Carlos (Manny Perez) is an aspiring comic-book artist living among many Latinos and some whites in New York City, a locus of crime whereby Carlos is made to face much responsibility.  That is to say, his father Eddie (Tomas Milian) gets shot and paralyzed by a robber and Carlos must care for him (temporarily) and run Eddie’s old bodega.  Exasperation besets the young Dominican as he dwells with a man–Eddie–who fails to support Carlos’s cartoonist ambitions and was often unfaithful to the dead wife he now says he loved.  What’s more, Carlos is having problems with his girlfriend and scarcely treats her properly.  Disorder grows; folly never stops.

Washington Heights (2003), by Alfredo de Villa, is small but potent.  And humane.  Villa’s Washington Heights, a section of Manhattan, is not hellish, just rough and disheartening.  Even so, the film demonstrates a failure of nerve by crafting certain troubling realities and then scurrying away from them before the credits roll.  Why, after all, does Carlos’s best friend, the white fellow played by Danny Hoch, become a thief and what happens to the guy who perpetrates violence against him?  Villa gives the whole thing short shrift.  This is very much a young man’s movie–young man-made, I mean.  There is little intellectual and artistic maturity behind it.

But it is worthy.  Perez is passable, Milian a little more than that.  I wonder about Milian’s nuances but not his passion.  Hoch is entirely true and Bobby Cannavale is forceful, even unforgettable, as a half-likable punk with money.  The DV visuals are fine, and so are Villa’s scenes of bodega business and of tension between Carlos and Maggie the Girlfriend, etc.  He’s a talented fimmaker, familiar territory in WH notwithstanding.

Washington Heights (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Audrey Tautou is enticingly sweet, and quite magnetic, in France’s He Loves Me . . . He Loves Me Not (2002).  She enacts a psychologically damaged woman who loves, and wants to run away with, a happily married cardiologist.  He’s played by Samuel Le Bihan, who is excellent, getting right the doctor’s manly professionalism and intermittent anger.

Directed by Laetita Colombani, the film plays like a Claude Chabrol opus until it strangely comes to a halt and rewinds in order to tell its story a second time.  It intends to let us know whether the cardiologist bears any culpability with respect to Tautou.  And it’s all fascinating.  The film verifies that an individual assertion about “my truth” is, in this case, no truth at all.

In her direction, Colombani is very sensitive to what her characters are going through, and, along with Tautou and Le Bihan, Sophie Guillemin (as Tautou’s friend, Heloise) gives an especially persuasive performance.

(In French with English subtitles)

The only thing I know about the Parker Brothers board game “Clue” is that a 1985 Hollywood movie is based on it.

Not without wit, not without slapstick, Jonathan Lynn‘s Clue is a comedic—nay, a farcical—mystery flick.  The final, true reveal at the end is not as captivating as what comes before it, and isn’t meant to be.  A zippy ride to the conclusion, just to give pleasure, is all Lynn and co-screenwriter John Landis are after.

Most of the actors shine.  Tim Curry is all poise and charm.  Smartly Michael McKean plays a sometimes hysterical State Department man, while Lesley Ann Warren thrills as a cynical lawbreaker.  Madeline Khan is damnably under-used, but Eileen Brennan is electric.  Attractive too.  The younger Colleen Camp is extra-attractive:  what a body in this body of thespians!

Four teenage boys try to rape an off-duty prostitute and subsequently kick to death the inoffensive man who attempts to rescue her.  The sheriff of Kiowa, Colorado, Matt Wyatt, arrests the four brutes, only to encounter the violent fury of one of the boys’ fathers and the fearful bearing of false witness about the crime.  A partial High Noon situation emerges, along with Matt’s getting twice wounded.  But he receives needed help from the murdered man’s brothers.

Sometimes, when reading Westerns, you get the sense that the stakes are not all that high.  Not so with A Killing in Kiowa (1972) by Lewis B. Patten.  The stakes seem sky high from beginning to end.  It’s a vivid and vigorous tale Patten imparts, with time not always presented in a linear fashion.  Also, I’m glad it avoids the frequently used cattlemen-vs.-farmer conflict.

Kiowa County, 1898 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

French author Michel Houellebecq exhibits a certain distrust of liberalism in such novels as the recent Serotonin (2019) because he wants to be, and is, ruthlessly honest in his vision of life.  Comprehensive too:  Serotonin is darkly political in various ways, as when its protagonist, an agronomist, considers the E.U. “a fat slut” that hurts French farmers, and when he broaches the subject of factory farms with their cruelty to animals.

Is there any optimism in this political outlook?  No.  The novel as a whole, furthermore, is preoccupied with death, especially death by suicide.  Florent, the protagonist, almost causes a death by murder.  Interestingly, though, Houellebecq distrusts not only liberalism but also his own natural agnosticism.  At one point Florent opines that God is “mediocre,” but there are positive remarks about God as well, even on the book’s last page.