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Gilly-13
Reviews
Astrid et Raphaëlle: Invisible (2020)
'B' in German notation is b flat
So, although 'h' is used to represent 'B' in German musical notation, the letter 'B' is used also, but it represents 'b flat'.
So Bach's name in German musical notation would be B (ti-flat), A (la), C (do), h (ti). Those four notes are only separated by halftone intervals, so A-B-h-C would be a chromatic sequence and truly a riddle to harmonize in the baroque idiom.
However, the progression presented by Bach's, B-A-C-h (b flat-A-C-B), name consists of two halftone drops which could be easily harmonized by the dominant chord to the sub-dominant (B to A, both thirds of their respective chord), and the tonic chord to the tonic with flatted seventh (C to h). That final chord, C7, is a rather bluesy usage in the key of C, but can be used in baroque counterpoint in transition to the sub-dominant F triad or in a transient key change to the key of the sub-dominant which is not unusual.
I love this series for very obvious reasons.
Remember the Night (1939)
I see why Sturges was furious
If you're watching this to see an example of Preston Sturges screen writing, forget it. The director wrung the humor out of typical Sturges satire and presented us with a maudlin mixture of folksy clichés, mixed metaphors, and dragged-out stereotypes--racial and political--in an attempt to twist it into a pre-war quasipatriotic homage to down-home "middle America".
The biggest criminal in this petty crime attempted melodrama is the director, Mitchell Leisen, for grinding all the edges off of Sturges satire. In the process, Leisen also manages to neutralize the romantic chemistry that actors like McMurray, and certainly Stanwyck, are capable of generating and suffocating their art in a cheesy small-town high school morality play.
Red Notice (2021)
Deduct five stars for Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds singlehandedly destroyed a great action film. Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot had are excellent action stars and they had good chemistry. Both were more than capable of providing all the comedic relief this movie needed without the fatuous stumble-bum antics that appear to make up the sum total of Reynolds's acting talent.
So bad I actually wondered if the producers had taken pity on the writers who brought Jar Jar Binks to world of cinema and given them work.
Otherwise, solid action film with good writing (if you factor out JarJar Reynolds's lines), and a credible plot line. Of course the action scenes are completely INcredible which makes it a 21st century action film.
Blue Bayou (2021)
writer/director/star never works
He a motion picture going on for about an hour-and-a-half, then it fell into the self-indulgent pitfall that awaits writer/director/stars. It was heavy with emotion, and seemed to be handling it well for the first 90 minutes or so. But the last half hour consisted mostly of the writer/director/star's profile filling the screen with some monotonous background music and nothing kept happening.
There was a flashback, some money in an envelope, some running back and forth. . . All for an irresolute non-ending with characters lost in the never-ending writer/director/star's profile sequence.
Good start . . . Goes nowhere.
The Old Man (2022)
Don't start watching this!
The outcome is predictable in 2 episodes but is dragged out excruciatingly in dry, argumentative recitations.
If you're seduced by the dogs, they inexplicably disappear at the most incongruous moment and are ultimately abandoned completely in a nameless kennel for the climactic episodes.
The Old Man: VII (2022)
I knew the secret at episode 2
Why did I have to watch two old emoters squabble for 200 desert miles in a Land Rover?
What everyone else said about wasted talent on a downward spiral to nowhere is absolutely true.
Quantico (2015)
Fast Times at FBI High
Followed through half the first season but it never rose above intense competitive intrigues of the Quantico Class of 2015 Senior Prom Theme Committee.
Six Minutes to Midnight (2020)
No possible tension because it made no sense
Am I to believe Ilse was going to shoot to death 20 well conditioned young women with a .22 handgun that held 8 rounds? Were they going to line up 3 abreast and wait to be killed?
What was the relationship between Ilse and Gretel? Just hair brushing? Why was Gretel standing between to people pointing guns?
The phone booth on a dirt road at the edge of the cornfield was simply too much to grant cinematic license for.
