John Hillcoat’s Lawless (2012), written by Nick Cave, is little more than an entertainment, but entertain it does.  It’s about backwoods bootleggers during the Prohibition era and unscrupulous law officers who desire a piece of the action.  Cave, however, is not much of a screenwriter.  Sometimes the script gets flimsy (why do those thugs who cut Tom Hardy’s throat remain for a while on his property instead of fleeing?) and the film is too brutal (Tom Hardy’s character in particular is too brutal).  Also, characterization here is poor, although that’s usually the case in this kind of film nowadays.

The look of the film is superb; it’s a transportingly made period piece.  There are several strong scenes, such as one in a Mennonite church during a foot-washing.

See Lawless if you wish.  It’s highly imperfect, but it does have some merits.

Tom Hardy (Photo credit: honeyfitz)

Ghost World (2001), by Terry Zwigoff, based on the underground comix of Daniel Clowes, mainly has to do with Enid (Thora Birch), a reserved, near-misanthropic adolescent just out of high school and, like her friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), a misfit.

Both girls decline to go to college but whereas Rebecca gets a lasting job, Enid does not.  She blows it with her employers, and also innocently spoils her chance to enroll in an art school.  After playing a cruel joke on a nerdy man called Seymour (Steve Buscemi), also a misfit, Enid sympathetically befriends him and tries to find him a girlfriend.  By and by she beds him, but Seymour’s not the man for her.  Enid is increasingly dissatisfied, still friends with Rebecca in spite of a probable shriveling of their relationship in the future.  The misfit is isolated–and possibly just as “clueless” as at first she believes Seymour to be.

The movie caustically satirizes sentimental blather and pretentious attitudes toward art, both of which Enid and Rebecca hate.  Enid’s summer-school art teacher embodies the latter.  A “ghost world” may well be one where things are insubstantial, and, to be sure, sentimental blather and pretentiousness are that.  It is also, perhaps, a world where people long to make a connection with other people but  do not do so, quite.  This describes Seymour’s liaison with the girlfriend he finally obtains, and even his liaison with Enid.  In fact, what Zwigoff and Clowes show us are people longing to make this connection without particularly liking other people.  Example:  Enid.

Ghost World  discards political correctness.  For instance, a silly twisted clothes-hanger sculpture is said by the student who made it to express a belief in a woman’s right to choose.  We may infer from this film that those in our day who wish to politicize everything could never rely on politics to remake the world Enid and Seymour live in.  Nor does it help that sardonic Enid loses much of whatever stature, whatever appeal, she has  for us at the movie’s beginning.  At one point she informs an old gent named Norman that the bus line where he daily waits for a bus has been discontinued.  Norman replies, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  How true!  This 18-year-old girl, we discover, doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  Or, rather, sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t.  Then again, she’s only 18 years old.

The conclusion is a bit of a surreal cheat, and I’m not sure Seymour would have flat-out dismissed the pretty real-estate agent he is dating.  Oh well:  Ghost World is smart, funny and unusual.  The first time I saw it I liked it a lot; the second time, though, it waned on me.  Then the third time I saw it, it returned to its former plateau.  (Yea!)  Birch is flawless (attractive too) as Enid, Johansson is okay–in this film.  In other films she is simply lackluster.  Buscemi is the opposite of lackluster.

Ghost World (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An Indian film (with English subtitles) directed by Anurag Basu, Kites (2009) may be the most romantic lovers-on-the-lam movie ever made.

Not that the romance doesn’t become tedious, however, although an amorous scene in the attic of an empty house, with J. and Natasha in their wedding clothes, is moving.

J. (Hrithik Roshan) is a con man from India, Natasha (Barbara Mori) a Mexican seduced away from a Vegas reprobate.  The style is too blatant and garish, but there is fun to be had.  In its non-tedious action scenes, for example, Kites has a few things in common with that little Susan Sarandon-Geena Davis movie of the early ’90s, but Thelma and Louise it ain’t.

It’s probably better, for all the mistakes Basu made.  I mean it.

Kites (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

His father’s anti-colonialism and pro-collectivism were instilled in Barak Obama when he was young, in all likelihood by his mother (Dad was gone).  Later he learned from the likes of Communist member Frank Marshall Davis, and the rest is history as the same old laughable contempt for capitalism became, after 2008, almost palpable.  We’ve learned nothing from Milton Friedman.

2016, the 2012 hit documentary by Dinesh d’Souza and John Sullivan, lets us know how essentially little it takes for leftism to grab a prosperous Western nation by the throat.  Ours is a country which owes a $16 trillion debt and which funds offshore drilling in Brazil while oil exploration on its own terrain often receives short shrift.  Madness!

Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2003), which concerns a drug dealer’s last day of freedom before his prison sentence begins, is a sluggish and offputting film which I didn’t bother watching to the end.  Lee’s style is pushy and unreal, and there is too much of Terence Blanchard’s often gimcrack music. 

“At its best,” wrote David Edelstein for Slate, “25th Hour is a melancholy tone poem,” but I wouldn’t expect a cinematic tone poem to be as talky as this.  And that it is genuinely poetic is debatable. 

Cover of 25th Hour