In The Intern (2015), director-writer Nancy Meyers creates a female character, Jules, who has it all.  Or she nearly does.  At the same time, Meyers has fashioned two of the kind of male characters she will value and cherish for the rest of her life: i.e., men who are enlightened about women and their jobs.  One of the problems with the film is that one of these men, Ben (Robert De Niro—Jules’s intern), is a paragon of righteousness, having no faults to speak of.  This is not quite the case with the other man, a stay-at-home dad to whom Jules is married.  And yet . . .

The Intern is not the most realistic feminist pic you could see, and, what’s more, it’s pretty bumpy—“clumsy” (Joe Morgenstern).  Truth to tell, it’s a failure, but an interesting one in which we get to see a well-grounded and sensitive performance by Anne Hathaway as Jules, in addition to Meyers’s curious imagination.  Alas, there is an immature, unfunny shlub too (Zack Pearlman’s Davis)—here because every American comedy-drama has to have one.  

Nothing spoils contest goods, such as those won by Jimmy Stewart’s Bill Lawrence in The Jackpot (1950), like Uncle Sam via the IRS.  Bill gives the right answer to a radio-show question and receives the loot the federal government becomes so eager to tax, understandably prompting Bill to loudly inquire whether the “STATE [government]” will be just as grasping.  You got that right, boy.

But it isn’t merely the IRS that is setting traps for Bill.  The winnings eventually shake up his marriage to Amy (Barbara Hale), who sees good reason for jealous suspicion. . . Walter Lang’s playful conservative flick is, like innumerable other Old Hollywood comedies, not very funny but still entertaining.  It is also forgotten—except by YouTube—but why should we forget something that has Jimmy Stewart and two very good-looking women: Barbara Hale and Patricia Medina (as a Frenchie)?  More, it provides the right amount of sentiment for its unmawkish romance.

The Jackpot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Re Taylor Swift‘s Red CD (2012), which I recently heard for the first time.  (I’m not much interested in her current CD, 1989.)

1) Predictably, there are too many love songs on this 16-track recording.  2) When Taylor isn’t boring me with “I Almost Do,” “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” “Everything Has Changed” and a couple of others, she’s delighting me with . . . the following:

With Liz Rose, Swift wrote the remarkable, nicely worded ballad “All Too Well,” which presents our girl as a country-pop Carly Simon, and by herself Swift wrote the calm, melodically fine “Begin Again.”  “22” sounds a bit like Rebecca Black’s “Friday”:  it’s optimistic catchiness.  The song’s college-girl boyfriend stuff continues in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” a fun song of exasperation.  By herself Swift also wrote “State of Grace,” which could use some better lyrics but is musically vivid and exciting.

Terrific as she is, Taylor Swift is not a great songwriter, but Red is an almost great CD.  There is more artistry than art in her many decent-sounding songs.

Change (Taylor Swift song) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The director of Ju Dou, To Live, and Not One Less, China’s Zhang Yimou is a brilliant master.  Small, amusing and sad, his Happy Times (2002) concentrates on a shortchanged person, a pared-down life—that of Wu Ying, a girl made blind by a brain tumor and treated ignobly by her husband-less stepmother.  The man who wishes to marry the stepmother is Zhao, a fiftyish loser of sorts so tired of bachelorhood that he lies to the stepmother about owning a big hotel.  Stirred by this, the woman asks Zhao to hire Wu Ying as a hotel masseuse; she wants the girl out of the way.  Hence Zhao rigs up a phony massage room and leads Wu to believe she is servicing customers who are in reality Zhao’s helpful friends.  The unseeing girl enjoys the “work” and considers these brief days the happiest of her life.

In this film one deprived soul immorally uses another deprived soul.  The lying little man is luckless, but the blind Wu Ying is more so, and yet Zhao does do something for the girl.  Indeed he can even be very kind to her; such paradoxes!  Largely, though, he is merely kind to himself, and things go into a tailspin.  For Wu, is it only through deception that happy times can be had?  What’s more, self-deception appears to plague both characters.

Zhao Benshan is capital as Zhao with lower-class ordinariness and ingenuous appeal, believable as a puritanical bachelor.  Dong Jie is absolutely winning with Wu Ting’s guilelessness and forbearance, but is not a cardboard saint.  Zhang’s direction is standard but careful and felt, perhaps reflecting an admiration for contemporary Iranian filmmakers.  Happy Times has heart; it has the heart of Not One Less, quite different from Zhang’s earlier great, nigh depressing pictures, although some might find Happy Times depressing too.

(In Mandarin with English subtitles)

Happy Times (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Beware if a man in a film noir complains about his humdrum life, as Dick Powell does in Pitfall (1948).  He’s destined to have his life stimulated by violence and, possibly, the kiss of a woman who’s not his wife.  The said woman is played by Lizabeth Scott, whose boyfriend is in the clink.  A nerdy aggressor (Raymond Burr) wishes to take advantage of this imprisonment by running away with lovely Scott, but Powell, the would-be adulterer, remains in the way. . . Whatever Jay Dratler’s novel is like, presumably it was good material for a movie, for a very involving story—solidly directed by Andre de Toth—gets underway.  The casting alone is very involving.

Pitfall (1948 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Powell and Scott aren’t perfect—indeed, they’re superficial (for more nuance, there’s Jane Wyatt)—but they still fit noir material like a glove.  I only wish Pitfall was on DVD: I had to watch it on YouTube.