Directed by the man who gave us Last Year at Marienbad—Alain Resnais—Wild Grass (2010) is an arrantly strange movie in which a nigh elderly man (Andre Dussollier) finds a woman’s stolen purse and, though married, later demands a love affair with the woman (Sabine Azema).  She gives it to him, and the wife doesn’t seem to mind.  But what a lamentable bauble it is!

It is, I think, a fascinating picture which seems to be about the inability of the mind to absorb common, and not so common, experience.  If I’m right—and I’m going to say that I am—this surely is not all it’s about.  Based on a novel called L’incident by Christian Gailly, the film is ever alert to life’s burdensome absurdity (f.y.i., I don’t quite believe in life’s absurdity).  There is a perhaps a parallel between the young girl at the finis who thinks she will become a cat and the Sabine Azema character who thinks she has become Dussollier’s actual lover.

The business with the cat bolsters Armond White’s opinion that Wild Grass offers a “summing up” of pop culture.  The stuff of pop culture is certainly here, albeit how valuable this element is I don’t know.  Regarding the aforementioned young girl, it is as though she is in a TV commercial and yet she is not.  If life is not exactly like this, rest assured that it is like most of the rest that goes on in this bold and wild movie.

(In French with English subtitles)

Directed by the man who gave us Last Year at Marienbad—Alain Resnais—Wild Grass (2010) is an arrantly strange movie in which a nigh elderly man (Andre Dussollier) finds a woman’s stolen purse and, though married, later demands a love affair with the woman (Sabine Azema).  She gives it to him, and the wife doesn’t seem to mind.  But what a lamentable bauble it is!

It is, I think, a fascinating picture which seems to be about the inability of the mind to absorb common, and not so common, experience.  If I’m right—and I’m going to say that I am—this surely is not all it’s about.  Based on a novel called L’incident by Christian Gailly, the film is ever alert to life’s burdensome absurdity (f.y.i., I don’t quite believe in life’s absurdity).  There is a perhaps a parallel between the young girl at the finis who thinks she will become a cat and the Sabine Azema character who thinks she has become Dussollier’s actual lover.

The business with the cat bolsters Armond White’s opinion that Wild Grass offers a “summing up” of pop culture.  The stuff of pop culture is certainly here, albeit how valuable this element is I don’t know.  Regarding the aforementioned young girl, it is as though she is in a TV commercial and yet she is not.  If life is not exactly like this, rest assured that it is like most of the rest that goes on in this bold and wild movie.

(In French with English subtitles)

In Hold Your Man (1933), Clark Gable plays a con artist who begins a relationship with the unscrupulous Ruby (Jean Harlow), only to meet abject failure.

For a long time the film is an abrasive farce with dandy, mostly Harlow-delivered wisecracks.  Indeed, if there was any personal vision here, the movie would be misanthropic.  Eventually, though, it all becomes more solemn, but in Anita Loos‘s screenplay there is no proper blending of comedy and drama.  Scenes in a women’s reformatory take over and, for my part, I was soon ready for the film to end.  The good cast and Sam Wood‘s direction were not about to save it.

The Hero (2017) is a sensitive human-condition film for potheads.  The principal characters enacted by Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon and Nick Offerman regularly and casually get high, without the film making any kind of point about drug use.  It’s just there—an uninteresting motif.  Almost nothing in director Brett Haley‘s script is novel or fresh, and it even turns fraudulent with its portrayal of a sad, 71-year-old man (Elliott) made happy by a much younger, attractive woman.  Miss Prepon pursues him, doing so not because Eliott has a measure of fame but simply because she has “a thing for old guys.”

A terrible romantic comedy, this, but a nifty musical.  Elvis Presley is a great singer in 1964’s Viva Las Vegas, but Ann-Margret outshines him because her voice is more than serviceable and her dancing charming and heartfelt.  Re the dancing, the movie wisely takes its cue from West Side Story: it’s vigorous.  So is some of the cutting from scene to scene (buckle up!)

As for the songs, they have hooks.

Cover of Viva Las Vegas [Blu-ray]