I have already reviewed The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) but was unfair to the film by claiming that Bob Rafelson‘s direction is derivative of Fellini and Antonioni. I don’t believe it quite is. Rafelson is his own man, one who regrettably settled for a clearly second-rate story idea and script, written by Jacob Brackman, for his art picture.

I still say King is about the tragic unfulfillment of dreams taking place amid fading respectable culture. It’s a culture Jason Stabler (Bruce Dern) sinks his claws into, whereas his brother (Jack Nicholson) is reluctant. But then, he is a frustrated and sometimes dishonest artist of sorts—and sexually restrained to boot. From beginning to end in the film, there is empty-world shabbiness. But also there is too little drama until the last twenty minutes—and even too little poetry so the picture is not much like, say, Antonioni’s Eclipse. It’s just not wholly uninteresting.

On a Fantastic Planet, blue giants enslave humans, except for the feral ones, until they get bothered by them. Then the giants intend to exterminate the humans.

This is an animated French film, from 1973, and it’s relentlessly weird. In large measure it is Yellow Submarine without the frivolity (and the music). Too, a lot of usually naturalistic nudity is featured. Civilization in Fantastic Planet is not civilized. Death and malevolence are everywhere, although so is the cruelty of nature. The film’s images can be mesmerizing, but what the narrative offers is obscure and unexplained and desultory.

(In French with English subtitles)

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)