A smart swipe at the Communist system in Hungary, before the fall of that system, issues from Love, one of the finest films of the Seventies.  A jailed political dissident provides moviemaker Karoly Makk with a fulcrum for exploring the theme of marital and family love.  That is, we witness love as an attitude, love as an emotion, love when it refuses to collapse.

The two main figures are the dissident’s wife and his aging mother, the latter of whom is semi-bitchy but still pitiable.  She dies before the Hungarian government releases her hapless son, who must now return to loving his hapless wife (sophisticatedly played by Mari Torocsik).  Talented Makk directed with prodigious imagination.

(In Hungarian with English subtitles)

In House of Sand and Fog (2003), Jennifer Connelly plays Kathy, a discontent ex-boozer evicted by mistake from the house her father left her.

Ben Kingsley plays Colonel Behrani, once in the Iranian army and now an American citizen, who buys the seized house, orders a bit of remodeling, and then puts it on the market at an outrageous price.  The county refuses to buy it back for such a sum despite its incompetent conduct toward Kathy, and she, poor lass, must remain homeless.  A helper, Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard), comes to her aid, even starting a love affair with the evictee, but is another woman’s husband.  His vigilante actions only make matters worse.  Kathy, to be sure, fights for her property but, although she gains some sympathy from Behrani and his family, feels helpless and suicidal.

‘Tis a world out of joint, with all its lost souls, in Vadim Perelman’s film.   The 1999 book by Andre Dubus III, of which this is an adaptation, is yet another novel I have not read, but I hope it is more convincing than the last one-third of this movie.  House becomes unwieldy, loses its way.  The other two-thirds, however, are extraordinarily good:  a true, effective American film for adults.  It moves at a perfect speed and exhibits an interesting verisimilitude.  It is sad without being depressing.  Neither the sex nor the brief nudity is gratuitous.

For Connelly’s first-rate performance—she is equal parts fragility and fed-up bluntness—and for the first hour and a half of the picture, I recommend House of Sand and Fog—really, a potential masterpiece.

Cover of House of Sand and Fog

In the 1930s, people had the Marx Brothers for their dose of wild farce.  In the early 2000s, they have SpongeBob Squarepants, considerably weirder and even crazier than Groucho and Co.  One look at that female squirrel in her Treedome under the sea and you realize that.  But this particular wild farce isn’t for everyone:  it’s animated—and now on a movie screen, not a TV screen, for the second time.

2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water serves up a plot too fanciful to keep up with and a bad-guy pirate (who runs his ship on Auto Pirate) acted by Antonio Banderas.  The cartoon farce rolls on until it is joined by a comparatively tame live action sequence on the beach, and then by some pallid “superhero” action.  So the movie isn’t perfect, but it is utterly, delightfully mirthful.  And it has a sweetly fey hero in . . . an underwater sponge.  

SpongeBob SquarePants (character) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the arch-villain in Jane the Virgin is a woman—Rose (Bridget Regan).  What a campy show this is!  And what’s this about her husband getting killed by wet cement that Rose deliberately pours on top of him?

We love this show for its camp.  But in the Chapter 13 episode, we also witness a fairly earnest, somewhat moving account of how a couple confronts the threat of a miscarriage.  Yep, I’m talking about lovable Jane and hard-to-pin-down Rafael.  Jane, you’ll recall, was artificially inseminated by mistake and wants to keep the baby.  It was the mistake of a woman, Dr. Luisa:  When women here aren’t making serious blunders, they’re perpetrating evil!  There’s Rose but there is also Petra, albeit a sympathetic character now.  Not that there’s a real problem with ALL the women, though.  Jane is lovable; and so are her grandmother (Ivonne Coll) and, yes, once trampy mother (Andrea Navedo).

By the way, I have written that Yara Martinez (Luisa) has a conventional beauty and Yael Grobglas (Petra) an unconventional beauty.  Bridget Regan’s is somewhere between the two.

Adios.

Reality Bites is trashy inanity not even worth reviewing.

Among other absurdities, we are supposed to believe that, after she loses her job at a TV station, Winona Ryder’s Lelaina, the valedictorian of her college class, can’t even handle a job selling hamburgers at a fast-food joint because she isn’t good enough at math (she must settle for working at a filling station instead).  More, we are supposed to accept and condone that director Ben Stiller has Lelaina show up at a more or less respectable event wearing an elegant dress without a bra, so that of course her breasts will jiggle when she has an altercation with her boyfriend (played by Stiller himself) and angrily marches out of the building.  Or maybe it was the producers who were responsible for this.  Either way, it’s crass.

Cover via Amazon