Directed by Danny DeVito, Death to Smoochy (2002) is a satirical comedy in which Smoochy, a fake rhino in a kids’ TV show, induces in others hostility and the hard-charging lust for money. Why did scriptwriter Adam Resnick think the film would be artistically successful if he unleashed a string of criminal mooks who would try to murder Smoochy (real name: Sheldon Mopes)? It merely causes the piece to be tiresome and obtuse. It is not even clear what DeVito’s Burke Bennett hopes to gain by knocking off the entertainer. No entertainer, this movie.

Possibly the best feature-film acting in 1989 was done by Victoria Principal in the TV thriller, Blind Witness. Characters here certainly make a lot of mistakes, and so do the scenarists. The film is ill-written. Intermittently even Richard A. Colla‘s directing is bad, but the performance of VP actually makes BW worthy, a minor winner.

Principal plays a blind woman who knows the police have arrested the wrong baddies for her husband’s murder. In her scenes of bewilderment and terror, Principal gives the movie no less and no more than Liv Ullmann (of Face to Face fame) would have given it. By “no more” I mean she is un-histrionic. The authenticity in her can be rather peculiar, which is fine, but usually it is not—also fine. And Principal is impeccably feminine. Other actors appear in Blind Witness and they’re good. Principal is great.

Re What a Man Wants, from South Korea:

A man wants to love and—er—be loved? Whatever the case, the deceitful men in this flick say they love certain women, also deceitful—chiefly their wives. Do they?

During the 2010s, with romantic comedy, South Korea seemed to be on a roll. It may be true of drama as well; I don’t know. The 2018 What a Man Wants is a saucy gem, its script, though a slight head scratcher, mostly unpredictable. I thought a woman (superbly acted by Song Ji-hyo) who refers to the Chinese as “chinks” would thereafter be a villain in the film, but no. The three writers make her more complex than that, lovable even. All involved make Man occasionally affecting. The male actors Lee Sung-min and Shin Ha-kyun are daring and brilliant. Directed by Lee Byeong-heon, the movie is lively and sensual and . . . well, if it is a sex comedy, it makes a sex comedy like David O’Russell’s Flirting with Disaster look sick.

Available on Tubi.

(In Korean with English subtitles)

Marriage is often an idol, but isn’t much of one. A beautiful girl, Noemie d’Artiailh, necessarily weds the rich Jean Peloueyre in A Kiss for the Leper (1921), a short novel by the French Francois Mauriac, but the marriage is absurd, never consummated. Noemie is repulsed by Jean’s ugly body. After his death, however, she grows to love Jean and, in fact, must accept being “condemned to greatness”: renunciation.

Both characters are Catholic, though at first the devoutness belongs to Noemie. Jean is drawn to Nietzsche, without abjuring Christian belief. What Leper is about is the difficulty of spiritual growth in lonely and depriving circumstances. Noemie and Jean spiritually advance and then retreat, retreat and then advance. For Jean this goes on in a short life. Noemi never remarries: “Every path but the path to renunciation was closed to her.” But that’s okay; to Mauriac this reality involves “a poor woman” driven to “stretch her hands to the cool waters of Eternal Life.” It makes sense to do so.

What has happened intellectually to leftists?

Six Supreme Court justices ruled that Lorie Smith, a Christian, did not have to honor same-sex marriage in her website design. Justice Sonya Sotomayor, a dissenter, argued that the Court must never permit a business to “refuse to serve a customer based on race, sex, religion or sexual orientation.” The Court isn’t doing that, and Miss Smith has been libeled.

Joe Biden puts out an executive fiat for cancelling massive student-loan debt, but loses his case in the Supreme Court. The result of this ruling, to Justice Elena Kagan—another leftist dissenter—“is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.” The Court—making policy? (Congress, by the way, did not support Biden’s aim.)