I could not care less about the perverse, monstrously irresponsible father (played by Woody Harrelson) of a New York magazine writer named Jeanette Walls.  Admittedly, The Glass Castle (2017), based on Walls’s memoir, is incessantly interesting—and vivid—but that’s all.  I mostly agree with Stephen Whitty:  “This is grim material, but well worth a movie.  The problem is that this film seems reluctant to really confront it.”  MAYBE it’s well worth a movie; I don’t know.  The stuff about its reluctance, though, is incontestably true.

What is not reluctant, or unknowing, is the honest acting.  It nearly makes this an valuable film.

Directed by Tom Hooper, Les Miserables (2012) may be the most naturalistic movie musical I’ve seen, though its theatrical character never disappears.

Most if not all the filming of this well-known stage work is smoothly successful, despite a few grating singing voices.  Hooper eventually has Anne Hathaway, the movie’s Fantine, looking ugly but, worse, she makes a spectacle of herself when she emotes.  The good news is that Hathaway sings well enough and is moving, insufficient as this is.

The song lyrics in Les Miz are not very literate or sophisticated—they’re just okay—but the sober and warm music is appealing.  The presence of political revolutionaries makes the Christian vision in the film’s finale rather odd, but, well, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) and Fantine are there too, and it is uplifting.

At the Movies ~ Les Misérables, 2012 (Photo credit: erjkprunczýk)

Cover of The Son’s Room

Nanni Moretti is a fine artist whose Italian film, The Son’s Room (2001), is a largely well done, sometimes brilliant, work about intense grief over the death of a couple’s adolescent son.  The parents—Giovanni (a psychiatrist) and Paola—and their surviving daughter are in a tailspin, with Giovanni finally deciding he cannot be both disconsolate and guilt-feeling and a psychiatrist.  Although the chronicle is a little thin, constantly shifting to Giovanni’s work with his patients, the film is sobering and smart (and not without humor).  Plus it’s persuasively acted by Laura Morante, Moretti, et al.

Moretti is unsympathetic to clergymen, though.  Or is Bert Cardullo right that the director-writer looks askance at the thinking of people in “a post-religious age”?  The conclusion of The Son’s Room does seem ambiguous, not about life’s continuum which causes Giovanni and Paola to laugh, but about a salutary acceptance of death by the secular-minded.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

If you want it, you got it.  A surfeit of sex jokes, that is.  Maybe adolescents want it, for this Ivan Reitman turkey, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), IS an adolescent film.  (It also moves at a rather leaden pace.)  In fact, the two principal females, played by Uma Thurman and Anna Faris, are easy lays.  That’s right, both of them.  We have something scurrilously demented here.

Cover of My Super Ex-Girlfriend

On Gabrielle (2006):

From France, this Patrice Chereau picture borrows Joseph Conrad’s fine 1897 story, “The Return,” for cinematic treatment.  A wife, Gabrielle, leaves her home to run off with a recent lover, but abruptly changes her mind and returns to her husband.  It does Jean the spouse no good at all.  Self-confidence goes; the expected confusion and wrath arrive.  The film has to do with desiccated lives and not merely a desiccated marriage.  What happens when marriage is the only thing a person can fall back on?  Nothing.

Isabelle Huppert plays Gabrielle in a performance perfect and great: the core of a person, of a broken aristocrat, is captured.  Equally powerful, emotionally wrenching, is Pascal Greggory as Jean.  The actors are superior to the director’s style, what with the occasional unnecessary music and the transitions from color to black-and-white.  Even worse are the arty intertitles.  But Gabrielle is no letdown, searing and meaningful as it is.  Huppert and Greggory are not its only strengths.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Gabrielle