In Like Crazy, from 2011, Felicity Jones is natural and likable in the role of Anna, an English girl attending college in Los Angeles. Anton Yelchin is graceful and credible as Jacob, the American student she is quickly attracted to. She wants to know him, a love affair is born. Themes include long-distance relationships, the testing of the heart, fear and uncertainty when a marriage partner is not fully known or understood. As it happens, Anna deliberately overstays her visa in America to avoid betraying, in a way, herself and Jacob but, later in the film, there are other actions which flatly feel like betrayals to both of them.

LC is a pretty decent film, especially if one has not seen an abundance of romantic dramas. Directed with too many fancy touches by Drake Doremus, its astute screenplay was co-written by him and Ben York Jones. Nudity is absent and profane talk is kept at a minimum. (Sex is another matter.) Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead are notably savvy as Anna’s parents.

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) is not quite as good as his Sideways (2005), but better than all his other films.  It partly concerns when the knowledge about other people ineluctably oppresses the heart and mind, and when such knowledge is withheld for other people’s good.  Adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, it is superbly put together with smart, appealing cinematography, compassion without heavy pathos, and acting that deepens the proceedings.  This last emanates from George Clooney, Beau Bridges, Shailene Woodley and a splendid Judy Greer.

(The photo is of Alexander Payne.)

Image by Pink Cow Photography via Flickr

Il Posto (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Adult life has begun for Domenico (Sandro Panseri); he goes out to look for a job in a corporation.  And he gets one in Ermanno Olmi‘s marvelous Il Posto (The Job, 1961), albeit the point of the film is that urban organization and anonymity are, at bottom, frightful.  It is this that Domenico encounters upon leaving his modest house for the city of Milan.  What’s more, he both meets a girl he likes (Loredana Detto) and, correlatively, experiences urban loneliness.  But one must work, even if it’s a dreary office job lasting a lifetime, and although it may seem to Domenico that Antonietta, the girl, is likely to permanently slip away from him, this is anything but a foregone conclusion.  Hers is an attitude that should lift his spirits.

Miss Detto must have lifted Olmi’s spirits, for he married her and is still married to her. . . Though the director considered Il Posto “harsh,” it is far from utterly bleak or pessimistic.  It is a trenchant achievement even better—considerably so—-than Olmi’s thoroughly religious Tree of Wooden Clogs.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Il Posto (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Adult life has begun for Domenico (Sandro Panseri); he goes out to look for a job in a corporation.  And he gets one in Ermanno Olmi‘s marvelous Il Posto (The Job, 1961), albeit the point of the film is that urban organization and anonymity are, at bottom, frightful.  It is this that Domenico encounters upon leaving his modest house for the city of Milan.  What’s more, he both meets a girl he likes (Loredana Detto) and, correlatively, experiences urban loneliness.  But one must work, even if it’s a dreary office job lasting a lifetime, and although it may seem to Domenico that Antonietta, the girl, is likely to permanently slip away from him, this is anything but a foregone conclusion.  Hers is an attitude that should lift his spirits.

Miss Detto must have lifted Olmi’s spirits, for he married her and is still married to her. . . Though the director considered Il Posto “harsh,” it is far from utterly bleak or pessimistic.  It is a trenchant achievement even better—considerably so—-than Olmi’s thoroughly religious Tree of Wooden Clogs.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Squishy TV shows, from The Voice to The Talk, keep lying to us with the message that we’re Able and Strong and Good Enough. We’re dreamers whose dreams can come true. They even intimate that we can create, and are worthy of, some kind of national utopia. It’s a false edification. It’s part of a therapeutic culture which mostly ignores the horrors of life. It would NEVER believe in something like the judgment of God on the United States. Its TV shows never explain, cannot explain, why we are Good Enough.