Judi Dench's attempt at emanating sufficient maternal magnetism to keep 20 patriotic German girls from their patriotic families on the eve of war was utterly unconvincing.
What happened to bus driver Broadbent?
How was a twin-engine Junker transport plane with a 100-ft wing span going to land between two columns of flare wielding girls standing 10 ft apart?
There was no access to the purposely chosen remote beach by car. After seeing the transport plane from the car as it was making its final approach to landing, Izzard and Dench could never have slogged over the coastal cliff and appeared on the beach in time.
Once the RAF intercepted the German transport plane, the attempt to generate tension was transparently silly because the movie was essentially over.
I spent most of the movie shaking my head in disbelief wondering what on Earth these characters were trying to do, and why.
Oh, 3 stars only because it was beautifully filmed. And ... yawn.
Rebecka Martinsson: Rendrängen: Del 1 (2020)
Zacharias is much better suited for this role
Especially since Rebecka finally made up her mind to return to her roots. Sascha looks and acts like someone whose roots are actually in Kiruna.
Ida Engvol didn't look like someone who could make up her mind.
Rebecka Martinsson (2017)
Sascha Zacharias much more convincing
Liked the show with Ida Engvol, love it with Zacharias. Once the Rebecka character made her choice to stay in Kiruna, it was more credible to have her look like someone who could be from Kiruna played by an actor who could convincingly portray Rebekha as someone capable of making such a decision and sticking to it.
Incidentally, I'm a big fan of this two-episode format for presenting each sequential case.
The Rookie: Real Crime (2022)
What diggerz039 said.
This faux-documentary style is a terrible plot exposition method, x10 for a police investigation program, x10 squared when investigating the murder of the documentary producer.
At least the hairball of who killed Patrick Hayes is expelled.
Bodyguard (2018)
Most overwrought version of the red-wire/green-wire cliche ever
Suspect deluge culminating in ½ hour of the most overused suspense device in film.
Entire plot subsequently recited by people sitting in chairs.
Aged so badly as to be simply annoying.
Dominion (2014)
Couldn't overcome sloppy writing
Good premise, good actors, but the writing was done by a junior prom committee that couldn't agree on the color of crepe paper.
Lead actors portraying "higher angels" bickered between themselves for 20 episodes much the same way as the writers themselves must have done trying to decide what direction to take the story.
I gave it too many chances, and it never got two marbles going in the same direction.
A Suitable Boy (2020)
Mira Nair is a pure genius!
Very demanding story with regard to character development and allegorical complexity for both the director and her audience, but worth every ounce of effort in the end.
Every detail of intricate familial and cultural interrelationship, every sensuous landscape still, every change of focus, each and every subtle camera movement come together like a tsunami in the climactic scene in the courtyard at the end the trial.
Follow the detailed exposition carefully from the start because, like all masterworks, lead directly to coda with gravitational momentum.
Ms. Nair is well and truly a force of nature.
The Souvenir (2019)
I had to "solve" this film, but it was worth it.
Like many, I was bored and confused after viewing "The Souvenir", but I had recently watched and liked Joanna Hogg's "Unrelated" (2007), so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought it over. Like some other reviewers, something came to me the next day.
I'm not a "feeling" kind of guy, so I have to work to appreciate her method of getting across an emotional complex and the way she will use the whole film to lead to a pinpoint, deep-drill moment of emotional elucidation.
In "The Souvenir", I came to think she was portraying Julie as a sort of emotional vampire, vicariously using the troubled life of her lover, Anthony, to fill in the blanks of her previously vapid, upper-middle-class existence--borrowing some misery to give her enough empathy to be able to relate to less fortunate beings in order to fulfill her artistic ambition to be a filmmaker.
The hints are there: her frustrated attempt at a working-class documentary; the advice from more than one source, to work from her own experience--the thing she lacks; her insincere credulity at finding needlemarks on Anthony's arm (you were right, nobody is THAT naive), and again when her flat is ransacked; her blind eye to where he goes with the money he borrows from her--an employee of the British foreign office borrowing constantly from a no-income film student.
