Cover of Twilight

A very fine Paul Newman entertainment of post-studio system film is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not the 1998 Twilight.  A very fine detective entertainment of post-studio system film is Chinatown, not the 1998 Twilight.  In this Robert Benton movie in which Newman plays an aging P.I., many of the details are a load of bull, especially in light of how many shootings take place.

Further, most crime dramas of the Sixties and early Seventies are candid but not vulgar (exception: Dirty Harry); Twilight is both.  Floating around is a rumor that Newman’s P.I. had his “pecker” accidentally shot off by a 17-year-old girl.  A man acted by James Garner urinates off his elevated terrace instead of in a toilet bowl, nearly hitting the P.I.  Part of the bull I mentioned consists in these scenes.  About the header on this review, let me say that much of the dialogue alone in the film proves it’s the work of a hack.

The dreamlike pre-Christian “civilization” of Federico Fellini‘s Satyricon (1970) is employed to reveal history as damned, as lost Sodom, indeed with persons both white and black united in their hedonism and in sexual nihilism.  Yes, nihilism: this is what this particular sphere yields.  But too much goes on, and with little profundity, in this bizarre, overlong picture.  I appreciate Fellini’s decision to show us both hedonists and sufferers (such as those on a slave ship) in this ancient . . . place, and certain sets and other visuals are striking.  Satyricon, even so, has no reason to exist.  It’s a time waster.

I’ll say this, though:  the director-writer exhibits a more acceptable half-male, half-female freak, who’s supposed to be a demigod, in this film than in the rotten Juliet of the Spirits.  Interesting, too, is that homosexual behavior here is part of why there is a sentiment of sexual nihilism.

The protag in Pedro Almodovar‘s Julieta (2016), the beautiful Julieta (played as a young woman by Adriana Ugarte) meets and engages in sex with a bearded man called Xoan while traveling on a train.  The sex scene is one of the proofs that this movie has in it more than a touch of art despite being a soundly commercial concoction.

Based on three stories by Alice Munro, it’s a pretty decent film about trauma and separation.  Julieta is made pregnant by Xoan, so she later finds and marries him, with the first trauma not far ahead.  Julieta can be soapy but Almodovar, in adapting his script and competently directing Ugarte, displays misery as vivid as the color red in the film.

As for the subject of separation, the film captures the awful state of a mother whose child (a daughter) chooses to back out of the mother’s life, made worse by Mom’s taking the blame for the backing-out.

The director’s bad-boy tackiness is absent in Julieta; instead, there is a Munro-like concentration on the human condition.  Mr. A shows some genuine tenderness, and he refuses to judge his characters.  A serious if brightly colored middlebrow artwork is what we have here, and actors Carmen Suarez, as the middle-aged Julieta, and Rossy de Palma, as a soul frumpish and melancholy, know what they’re doing.

(In Spanish with English subtitles)

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The film, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), is an adapted work for sure:  it is based on the English translation of a play.  And it’s made pleasant by director Ernst Lubitsch, surefooted and keeping the charm flowing, and actors Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper and David Niven.

Curiously, it deals with a married couple devoid of, well, relations—of any kind.  They aren’t even kissing.  This is because, not long after marrying him, Nicole (Colbert) wishes to divorce millionaire Michael (Cooper) and get from him a lot of prenup money.  Wow, you say.  She must be depraved.  Er, no.  Not quite.  Watch the flick to the end.  One thing which is certain is that the plot action is not obvious.

Both enjoyable, Colbert and Cooper do everything they can to flesh out their characters, but they’re a bit hamstrung because no real psychology exists here.  Still, it’s diverting—for a long time, a happy-go-unlucky movie, which keeps it interesting.

Catch-22 (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I dislike Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which never should have been made into a movie.  It was, though, by Mike Nichols and half-talented scenarist Buck Henry.

About Nichols, Stanley Kauffmann was correct:  “at whatever level, he was born to direct,” and the material in The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge was worthy of him.  But the misguided, sophomoric stuff in the Catch-22 screenplay is not.  (Not that Nichols’s direction is mistake-free; note the use of the 2001 music by Richard Strauss.)

Really, the Heller novel has little sophistication—not none, but little.  What sophistication, what thoughtfulness, is there, however, hasn’t been passed on to the film, because I don’t believe Henry knew how to do it.  Spare me Heller’s Snowden episode, but in the movie it’s no good at all.  Neither are the caricatures from Orson Welles, Bob Newhart, and Buck Henry himself, and the comedy is sometimes too raffish.  A fantasy scene with full frontal female nudity is blatant and unnecessary.  I’m glad Catch-22 did not begin a veritable decline in Nichols’s oeuvre.