1970s society, in Christine (2016), has its mass media technology everywhere as well as its small and trivial consolations and “solutions”, e.g. Transactional Analysis, for life’s burdens.  None of it does 29-year-old Christine Chubbuck any ultimate good.  She is played, magnificently, by Rebecca Hall, but it is now widely known that Chubbuck was an actual person: a Sarasota TV reporter who, in 1974, shot herself on a live broadcast.

As played by Hall, Chubbuck is pretty and intelligent but neurotic, with an incessantly conflicted mind.  Living with a socializing mother (J. Smith-Cameron), she herself is socially hindered.  At the workplace she receives one blow after another, usually self-created, leaving her career un-advanced.  Her hot-tempered boss (Tracy Letts), fighting for newscast ratings, is getting fed up with her.

Christine is one of the best movies about a life in decline I have seen, and—as Peter Rainer indicated—director Antonio Campos and scenarist Craig Shilowich wisely decline to turn Chubbuck into a martyr.  What’s more, they demonstrate that a life ending in suicide is a life.  A person is living it, is active and thinking and talking.  All of this manages to be quite fresh.  Characterization is handled knowingly and perceptively.  The film is conventionally, flawlessly directed and (by Joe Anderson) photographed.  I had to see it in an arthouse theatre—in Tulsa, at the Circle Cinema—and although it belongs there, it should also be at the multiplex.

Cover of Madigan

A police tale meant for adults, Don Siegel‘s Madigan (1968) is sort of a superfluous film without being a bad one.

It makes clear what we already know:  Cops are only human, notwithstanding Detective Don Madigan (Richard Widmark) is essentially a mensch.  Like other cops.  Yes, he mistakenly lets a thoroughgoing bad guy (poorly played by Steve Ihnat) get away, but he proves competent enough for the center of the film: retrieving the creep.

Madigan is married to a selfish wife (Inger Stevens), but when the film focuses on the pair, what’s missing is a point of view.  In fact, there is somewhat more of a character study of Henry Fonda‘s police commissioner than there is of Madigan.  Too bad.  But Widmark, Fonda, Harry Guardino and others are absolutely fine, whereas the acting of Stevens, the American Catherine Deneuve, is no better than that of Deneuve.

Another thing:  It’s 1968, and New York City is starting to become really heinous.

This week’s Jane the Virgin had a nice flow to it and sensibly dealt with the difficulty of financially getting by.  It was also briefly moving in its treatment of sad Luisa (a sapid acting job by Yara Martinez).

But probably nothing on TV this week will be as gripping as last night’s broadcast of the Presidential and Congressional elections.  Spittin’ mad, foul-mouthed celebrities like Madonna and Rachel Bloom deserve what they got, but, well, the Republican voters who preferred Trump over Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, et al. did not.

Cover of The Opposite of Sex

The teenaged girl acted by Christina Ricci in the 1998 Don Roos film, The Opposite of Sex, is unsavory and callow and makes a number of politically incorrect remarks about homosexuals (the impetus: her gay half-brother).  Despite this, the movie is every bit as pro-gay as it is pro-straight if pro-straight is a necessary designation.  What it so tritely and predictably scorns are evangelical Christians.  It pretends to understand homosexuality when in fact it is as ignorant as a stone, and about Christianity it is not ignorant so much as culpably blind.

Cover of Duel (Collector’s Edition)

Man-made cars and the interstate highway system are not the modern wonders to make us forget, and not be shocked by, the strange brutality in human behavior.  Indeed, it is on the interstate that businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver)—in Steven Spielberg‘s Duel (1971)—encounters a stranger who tries to off him with a tanker truck, the reason for which is never revealed.  It is activity as absurd as it is horrible.

Spielberg’s first notable success, Duel is a made-for-TV action thriller which has been called “Jaws on wheels” except that it’s a better flick than Master Steven’s Jaws.  It has a shaky climax, but is consistently fun and nicely economical.  The smart script is by Richard Matheson, and Weaver is constantly on screen but never abandoned by skill.  As well, Duel is one of those many 1970s films enamored of rural American settings, as though it is only in these pristine outdoor places that insights about life may be had.