SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen the latest (June 23) episode.

In my view, the final season of the old 24 series was lousy.  For one thing, Jack Bauer committed the immoral act of shooting down an unarmed Katee Sackhoff.  In the reboot, he throws an unarmed Margot Al-Harazi (Michelle Fairley) out of a high window—just like Jezebel—but no one cares because Margot is so incredibly, appallingly evil.  Just like Jezebel.

Other individual deaths have occurred as well.  Sorry to see you go, Jordan. . . I’m not sure whether Margot’s daughter Simone (the very pretty Emily Berrington) is dead 0r not, but I don’t think so.  She’s had quite an experience with vehicles lately (being hit by a bus, being involved in an insane car chase).  Everybody is waiting to see when Steve Navarro (Benjamin Bratt) gets it in the neck.  How do so many cold-blooded “moles,” which is what Navarro is, manage to get inside CTU?  Why such background check deficiencies?

Cover of Driving Miss Daisy (Keepcase)

Bruce Beresford often fashions wonderful endings for his movies, and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) is no exception.  Nowhere does the film display more heart, more humanizing feeling, than in its last sequence.  The feeling doesn’t seem as legitimate as that in, say, the Taiwanese picture Eat Drink Man Woman because Miss Daisy (Jessica Tandy) is not quite as sympathetic a character as those in Ang Lee’s film; she doesn’t change much in the course of the piece.  She is scrappy and sharp-tongued from start to finish, but that in no way means we don’t like her, don’t care about her, and a moving ending is a moving ending.  The one encouraging fact about her is that she ultimately acknowledges her black chauffeur, Hoke (Morgan Freeman), as her best friend.  Miss Daisy is a white Southerner.  She’s also Jewish, though, and seemingly less inclined toward racial pride and prejudice than many, or most, Southern white Gentiles.  She and her grown son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) are liberals in the Fifties and Sixties.

Written by Alfred Uhry and based on his play, Daisy is minor Beresford but, like his Breaker Morant, beautifully transferred from stage to screen.  The Aussie’s directorial care is a pleasure to behold even in a comparatively unambitious work like this.  On the minus side, there is an excess of music; on the plus side, it is a family film.  I am persuaded to add, however, that as I watched Miss Daisy, et al. grow older and thus slow down as the years advanced, as I watched Miss Daisy’s increasing fragility, I was saddened to think of all of us having to live in a fallen world of irreversible time.

The Convent (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Convent (1995), by Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira, is a Christian film set in a locus of angels and gargoyles, but is, alas, rather tedious and burdened with a confused plot.

It has a monastery, a statue of Mary Magdalene, a statue of a crucified monk, a demonic figure in human form, a devout, purehearted girl who tells the demonic figure, “I miss God”, before dashing away from him, a woman with a gift for “ubiquity,” etc.  But it doesn’t have a good story.  Oliveira got some noteworthy shots, but held his camera on most of them for too long.  Shots of the sky are meant to make us think of God, as is the image of sunlight slowly ridding that crucified monk statue of the dim shade over it and bringing illumination.  A pleasant sight, this.

In the sublime Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Judy Garland plays a teenaged girl even though she was then in her early 20s and divorced.  But it hardly matters: she is both convincing and luminous in the role.  This is partly due to makeup artist Dorothy Ponedel, but Garland’s technical skills remained first-rate and are the most winning thing about the film.  There is never any lack of nuance or proper restraint in her singing; well does she serve such dandy numbers as “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song.”

Directed by Vincente Minnelli, St. Louis is a 1940s pop masterpiece.  After seeing it for the umpteenth time, I noticed something: the characters in the film are strangely sanctified through being a close-knit family.  No wonder they sing a lot; they’re usually happy and expectant.  They’re far removed from the dark domain Judy chose to create, before the making of the film, by getting both a divorce and an abortion.

Meet Me in St. Louis (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hollywood has transferred to the big screen a very popular YA novel, The Fault in Our Stars, about teens with cancer (principally two of them—in a romance).  Although a strong film in several ways, I found it largely unsatisfying because of the sick boy (Ansel Elgort) who is too well-adjusted to be true (as well as handsome, of course) and the asinine, contemptible writer enacted by William Dafoe.  Every time these two elements are thrust before us, the picture struggles to be effectual.  It shouldn’t have to.

Ansel Elgort – DSC_0113 2 (Photo credit: MingleMediaTVNetwork)