The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise are crummy TV programs, as is The Bachelorette; they’re offensive and phony.  However, they do offer something to the male ego when they confirm that women still want to be loved (with eros) by men.  And they offer something to the female ego when they show how it pleases a man to win a woman’s heart and that even he can get weepy when he fails to do so.

Weepy:  a problem exists in that we don’t know how phony these programs are in their creation of drama.  Did Kamil in Bachelor in Paradise (2018) feel pressured to reject Annaliese so the show could end more dramatically, more stimulatingly, then it would have otherwise?  I hope not, but who knows?  Me, I’d rather see this televised junk produce happy couples than ones who weep via fraudulent drama.

The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise are crummy TV programs, as is The Bachelorette; they’re offensive and phony.  However, they do offer something to the male ego when they confirm that women still want to be loved (with eros) by men.  And they offer something to the female ego when they show how it pleases a man to win a woman’s heart and that even he can get weepy when he fails to do so.

Weepy:  a problem exists in that we don’t know how phony these programs are in their creation of drama.  Did Kamil in Bachelor in Paradise (2018) feel pressured to reject Annaliese so the show could end more dramatically, more stimulatingly, then it would have otherwise?  I hope not, but who knows?  Me, I’d rather see this televised junk produce happy couples than ones who weep via fraudulent drama.

For a long time the noir item, Scarlet Street (1945), is to me interestingly artificial and almost quaint as it focuses on an innocent played by Edward G. Robinson who falls in love with an alluring slugabed (Joan Bennett).  Er, well, she’s not just an alluring slugabed:  she’s doing the will of a reprehensible con artist (Dan Duryea).  By and by the flick, directed by Fritz Lang, grows much less artificial (or stylized) and its almost-quaintness disappears.

SS is based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, itself based on a novel, and it is as sexy, nice-looking and perceptively cast as it is unoriginal.  Robinson knew how to enact an innocent—one who is foolish and finally miserable.  Duryea is never false with his two-faced character, not even when he abuses his glamorous girlfriend, Bennett.  The powerfully feminine Joan, with fine range, is the best thing about the film.

Directed by Josh Schwartz, Fun Size (2012) is a sex comedy for teenagers.  Not a good idea.

It’s “envelope-pushing” crud, and I put envelope-pushing in quotes because that’s merely what the moviemakers believe it to be.  In truth it’s just a naughty nonentity.  A teens-in-trouble romp, it’s incompetently written and not much better directed:  I wasn’t always sure where the camera was taking me.

Yes, there are laughs in Fun Size, but a giant plastic chicken on top of a restaurant falling on a car and appearing to copulate with it is smutty silliness.  Just as offputting is a toad of a young boy, Albert, with his immature scatology.  The movie stars Victoria Justice, who is lovely but bland, and several others who are better.

Those primarily responsible for this thing may be accurately described as big boobs.

(The photo is of Victoria Justice.)

Victoria Justice Image (Photo credit: jake.auzzie)

Dick Heldar in The Light That Failed, William Wellman‘s film of 1939, is a London painter who eventually goes blind long after receiving a head-slashing wound on the battlefield.  A message is conveyed:  There is a great deal that will not break a man, but war will.

Heldar is not broken, for example, by his sweetheart Maisie’s leaving him, or by Cockney girl Bessie’s wronging him, but war is another matter.  Wellman’s direction of this adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s first novel is expert, although most of the cast is just okay.  Ronald Colman decorates the film without solidifying it, as Wellman does.  His opening war sequence is engrossing.  For good measure, there is also Ida Lupino—true and energetic as the pathetic Bessie.