The heroes of Western novels sure have a lot of problems.  Martin Kelso, for example, is buried in difficulties and turmoil in Lewis B. Patten’s The Tarnished Star (1963), another sapid oater by the author of A Killing in Kiowa.

But . . . no problems, no drama.  Once again, a conflict between homesteaders and cattlemen proceeds apace, but Patten usually avoids predictable action and even boring, tiresome characterization.  E.g., Kelso’s father is a sheriff and a legendary man, but Kelso has to painstakingly push him to enforce the law against the hostile cattlemen.

Star is short and not actually conclusive, but it’s likable.  Just as fun as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. 

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The French director Robert Bresson, whose 13 films are currently being shown in a New York City retrospective, was a Christian artist without being a Christian man, i.e. a bona fide Christian believer.  His cinematic style usually leaves me cold, although not in two great pictures he released during the 1950s:  Diary of a Country Priest (from the Bernanos novel) and A Man Escaped.  Here, the man who was raised a Catholic presents protagonists who receive significant mercy from God, in films as spiritual as they are austere.  After that, however, works appear in which some spirituality arises, but mostly there is wan despair over the world’s violation of innocence–expressed through a flat, eccentric style.  Even the very interesting and compelling Au hasard Balthazar (1966) is not quite what it ought to be.  The “automatic, affectless performances” (Nick Pinterton, The Village Voice) Bresson demanded of his cast do the film no favors.

All the same, the two masterpieces I mentioned above–and 1945’s The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne–prove the level of brilliance in Bresson before he took what I believe to be a regrettable turn for a Christian artist.

(The photo is of Robert Bresson.)  

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On Little Children (2007):

Kate Winslet is commanding but never hammy.  All the anxiety, ambivalence, femininity, and intelligence of the character of Sarah in this Todd Field movie Winslet supplies.  She’s the best thing in it.  An adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel (which I’ve never read), Little Children doesn’t make the grade, though.  Winslet’s suburban wife becomes an adulterer in this almost dated tale of unhappy suburban sinners, and what ensues, I’m sorry to say, is a forced, uneasy denouement in addition to an uneven tone.  The film is inferior to the same director’s flawed but worthwhile In the Bedroom (2001).  I disagree with critic Dana Stevens that Perrotta, who co-wrote the screenplay, “is a natural match” for Field.

Field has an artistic eye, after all–he uses depth of field as though he invented it–and his scene creation is better than the script.  No doubt LC was not the novel he should have filmed.

Cover of Little Children

Hollywood is woefully indifferent to the scripts it puts together for its action flicks (those scoundrels!), and so the one created for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) doesn’t exactly tell a high-quality story.  But it’s such a wonderfully rich B-feature I was delighted to have laid eyes on it. 

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his International Monetary Fund team–scratch that!  that’s not what IMF stands for here–go after a mad scientist with a remake-the-world scheme.  There are plenty of tight, technically savvy action scenes (Ethan’s vertical car ride to the bottom of a confined area, his effort to climb a stunning skyscraper, Jane Carter’s heated battle with a female assassin).  Also, the film sort of channels pictures of the past:  2001: A Space Odyssey gadgets and “zero gravity” floating emerge.*  And in Mumbai, where the story finally ends up, Tom Cruise becomes an everyman James Bond and Paula Patton, who plays Agent Jane Carter, becomes an exemplary Bond movie beauty-cum-heroine.

Irresistible stuff.

Directed by Brad Bird.

*It’s not really zero gravity, which I why I used the term in quotation marks.

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The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon’s  2011 documentary about Sarah Palin, begins with footage of familiar people speaking about Palin in words ranging from insulting to disgusting.

Sarah Palin is not Hitler; she is not a monster.  The loutish haters treat her as though she were.  Bannon’s film is wholly in favor of her, using for voiceover parts of the Going Rogue audiobook and featuring people who used to work with Palin as they talk about her accomplishments.  It’s also a film about Alaska and the oil industry, which became the esteemed governor’s opponent.  (It’s not so much about the John McCain presidential campaign.)

The Undefeated is propaganda, though.  It should have been more intelligently searching.  Bannon still could have shown he was on Palin’s side had he focused on any sensible questions that have been raised about her decisions, her governance, etc.  For example, was her governance in Alaska always conservative—probably not–and if not, why?  Such a thing hardly would have hurt her standing as a right-winger.  Palin’s respect for conservative values has long been evident.

Bannon’s film is technically well-made, but a more incisive pro-Sarah doc would have been a stronger doc.

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