A terrific Swedish film adapted from a best-seller called Swedish Heroes was given the U.S. title of Expectations (1997), which is fitting because human expectations run rampant here.  Some are dashed, others are fulfilled.  One of them abides in an aging fellow who has wasted his life and concerns a beautiful female angel!

The film examines parent-child, husband-wife relationships, etc. with humor and charm and directorial skill from Daniel Bergman.  There is so much ultimate sanguinity, though, that Expectations is practically feel-good stuff, but that’s okay.  It’s not as though everything in the film is pleasant.  Swedish acting, by the way, is as estimable as it ever was.

Don Draper of Mad Men works on Madison Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since there’s a dearth of serious, intelligent movies right now (a common event), I’ll cast an eye on the serious, intelligent TV series Mad Men.

There is nothing mad about these men of Madison Avenue:  they’re perfectly sane, and usually efficient.  But they can be self-defeating.  I’ve been re-watching the fourth season, in which Don Draper (Jon Hamm) loses to cancer the only friend who has ever truly known him and consequently feels defeated.  In following episodes, though, we see the proclivity to be self-defeating that in Draper we are used to seeing.

Probably Don wins our sympathy in this season more than in the first three, but it is unfortunate that his religion is Coming Out On Top.  This leads him to some puzzling behavior, as when he expresses a preference for charming Megan (Jessica Pare) over the woman with whom he is already in a relationship:  the affable, highly supportive Faye (Cara Buono).  Then again, Faye might deserve better than the two-timing Don, but what about Megan?  ‘Tis hard for a woman to come out on top when Draper strives to do so, for all the blessed privilege that comes her way.  (Ah, the unprecedented wealth of America!)  Mad Men looks at privilege warily.  After all, Don’s ex-wife Betty (January Jones) is very privileged, and she unjustly fires the black nanny and won’t even give her a good recommendation.

That’s almost mad!

Jane the virgin in Jane the Virgin, the new CW series, is still waiting till marriage to have sex, and it would be nice to see the show’s writers respect and satisfy that aim.  Curiously, she is involved with a former playboy named Rafael (Justin Baldoni).  (She’s no longer engaged to the police officer, who retains his taste for the interracial.)

It was good to see the talented Yara Martinez again on the Dec. 8th episode, but not quite believable that her character, the put-upon lesbian Luisa Alver, is hauled off to a mental hospital.  Martinez, for good measure, has a conventional beauty and Yael Grobglas, as Petra, an unconventional beauty.  Sleek and wispy-looking, Grobglas is beguilingly adept as a conniving but not wholly self-assured future divorcee.

Good acting and good looks prevail in Jane the Virgin:  the show might be a milestone in commercial effort.  And a funny one at that.

1993’s In the Name of the Father begins with almost risible melodrama about British vs. Northern Ireland confrontation before concentrating on the 1974 bombing of a Guildford, England pub and the arrest of the Irish foursome—the Guildford Four—accused of the bombing.  This included Gerry Conlon, here played by Daniel Day-Lewis, on whose book (Conlon’s, that is) the movie is based.  After the melodrama, the film nicely aspires to tell the truth about young people, hippies included, just as it reveals a stoic IRA leader to be coldly inhuman.

Woe is me, though:  I have read that in its anti-British tendentiousness Father is a historical fraud, yet another phony docudrama.  The Guildford Four may have been guilty, and in fact some of what we see does not have the ring of truth.  The IRA leader in prison with Conlon is fictitious, but that’s okay, undamaging to the film.  The rub is that one wants more truth than lies in a film which is assuredly partisan.  We don’t want ambiguity all but rejected because director Jim Sheridan hates the British presence in Belfast.  Only this, I believe, keeps Father from being recommendable.

In the Name of the Father (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), Michael Douglas plays divorced, jobless, bespectacled Bill, who snaps under modern day pressure and starts doing deleterious things en route to his ex-wife’s house.  Its first half hour is wrenchingly honest, but then it gets very wobbly.  It politicizes itself by showing how terrified it is of seeming more essentially conservative than essentially liberal, when only political neutrality would have saved the day.  Here and there the film is highly imaginative, and the acting of Douglas, Barbara Hershey and Robert Duvall is un-hammily not to be improved on.  James Newton Howard’s score is sleek and fervid.  The script, however, turns into a p.c. debacle, hoping, really, to be more ideological than artistic; and the film’s visceral power doesn’t stand a chance against that.  It deflates.

Cover of Falling Down