An elderly couple visit their grown son and daughter and widowed daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story (1953), the great classic Japanese film directed and co-written (with Kogo Noda) by Yasujiro Ozu.

The couple’s children are harmless people who are nevertheless not as generous and attentive to their parents as they ought to be.  The daughter-in-law, Noriko, is generous and attentive.  Work and immediate family prevent the son, a doctor, and the daughter, a beautician, from experiencing the loneliness and isolation consistently imposed on the characters who have had, or are having, these life-enriching realities stripped away from them.  The parents are among these characters, and Noriko is too.  With scant opportunity to genuinely love her husband before he died in the war, she remains idiosyncratically loyal to the man but also secluded and not really living.  On this particular subject—loneliness and isolation—Tokyo Story, though a quiet film, is shattering.

(In Japanese with English subtitles)

Cover of Tokyo Story – Criterion Collection

I saw the film version of The Humbling (2014)—Philip Roth’s novel, which I reviewed on this site—on DVD the other day.  Barry Levinson directed the picture imaginatively and Al Pacino is extraordinary as the malfunctioning great actor who gets involved with the strange lesbian (Greta Gerwig), but the undertaking would have been better had the film been a little more faithful to the novel.

Buck Henry and Michael Zebede wrote the script, and I disesteem Henry’s attempts at arch comedy.  For a transsexual character, the ex-lover of Gerwig’s lesbian, to be tossed in is pointless, and the tragic ending is more garish, less believable, than Roth’s ending.  The film could have been a memorable success, but in truth it is too eccentric to even register as something disturbing and important.

The Doris Day mode continued as late as 1968, the year of The Graduate, with Dean Martin and Stella Stevens in the romantic comedy, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life).

Eli Wallach is superb as a fiftyish man who cheats on his wife.  His buddy David Sloane (Martin) thinks he has proof that the adulterer’s mistress (Ann Jackson) is fickle, so he tries to save Wallach’s marriage by making advances to her.  But he does so to the wrong girl (Stevens), not the one involved with his friend.

Not far behind Wallach, Stella Stevens is lively and endearing—and drop-dead beautiful.  Martin, on the other hand, is inadequate, but Jackson and some others aren’t.  They’re authoritatively comic.  Fielder Cook’s directing is not quite good and not quite bad, notwithstanding, despite unsatisfying characterization, Marriage contains dollops of wit and some tasty humor.  It’s flawed but entertaining.  In addition, mainly a family pic, it’s hardly sexy at all, released only a year before such films as Goodbye Columbus and Last Summer, with their naked bodies, appeared.

I fell asleep for a minute or so during the first quarter of Aloha (2015), a Cameron Crowe picture, because I didn’t know what was going on.  Later, after I got some idea of what was going on, it was easy to see how insipid and unlikely this Crowe-written stuff was.  Aloha‘s rom com I found tepid and its military-industrial, businessman-bashing element is hogwash.  (Bill Murray plays Mr. Halliburton—er, I mean Mr. Carson Welch, CEO.)

Crowe deserves to eat crow.

Based on the novel by Brian Moore, author of the film version’s screenplay, Black Robe (1991) deals with French missionary efforts among the Algonquin and Huron Indians in the 17th century.  Lothaire Bluteau is miscast as the Jesuit priest Father Laforgue merely because his acting is poor, but this Bruce Beresford-directed movie has plenty of good qualities.

It quickly becomes evident that Laforgue, a virtuous man, is failing miserably to establish a rapport with the Algonquin Indians on whom he depends to take him to the Hurons—a fact that prompts Moore to throw doubt on the value of missionary work at large.  Christianity itself has intrinsic worth, but to Moore (no friend of Catholicism) it is impossible to say it’s a metaphysical worth.  Though he remains a Christian, Laforgue makes concessions to pagan Indian belief (the forest is speaking to us, don’t ya know?).  Thus it isn’t just the acting in BR that makes me wince.

Cover of Black Robe