Larry Stevens (Dick Powell), the main character in It Happened Tomorrow (1944), is a newspaper reporter who miraculously receives, for several successive days, tomorrow’s newspaper with tomorrow’s news—i.e., the future is revealed—and he begins to exploit this marvelous knowledge.

The story is set in America in the late 1800s, and it is interesting to see such a setting without the presence of cowboys and cattle ranches.  But like the Western stuff, It Happened Tomorrow is a fantasy.  It was directed by Rene Clair of France, active in Hollywood for a while, and everything Clair touched turned to pixie dust.  He kept his movies nicely fey: this one is an enchanting comic Twilight Zone, and a soothing love story.  Tain’t original:  the film derives from a play and a novel, but Clair makes it his own.

Cover of It Happened Tomorrow

Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a clever if almost dull short story about a married woman with Alzheimer’s who, while in a nursing home, grows emotionally attached to another woman’s husband, also with Alzheimer’s.  It makes for a truly impressive film adaptation written and directed by actress Sarah Polley, who gives adequate attention to the sorrow and strain delivered to the sick patient’s once unfaithful husband (Gordon Pinsent).  Almost dull?  No.  It’s absorbing.  Though often with eyes too bright for an Alzheimer’s patient, Julie Christie acts with more savvy and affecting skill than she ever did in the past.  Polley’s nursing-home shots are engagingly true, and her closeups make Away From Her (2006), the picture’s title, an exquisite drama of faces, especially when the camera is on Christie.

The film deals with the fallen-world madness of advanced age.  The dying of a mind and the toll it takes, the senior citizen’s (ugh, that term!) longing for human consolation and companionship—this is the film’s thematic content.  Culpability is another theme.

I’d like to make one more observation:  Away From Her ends with Fiona, the lady with Alzheimer’s, struggling with her words as she expresses her gratitude to her husband.  “You could have just driven away,” she says.  “Just driven away and forsook me.  Forsooken me.  Forsaken.”  “Not a chance,” the husband replies.  It’s a tender scene but, ah, he did forsake her, really, by sleeping with Olympia Dukakis.  (One more act of adultery for Pinsent’s character.)  Such a thing never takes place in Munro’s story, a wise move on her part.  It renders the husband a more sympathetic, a nobler, protagonist.  Polley certainly appears to be an artist; Munro certifiably is.

Cover of Away from Her

Co-starring the late Lauren Bacall and starring Rock Hudson, Written on the Wind (1956) is about a wealthy young alcoholic, Kyle (Robert Stack), who is in most ways inferior to his best friend Mitch (Hudson), but ends up marrying the pleasant secretary (Bacall) for whom Mitch has a strong yen.  Eventually Kyle, believing himself sterile, grows powerfully self-destructive and feels threatened by Mitch—who, to be sure, has no amorous liking for Kyle’s sexually promiscuous sister (Dorothy Malone) who loves Mitch.

Is this a soap opera?  Oh, yes.  I don’t know what the novel by Robert Wilder is like, but in the film’s first few moments, director Douglas Sirk demonstrates that we’re in for soap-opera fun.  This is passionate drama usually identified as melodrama, and it’s melodrama with a theme: the dead ends encountered by love.

It isn’t art, and there is clearly a cornball use of music, but it is a handsome-looking production.  Since Bacall was gorgeous but not big in the chest, the moviemakers do all they can to make Malone utterly sexy, which isn’t hard.  Malone also turns out the best performance.  Hudson is just Hudson—uninteresting.  Unlike Written on the Wind.

Cover via Amazon

Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) in this new Brett Ratner movie is a trifle too naïve for my taste, and assuredly the dialogue isn’t brainy.  But the battle scenes, involving Hercules and the Thracian army, are fun and sweatily compelling.  Also, it was savvily photographed (by Dante Spinotti) and costumed—the actors, I mean—(by Jany Temime).  Rebecca Ferguson looks like a million bucks in hers, for she’s a classical beauty—and has acting ability to boot.

Nothing great, this Hercules, but it is watchable.

Image from page 289 of “The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary and Greek lexicon; forming a glossary of all the words representing visible objects connected with the arts, manufactures, and every-day life of the Greeks and Romans, with represen (Photo credit: Internet Archive Book Images)

We’ve certainly lived with electricity a long, long time.  Now, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), it’s being used by Jamie Foxx as one of the most destructive weapons imaginable.  The power was forcibly harnessed in Foxx’s character, Max Dillon, via electric eels!  Oh, well.

For a superhero movie, this one is quite rich.  It’s long but not overstuffed with action (stuffed, not overstuffed).  Its look is wonderfully urban, varied, and pretty:  kudos to cinematographer Dan Mindel.  It’s an appealing love story, wherein a sensitive Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is frequently distraught in his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone)—and what charismatic actors Garfield and Stone are here!  Others, too, do very well.

A family pic (no sex between the principals), TAS2 is, I think, better than the first (reboot) film.  Too, it beats the pillow feathers out of most of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies.

The Average Spider-Man | The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review (Photo credit: BagoGames)