ceremonially execute a man (Roger Jacquet) who has committed wartime crime.  (The war is the American civil war.)  Somehow, in truth, a lawbreaker’s loss of freedom through death matters.

I have never read Bierce’s story, but if it deserves skillful film directing, it gets it from Enrico.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (2018) is a delightful sequel to the fine Mamma Mia—er, wait a minute.  Mamma Mia (of 2008) is not fine: it’s unspeakably insipid.  Here We Go Again is superior to it.  It is delightful.  With Oliver Parker as director, the moviemakers got this one right.

Kyle Smith, who loved the picture, nevertheless opined that most of the ABBA songs proffered here are “second-raters.”  I take exception.  “One of Us” and “My Love, My Life” second-raters?  The former is a jaunty, heartfelt, lyrically smart item, and the latter a very dulcet ballad.  Both are performed moderately well.  A madcap dance routine gives the pleasurable “Waterloo” a run for its money, and “The Name of the Game” is a dignified worthy.  Although Lily James has little charisma, musically the movie is formidable.

The cast is fun and, along with there being breathtaking locations, Here We Go Again is awash in dancers; and, boy, do we see this when the zippy “Dancing Queen” is revived from the first film. . . MM The Sequel is not gay, as one professional critic happily considers it.  It is simply fantastic (i.e. fantasy-filled) and weird.  However, there does arise a lot of off-screen pagan fornication between James’s Donna and several men (Amanda Seyfried, meet your mother, Lily James), so the moviemakers decided to dilute this with a final church christening of a newborn baby.  It happens during the singing of “My Love, My Life,” with its “God bless you” line.  God bless you, ABBA.

Italy’s Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), by Vittorio De Seta (not De Sica), is about Sardinian shepherds—a man and his younger brother—and their troubles with bandits, other shepherds, and uncompassionate policemen.  These two are persons of nature, working with and against nature—and against, to use a narrator’s word, “hostility.”  By hostility I mean the world:  everything from limited water to an unjust police official represents the world.

A classic art film, this, and a neorealistic one.  I managed to find it on YouTube.  I hope others will always be able to as well.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

The married man in the 1979 English novel A Married Man, by the Catholic writer Piers Paul Read, is a sometime adulterer named John Strickland.  A barrister and a socialist who intends to run for political office, Strickland is also an atheist married to a Catholic wife, Clare, who does not support her husband’s political ambitions.  The marriage is patently rickety, especially after Strickland meets young Paula Gerrand, a wealthy leftist.  A serious affair begins.  Read sensibly concentrates on the interesting progress of love (illicit though it is), on the pleasures and emotional hold of a liaison, before finally bringing in the spiritual, plainly Christian, material.

Both Strickland and Clare throw themselves into an abyss.  Clare, however, repents, or seems to.  Strickland lacks an understanding of who he really is, thus differing from his wife who observes at one point, ” I may be a wanton woman now, but I’m still capable of feeling ashamed.”  On the other hand, from Strickland we get this:  “Even I might believe in God . . . if He could show me the man I really am.”  Of course it is the Christian’s view that God can do this.

Of the four Read novels I have read, this is my favorite.  It is well-paced, sophisticated, meaningful.  If anyone were to tell me he or she wishes to read only one novel this year about male-female relationships, I’d say let it be this one.

Cover of A Married Man