It occurred to me that this was the reason Joanna Hogg gave Honor Swynton Byrne her journals and materials from that time instead of a script in order to keep the actress as naive and unaware of her own motives as Hogg, herself, must have been at that age in this semi-autobiographical study.
Then there was the extended discussion of the murder scene in "Psycho". The iconic portrayal of a brutal stabbing without any depiction of the actual physical violence. Julie says little, but has the last word in the discussion, (from memory) "You don't see the actual killing, but you see the end result."
Congruently, you don't see Anthony's death, but the end results: the news of his overdose in the bathroom of an art gallery and the lack of remorse on Julie's part, contrasted with the excellent expression of grief by Tilda Swynton, the enormously talented mother of the character, as well as the actress,.
And then the solution came to me when I rememberd the "Joanna Hogg moment"--that magnificent shot where Swynton Byrne turns her concentration from directing a film--the attainment of her film student goal--and glares impassively, directly, and most un-naively into Joanna Hogg's camera.
Now, we all knew that was meant to be very cinematically significant, but I honestly didn't understand the significance until I solved the rest of the movie--that final, unblinking glare at the audience was Julie saying, "Yeah, I'm an upper class brat, and I got what I wanted. TFB if my junkie boyfriend died."
And that realization with the memory of the defiant glare from her pallid, emotionless face made my blood run cold just as my mail carrier plucked the DVD from my mailbox the next day.
I won't watch it again, but I recommend that the bored and confused give it some reconsideration.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine: He Said, She Said (2019)
Stephanie Beatrix - director
Very interesting to see how skillfully Beatrix gave Brauer and Fumero opportunities to show their acting talent while maintaining the comedic integrity of the program.
In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed (2004)
All Faith and No Facts
This kind of religious rhapsodizing should be reserved for celebrating phenomena of a truly spiritual nature and not political propaganda. "Song of Bernadette" works for the spiritual life of a Spanish peasant--not for the governor of California. It's telling that the production company, Leo McWatkins, is headed by Tim Watkins, former CFO of Viguerie Companies (see his bio at the McWatkins web site). Viguerie accepted responsibility and paid penalties for election-law violations and mail fraud for bilking senior citizens of "campaign contributions" on religious pretexts--contributions which it then turned around and used to campaign against the very Social Security system that supported the senior-citizen contributors. (US v American TARGET, 4th Circuit, MISC-99-56-MC) (see also, "Please Mr. Postman", National Review, 6/20/86, David Brooks) "In the Face of Evil" is another example of the same old shell game: exploiting religion and spirituality to serve the political agenda of the "new right". And, no, Michael Moore's guerrilla-documentary style is no justification for this kind of corporate collusion among investment-broker/film-directors and mass-marketer/producers to spin politics in religious terms.
The Constant Gardener (2005)
Utter junk
Every 5th movie made in the last five years or so has been produced in this junk style of quasi-artistic film-making characterized by erratic photography and Cunard editing masquerading as tension and suspense in a screenplay that runs the risk of being discovered as devoid of plot if presented in sequence or photographed in an intelligible manner.
Why!? To simulate reality? If anyone's life actually occurs in such an obscure and disjointed manner, then the anti-depressants aren't doing their job (I mean the directors').
When Spielberg filmed the Normandy invasion this way, it was an achievement of craft that brought the experience home to the viewer with unparalleled impact. Filming every scene since Private Ryan, however--whether of a lone actor getting into a taxi or two inept ones in an awkward love scene--in this same frenetic manner does not substitute for "art" or "chemistry" when the actors and direct have so glaringly not provided it during the filming of the scene.
I dearly wish that those who are adept at naming film styles would please acknowledge and name this abysmal, fumbling mode so that those of us who would not rent, lease, purchase, or otherwise cross the street for this kind of product would be mercifully warned away by the advertising.
Le salaire de la peur (1953)
Good cinema, but unintentionally comical.
