Most of the critics have been slamming Kick-Ass 2. Check out rottentomatoes.com. As usual, though, they find it difficult to explain their opposition. They think the film is gratuitous—or something. Largely the reviews are interchangeable and thus boring. Also, as usual, there is no true criticism here since the reviewers do the reader’s thinking for him or her instead of stimulating thinking. Too bad.
Category: General Page 239 of 271
In the early Seventies, French director Louis Malle made a film about adolescents which deliberately went in a transgressive direction. This is Murmur of the Heart (1971), not merely a transgressive opus but, more seriously, a vile one as well. The three teenage boys at the center, especially the dominant Laurent (Benoit Ferreux), no one in his right mind would tolerate, but naturally the adults around them do until the story builds to an act of tender incest between Laurent and his freewheeling mother (Lea Massari). It’s nearly the last thing that happens in the film and—transgressively—it’s never censured. It’s condoned.
Whatever its pretensions are, Murmur is basically anti-bourgeois, an easygoing act of rebellion. What’s more, it implicitly believes that the most important thing that goes on between a man and a woman is sexual intercourse. It isn’t. But this absolutely accounts for the incest.
Lest I sound smug, let me put it profanely: Murmur of the Heart is a piece of shit.
Cover via Amazon
I doubt that the Christian film Courageous (2012) speaks to very many nonbelievers since it is overflowing with evangelical spirituality and is not at all subtle. Alex Kendrick did a lot of work here—he directed, stars in, and co-wrote the flick with his brother Stephen—but the finished product is neither art nor admirable craft. It concerns fatherhood, and Christian living for fathers, and although I agree with the religious and pro-family propaganda, propaganda is what it is and so does not belong in fictional cinema.
The Kendricks’ previous film, Fireproof, was somewhat better. For all its weaknesses, it fascinates—and its drama is relevant to subject and theme. That’s not always the case with the un-fascinating Courageous.
Courageous (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The French film La Discrete (1990), by Christian Vincent, is a revenge tale in which revenge becomes, first, methodical and dispassionate and, second, unimportant to the man avenging himself. This is Antoine, an aspiring writer whose paramour leaves him for another guy, whereupon Antoine remarks to a friend of his, a publisher, that he would wreak revenge if he knew how. The publisher explains how: Antoine can get even with the female sex in general–and become a published author to boot—if he will find a girl at random whom he will court, sleep with and then abandon, and concomitantly put the details of all this into a diary. The diary will be turned into a book.
A newspaper ad calling for a typist is what the blackguards use as bait to acquire a girl, and a student named Catherine is the one who comes along. At first revolted by Catherine’s near-plain visage, Antoine nevertheless initiates a romance with her and, yes, he sleeps with her. Not at all a bona fide woman-hater, however, the restless writer loses all desire to betray the girl, much to the publisher’s disgruntlement. And yet—though I will not elaborate on it—Catherine gets hurt, feels abandoned. The film is about how life inevitably moves on after plans are dropped, after evil is decided against, after scores no longer have to be settled. And it’s about loneliness and solitude: Catherine, it turns out, is consigned to isolation. Too, there is the theme of the malice which sometimes lurks behind loneliness: we see this in the publisher. Solitude prevails whether scores are settled or not.
Christian Vincent directed with taste and shrewdness, and co-wrote the talky but intriguing script. He seems very surefooted with actors too. Fabrice Luchini gives Antoine a perfect intellectual glitter and seductive extroversion. Catherine is made appealing, and this despite a certain self-effacement, by young Judith Henry. Maurice Garrel fills the bill, with virile sobriety, as the publisher. Once again we feel like celebrating French acting as much as we have celebrated British acting.
(In French with English subtitles)
English: Fabrice Luchini, French actor Français : Fabrice Luchini, acteur français (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Mom gets wildly demon-possessed in James Wan’s formidable The Conjuring (2013) but before that, she and the rest of the family incur “infestation”: unclean spirits in the house, getting all spooky. Mom is played by a magnificent Lili Taylor, who is every bit a mother (of five daughters) in the role, is convincingly worried and appalled, and is creepily demonized without a trace of overacting.
The film itself needed the excess happenings sliced from its plot unless of course the excess went on in real life, for The Conjuring is “based on a true story.” It’s a story involving not only demons but also two Catholic paranormal investigators (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson), who manage to be efficacious in a vital exorcism. And it does this without any jabs at the Catholic church. (Take THAT, Village Voice.)
As a horror director James Wan knows what he’s doing. It’s an expert work visually and photographically, if not so much in its scenario. There’s a clever title sequence at the end, too.
