Suspicion

I'm on a Hitchcock spree. Suspicion is supposed to be one of his best, and after having watched it, I agree.

Warning: spoilers.

I like movies that play with genre conventions, or switch genres. Watching Suspicion, you can't tell whether Cary Grant is a bad guy and a murderer, or a good guy and not a murderer. So we think it's thriller or maybe a psychological thriller.

As it turns out, he's not a murderer, but he is a bad guy (redeemed by the love of a good woman), so the movie turns out to be a melodrama. Nicely played, Hitchcock!

Unbeknownst to me beforehand, Suspicion is also a landmark in the portrayal of LGBTQ characters (the following is an excerpt from Great Moments in Gayness: "Suspicion"):

Johnnie (Cary Grant) and Lina (Joan Fontaine) visit Johnnie's friend Isobel, a writer of murder mysteries. Also attending dinner is Phyllis. Based on their familiarity and the way they serve dinner, it is obvious the two women live together. Moreover, while Isobel ("Izzy") dresses as a British lady should, Phyllis ("Phil" to her partner) is in a man's suit and tie, with a man's hairstyle  

And this is what's so glorious. Phil and Izzy aren't dangerous. They're not villains. 

They're not the subject of a joke, nor exaggerated, nor horrifying. They simply are. A butch/femme couple, in 1941, relaxing at home, entertaining a straight couple, chatting about books. Fifty years later, Basic Instinct inspired protest from the LGBT community, because it was still almost impossible to see gays and lesbians in a movie unless they were killers or crazy, suicidal or deranged or tragic or pornified, or—best case scenario—the wacky sexless neighbor. 

Phil and Izzy are just an ordinary gay couple. They're not in the movie because they're gay, and their gayness is never mentioned. That they're butch/femme—probably the least-represented type of queer couple in the media—just adds to my pleasure.

Elysium

In the past few years there have been quite a few sci-fi movies that have a right-wing political subtext (see here and here). The good news is that I finally came across one that has a left-ish subtext. The bad news is that it's kind of a crap movie.

Is there anything good about this movie? Yes, the premise and the action and the effects and the acting are all decent.  So why do I think it's crap? Two reasons: unnecessary horrible violence, and terrible politics. I won't say anything more about the violence. If you like that sort of thing, good for you. I don't.

Regarding the politics of this movie, my statements so far may seem a little incoherent. On the one hand I'm glad to finally see a big-budget Hollywood movie that leans to the left, but on the other I said its politics are crap. I think both are true, and I'll explain why.

Fundamentally, the movie is an extended argument in favor of free health care and loose immigration policies, both of which I'm also in favor of (the first more than the second). The problem is that it offers no good reasons for these positions, and so it won't change anybody's mind. I hate bad arguments as much as I hate bad policies. I think there are good arguments to be made regarding these issues, but Elysium does not make them. Maybe that's inherent in the medium. Maybe I'm expecting too much substance from a mere Hollywood movie.

I dislike the message of this movie for the same reason I dislike most of Frank Capra's movies: in both cases, the message is that bad policies are caused by the bad character of certain people in power. So if we just replace those bad people, everything will be fine. This is almost never the case. Bad policies are a consequence of how power works. And there is a certain ideology that goes along with that deference to power, and that ideology is attractive to a lot of people. Like a lot of liberals, this movie does not really engage with conservatism or libertarianism, rather it tells us that those ideologies are based on the bad character of the people who hold them, and that's the end of the story. Crap! Crap I say!

What about the women in the movie? Well, there are only two: Jodie Foster and Alice Braga. I've always disliked Jodie Foster, I'm not sure why. And I though Ms. Braga was adequate in her part, but nothing more. 

Speaking of the Jodie Foster character, she seems to be following along in a recent trend of making the bad guy boss a woman. I've seen this in Divergent and the Scorch Trials, and it's getting tired.

And another thing: Jodie Foster does a speech that's a direct ripoff of Jack Nicholson's "you can't handle the truth!" speech in A Few Good Men. And just as with the Nicholson character, Foster's speech strikes a chord. It seems to me that in both these movies, they gave the villain such a good speech that it undercuts the point of the movie.

The Scorch Trials

Conservatives like to point out that Hollywood does not reflect the values of mainstream America, and I think there's some truth to that. But it looks like things are changing.

My twelve-year-old son wanted to see the Scorch Trials. It's the second in a series of movies, adapted from a series of Young Adult novels. I guess the series has been billed as "the Hunger Games for boys," which seems accurate. We had seen and enjoyed the first movie in the series (the Maze Runner).

My son liked the Scorch Trials, and I enjoyed it while I was watching it. It was nice and action-y without being too violent. But thinking about it afterward, I realized it's very very similar to another movie I've seen and reviewed recently: Divergent. Not only are there similar stories and characters, but these two movies share a conservative world view. They actually deal with philosophical ideas, so I am appreciative that there's something going on under the surface, even though I don't agree with the conclusions.

Divergent and the Scorch Trials share some overt similarities:

• Set in a dystopian future (with pockets of civilization among large areas of lawlessness, ruins, and filth),
• a ragtag bunch of teens
• (who share some special trait which may help save the world, but which keeps them from fitting in)
• and who fight against an oppressive power structure
• (the leader of which is a woman).

Going a little deeper, we find that the underlying message of both movies is: don't trust the liberals......their philosophy may sound good, but it's morally wrong, and will lead to more suffering and injustice (it's bad in theory and in practice). In the case of Divergent, the liberal idea that the movie demonizes is that government knows best, and people should accommodate to government power for their own good. Now, maybe there is some liberal somewhere who believes this, but I don't and I don't know anyone who does. It's not really a liberal idea, it's a conservative caricature of a liberal idea.

