I have no use for Oliver Stone’s wrongheaded movies, and not surprisingly his latest, Savages (2012), is more interesting than truly good.  It is very interesting, though, in my view; an intriguing drug-cartel drama.  For the most part it is poorly written–forget the film’s dumb suggestion that there are “beautiful savages” here–but it’s dramatically sobering and visually seductive nonetheless.  Or at least it’s visually seductive when it avoids Stone’s filmic pretentiousness; it is Don Mindel’s fine cinematography with its seaside colors that gives the movie its look.

Histrionically Benicio Del Toro (as a drug-trade bully), Salma Hayek (as the Baja cartel leader) and John Travolta (as a corrupt cop) carry the film.  Taylor Kitsch and Blake Lively do not.  Travolta gives it all he’s got, with acting that’s tough-fibered and unself-conscious.  Hayek is pleasantly solemn.

David Thomson, on the Internet, is right:  Savages is trashy, and not because Kitsch bares his bottom.  It’s quite a sensationalistic stew.  Even so, Thomson accepts the film and so do I.  Reluctantly.

Taylor Kitsch (Photo credit: Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer)

1963’s Seduced and Abandoned, which received a Big Apple showing in 2007, was said by someone at New York magazine to make Judd Apatow’s film, Knocked Up, look tame by comparison.  That it does, and like Knocked Up, Pietro Germi’s Italian gem concerns a non-slutty female who gets pregnant outside marriage.

An adroit Stefania Sandrella stars as Agnese, the seduced and abandoned one, a Sicilian girl of 16 defiled by her sister’s fiance, Peppino (Aldo Puglisi).  It’s statutory rape, even though Agnese’s father, Don Vincenzo Ascalone (an outstanding Saro Urzi) gets furious with both Peppino and Agnese.  As puny as a worm, Peppino refuses to marry the violated girl because now she is no longer a virgin!  It’s a matter of honor.

Acridly, hilariously satirical, Seduced exposes Honor pursued and safeguarded in the face of, and regardless of, utter hypocrisy.  Superficiality prevails, while that which is DIShonorable keeps coming to the fore (Peppino’s finally agreeing to marry Agnese just to stay out of jail, Don Vincenzo’s plan to murder Peppino).  What Germi’s movie displays is a healthy old-style liberalism, albeit one with a limited but genuine respect for such institutions as the Catholic church and the judicial system.  No love for anarchy here.  It’s just a daring dark comedy, one of the finest I’ve seen.

(The film is in Italian with English subtitles.)

Cover via Amazon

Is Canadian Idol as rotten as American Idol?  Don’t know, but one of the past contestants on the Canadian version, Carly Rae Jepsen, was handed a great pop song in 2011.  It’s the energetic “Call Me Maybe,” which opens with–a pizzicato?–before providing very simple synthesizer-strings for the chorus and delivering its “love” lyric.

‘Hey, I just met you / And this is crazy,” Carly Rae sings and, to be sure, the song is not entirely positive or affirmative.  It hints that perhaps the girl would be better off if she were more acquainted with Mr. Ripped Jeans.  “Call me, MAYBE” is the directive.  The tune is quite cheery, sure, but small wonder it grinds to an unusual halt.

Of course “Call Me Maybe” is not great in the way that, say, Jewel’s “Foolish Games” or Sheryl Crow’s “My Favorite Mistake” is great.  Along with being more sophisticated, these songs are affecting.  “Foolish Games” is a piano-dominated lament with a superb climax, perfect for Jewel’s voice.  “My Favorite Mistake” offers a mean, creaky guitar and a solemn vocal.  Here and there the words are rather weak, but the music isn’t–and, like the Jewel number, it’s movingly sung.  There is higher merit here than in Jepsen’s ditty, but hooray for all three songs.  They’re entertaining.

Though something more than a commercial Hollywood film, People Like Us (2012) is flatly unsatisfactory.  I found it hard to swallow nearly everything that goes on in it, as when a deceased father leaves his neglectful, irresponsible son a boatload of money to turn over to the half-sister he has never met.  True, the picture is moving, but it’s ultimately sentimental as well.

Kick-Ass (2010) has the title it does because that’s what Dave (Aaron Johnson), the adolescent superhero, calls himself after he immaturely decides that costumed superheroism is what someone needs to attempt and that he might as well be the someone.  So he dons a rubber wetsuit and goes off to help people, often ineptly.

I said the decision is immature, but . . . is it?  Two persons observe the actions of Kick-Ass, now a media star, and they themselves are superheroes–good ones.  They’re a father-and-daughter team, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), the latter only eleven years old.  Big Daddy’s real name is Damon, and he is an ex-cop framed by a drug lord, Frank D’Amico, and wrongfully sent to the penitentiary.  During this time Damon’s wife committed suicide.  Now Damon/Big Daddy wants revenge.  To be sure, D’Amico is an amazingly cruel and homicidal criminal, one of whose vile assistants Kick-Ass encounters since he, the assistant, has a girlfriend on whom Kick-Ass has a crush.  The damsel wants to be free of the assistant, and the teenaged crusader appreciates this.

If all this sounds insane, it is.  Kick-Ass is an insane pop film, in addition to being gutsy, amusing, exciting, violent, deserving of its R rating and, to a minimal extent, politically incorrect.  I loved every minute of it.  Especially insane is the slaughter of all the bad guys which Hit Girl manages to achieve.  With her purple wig and sometimes foul mouth, she seems to embody a troubling notion:  that ours is such an evil world, even to its children, we would be better off with a youngster this powerful, if she existed, than we are without her.  Hit Girl (real name:  Mindy) “lives by a simple code that says evil loses,” writes John Nolte on the Big Hollywood website.

Britain’s Matthew Vaughn ably directed and, with Jane Goldman, penned the movie’s screenplay, which is based on a graphic novel whose plot may well be as uneven as the one here.  Some stale stuff about Dave’s normal sexual longings arises, but in any case it adds to the movie’s general spiciness. . . Initially Aaron Johnson overacts; then he settles down and does a palatable job.  Cage, usually mediocre, is engaging and earnest and virile enough as Damon/Big Daddy.  Moretz is lovable in spite of everything, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse enacts D’Amico’s naughty son, masquerading as a superhero called Red Mist, effectually.

Cover of Kick-Ass