In a World . . . (2013), a new comic film by a woman named Lake Bell, is frequently droll and honest (with some atypical humor), but finally too soft and tame for my taste.  The love interest for main character Carol (Bell)—an amiable, none-too-virile bore (Demetri Martin)—is the kind of man who perfectly confirms this softness.  It’s good, then, when hairy Fred Melamed appears on screen to shake things up.

The main action and a subplot involving Carol’s sister Dani and her husband do not gel, and visually the film is too dark.  I couldn’t get a handle on the faces of Bell and Michaela Watkins.  Yes, for a long time In a World . . . has a strange appeal, the appeal of what seems like a rara avis.  And the acting is delicious.  Even so . . . this Bell isn’t ringing for me.

English: Lake Bell at the 2011 Comic Con in San Diego (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Hard Day’s Night, directed by Richard Lester, is the Beatles’ best movie, which is not saying much.  What says significantly more is that it is probably the finest screen comedy of 1964 (to me, it ain’t Dr. Strangelove).  Alun Owen’s script is funny and witty, literate in a way the Beatles’ early-60s songs are not.  But those songs—“And I Love Her”, “I Should Have Known Better”, etc.—make for a very engaging jukebox musical, with no missteps made in Lester’s smart “staging.”

I’ve seen this thoroughly English movie on both the big screen and DVD and, oddly, it has a way of making London seem small.  So be it.  A Hard Day’s Night is just for entertainment, and the Beatles themselves are not diminished. 

A Hard Day’s Night poster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most of the critics have been slamming Kick-Ass 2.  Check out rottentomatoes.com.  As usual, though, they find it difficult to explain their opposition.  They think the film is gratuitous—or something.  Largely the reviews are interchangeable and thus boring.  Also, as usual, there is no true criticism here since the reviewers do the reader’s thinking for him or her instead of stimulating thinking.  Too bad.

In the early Seventies, French director Louis Malle made a film about adolescents which deliberately went in a transgressive direction.  This is Murmur of the Heart (1971), not merely a transgressive opus but, more seriously, a vile one as well.  The three teenage boys at the center, especially the dominant Laurent (Benoit Ferreux), no one in his right mind would tolerate, but naturally the adults around them do until the story builds to an act of tender incest between Laurent and his freewheeling mother (Lea Massari).  It’s nearly the last thing that happens in the film and—transgressively—it’s never censured.  It’s condoned.

Whatever its pretensions are, Murmur is basically anti-bourgeois, an easygoing act of rebellion.  What’s more, it implicitly believes that the most important thing that goes on between a man and a woman is sexual intercourse.  It isn’t.  But this absolutely accounts for the incest.

Lest I sound smug, let me put it profanely:  Murmur of the Heart is a piece of shit.

Cover via Amazon

I doubt that the Christian film Courageous (2012) speaks to very many nonbelievers since it is overflowing with evangelical spirituality and is not at all subtle.  Alex Kendrick did a lot of work here—he directed, stars in, and co-wrote the flick with his brother Stephen—but the finished product is neither art nor admirable craft.  It concerns fatherhood, and Christian living for fathers, and although I agree with the religious and pro-family propaganda, propaganda is what it is and so does not belong in fictional cinema.

The Kendricks’ previous film, Fireproof, was somewhat better.  For all its weaknesses, it fascinates—and its drama is relevant to subject and theme.  That’s not always the case with the un-fascinating Courageous.

Courageous (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)