The Fantasticks ran in New York from 1960 to 2001, and has been revived there of late.

This Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical has a certain artistic purity—not just merit but purity—to complement the lovely ballads and nice love story.  It’s small but endearing.  Not unserious either, although all those Big Apple audiences might not have cared about that.  It has to do with love’s protectiveness when the surrounding world is harsh.  The libretto can be hokey, but it is also literate.  Satisfying enough to be more than literate are such songs as “Try to Remember,” “Much More” and “It Depends On What You Pay,” wherein the last of which the repeated word rape never means more than abduction.

The Fantasticks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the Frank Capra picture, is a strange work of art.  Perhaps never has sentimentality been so smartly and lovingly filmed, never has facile optimism been so impressively crafted.

Patently the film is faulty.  Indeed, it’s stupid about money lending practices, i.e. those of the Bailey Building and Loan Association.  Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) is callous, but he’s right to say, “It isn’t fair to the little people to encourage them to live beyond their means.”  Still, it is the humane family man, George Bailey (James Stewart), and not Potter, who must triumph, who—in truth—must be on his way to being as content as his father was. It’s an enticing trip—with images as lovely as those in The Magnificent Ambersons.  I’m not sure it’s one of Capra’s best movies, however, although it is clearly more personal than, say, It Happened One Night.

It’s a Wonderful Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The criminal activity in Jane the Virgin is getting complicated—for me, anyway—but it’s good to see something other than the working-out of human relationships (Jane’s still working it out with Rafael).

The stakes never seem very high here, but I guess that’s what you get from a soapy comedy.  The Norman Conquests this ain’t.  It’s still sometimes funny, though—check out what the girl who has seen Titanic has to say in the Chapter 10 episode—and still fun.

Recently Gina Rodriguez won a Golden Globe award.  (A what?  Huh?)  With not only her facial play but also her movement, with her energy and wholesome allure, she nails the character.

In Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, a 1960 example of cinema as the free exercise of imagination (complete with jokes), a man has a blighted past because of what happened to his wife and now a blighted present because of his crooked brother.

The film begins with the brother frantically running from fellow thieves until, after stumbling and falling, he is assisted by a stranger who immediately starts talking about his relationship with his wife.  Incongruous, this, but true to form:  Truffaut wastes no time bringing up one of his favorite subjects: women.  Women mean a lot to him, in an entranced, are-women-magical? way far removed from animal sex.

Shoot the Piano Player alternates between the main character’s—Charlie Kohler’s—involvement with women and his involvement with the crooks his brother knows.  The result is a personal, quite sad pulp fiction, though with a disappointing finis.  (Why’d you have to knock off Marie Dubois?)  Should have been more moving, for one thing. 

Shoot the Piano Player (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(In French with English subtitles)

Though very pretty, Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) could use some visual and histrionic restraint (I don’t care for the acting here of Gong Li, Kaori Momoi and Youki Kudoh).  But the film in toto, an adaptation of the Arthur Golden novel, is an interesting middlebrow treat set in the morally objectionable geisha world, a perverse system which is all a girl like Zhang Ziyi’s Sayouri knows and can benefit from.  Unfortunately.

Marshall has better subject matter to work with than he did in the movie musical Chicago, and has directed extremely well.  The candy colors come from cinematographer Dion Beebe.  John Williams’s score is lustrous and not overripe.  Unlike Chicago, in my view, the movie largely provides Hollywood fun, despite the corny conclusion.

Strongly political, progressive critics don’t like Memoirs of a Geisha.  It’s a chronicle distinctly non-feminist, you see (not anti-feminist, just non- ).

Memoirs of a Geisha (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)