I was going to see Tower Heist this weekend, but I got a chance to see an old epic on the big screen and opted for that instead.  It was Spartacus (1960), one of Stanley Kubrick’s better films–good on the small screen, a gem on the big.  Therein, Kirk Douglas plays the gladiator Spartacus, who is determined to fight historical dehumanization by leading a slave rebellion against ancient Rome.  Douglas has star power but greatness too:  he’s never without forcefulness and personality.  Other great ones are Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton; every time they’re on the screen we like it.  Jean Simmons, enacting Spartacus’ wife, fills the bill.

I love epic movies; good ones offer cakes-and-ale, as this one does.  They don’t get monotonous.  Kubrick directed carefully and wisely.  Outstanding is the battle scene where the rebels use against the Roman soldiers rollers of burning straw, and the long shot of Simmons and Ustinov riding away on a stretched-out road lined with crucified slaves, Spartacus among them, before the picture ends.  The last epic film I saw in a theatre hitherto (they aren’t plentiful) was Mongol, which was enjoyable but somewhat less so than this one, just as Spartacus is not as great as The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia and Lord of the Rings.

(Spartacus is showing in Tulsa, Oklahoma until Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011.) 

Cover of Spartacus

The 2006 German film, The Lives of Others, successfully does what today’s movie critics declined to mention in their reviews:  it condemns Communism.  Too, it exposes a government, East German in 1984, that is slowly getting weary of Communism, whether the death throes are there or not.  A Stasi member called Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) realizes just how spiritually draining the GDR is.  Although the change which comes over him is insufficiently believable, Wiesler seems to be humanized by three things:  music, some poetry by Brecht, and–the lives of others, viz. the people he is spying on.  One of them is the victim of a Commie’s sexual harassment. 

Directed and written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others is absorbing and nicely plotted.  It’s rated R because actress Martina Gedeck has her breast squeezed (by a man) and then exposed.  But it isn’t gratuitous.

(The film is in German with English subtitles.) 

Cover of The Lives of Others

The Merchant Ivory film, Before the Rains (2007), is a wonderland of rich scenery.  Set in India, it was photographed by its director, Santosh Sivan.  Too bad a second-rate story, with the character of a British colonialist in 1937 given short shrift, wrecks the enterprise.  In fact, a whole lotta hogwash is here.

Linus Roache supplies a little too much on-the-surface acting as the colonialist, but is passable.  Rahul Bose is largely uninteresting as an Indian right-hand man.  The women, Nandita Das and Jennifer Ehle, however, have their hearts in it and never make a false move.  Put another way, no surface stuff.  If you’re drawn at all to this film, see it for these two performances.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

In the non-naturalistic The Leftovers (2011), Tom Perrotta’s new novel, millions of people have disappeared from the earth in a Rapture-like phenomenon, and a great many were not Christians.  It was a “random harvest” and most of Perrotta’s attention is fixed on what has ensued in the U.S. suburbs now that this inexplicable tragedy has occurred.  At bottom the Sudden Departure, as it is called, is simply the next bad thing to happen after such events as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese tsunami, etc.; the novel subtly presents it as such.

A spellbinding fact is that sundry religious cults have arisen, winning such converts as the wife (Laurie) and son (Tom) of Kevin Garvey, the mayor of a town called Mapleton.  The cult that has lured in Laurie is the Guilty Remnant, a bizarre religion whose adherents wear white, almost never speak, and routinely smoke cigarettes.  Perrotta’s point here may well be this:  To slightly alter something G.K. Chesterton said, when people stop believing in the traditional God, they start believing in anything.  False gods are ubiquitous, notwithstanding there is in the book a ruined minister, Max Jamison, who does not even turn to a false god.  He fails to accept that a non-traditional event like the random (but was it random?) Sudden Departure could have come from the true Deity.

One might suspect The Leftovers of being depressing, but it isn’t.  It’s merely serious as well as lively, wry and humane.  Though it’s been called satirical, for the most part that isn’t true.

The photo is of Tom Perrotta.  

The screenplay for 50/50 was penned by one Will Reiser and is based on Reiser’s own bout with spinal cancer.  A tragic comedy as opposed to a comic tragedy, it stars Joseph Gordon-Leavitt as the young, dutiful suburbanite with a tumor on his spine.

The most interesting thing about the film is how it exhibits the ways in which people react to and deal with Adam’s (Gordon-Leavitt’s) cancer.  His girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) starts behaving disgracefully.  Adam’s close buddy Kyle (Seth Rogen) wants Adam to get laid–and also uses him to attract women.  But, in addition, he always sticks by him.  Adam himself reacts to the disease by smoking marijuana.  Welcome to the Western world and its young people.

Directed by Jonathan Levine, 50/50 is mildly funny–I don’t consider it hilarious, as some have claimed–and occasionally packs a punch (as when Adam begins to act irrationally behind the wheel of Kyle’s car).  It’s also rather slight, though.  Really, it’s a little less enjoyable than some of today’s lauded TV series such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Big Love and Sons of Anarchy.  TV writers are giving motion picture writers a run for their money, notwithstanding 50/50 IS perfectly watchable.