Why mince words? The United States is an insane asylum right now, for various reasons. Why, American movies, as critic John Nolte has pointed out, don’t even offer any sex appeal anymore. They’re chaste in a wimpy, post-#MeToo way (not in a good way). Recently I saw the 1982 flick, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Now that has sex appeal, no doubt about it. Racy teenagers pop up, attractive girls racy in their nudity. However, Fast Times isn’t much of a movie, half-baked and obtuse as it is. It’s a meandering “comedy.” I hope Hollywood doesn’t remake it, though; it will engender something even worse.

Two socially insecure teenagers are at the center of the anime movie on Netflix, Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2020).

Japanese anime can be weird to Western eyes, and this one is (to my eyes, anyway). But, really, I finally consider it more imaginative than weird, with a delicate story that is easy to follow. And the kids are relatable. Words is a romance: a boy known as Cherry wears headphones to help avoid human interaction; Smile, the girl who likes him, hides with a mouth mask the buck teeth with braces she is embarrassed by. These two are simply unformed, inexperienced, notwithstanding Smile’s admirable talent with online videos. But it’s time to mature, even to make a connection of sorts with a declining old man.

Directed by Kyohei Ishiguro, the film is chaste and amusing. Alas, it churns out easy answers for its challenging situations, but before we get there it’s a pleasant trip. As often with anime, the visuals are enchanting and beautifully on-point. The pic reminds me a little of the anime TV series Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku (whose first season I saw on Amazon Prime) except, happily, it has no interest in homoerotic rags.

In the late Thirties, John Wayne starred in a number of so-called B Westerns, none of them long and some of them far better than the episodes of old TV Westerns (ugh!).  1934’s The Trail Beyond clocks in at 55 minutes and, based on a written story, delivers a fairly complex and beguiling plot.  Wayne enacts a man looking for a missing girl and, before finding her, coming upon her dead father’s map to a gold mine, soon to be coveted by reprobates.

The movie is sophisticated enough to feature two cowboys dressed in suits and ties, leaving chaps and ten gallon hats behind, while traveling on a train; and the action scenes are first-rate for a Thirties pic.  Never were the great outdoors so extensively used for zippy Western adventure—er, in my experience, anyway.  It is a dandy spectacle when an overhead shot reveals a man necessarily driving both himself and his horse off a cliff to the river below.

The best thing about the B Westerns is that they were short.  But that doesn’t mean they weren’t enjoyable.

Cover via Amazon

Amazon Prime has categorized the William Wyler-Lillian Hellman film, The Children’s Hour (1962), adapted from Hellman’s play, as an “LGBTQ” picture, but this is silly and misleading. It is a film about the awful harm caused by ordinary adults inane enough to fall for the lies of children. A lie is told about something “unnatural” in the close friendship between two teachers, Karen and Martha, at a girls’ boarding school. Shirley MacLaine‘s Martha is indeed a lesbian—unbeknown to everyone, including Karen—but there is no amour (none at all for the troubled Martha).

The film is sharp and moving, but there is also phoniness in that two grown women are unable to prevail, even in a legal slander case, over a malicious child. Also in the fact of Dr. Joe Gardin’s failure to believe his fiancee Karen’s affirmation that no sexual relationship exists between the two women. A dark story is this, but a seriously flawed one—filmed nevertheless by a man, Wyler, with a striking oeuvre (The Best Years of Our Lives, The Letter, The Collector, The Liberation of L.B. Jones).

As for the acting, MacLaine is likable but not always genuine in her emoting, whereas Audrey Hepburn (Karen) is likable and quite true. Miriam Hopkins and Fay Bainter are gratifyingly effective. I’m glad I had a few words of praise for this opus dealing with troubled and troubling people, even if The Children’s Hour is not Wyler’s finest hour.

Days of Heaven (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With Days of Heaven (1978), Terrence Malick wanted to tell a story mostly through artistic pictures, and without a doubt the film is superbly shot.  But the writing is a reality too, and here Malick greatly disappoints.

The “little people” of pre-World War I America are sinners too (the film makes clear).  Life, however, is ferociously demanding, and a man like Richard Gere‘s Bill might, or will, shun moral duty in fighting against it.  There is no profundity in the movie beyond this, and much of the narrative detail is feeble.  Still, it is absorbing to watch a plague of locusts, often in closeup, eat away at far-reaching crops and uniformed policemen in the early 20th century ride vigorously their horses through the woods.