This is an example of film with great cinematic and artistic appeal but one that is uproariously funny if you've ever worked a day in your life. I understand these expatriates weren't supposed to be masters of common carriage, but, if not for the life-and-death tragedy, this might have been shortened to an episode of the Howard, Fine, and Howard Delivery Service. "That can of nitroglycerine is for the OTHER wall, you dummy. <slap, slap>"
I had to work hard to concentrate on the more profound issues this film addressed, and it did a well-photographed, insightful job of addressing those compelling issue of that post-war era of film making (e.g., personal courage, capitalist colonialism, and, less successfully, gender issues). The hardest job of the film for me, however, was not delivering the nitro, but overlooking the hilariously inept antics in which this zany little troupe of down-and-outers-fallen-on-hard-times got themselves entangled in the physical aspects of the plot.
No, a square handkerchief lying in the road has no meaning whatsoever to any truck driver in any country. No, a bumpy road is not smoother at 40 m.p.h. No, you don't stand behind the tailgate of a truck while directing the driver to back over you. No, you can't chip a 30-inch deep hole in a rock with a spare crankshaft. No, porous rock with visible cracks won't hold nitroglycerine like a cocktail glass. No, you can't tie a knot in wire rope. No, you don't suck fluid, especially the highly explosive variety, into a syphon tube with your mouth. No, the explosion of a truckload of nitroglycerine would not leave a pond-size depression, it would remove the entire face of the slope. No, crude oil is not the consistency of cafe au lait. And no, carrying an open jerry can of nitroglycerine precariously for several hundred yards PAST its cover AND the truck it was nested in is not suspenseful, it's frustratingly stupid.
If you can get past the unintentional physical slapstick, however, there is an underlying good movie, although implausibly scripted to the point of absurdity.
Jing Ke ci Qin Wang (1998)
Exceptionally beautiful imagery
Chen Kaige gives us magnificent depth of atmosphere. Yes, it's a 'period piece', but Chen's artistic use of imagery makes it something more. The actors often behave like players using the stylized diction, postures and facial expressions of Peking Opera. All the actors in a scene play to the 'back wall' even when addressing each other. They are like spirits of the past enunciating with powerful clarity a story with urgent meaning for those in the present. Combined with close attention to scale and masterful cinematography indoors and out, "Jing ke ci qin wang" is a stunning tale told with great reverence in its own idiom that captivates completely.
Scott of the Antarctic (1948)
Woefully inaccurate
The movie is slightly redeemed by John Mills's performance, also a great team of cinematographers. This was done at a time when Scott was still considered, in England, to be something of a hero rather than the bungling martinet he was. The film is rife with romantic inaccuracies. E.g., the schoolgirl who makes the touchingly brave effort to contribute her pennies represented, in reality, a concerted campaign by Kathleen Scott to raise money for the expedition from English schoolchildren after Scott was snubbed by the Royal Geographical Society; Oates, the cavalryman, was disgusted with the condition of the Manchurian ponies purchased by Meares, the dog expert, who warned Scott he had no knowledge of horseflesh; Lieut. 'Teddy' Evans did not *ask* permission for his 4-man party to leave their skis behind, his party was singled out and *ordered* by Scott to depot their skis--an order which Lieut. Evans questioned vigorously; on the ill-fated return journey, Scott was not nearly so solicitous of P.O. 'Taff' Evans's weakening condition as is portrayed and essentially abandoned Taff at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier; and, no mention is made of the rampant symptoms of scurvy that affected the second return party and the polar party--a touchy subject with the Royal Navy.
Perhaps the most offensive inaccuracy is the portrayal of the great Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen as a monosyllabic lout. "I like doogs", he repeats. In reality, Nansen never used dogs himself; it was Amundsen who learned to drive dogs from the natives of Arctic Canada on his Gjoa expedition through the Northwest Passage. What Nansen tried to impress upon Scott was: a) the foolishness of testing motor sledges in the relative warmth of a Norwegian snow field in spring; and, b) the importance of skis, which Scott, up to this point, had no plans to use. It was only by virtue of a demonstration staged by conspiracy between Nansen and Kathleen Scott (the two later had a brief affair), that Scott was persuaded to take the Norwegian skier, Gran, along to teach his men to use skis. Scott then equipped his expedition with skis, took Gran to Antarctica, but never gave him the opportunity to instruct his men.
