Cover of Love Comes Lately

In the 2008 Love Comes Lately, three Isaac Singer stories merge to make one humorous but dark movie, an English-language concoction written and directed by Germany’s Jan Schutte.

The film centers on an elderly Jewish fiction writer, Max (Otto Tausig), whose longtime girlfriend (Rhea Perlman) neurotically fails him with her jealousy, while he fails her by going to bed with Barbara Hershey‘s Rosalie.  Through such vignettes Schutte exhibits human beings as a race of lonely sinners, and in fact two of the movie’s Jews, Max and Rosalie, are said by Rosalie to “belong to the same tribe—the one that’s destroying itself” (a Singer line?).  The film doesn’t wholly work because it intermittently dramatizes Max’s writing—with Elizabeth Pena playing a complete creature of imagination—thus giving it the same pictorial weight that the story of the old writer has.  Still, it is meaningful, thought-provoking, and engaging.

The horrifying withdrawal from Afghanistan is the biggest proof that the U.S. is now a lamentable nuthouse. Americans and Afghan friends were left in a country ruled not by men but devils. This and other facts—flabbergasting influxes of illegal immigrants among them—will be used against President Biden in the 2024 election. It won’t be pretty.

The horrifying withdrawal from Afghanistan is the biggest proof that the U.S. is now a lamentable nuthouse. Americans and Afghan friends were left in a country ruled not by men but devils. This and other facts—flabbergasting influxes of illegal immigrants among them—will be used against President Biden in the 2024 election. It won’t be pretty.

Cover of Nashville

Robert Altman’s 1975 film, Nashville, was severely whittled down from eight hours (!) to two and a half hours long, and this is the only version we have. In this version at least, it is obvious that Joan Tewkesbury‘s script is shallow and biased toward ordinary Americans in the South.

Consider that every song the country-and-western top dog, Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), sings is sanctimonious (not likely), but that he himself is arrogant and disdainful.  Consider that Suleen Gay (Gwen Welles), a likable waitress aspiring to be a country performer, is more or less a Catholic hypocrite, and deluded about her singing ability to boot.  And this is only the beginning.  It is not that the film invariably fails to be honest, but that only up to a point is it honest.  Indeed, in many plot elements there is mendacity as well.

It can’t be denied, however, that Nashville is wonderfully imaginative, with commendable scene creation.  An example is the funny sequence with the traffic jam after a car crash.  And there’s the scene where Keith Carradine sings “I’m Easy” to a concert audience while the camera catches the faces of the singer’s female conquests, erotic desire rising in a watching—and married—Lily Tomlin.  Granted, the actors’ improvisation in the film leaves me cold, but the actors themselves don’t.  They know what they’re doing.

As director, Altman is outstanding.  Unlike Tewkesbury.  The movie is a superficial mess which I do not regret having seen four or five times.

(500) Days of Summer, a 2009 pic, is not always clever—it can be gimmicky, as in its European art film references—but it certainly avoids being dull and utterly ordinary. It tells of a romantic affair between two young adults, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), over a 500-day period. And as critic Deborah Ross points out, “For him, it’s love. For her, it’s a lark.” Happy days become few. Maybe Tom’s next girlfriend (Minka Kelly?) will take it seriously.

Although there is some crassness in the screenplay, charm arises as well. Tom suffers, but Gordon-Levitt is no Ingmar Bergman-guided actor, that’s for sure. He is passable, and handsome. Deschanel is passable and lovely. Scenarists Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber do a smooth and interesting job of holding chronological time at bay. Again, not dull. (500) Days of Summer has its virtues.