Cover of McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) does appear to be far more truthful about the American West than other Westerns (i.e., mythological Westerns).  However, I don’t know which is more ill-written—the movie’s Leonard Cohen songs or the Altman-Brian McKay script.  Er . . . it has to be the script.

Warren Beatty enacts a profane cynic who becomes a dominating businessman in a frontier town, and gradually he begins a relationship with a brothel madam (Julie Christie) which is pretty hazy.  The film is boringly and laughably anti-capitalist and has a lot of lame, dopey dialogue.  Although it isn’t Beatty’s fault, he doesn’t really know what kind of man he is portraying, and yet his acting is assuredly superior to that of Christie and Rene Auberjonois, who are merely going through the motions.

The costumes and production design are exactly what a non-mythological Western should have.  Even so, I said the Beatty character, John McCabe, is a profane cynic; hence it comes as no surprise that Altman’s film is an offputting, foul-mouthed (and unfocused) mess.

A tenuously supernatural love story, the film If I Stay (2014) lies to us about comatose people having the inner power to cheat death.  Pretty deplorable.

Chloe Grace Moretz does a good job of creating a character: that of Mia, the cello-playing girl who becomes comatose.  Miss Moretz is likable and, quite kinetic in this movie, her whole physical appearance is a charmer.  Jamie Blackley enacts her lover—a hip nobody.

Like so many other flicks about teenage love, If I Stay makes a big deal of the fact that the guy is experienced and the girl inexperienced.  By now this has become mildly sexist.

Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, both actors, scored a lot of points in directing the 1996 Big Night, for which they chose an easygoing but not too slow pace, dabs of effective slow mo, wise medium shots of people, and Felliniesque dramatics.  They both act in the film too, and Tucci, talented guy, co-wrote the original screenplay, which has to do with the efforts of Italian brothers to keep their traditional Italian restaurant afloat in the big-city America of the 1950s.  Sadly, one of the brothers has given up all integrity.  He is desperate, even betraying his pleasant girlfriend (Minnie Driver).  A novel idea obtains, then: i.e., moral compromise takes place so that compromise with cuisine (traditional Italian) might be eschewed.  Not that the filmmakers condone this compromise, you understand; they don’t.  But it does go on.

Honest and endearing, Big Night is one of the cinematic big deals of ’96.

(All reviews are by Earl Dean)