For a more accurate and far less romanticized enactment, take the time to find and see "The Last Place on Earth", a 7-hour BBC documentary from 1985 based on Roland Huntford's book, "Scott and Amundsen".
The Last Place on Earth (1985)
Excellent documentary drama
Roland Huntford's definitive saga of polar exploration, "Scott and Amundsen", is brought very faithfully to film in this 7-episode BBC series. Huntford was the former Scandinavian correspondent for London's "Observer", and his book was the first to debunk Scott's supposed heroic martyrdom.
Beautiful cinematography and several very solid performances by Sverre Anker Ousdal as the introspective and driven Amundsen; Martin Shaw nails the effete martinet, Scott; Michael Maloney is great as Scott's betrayed 2nd Officer, Teddy Evans; Toralv Maurstad as the outspoken Norwegian polar veteran, Hjalmer Johanssen; and, Richard Morant as, W.E.G. Oates, the army officer in a Navy environment and apparently the only man in Scott's party capable of independent thought.
The Volga Boatman (1926)
There's a good one-hour movie here somewhere
DeMille's tendency to overstate is unbridled, making this a little overdrawn even for a silent epic. Every scene is an epic unto itself and staged as such. It unfolds coherently with DeMille's relentlessly chronological epic momentum, but it drags in many places for lack of editing. Boyd is definitely charismatic in the role that launched his career as a silent matinee idol. His blue eyes rivet the camera even in black-and-white. The pure idealism that he brought to bear in over 50 subsequent stints as Hopalong Cassidy radiates from his Wagnerian portrayal of this bolshevik boatman who cannot betray what he knows in his heart--the universal cowboy hero of every Saturday morning in any get-up. The electricity is there between Boyd and his soon-to-be bride in real life, Elinor Fair, as the princess-in-love-with-the-noble-peasant. Julia Faye adds needed sensuous energy with her tawdry portrayal of the Tartar peasant girl (who also lusts after Boyd, of course). All the elements of human emotion against an epic backdrop are here, and DeMille develops them all as thoroughly as the themes in any of Bach's "Two and Three-Part Inventions". Great piano score from the original cue notes, too, b/t/w.
Black Jack (1950)
Brave attempt at a post-war Eurofilm
A Spanish-French-UK production with a cast about ready to fade into either oblivion or television. Dalio turns in the best performance as the weasel captain of a tramp steamer, but an echo of his earlier work under greats like Jean Renoir. Moorehead is also deliciously double-crossing. Saunders is caught out of his element trying to create a character similar to Harry Lime in The 3rd Man--the shady, disillusioned post-war 'businessman'. Bogart might have made this role succeed; however, none could equal the archtypal performance by Welles as Harry Lime. As it is, Saunders is not credible as a conflicted entrepreneur and completely unbelievable as a wheezing love interest for Patricia Roc, herself well past the ingenue stage. Herbert Marshall turns in the same performance he will soon do weekly in Times Square Playhouse for American television yawn. Great moments of outdoor cinematography in the all-natural sound stage of the Spanish Mediterranean by the director who gave us Pepe LeMoko.
Humoresque (1946)
Not much of a movie, but great cinema
Isaac Stern's music, Oscar Levant's wit, and Joan Crawford's lower lip raise this an order of magnitude above just another story of doomed love. Seriously, Crawford's performance is magnificent--even better, as many have said, than her portrayal of Mildred Pierce in the preceding year--but, everything pales in the relentless glare of that urethane lip gloss. I expected more from Clifford Odets's screenwriting and Jean Legulesco's direction was somewhat artificial even for its time.