Francois Truffaut’s French film The 400 Blows (1959) still impresses, and always will.  We respond favorably to its autobiography, it holds us with its detail and moves at a nice clip.  For a narrative work of art it has little to say, but the frozen-frame face of the juvenile delinquent after he has sweatily dashed to the seashore bespeaks much about being on the brink of maturity, of resignation, of personal change.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover via Amazon

Two women, both married, are gaga over a young ne’er-do-well—and commit adultery with him.  But, well, nobody’s all bad:  so does Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh (1997)—it should have been translated “Trembling Flesh”—remind us.

The mode is that of a serious but crazy thriller, with no shortage of intriguing or droll details (e.g., TV will frequently grab a character’s attention, even in the course of a physical fight).  Almodovar will do anything to keep our eyes glued to his footage, which is why he is a sensationalist.  Naked body time:  The big intimacy scene may well have been the most vividly sexy segment in ’97 cinema.  Some of this stark stuff doesn’t work (Angela Molina shooting Jose Sancho), but on the whole Carne Tremula is a carefree, pleasurable oddity.

(In Spanish with English subtitles)

Live Flesh (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People who have been long unemployed in America will not be hired for nascent jobs.  Employers are not interested in them.  This is the subject of a pretty good Slate.com article by Matthew Yglesias (Dec. 11).

Yet how many times can we provide these people with federal unemployment compensation?  It’s unaffordable.  To do nothing for them, however, “is cruel and insane,” says Yglesias.  Indeed it is.  Something should be done.  Maybe one more year (2014) of unemployment comp, though at the same time I’d like to see President Obama and Congress do all they can to remove this infernal climate of uncertainty for entrepreneurs and corporations.  (Alas, Obama can’t be trusted for this.)  A proliferation of jobs—more jobs than we have workers for—is what is needed:  THIS is what will benefit the long-term unemployed.

Obamacare, thou should’st not be living at this hour.  Or any hour.

All the President’s Men, the Alan Pakula film, was a stand-out in 1976 largely because most other movies that year were so dismal.

Scripted by William Goldman, Men concerns the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein breaking of the ’72 Watergate story, and is as evenhanded about it as it needs to be, however skeptical I am about . . . this and that.  In the final analysis, it’s not a very important film, merely a celluloid chronicle telling us a lot about the newspaper business but not much about anything else.

Even so, for a long time it’s very absorbing; all the time it’s wonderfully acted.  It almost convinces me that the American media in the 1970s was not quite the joke it later became.   Not THAT big a joke.

All the President’s Men (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is well known that Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) ends more or less apocalyptically—unique for film noir—but this isn’t so strange considering how many deaths precede the climax and that the movie’s hero, Mike Hammer, is capable of low-level sadism as well as other forms of naughtiness.  We just wait and see what the world has to dish up after all the violence.

What Aldrich has dished up is a weird credit sequence, a tough-as-nails opening scene with Cloris Leachman running down the highway, interesting staging, and cool sex appeal.  Looking both manly and unintimidating, Ralph Meeker is appropriately charmless yet not quite repelling as Hammer.  How could a man who receives as many smooches from strange women as this guy does be repelling?

Cover of Kiss Me Deadly