Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan did not, in my opinion, put out a truly successful film with Manchester by the Sea; but he does better, without quite redeeming himself, in the scenario-penning for Howards End (2018), a four-hour TV miniseries.  I have watched more than the first two hours of the show on Amazon Prime and love how limpid and fundamentally profound it is.

Because of landscapes near the sea and very winning costumes, the “film” is twice as lovely-looking as Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.  I am much enjoying Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard as reformist young women of the early 20th century and Matthew Macfadyen in all his solidity.  E.M. Forster’s Howards End is yet another novel I have not read; I suspect I wouldn’t want it said that this Howards End is yet another TV series I have not seen.  More on the show later.

Liberal men (and female feminists) in today’s post-MeToo movie industry would never release a film like Brian De Palma‘s Dressed to Kill (1980), for they would obtusely suspect it of being sexist.  It is rather refreshing to see such a candid work from the past, although I myself am bothered by the film’s sensationalism at the beginning and close to the end.  Indeed, it is this and Angie Dickinson‘s second-rate acting that make the film so unpromising for the first 15 minutes.  Then it gets stronger.

Dickinson plays an unhappy, sexually dissatisfied wife and mother who ceases to have any scruples about her marriage.  Eventually she is murdered.  Dressed to Kill, which De Palma wrote as well as directed, is Psycho with sex steadily focused on, sex taken utterly seriously.

The movie, I repeat, gets stronger, but only for a while.  De Palma intentionally steals from Hitchcock but is not as powerful a thriller director as Hitchcock.  Further, his screenplay contains too much that is hard to swallow.  Deeply sensual through its female bodies—including that of Nancy Allen, De Palma’s ex-wife—the movie is nevertheless non-sexist.  Why did it have to be non-sexist sensationalism?

To Denys Arcand, the American empire must be a North American empire, which is to say Canada and the United States (not Mexico).  His film, The Fall of the American Empire (2018), after all, is set in Montreal, where there is as much hunger for ill-gotten money as in Chicago or Houston.

This movie doesn’t cut it, though.  For most of its running time it isn’t dull, but Arcand is an unsatisfying writer, The Barbarian Invasions notwithstanding.  It’s politically insignificant and artistically paltry.

(In French with English subtitles)

The coronavirus phenomenon has prompted me to re-visit the seventh episode of The Tudors, Season 1 (2007), for it concerns the mysterious plague (far worse than COVID-19) of 16th century Europe and the prevalent anguish it caused.  As it drives King Henry the Eighth (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) into what he hopes is safe isolation, scores of people die from the disease, Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) nearly one of them.

Despite its ill-fitting melodrama, it is good commercial drama, somewhat relevant to 2020.  Excellently acted and savvily directed by Alison Maclean, the episode is often potent.  Coming down with the plague, Anne Boleyn quickly departs from a carriage and tramps along the road in disturbing despair.  Despair is never mentioned, but we know it’s there.  This dark moment is later followed by a lovely moment which ends the hour-long episode.  May there be upcoming lovely moments apropos of coronavirus.