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In Priceless, a 2008 French film (with English subtitles) by Pierre Salvadori, Audrey Tautou stars as Irene, a gold-digging beauty who mistakes a waiter-cum-bartender, Jean (Gad Elmaleh), for a rich man, only to discover the truth after Jean has happily bedded her twice.  Following a brush-off, Irene sees red when Jean inadvertently spoils a gold-digging date she is on, but she gets her revenge.  She quickly starts making demands of the waiter which drain him dry of money.  It scarcely matters to Jean, however:  he now loves the naughty gamine.  He also gets his bills paid, mirabile dictu, through becoming the kept man of an older widow played by Marie-Christine Adam, whom he cannot love.  He has his eye on Irene–and she on him!

Corruption runs deep in this film and exists mostly within women.  Two women, Irene one of them, want to marry money, while another, the widow, supplies gifts to a young man for sex and companionship.  It is Jean who is decent in many, though not all, ways.  He unselfishly loves Irene even as the latter tries to play her gold-digging game–seemingly–to the end.  But fear not:  Priceless (or Hors de Prix) is a comedy of reformation–Irene’s.  And, no, it’s not a wholly convincing reformation but it will do.  It will do because, being a comedy, the film needs a happy ending and because Irene is perspicacious enough to see that Jean is deserving.

Sophisticated comedy (sometimes farce) in French cinema may still be going strong, although I don’t know since most French movies don’t get distributed to the U.S.  I do know that the Salvadori film, whose script is by Benoit Graffin and Salvadori himself, is superbly written, with character and plot as its grabbers.  It isn’t cerebral at all, but it is honest and truly amusing.

Elmaleh is nearly stolid as Jean but still does well by him:  a nearly stolid Jean is okay.  Tautou, a good enough comic actress, is as nuanced as she is sensual.  She’s triumphing as often as Virginie Ledoyen.

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Want to see a strong documentary?  Kevin Knoblock’s Border War, from 2006, is it, for it skillfully presents its subject of the “border war” involving illegal immigrants from Mexico.  It concentrates on a number of participants in this war, most of them opponents of illegal entry and of such measures as a guest-worker program–e.g. former Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona. 

Lupe Moreno, another participant, is a Latina activist against the illegals, she whose father, a migrant worker, helped Mexican family members and others emigrate to a “safe house” in California when Lupe was a little girl.  Lupe lived in the safe house and had a very hard time of it.  Her father’s doings drove Lupe’s mother to leave the man, and Lupe, unprotected, was sexually molested by the immigrants, all of whom were male.  What’s more, a nephew of hers was murdered by an illegal immigrant.

So was Teri March’s husband, a policeman.  A vicious, drug-dealing illegal shot Dave March to death and, at long last, was extradited to the U.S.  (Brutal, this, and even  more brutal was the 1994 murder of a 16-year-old girl in Texas at the hands of an illegal immigrant named Humberto Leal Garcia.  After raping the girl, Garcia crushed her skull with a 35-pound piece of asphalt.  He was FINALLY executed in 2011.)   The film’s resident defender of the illegals, Enrique Morones, correctly notes that most border-crossers do not belong to the criminal class (they’re often excellent workers) and explains their desperation to escape poverty.  Morones helps them with food and water, but, although he doesn’t want them to cross the border, he also glorifies them.  “They’re heroes,” he says.  Also featured  is a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Jose Maheda, who rightly comments that the illegals ought to be treated with respect after they’re apprehended.  He knows, however, they’re not actually heroic.  They’ve broken the law and they leave garbage all over the desert.  And they’re dependent on evil “coyotes,” i.e. men who smuggle immigrants into America for profit.

Knoblock isn’t on the side of the open-borders advocates.  He lets Morones speak his mind, but he knows the man’s assertions about illegal entry are worthless compared with what Moreno, Hayworth and a few others have to say.  I wish the film had spent a little time on the economic costs of massive immigration but it isn’t an analytical work and, withal, simply assumes the audience knows those costs are there.  And we do know it, do we not?  It is enough that Knoblock is alarmed by how many people are getting in.  An Arizona rancher tells Rep. Hayworth that he once asked a coyote, “How many [immigrants] make it through?”  The coyote answered, “They all make it through.”  Sounds unsustainable to me.

Border War is a dark conservative film which wholeheartedly wishes to persuade liberals and conservatives alike that what’s going on is important. . .

It is still relevant.

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The famous picture about two “cowboys” working with livestock who initiate a homosexual love affair in 1963, Brokeback Mountain (2005) tells us that sexual and emotional self-denial is an unfortunate, even a tragic, thing.  It’s wrong:  What it should be telling us that such self-denial CAN BE an unfortunate thing, not simply that it is.  Pretty simpleminded message.

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It never came to a Tulsa theatre, but 2007’s Broken English, which I saw on DVD, is a small triumph for director-writer Zoe Cassavetes.  Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) has no boyfriend.  She does have a fling, however, in her native New York City with a Frenchman, Julien (Melvil Poupaud).  It hurts her when he returns to Paris; indeed, Nora’s life is a vacuous mess.  Ergo she decides to fly to Paris with her best friend to try to find Julien, that is, to find a man she does not actually love.  She goes because she wants to love and to be loved.  On another level, she goes not to find Julien but herself.

The film has to do with the drift and hope, not to mention the anxiety, of the lovelorn.  I can’t resist declaring that this is one Nora who is not in anyone’s doll house–because she has no husband.  Even so, there is no evidence that her best friend, a dissatisfied wife played by Drea de Matteo, is living in Ibsen’s doll house either.  The adeptly directed Broken English is the work of the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.  It’s more deserving than daddy’s films.

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Shark Night 3-D (2011) is meant to resemble grindhouse movies of the ’70s, which is to say it’s disgustingly low and stupid.  Its PG-13 rating, though, is just about right:  it features neither the F word nor bona fide nudity.

It must be that an American Idol culture sooner or later produces a flick like this, which co-stars an utterly hot but badly performing Katharine McPhee, an  Idol alumna.  Superior acting issues from Sara Paxton and Dustin Milligan, who are also utterly hot.  The thing is, if Shark Night were a song routine, Simon Cowell would deservedly savage it.

Make a grindhouse movie if you will, but a useless mess is–probably–all you’ll end up with.