If you want it, you got it. A surfeit of sex jokes, that is. Maybe adolescents want it, for this Ivan Reitman turkey, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), IS an adolescent film. (It also moves at a rather leaden pace.) In fact, the two principal females, played by Uma Thurman and Anna Faris, are easy lays. That’s right, both of them. We have something scurrilously demented here.
Cover of My Super Ex-Girlfriend
It can be safely said that Jack Arnold‘s It Came from Outer Space (1953) is not big on aesthetics due to, early on, some technical inadequacy such as an unstable camera. It starts looking better, though, as time goes on; and it’s in color, which is nice. But it is hardly a visual gem.
Aliens in the flick seem to do a horrible job of flying their spacecraft since John Putnam (Richard Carlson) and others believe the craft to be a meteor rapidly hitting the earth. Meaning no harm to the earthlings, the aliens nevertheless say they are willing to destroy people if they are kept from repairing their ship. Nearby citizens are ignorant of, and rattled by, the aliens’ tools of choice. They grow aggressive.
Based on a Ray Bradbury story, Outer Space is fairly enjoyable. I watched it because Barbara Rush, who is in it, very recently died at age 97. Like Carlson, she is an uninteresting actor here, but the finest thing about the film is Miss Rush’s innocent-looking beauty, brunette magnetism. A B- movie was a little less B with her in it.
Is the modern age—let’s say it starts in 1969 when Withnail and I takes place—the age of hypersensitivity, or is it merely that actors are hypersensitive? The two out-of-work actors in this film seem to exhibit this trait, with, alas, happiness consistently beyond reach. They comfort themselves, however, with booze, pot and cigarettes, not so much with their friendship, though. Almost thirty, Withnail (Richard E. Grant) frustrates Marwood (Paul McGann) and probably vice versa when Marwood convinces Withnail to leave London for a while and spend time in the country. It doesn’t go well.
The film is an autobiographical one, from 1987, written and directed by Bruce Robinson, who co-starred in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. Very adept at dialogue, he’s a literate Brit with a literate—and witty—movie. He is pleasantly inventive and some of his film’s incidents could have gotten gross but never do. ‘Tis a deserving work.
On Gabrielle (2006):
From France, this Patrice Chereau picture borrows Joseph Conrad’s fine 1897 story, “The Return,” for cinematic treatment. A wife, Gabrielle, leaves her home to run off with a recent lover, but abruptly changes her mind and returns to her husband. It does Jean the spouse no good at all. Self-confidence goes; the expected confusion and wrath arrive. The film has to do with desiccated lives and not merely a desiccated marriage. What happens when marriage is the only thing a person can fall back on? Nothing.
Isabelle Huppert plays Gabrielle in a performance perfect and great: the core of a person, of a broken aristocrat, is captured. Equally powerful, emotionally wrenching, is Pascal Greggory as Jean. The actors are superior to the director’s style, what with the occasional unnecessary music and the transitions from color to black-and-white. Even worse are the arty intertitles. But Gabrielle is no letdown, searing and meaningful as it is. Huppert and Greggory are not its only strengths.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of Gabrielle
Cover of The Good Fairy
Ferenc Molnar probably wrote a delightful play when he wrote The Good Fairy, since it was turned into a delightful 1935 movie by William Wyler. With cool subtlety Margaret Sullavan (once married to Wyler) enacts a friendly, callow girl raised in an orphanage and encouraged there to practice good deeds. She does one, willy-nilly, for a professional man (Herbert Marshall), a lawyer whose integrity is sadly losing him money. But to accomplish this, Sullavan’s “good fairy” has to lie to a love-hungry CEO (Frank Morgan), who is generous enough to bestow wealth on the man he believes to be Sullavan’s husband—the lawyer.
Both men are needy in their own way, albeit Sullavan, or Luisa Ginglebuscher (her character’s name), can help only one of them. The CEO is privileged regardless, and it impresses that the film does something many modern-age people would disdain. It looks through a positive lens at “men of privilege.” Yes, the lawyer is poor but, as an educated man, he could gain privilege—and wealth—at any time. And he does.
A true artist, Preston Sturges, wrote the screenplay for Fairy, and even though it isn’t one of his “personal” works, no doubt he understood what Molnar was doing.
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