Cover of Clean

Clean, the engrossing 2003 picture by Olivier Assayas, stretches from Canada to Western Europe, and from heroin to methadone to “clean.”

Maggie Cheung gets jailed in Canada for possession, then moves to Paris to beat her addiction.  Plus she wants to see her young son in London.  It’s all very hard.  Cheung’s recovering addict is a stumbling bisexual and would-be Deborah Harry (another former addict), living with humiliation.  Speaking now in French, now in English, Maggie’s acting is outstanding, full of depth.  She and director-writer Assayas were married but got divorced during the filming of Clean, and Cheung is not in good spirits.  Sad.  There are some things just as lamentable as drug addition.

Oliver (David Suchet) is a laid-off IBM technician, and he is homeless.  Every day is Sunday for such a man; he has no job to go to.  On one particular Sunday, he meets Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a little-known actress separated from her husband.  After Madeleine mistakes Oliver for a movie director, the two talk and then engage in sex, which—count on it—will never happen again.  They realize that what has developed is a charade.

Jonathan Rossiter‘s characters in Sunday (1997) are bereft.  The film is nonchalantly concerned to show us what would be rightly considered beside the point, as the copulation in the hallway between Madeleine and Oliver turns out to be.  Likewise with the activities of the men from the homeless shelter (again: bereft) where Oliver is staying.  Like Oliver, they’re inescapably wasting their time.

A poetic American indie, Sunday is sad but, because it’s also amusing, not quite a heartbreaker.  There is more acumen than pathos.  Rossiter provides some masterly direction, and Suchet and Harrow are distinguished. ‘Tain’t for children, though.  Lisa Harrow gets stripped to an extent she never did in The Last Days of Chez Nous (the only other movie I’ve seen her in).

Cover of Save the Tiger

The star of the film Save the Tiger (1973), Jack Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, a Los Angeles clothing manufacturer who, in financial dire straits, plots to have one of his factories set on fire for the insurance money. . . As it happens, Harry prefers the past to his depraved self in the 1970s present.  In the Forties, after all, he was an American soldier at Anzio.  But Harry also prefers the past to the moral condition of present-day America, with, for example, its deep incivility.  A parking attendant snaps at him, a cab driver is angrily sarcastic to him.

What’s wrong with the film is that not only does Harry romanticize the past, so does Steve Shagan‘s script.  Harry says there used to be rules but not anymore—which is why such things as pornography and a lack of patriotism exist in our culture—and the movie seems to accept this.  Well, as objectionable as pornography, etc. are, and despite the collapse of so many traditional Western values, it is of course false that there are no rules.  What is true is that many otherwise decent or likable people keep pushing against the rules, often for the sake of an agenda.

Save the Tiger avoids self-righteousness and condescension—toward, for instance, the hippie girl (Laurie Heineman) whom Harry beds even though he is married.  Directed by John Avildsen, it is largely intelligent, but problematic.  Indeed, Avildsen should have known that the bright big-band song at the end of the film was inappropriate in light of the very dark incidents that Tiger was setting in motion.

On Monday night’s Jane the Virgin, a woman tells Rogelio, Jane’s father, she would like to have a baby with him since the two have much in common.  For one thing, the woman asserts, they’re both “aging narcissists.”  What other response would Rogelio make than to say something along the lines of “How dare you say that I’m aging!”?

Yeah, the episode gave us that and a whole lot of other things too, even some Hitchcock parody.  Take-baby-to-church Sunday rolled around (Mateo’s first time at Mass) after Alba admonished Jane to see to Mateo’s spiritual development.  The kid is too young for church, however, and—well, though I feared the episode would finally express some kind of banal, fatuous, secular-minded sentiment about religion, it pleasantly did not.

No Petra or Luisa this time.  Instead, pretty Justina Machado showed up, enacting a love dealer (i.e. a matchmaker), a new factor named Darcy Factor.

Cover of The Sugarland Express

Is The Sugarland Express (1974) a stupid movie, or is it just that the people in it are stupid?  Well, a ton of human stupidity obtains, but when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s The Sugarland Express that’s stupid.  The lower class woman played by Goldie Hawn is nothing but a cretin about whom we care very little if at all.  It’s an underwritten role and Hawn, withal, fails to make her sympathetic.

Steven Spielberg has a full supply of moviemaking talent, but his film, though based on a true story, has no good reason to exist.  At least Duel and the finally unsatisfactory Jaws are entertaining.  Sugarland can be entertaining too, but is so trivial the entertainment value seems as though it’s always on the periphery.