(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.

A few weeks ago I reviewed the documentary film For Sama, which revealed violent, warring suppression in Syria. What has lately happened in Afghanistan is worse.

The Big Withdrawal there was not disgraceful; it was unspeakably disgraceful. It was vile. It is contended that Afghans who helped American soldiers (e.g., interpreters) should have been flown to third countries and vetted there before emigration to the U.S. occurred. We know all the absurd garbage that went on instead, including the abandonment of helpful Afghans.

The Left can’t govern. If Donald Trump was unfit to be president (morally), a representative of the Left is even more so.

The agony of motherhood and wanted prosperity is the central theme of 1937’s Stella Dallas, in which “A working-class woman [Stella] is willing to do whatever it takes to give her daughter a socially promising future” (imdb.com).

Here, a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty became a play and then a Hollywood movie directed by King Vidor. Neither too literary nor too theatrical, the film is pleasantly pictorial and sensibly paced. And unlike the silent film made of Stella Dallas, which I’ve never seen, it offers the actors’ voices—naturally beneficial. One wants to hear and not just see Barbara Stanwyck, whose Stella is appealing and ardent but no aristocrat. Astoundingly, she can handle a great deal if not quite everything. It is a terrific performance.

Respect for women.  The detestation of cruelty, whether that of the Indian or of the white man.  Manly struggle for the good of others.

These are the values upheld in the short 1957 novel, West to the Sun, by Noel Loomis. Loomis wrote Westerns, and this is essentially what Sun is despite its being set in the 1700s on the cusp of the Revolutionary War.  Yes, the characters–Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards in North America–are paper-thin, but the story is a sturdy grabber and the details are engaging.  Disturbing too:  boy, could the Indians be shockingly brutal!

In Between the Lines (1977), directed by Joyce Micklin Silver, pleasing performances issue from John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Stephen Collins, Jill Eikenberry and others. Thanks to Silver, though, Eikenberry looks almost unattractive, and so does the satisfactory Gwen Welles except for her bare bosom.

The flick is about the worldly concerns of workers at an underground newspaper, the Mainline, in Boston. (Heard’s character is a Damn Good Writer.) Although I was often entertained by it, I found very little of it to be believable. It ain’t the gold we would like to see from Silver.