The 1967 Mars Needs Women is a low-budget, visually crude and, up to a point, silly sci fi TV movie (was it ever broadcast?). But at least it co-stars Yvonne Craig. Most of the other actors in the flick make Miss Craig look (histrionically) like Jane Fonda. As for appearance, to me Craig looks just as good as the young Fonda. A sleek brunette, she plays Dr. Marjorie Bolen, an expert in something called space genetics. She’s smart but also, well, ready for romance, unaware that handsome Dop (Tommy Kirk) is a humanoid Martian.

Miss Craig is the only really appealing element in this movie, another one I saw on Amazon Prime—for free, of course.

Matthew Weiner‘s television series Mad Men deserves to be a classic achievement. His 2014 movie Are You Here, however, has some charm and cleverness, but is disappointingly insufficient.

It asks how viable it is to be a social dropout idealist, which is fine, but then expects us to suspend disbelief time and again. (The dropout’s father, after dying, leaves his entire estate to his radical and feckless son?) Technically sapid (kudos to cinematographer Chris Manley), the film nevertheless becomes sentimental through Owen Wilson‘s hokey tears, and we don’t even care about his character.

Are You Here has been castigated for featuring too much naked flesh, albeit it contains no more of it than, say, Pialat’s Loulou. But Loulou is a much better film.

Matthew Weiner‘s television series Mad Men deserves to be a classic achievement. His 2014 movie Are You Here, however, has some charm and cleverness, but is disappointingly insufficient.

It asks how viable it is to be a social dropout idealist, which is fine, but then expects us to suspend disbelief time and again. (The dropout’s father, after dying, leaves his entire estate to his radical and feckless son?) Technically sapid (kudos to cinematographer Chris Manley), the film nevertheless becomes sentimental through Owen Wilson‘s hokey tears, and we don’t even care about his character.

Are You Here has been castigated for featuring too much naked flesh, albeit it contains no more of it than, say, Pialat’s Loulou. But Loulou is a much better film.

The 1983 film, Tender Mercies, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, is the finest Bruce Beresford picture I’ve seen.  It’s certainly better than his Black Robe (1991) with its indefensible pseudo-religious conclusion. 

The earlier film tells the story of Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), an alcoholic ex-country singer, who meets and marries a Texas widow called Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), who has a young son.  Much vexed by his past, Mac sometimes expresses neurotic frustration and feels expected grief—he even has a brief conflict with his ex-wife—but he also gradually gives up drinking and is considerably happy with Rosa Lee.  He even returns to singing and recording country ditties.  The film concerns a trek to personal betterment, to spiritual promise, to God in fact.  Mac gets baptized.  Thereafter we do not hear him use the Lord’s name in vain, as we do earlier in the movie.  Instead he sings the hymn “Wings of a Dove,” even after after a particular calamity befalls him.  One can safely assume he is a convert.

TM‘s characters have difficulty explaining their feelings and motivations, and ambivalence is everywhere.  Clearly there is plenty of it in Mac’s daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin), who was raised mostly by Mac’s ex-wife Dixie, a woman foolish and spiteful and wounded.  Indeed, we get a glimpse at how parental woundedness, that of Mac and Dixie, can render a child a lost soul.  And yet Foote’s screenplay leaves us in no doubt that, for a man, to have God and a good woman is to make a true progress in light.  We never could have doubted it.

Beresford has always been an expert filmmaker, knowing how to do a lot with open spaces.  Many people, myself included, have enjoyed his secular heart-warmer Driving Miss Daisy (1989).  Even so, I prefer the Foote-written heart-warmer.

Cover of Tender Mercies

Former baseball pro Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is hired as a catcher for the minor-league Durham Bulls, but only so he can help to shape player Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) into a more self-controlled pitcher. Perfectly loyal to the oft-defeated Bulls is unmarried Annie (Susan Sarandon) to whom baseball is a religion. In point of fact, she is a spiritual force for the team, though with a spirituality affiliated with sex (as well as poetry). Every year she gets intimately involved with a different Bulls player and, as it happens, Crash is interested. Currently, however, Nuke is enlisted to be her partner.

Thus on the one hand in Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham (1988) there is baseball, and on the other hand, sex. The only thing they have in common is that they are not religions. But, although baseball in the late ’50s remains pretty much the same, the country itself is slowly changing philosophically and sexually, not without quirkiness.

Durham is intelligent without being profound. Seldom hokey, it is also sensual nearly to the point of vulgarity, and it has an appealing cast. Robbins is memorably convincing as a pitcher based on the real-life Steve Dalkowski, who died recently at 80. Like Nuke, Dalkowski had an often wayward power pitch—one that likely reached speeds of over 105 mph.