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.

The 1971 film Such Good Friends, by Otto Preminger, is like a comic An Unmarried Woman with a sick and dying husband.  The wife of this husband, Julie (Dyan Cannon), firmly and understandably sees her marriage to Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) as a good one.  But then his health starts failing badly before Julie’s obsession with his welfare is supplanted by anguish over the relationship per se.  At first—and at later moments too—the film is a sex comedy, presently turning into a comedy plain and simple: one with pathos.

The script is by Elaine May (using the pseudonym of Esther Dale), adapting a novel by Lois Gould, and there are trenchant, witty lines.  Occasionally, however, the flick is distasteful:  I don’t want to see James Coco in his underwear waiting to be fellated.  Friends, further, can be preposterous. . . Dyan Cannon does not flesh out her character memorably, as do Coco and Ken Howard.  The music, too, sometimes fails to cut it.  I disagree with the internet reviewer who found the film dull, but it is my opinion that, in spite of its several pleasures, Such Good Friends is forgettable.