Baz Luhrmann‘s Moulin Rouge! (2001) is childish—along with colorful, gaudy and sensual—but also, to me, weird fun. By childish I mean cartoonish—inappropriately so. Then again, Satine’s solitary foreplay (provided by Nicole Kidman) may seem silly but it gives way to her pleasant fascination with Christian’s romantic feeling. It’s palatable comedy.

Christian (Ewan McGregor) breaks out in song, of course; the flick is a jukebox musical, which means Luhrmann was free to search the warehouse for tuneful hits. Never mind the unfamiliar stuff. I like quite a few of his choices but, regrettably, all brains and taste break down during the “Roxanne” number. The film’s editor, Jill Bilcock, though, is a successful hard worker, and Donald McAlpine’s cinematography is tasteful and lovely. MR can be ingratiating. When it was released in 2001, it was a big-screen wonder.

Cover of The Passenger

Although disappointed with Michelangelo Antonioni‘s The Passenger (1975), Stanley Kauffmann called the film “a fairly successful high-class entertainment.”  I pretty much agree with the “high-class entertainment” part, but not with the “fairly successful” judgment.  The narrative is too weak and mystifying for any ultimate success to emerge.

The film’s premise, as described by Kauffmann, is: “a man changes identity [illegally] and tries to live a new life.”  Antonioni transcends the entertainment value by summoning something interesting:  the man who tries to live a new life (Jack Nicholson) is taking a wayward course and is doing so in a world that is even more wayward.  In fact, because of how the film was shot, his waywardness and the world’s have a way of blending.

Less than compelling, The Passenger is very compellingly directed except where acting is concerned.  Antonioni’s eye is the one to have for a travelogue-like art film.

The Blue Gardenia, from 1953, is a small picture (a thriller) that has a way of seeming not so small. This is because Anne Baxter‘s Norah is such a tragic figure and the mystery here of a man’s death is pretty puzzling and involving.

A womanizer (Raymond Burr) gets Norah drunk and she thinks that in his apartment she might have murdered him. Alas, when an ace newspaper reporter (Richard Conte) dominates the plot, the movie starts to sag. It would have helped had the piece been a tad more cynical about newspaper reporters. (Gee, wouldn’t you know it? Conte develops a crush on Norah.)

The film was directed by Fritz Lang. As a police detective George Reeves, the original TV Superman, is one of the best things in it.

For years the U.S. will be either disrespected or hated in most parts of the world for its abandonment of American civilians and Afghan allies in Afghanistan. It will be seen as shockingly weak. And the overall weakness that is there, for various reasons, will drive numerous Americans to despise the Biden administration.

The venerable Bruce Beresford directed the excellent Tender Mercies and Mister Johnson, but knows he made a mistake in concocting King David (1985), a film about the biblical sovereign. An episodic drag, it features a David (Richard Gere) who never proves spiritual—or charismatic—enough, and fails to make many points about his life, such as his longing for Bathsheba, rightly explicit.

Some notable acting beams its way to us, but the voiceover narration adds nothing to KD, which, by the way, is not entirely faithful to the Old Testament text. Further, the only powerful scenes in the film are the violent ones. As I said, Beresford knows the movie is a failure. There are barely any grounds for seeing it.