Reviews by Al

After watching several French films, I’ve come to realize the French are a different sort.  Not in a bad way, but just different.  Here a French police woman reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, is an ex-alcoholic, and was a mother, before her son died at a young age.  Life is tough it seems.  The young lieutenant learns the ropes with her and other detectives as they chase a couple murderers.  The divergence from Hollywood and Hollywood’s tendency towards star power rather than story is refreshing.

I didn’t recognize Olivier in this film by Hitchcock.  I suppose he doesn’t have a very distinctive face.  Older, but not unattractive here.  Joan Fontaine was very young and pretty and she plays an innocent quite well.  Hollywood code required that the film be changed from the du Maurier book in a significant way.  I actually like the film the way it is.  But the book is much darker and quite different from the film.  I wonder that Hitchcock might have been quite disappointed about not being able to take more liberties with the film, but apparently he was somewhat micro-managed by producer David O’Selznick.  There is a lesbian story-line which surprisingly survived the censors.

Leo acquired a white South African accent for this movie.  It’s just so sexy.  Unclear to me why, but it just works for me.  The movie is at times obviously written from the white man’s point of view as almost all movies are.  The reactions of the actors to the extreme violence of the situation is a bit too understated.  Perhaps everyone in that region is inured to the violence and the way blacks attack other blacks in the movie.  Meanwhile the white interlopers go nearly untouched and actually massacre a huge number of blacks — rebels, but nevertheless — in the process of going after the big pink diamond.

Hounsou, DiCaprio and Connelly are pretty good here.  The story is passable, though I found the ending a bit nonsensical. 

Horrifically bad film even with John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons.  My DVD player nearly broke with all the fast forwarding.

It won at Sundance and deservedly.  The writer/directors did a reasonable job banging out the very good script in a short amount of time because apparently they got the funding for the movie before they had a script.  I did enjoy the one gay storyline which is at least sensible and refreshingly non-tragic.

Dench is amazing here as the manipulative lesbian — I sometimes wish people would stop writing bad storylines about gays and lesbians.  She falls in love with the new young and married w/2 kids art teacher, Blanchett, who herself has fallen in love with a young 10th year (grade) student — a boy.  The story seems so wrong and unlikely with Dench’s character’s gaydar 180 degrees out of phase, but it’s like watching a spectacular accident happen.  Despite the terrible story, the acting is quite good.

A disjointed and confusing film.  If the purpose was to confuse so that you’ll buy the DVD, it might work, but I don’t think further viewings will help.  Anyway, Matt Damon is getting old, and his boyish face isn’t taking it too gracefully.  His dour portrayal of a supposed legend of American intelligence, Edward Wilson, seems a bit too understated.  Still you get an idea of a paranoid man with a constant poker face.  Matt hides his furtive smiles as best he can.  The movie goes on for quite awhile.  Angelina is a huge woman.  She even dwarfs the reasonably tall Matt here, but her  more passive role seems to not quite suit her.

Another movie with Josh Hartnett.  Hey 80 points right there.  But it’s also an adaptation of book by James Ellroy — the same guy who wrote L.A. Confidential.  Scarlett Johansson is also great here.  A long film, but nicely written and acted.  I loved the moment of ‘man-oh-man’ surprise where Hartnett’s character realizes he’s been deceived.  It retells of a true story of a gruesome murder in Hollywood the late 1940s.  Seemed much better than a similar recent movie, Hollywoodland. 

*Spoiler alert*  Gay interest: One character has his gayness hinted at.  But of course, he later dies.  This reminds me of LA Confidential where the gay cop, played by Kevin Spacey, gets killed (although before dying he provides the hint which nails the real villian).  Perhaps Ellroy has something against gay folks, eh?

Interesting points about games and television of today.  The common wisdom is that both are mindless and mind numbing.  In fact, quite the reverse is true posits the author.  Today’s games require quite a lot of thought and problem solving.  Goals and rules are vague and require probing to understand.  Players learn to deal with the unknown.  Reality television involves you in a world of complex social interactions, deceptions, and strategies.  In fact not just reality shows but, dramas today also have very complex social worlds with many characters.  Much is hidden and requires the audience to figure out.  With my lack of social ability, it finally makes sense why I don’t really take to the reality shows or dramas.  He claims even recent sitcoms such as Seinfeld and the Simpsons have grown more dense and sophisticated.  Meanwhile, the author says there is a place for reading too, it’s just that these other media aren’t as absolutely bad as you might think.

This book surveys all the world cultures for homosexuality.  For some reason the most fascinating culture for me was that of the ancient Greeks.  I guess because the open attitude and acceptance about sexuality seems so different from even our supposedly advanced American culture of today that it is difficult to comprehend.  Attraction to the same sex was openly practiced and viewed as a natural part of range of human behavior.  Heterosexuals experienced and understood same-sex beauty and attraction and didn’t force themselves to suppress it or deny feeling it; in fact, it seems almost encouraged or special effort was made to develop this ’skill’. 

Yet reading on, the idea of dominance did exist.  It was acceptable for a person of high position to be the ‘top’, but never the ‘bottom’.  This is an attitude which I think still exists in Latin America or the more chauvinistic parts of the world today.  Young males would take gifts and even money for the service to older males, and this is not unheard of today as well.   So this Greek way perhaps isn’t perhaps as completely revolutionary as it might seem.  But I still find it astounding to see pottery with the fairly explicit acts depicted.  But never have I seen Greek pottery with explicit heterosexual acts depicted.  This is either puzzling or I never noticed this more pedestrian pairing or ancient artists never bothered to paint it.  Or perhaps all the ancient artists were gay.

The book does mention that pairings of males of the same age were also known in ancient Greece.  So not all the gay activity was  between older males and younger males.