Jane the virgin in Jane the Virgin, the new CW series, is still waiting till marriage to have sex, and it would be nice to see the show’s writers respect and satisfy that aim.  Curiously, she is involved with a former playboy named Rafael (Justin Baldoni).  (She’s no longer engaged to the police officer, who retains his taste for the interracial.)

It was good to see the talented Yara Martinez again on the Dec. 8th episode, but not quite believable that her character, the put-upon lesbian Luisa Alver, is hauled off to a mental hospital.  Martinez, for good measure, has a conventional beauty and Yael Grobglas, as Petra, an unconventional beauty.  Sleek and wispy-looking, Grobglas is beguilingly adept as a conniving but not wholly self-assured future divorcee.

Good acting and good looks prevail in Jane the Virgin:  the show might be a milestone in commercial effort.  And a funny one at that.

1993’s In the Name of the Father begins with almost risible melodrama about British vs. Northern Ireland confrontation before concentrating on the 1974 bombing of a Guildford, England pub and the arrest of the Irish foursome—the Guildford Four—accused of the bombing.  This included Gerry Conlon, here played by Daniel Day-Lewis, on whose book (Conlon’s, that is) the movie is based.  After the melodrama, the film nicely aspires to tell the truth about young people, hippies included, just as it reveals a stoic IRA leader to be coldly inhuman.

Woe is me, though:  I have read that in its anti-British tendentiousness Father is a historical fraud, yet another phony docudrama.  The Guildford Four may have been guilty, and in fact some of what we see does not have the ring of truth.  The IRA leader in prison with Conlon is fictitious, but that’s okay, undamaging to the film.  The rub is that one wants more truth than lies in a film which is assuredly partisan.  We don’t want ambiguity all but rejected because director Jim Sheridan hates the British presence in Belfast.  Only this, I believe, keeps Father from being recommendable.

In the Name of the Father (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), Michael Douglas plays divorced, jobless, bespectacled Bill, who snaps under modern day pressure and starts doing deleterious things en route to his ex-wife’s house.  Its first half hour is wrenchingly honest, but then it gets very wobbly.  It politicizes itself by showing how terrified it is of seeming more essentially conservative than essentially liberal, when only political neutrality would have saved the day.  Here and there the film is highly imaginative, and the acting of Douglas, Barbara Hershey and Robert Duvall is un-hammily not to be improved on.  James Newton Howard’s score is sleek and fervid.  The script, however, turns into a p.c. debacle, hoping, really, to be more ideological than artistic; and the film’s visceral power doesn’t stand a chance against that.  It deflates.

Cover of Falling Down

Because the Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood is utterly fascinating (on the second reading, that is; on the first reading it meanders), the faithful film version by John Huston is utterly fascinating.

It tells of a Southern oddball who rebels against his fundamentalist Christian upbringing by preaching atheism until he discovers that, well, he cannot escape the Jesus he verbally denies.  He wants Him.  He has Christianity in his blood, therefore to O’Connor—and to me—he has wise blood.  The film, from 1979, is deeply and idiosyncratically religious as well as ably made.  It sorely lacks O’Connor’s sense of terror but not her humor.  Most of the performers, e.g. Brad Dourif in the main role, do well.  (Ned Beatty is immensely enjoyable.)  The film’s last few minutes, though, do not compare with the poetic final paragraph in the novel, wherein the Southern rebel dies in a state of grace and, distant now from earthly existence, is perceived to be a faraway light.

Wise Blood (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Blue Ruin (2014), a recent film by Jeremy Saulnier, a loner who lives as a bum learns that the murderer of his parents is being released from prison.  Hungry for vengeance, wide-eyed Dwight, the loner (played by Macon Blair), tracks down the ex-con and kills him, thus precipitating a chain of vigilante attempts as well as harrowing violence.  It is clear that the film deals with what makes revenge problematic, but it also centers on the shattering messiness of life as lived by lost souls who make dark, bad decisions.

Individuals scenes in Blue Ruin are better than Saulnier’s okay writing: disbelief must be suspended a little too often.  But his direction is fine and the movie is a potent nail-biter.