Federico Fellini’s 1954 film I Vitelloni (“Overgrown Calves”) proves just how satisfying an original screenplay can be.  Three heads, one of them Fellini’s, produced it, and the result is a sure artistic success about life as lived by five young men in a provincial Italian town.  Unambitious about traditional living—traditional living, to be sure, in an arid town—the callow “overgrown calves” are indifferent to the social values their elders know must exist.

Fellini’s direction is careful and winningly imaginative, serving a film as buoyant as it is sad.  Precisely the sympathy for freakish people we want, but don’t always get, from a Fellini movie exists in spades here.  Better, everything is made engaging, from characters to details.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

I Vitelloni (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The quicksilver farce in They Came Together (2014) is reminiscent of that in the TV shows Arrested Development and 30 Rock.  Just as both of those series were low-rated, David Wain’s movie failed to open in very many theatres and few people have heard of it.  It’s now on DVD and Blu-Ray and (in my opinion) manages to be properly structured and brashly hilarious.

A full-length parody of romantic comedies, it features Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler doing expert work as lovers Joel and Molly, and although much of the humor is not integral to the parody, that’s fine; it keeps the laughs coming. . . I used the word “brashly.”  Brash because, for one thing, it’s often, but not constantly, bawdy (from the silly title on).  Also, it can get pleasantly weird, as when the couple are in bed after having sex and are fully clothed.  Or . . . did they have sex?  It’s agreeable, too, that Wain likes his characters while he does his crazy lampooning.

English: Amy Poehler at the 2011 Time 100 gala. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 1994 David O. Russell film, Spanking the Monkey, has, or seems to have, something important to say about family incohesiveness and breakdown, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing it on my first viewing as shoddy and on my second viewing as a shoddy bore.  All that stuff about college boy Raymond’s lovemaking difficulties with the high school girl meanders enough to make it a bore.  When Raymond and his mother childishly play with some cheese they’re supposed to be eating, it constitutes some of the tackiest film footage to be shown in ’94 and probably beyond.  As for the gradual mother-son incest, why bother to comment?  It doesn’t offend; I just have no idea why it’s there, why it occurs.  Is it merely because mother and son are sexually starved?  Not viable.  Spanking the Monkey is an independent film—independent of taste and brains.

Cover of Spanking the Monkey

The work of cinema’s most notorious nonbeliever, the Spanish lapsed Catholic Luis Bunuel, The Milky Way (1968) is a surrealistic and of course sardonic potpourri picture about 1) Catholic history, and 2) our Christ-haunted Western civilization.

Toward some things Christian Bunuel is in a sympathetic mood, but the mood doesn’t last; before long, he snickers at what he myopically considers ludicrous and trivial.  Consider: a papist-hating heretic beholds an apparition of the Virgin Mary, later informing a kindly priest of it, and there is in all this a certain sweetness, no sardonicism.  Afterwards, however, a beautiful girl surrealistically pops up in the heretic’s (or ex-heretic’s) room at an inn, which prompts the priest to start lecturing the fellow about the ugliness of sexual impurity and the sacredness of virginity and celibacy—all to Bunuel’s displeasure.  He creates biting irony in this whole miracle-followed-by-sexual-morality spectacle, as though nothing of the sort could possibly emanate from a deity.

Most of the film’s surrealism flounders.  This being a “history,” Jesus appears in the century in which He lived (as a man) but not for a second do I accept Him as the Jesus of Scripture.  He is kind but so lighthearted He lacks most of the dignity I believe the Savior of the world would have.  In point of fact, Bunuel doesn’t even allow Him the dignity, after He has healed two blind men, of keeping them healed, for it isn’t long before the blindness mysteriously returns.  Our atheistic director could never have accepted that Jesus actually worked those New Testament miracles, but is this a good way to show it?

Or maybe he simply wanted to symbolize the figurative blindness of some of Jesus’ future followers, since Christians in this film often persecute heretics and oppose each other, but is this a good way to show that?  To me it isn’t, but even if it were, I wouldn’t want to hear it from a creepy pseudo-thinker like Bunuel.

Two priests demand a heretic to repent as he is tortured. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Doomsday Marshall, from 1975, is another transport-the-prisoner Western with flinty Marshall John Rye as the transporter and disgraceful Luke Braden as the prisoner.  Braden is en route to being hanged, but has a purty wife hoping to free him and former friends hoping to kill him before he blabs what he knows.

Written by Ray Hogan, TDM is a book, not a movie, albeit it would make a good movie.  Ne’er a dull moment is here, ne’er a plot point (as I recall) to make you wince.  As for Hogan’s style, it is ordinary and palatable—perhaps not needing the kind of editing some oaters call for but don’t get.

I liked it.  But, boy, those Old West duties were hell!