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Yes, there is teenage heartache in the 2011 Prom, but there is hokum as well.

Nova (Aimee Teegarden) crushes on a boy who’s uninterested in her and, what’s more, faces the total destruction by fire of the prom decorations she and others have fashioned at her high school.  After the school principal forces a bad-boy type to help Nova re-do the decorating, the girl gradually draws close to the lad, which doesn’t exactly win her father’s approbation.  Meanwhile, other kids at the school try, and sometimes fail, to find dates for the prom, even as others are reaching for a relationship stability they know can be easily denied them.

Thank goodness this is one teen movie that doesn’t accuse kids who are popular of being snobbish or patronizing.  (Nova is class president.)  Even so, Katie Wech’s script steps into trite Fantasyland even as it attempts to create some serious drama.  Why would Nova think Jesse Richter (Thomas McDonell), the “bad boy”, is right for her?  Why does a girl called Simone so readily agree to go to the prom with a morally unworthy boy named Tyler?  (Interesting:  Tyler is the ONLY morally unworthy character in the film, and he’s African-American.)  Simone, after all, is loved by polite, nice-looking Lucas, one of the teens who aches for the aforementioned relationship stability.

A Disney movie, the profanity-free, sex-free Prom fails to be as convincing and as fresh as it ought to be.  Teegarden (of Friday Night Lights fame), McDonell, Nolan Sotillo and many others are only passable in their roles, but at least they’re that.  Danielle Campbell (Simone) and Kylie Bunbury are less than passable; they’re simply dull, although Miss Campbell has the advantage of being glamorously beautiful.

I’m not trying to discourage anyone from seeing this film, but I do consider it a weakling.  

Cover of Crazy Love

Crazy Love (2007) begins with the murky vision of an injured person, which vision, or eyesight, is meant to be that of Linda Riss.  The man who did it to her was her former lover, Burt Pugach.

A plain-looking New York lawyer with money, raised by a barbaric mother, Pugach fell hard for the nigh beautiful Linda in the late 1950s and started dating her.  But, unknown to Riss, the skinny chap was a married lover, and his wife refused to divorce him.  Linda broke it off, by and by getting engaged to another man.  Mad Burt, however, was obsessed with Linda; he couldn’t hack the idea of losing her.  If he couldn’t have her, neither would any other man:  He hired a thug to throw lye in her face, an act which disfigured and largely blinded the young brunette.  Now deeming marriage impractical, Linda urged her fiance to renounce their engagement, which at last he did.  Pugach, meanwhile, was arrested, tried and sent to prison.  The media coverage was copious.

In prison Pugach wrote and wrote to Linda, declaring his love.  She paid no attention, but Linda was in decline, suitor-less, still a virgin.  Finally Burt was freed.  Can you guess what happens next in Dan Klores’s riveting documentary?  That’s right:  Linda takes Pugach back and the twosome are married.  They’ve been married ever since–usually happily–albeit not without Pugach’s opting to have an affair and Linda’s sad nagging.  Crazy love.  Crazy life.  It is clear that Linda Riss is neither insane nor stupid.  Call her weak if you want to.  To my mind, she was reduced to marrying Pugach, for no one else wanted her.  And she apparently sought financial security.

What a movie!  What’s wrong with it, though, is that director Klores is not sufficiently vexed by a man’s throwing lye in a woman’s eyes, AFTER, in point of fact, the man refuses to tell the woman he has a wife and that therefore their liaison is adulterous.  In other words, he takes domestic violence–and sheer evil–too lightly.  It’s good that his film isn’t moralistic, but bad that it has no moral resonance.  What about the Linda Risses of the world who could never bring themselves to marry their Pugaches?  They wear the wounds of severe violence and must always be alone.  They have truly been victimized. 

Cover of Scream Trilogy - Boxed Set

Scream 4 (2011) has Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returning to the town of Woodsboro only to start witnessing, darn it, a new crop of brutal murders at the hands of “Ghost Face”.  The story here is stupid and there is so much carnage it gets tedious, but that doesn’t mean Wes Craven’s film is a loser.  To me, it’s gruesomely entertaining and intermittently clever, as witness the doings at the teenagers’ horror-movie marathon.  And if you don’t like the offensive publicist played by Alison Brie, well, screenwriter Kevin Williamson has no sympathy for her, that’s for sure.

Scream 4 is a deliberately self-aware horror flick (as was the first Scream; I didn’t see the other two), but self-awareness and graphic violence is not a good combination.  There’s a certain cheapness about it.

One review I read declares that Craven’s movie has something to say.  I disagree.  It has nothing to say.  It’s just there to entertain.  Indeed, I’m glad there is absolutely nothing political about it.

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The Judd Apatow-produced Bridesmaids (2011) is a dandy comedy finally marred by sentimentality and the repulsiveness of the character played by Melissa McCarthy.  Oh, and there’s also Kristen Wiig’s mugging as she enacts Annie, a nigh fortyish woman whose life goes to pot now that her bakery has gone out of business and her best friend (Maya Rudolph) is engaged to be married.  Annie, you see, has neither husband nor actual boyfriend.

It would be unfair, however, to ignore the ardor in Wiig’s acting.  She believes in what she’s doing; she ain’t lazy.

Bridesmaids is raunchy but not excessively so.   And a great deal of it is certifiably funny, albeit Apatow can’t help imposing the most pointless scatology on the film in order to attract nasty-minded male viewers.  Karina Longworth in The Village Voice knows there’s a rub here:  “Comedy of humiliation is one thing; a fat lady shitting in a sink is another.”  (The lady in the sink is Melissa McCarthy.)

Skillfully directed by Paul Feig, penned by Wiig and Annie Mumolo, the picture works pretty well as a middlebrow adult farce until its last 15 minutes.  Then it’s chick-flick time. 

Question:  Did Wiig write the scene in which her character has her breast fondled by Jon Hamm? 

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Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men (2010) tells the true story of several French monks in Algeria who were taken hostage and later murdered by Muslim terrorists.  (It happened in 1996.)  Two of the eight of them escaped.

The monks are very admirable, truly Christian men living among and ministering to the rural Algerian people.  Indeed, they are First World men helping folks–Muslims–living in a Third World area.  If the film has a fault, it is that the monks are practically without fault.  Christians come off looking very good here (although I dislike the abbot’s use of the expression Inshu’Allah [“God willing”]).   Of Gods and Men is not terribly hard on anybody, however:  the Muslims too are usually sympathetic characters.  In some measure even a bloodthirsty Islamist called Ali Fayattia (Farid Larbi) is.

Lambert Wilson provides the abbot, Brother Christian, with intelligence and, like the other French Caucasian actors, a true spiritual dimension, a convincing devoutness.  Beautiful but not lush, the film is visually rich.  

Des Hommes et  Des Dieux is a French picture with English subtitles.