The first scene has a woman named Gail on the phone with a woman named Linda, apologizing for missing Linda’s recent party and asking how many people attended.  Linda replies that there was none who attended.  The party was a total bust.  This because, in Hal Salwen‘s gentle satire Denise Calls Up (1996), there are no longer in-the-flesh contacts and relationships; people are busy and do everything over the phone.  They even make love over the phone except, well, this is no lovemaking—or sex—at all.  But they don’t know that!  They have settled for the absence of the ordinary human encounters they wish to avoid or simply have no time for.  Or they refuse to make time.  Even the donation of sperm to an anonymous woman who wants to get pregnant is the equivalent of an over-the-wire service.  Predictably, it is over the phone that the donor becomes acquainted with the anonymous woman (she’s the Denise who one day calls up the donor).

Salwen’s film is witty and shrewd as well as competently directed and, by Gary Sharfin, edited.

The one-liners are what you’d expect: wholly trivial, sometimes hokey, usually funny.  The sight gags are wild and punchy and usually entertaining.  Hit the Ice (1943) is probably more of a musical than a comedy-team farce ought to be: singer and recording star Ginny Simms belts out a lot of numbers.  But the numbers are nicely digestible and never upstage the comedy. . . I couldn’t help thinking that Hit the Ice was headed for an unhappy ending, at the expense (of course) of the Lou Costello character, but no such oddity emerges.  Nothing truly cruel would be hitting the boys.  This is just like any other comedy-team farce, only funnier than many of them.

Hit the Ice (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I consider Iris (2001), about the British novelist Iris Murdoch and Alzheimer’s disease, a lousy film.

Not only does smug Murdoch wear her intellect on her sleeve, which is bad enough, but nothing justifies such a thing since the talk here is constantly intellectually shallow.  Acted as a young woman by Kate Winslet (and here the smugness comes in) and as an elderly woman by Judi Dench, the revered Iris has a penchant for skinny dipping as well as adultery, even lesbian adultery.  She is, then, a run-of-the-mill female rake, which is not very interesting.  And then there’s Murdoch’s husband John Bayley (he’s always fun),  who is such a silly and awkward man it is damned difficult to think of him as a professor of literature.  The blame for the jejune acting of the two men who portray him belongs, I think, to the director, Richard Eyre.  This is Eyre’s John Bayley before it is the actors.’

Iris (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Window to Paris (which I’m not sure ever made it to DVD):

A Russian film, this, which came out in 1993 and which features a teacher affirming to his pupils, “You were born into a miserable, crooked, bankrupt country, but it is still your home.”  That is, post-Red Russia is still their home and, unlike Communist Russia, ought to be given a chance.  Paris, on the other hand, is not the Russian pupils’ home, just a dazzling locus the economically disadvantaged characters here happen to reach via a magical window in a St. Petersburg apartment building.  So, yes, Yuri Mamin‘s film is a comic fantasy, a very amusing one.  For me not all its humor works, but most of it does—and the movie as a whole works.

Mamin has purveyed a good story and intelligent concerns, and he knows how to direct.  It delights the spectator when those earthy Russians discover France’s prosperity, but it is worth remembering a point the critic James Bowman has made: that what these characters desire is “a way to enjoy the riches of the West at will, but then and always to return to dreary mother Russia.”  In other words, they want the impossible but, well, they’re only human and at least a love for mother Russia has never died in their bosoms.

(In Russian with English subtitles)

Well, the full title is Kick Ass 2 Prelude: Hit-Girl (2012), the second in the series of graphic novels by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.  

Hit-Girl is in the title since she—Mindy McCready—is the focus here: the young hero who calls himself Kick Ass takes a back seat.  And, no doubt about it, when I picked THIS up, I selected one hyperviolent, foul-mouthed publication; and the savage blowing-away of criminals is allied with a strong libertarian-conservative (both) outlook and anger.  When Dave, a.k.a. Kick Ass, unironically exhorts Mindy to watch TV shows about celebrities instead of Fox News—the better to get her to fit in with her peers—Mindy replies, “So how do I keep tabs on Obama and our record f–king deficit?”

There is nothing wonderful about the plot, but nothing wrong with the gutsy artwork either.  The book cover for Kick Ass 2 says it is “now a major motion picture” but, no, most of what appears here never made it to the screen.  It’s rougher and more felt than what’s in the adaptations.

Kick-Ass 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)