The satirizing of men and women in modern England in the 1970 film Take a Girl Like You is hardly strong or memorable. The insights are few and the laughs are zero. There are men who are horndogs and Hayley Mills‘s Jenny refusing to lose her virginity.

A Kingsley Amis book is the source novel here. The movie was directed by the late Jonathan Miller, a British theatre director who may or may not have been an artist; I can’t say. To me, Take a Girl Like You is tame, insignificant non-art. It is worth seeing, though—I’ll make the concession—for the charm and good looks of Miss Mills.

Rowan Joffe‘s direction of Before I Go To Sleep (2014), from a novel by S.J. Watson, is pleasantly sensitive to the film’s eerie material. His screenplay is suitably penned. Mystery lies atop mystery for a woman (Nicole Kidman) so abused she is temporarily brain-damaged.

Kidman knows how to be anguished, is never false. Colin Firth is richly effective. There are too many mentions of adultery in the tale, but the small Sleep is a scary pleasure. To the critics who dislike it I have a ho-hum reaction.

Any sensible gun owners who caught ABC’s The View the other day were probably infuriated by the words of Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar about the Indiana man who shot down the mall assassin. Hostin dissed the gent, Eli Dicken, because he took a gun into a mall that prohibited them; and both she and Behar opined that Dicken was simply “lucky” that he killed the assassin. Are they not glad that Dicken tried his luck?

The usual smugness was there. The View is a nauseating, plebeian piece of shit. I use the profane word because the show deserves it.

How many Westerns present a woman doctor having sex with her nice-guy husband? Bone Tomahawk (2015) does; it’s different—as well as one of the best Westerns I’ve seen.

The kind of R-rated adult Western that The Wild Bunch is, S. Craig Zahler‘s movie is as shocking as the Peckinpah classic was in 1969. As I indicated in an earlier review, it is “grungy” and “gory” as it relates the tale of the abduction of three people by brutal, cannibalistic primitives. It conveys, I think, a message about men and women who work to maintain a society sometimes being forced to encounter the ultra-criminal, the ultra-violent, even the “anti-social” types like David Arquette‘s Purvis who deserve to die. Ah, but do they deserve to die at the hands of the primitives?—a necessary question.

In 1970 William Wyler and scriptwriter Jesse Hill Ford purveyed a sturdy film about poisonous race relations in the 1960s South—The Liberation of L.B. Jones. Herein, a rich black undertaker, L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne), is determined to divorce his floozy wife (Lola Falana) for regularly sleeping with a white policeman (Anthony Zerbe). L.B.’s powerful lawyer, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb), is a not-very-demonstrative racist bothered that a trial will destroy the white cop’s reputation in the community and so he warns the man, a demonstrative racist, about it. Horror ensues.

Based on Ford’s novel, the film is about racial pride and its fruit of injustice. Wyler made it as disturbing as The Collector. Certifiably it is not irrelevant to 2022 but, thank Heaven, it ain’t the Jayland Walker story either. Walker was shot to death after leading cops on a high-speed car chase and allegedly firing a gun from the car’s window. What goes on in L.B. Jones is far graver; it is genuine racism.

The movie has minor flaws—example: Browne and Lee Majors are boring actors here—and many virtues. It should be seen. It was, alas, Wyler’s last film.