With the Scorch Trials, the demonized idea is utilitarianism (or rather, a cartoon version of utilitarianism). Here's how it works (warning: spoilers). The zombie apocalypse has happened (caused by a virus or something), our hero and his plucky companions are immune, and the key to finding a cure is in their blood. A big bad organization has taken them prisoner, and is doing non-consensual and horrifying experiments on similar teens, in an effort to find a cure. It's not clear if the bad guys (known somewhat unsubtly as WCKD) are in fact the government or what, but they might as well be. They're the oppressive power in the movie.

So, if the bad guys hold people against their will and use their precious bodily fluids to help others, it's a form of forced re-distribution. The bad guys are taking liberty (and life) from some individuals, to increase the overall well-being of society. It's the perfect nightmare for conservatives and libertarians. And I have to give some points to the writers, for making this bogyman philosophy attractive enough that one of the main characters falls for it and betrays her fellow teens. The bad ideas are not plainly wrong, they're seductive.

The trouble is, pretty much nobody believes in this terrible version of utilitarianism (just as with Divergent, nobody believes that individuals are so malleable that they can and should be forced to serve the government). The right-wing types conflate coercive taking of money (that is to say, taxes) with coercive taking of bodies and lives. It's a confusion I've seen many times in debates with the right. They don't want to pay taxes, so they convince themselves that taxes are literally slavery.

Oh, by the way, the author of Divergent (the book) is a born-again Christian, and the author of the Scorch Trials (the book) is a Mormon. I am not surprised. [I don't know anything about the screenwriters, and I'm too lazy to do any research on them. Below, I'll speak of  "the writers," conflating the book version of the Scorch Trials and the movie version.]

Okay, so now we've looked at the most obvious layer of the Scorch Trial movie (plot and characters), then we went a little deeper at the philosophical points that the writers intended. But now we're going even deeper, into the writers' subconscious commitments. Now we're out of the realm of philosophy, and into the realm of identity. These observations will necessarily be more speculative than what I've discussed so far.

I hate to do this, but my honest reading of the movie is that at the most fundamental level, it's a straight white male's anxiety about his country being taken over by women, gays, and people of color.

The two main female characters are the bad guy boss (played by Patricia Clarkson) and our hero's love interest (played by Kaya Scodelario). Now the Clarkson character is interesting. She's not a cruel person, in fact her intentions are good. (There is an actually evil character for contrast, played by the guy who plays Littlefinger in Game of Thrones.....again I'm too lazy to look him up, so sue me.) Her problem is not that she has an evil heart, it's that she's a true believer in an evil philosophy (that the end justifies the means). Typical woman, right? A soft heart, but a soft head to go a long with it. And the Scodelaria character also buys into the evil philosophy, and ends up betraying her friends (all for the greater good, of course). So, the female characters are not evil, they're weak, and it would have been better if they'd never been placed in a position to act on their feelings. Just as Eve betrayed Adam and brought sin into the world. Surely you can see why women in power are dangerous? Or so this movie would like us to believe.

There is only one character who seems to be anything other than heterosexual. Of course he is amoral, a drug dealer, and a liar. But worse than that is the fact that that he's tortured by the good guys, in a scene I found very disturbing in a movie aimed at teens. None of the characters had any qualms about torturing this guy. I suppose that's right in line with the conservative willingness to torture people who are suspected of not being on our side. Interestingly, the seemingly gay character is not tortured by our (white) hero, or by his original companions, but by the Giancarlo Esposito character. In the movie, as in real life, the "good guys" support torture, but we're too sensitive to actually do it ourselves, so we outsource the dirty work to some brown people (because they're really just savages, I guess).

Speaking of brown people, I've saved my most speculative point for last. In the movie, the US is mostly a huge deserted wasteland. Ah, but it's not deserted, really. There are......zombies!  They don't call them that, they call them plague victims or something. So if you get bit or scratched by one of them, you turn into one. I believe this is a symbol for the US being "taken over" by Mexican immigrants. They're savages, they're dirty, they're violent, and they must be avoided or gotten rid of. This fits in perfectly with the unconscious racism so many conservatives feel. I'll never forget the time I was listening to a couple of conservatives talk about illegal immigration. They made a lot of good points, but the most striking part of that nigh for me was that at different points in the conversation, immigrants were said to "breed like cockroaches" and to "spread like cancer." This attitude of disgust and anxiety seems to me what drives these folks' policy preferences. And it seems to me it's also what's at the heart of the Scorch Trials.

Oh, I almost forgot!  This is a shallow movie review, and all I'm really concerned with is feminine charms.  So with no further ado, the women I love in this movie. First, Patricia Clarkson. I think she's just fabulous!  She, along with Stanley Tucci, is one of the best things about one of my favorite movies of all time, Easy A.

And then there's Lili Taylor!  Her movies seem to be few and far between, but there's always something about her that's very grounded and real. She seems like a good person. Maybe it's just acting, I don't know.

Last and least, there's Kaya Scodelaria. She's merely gorgeous.

About Time

Oh, my gosh, I loved this movie so much!  I'm not saying it's the best movie ever, just that I personally loved the experience of watching it.

Why, you ask? I don't know...I could point out that it's about time travel, it's set in the UK, and has a gorgeous female lead. But I can imagine another movie that had all those ingredients, that I didn't like nearly as much.

I think the main thing I liked about About Time is just that it has such a good feel about it: sad, compassionate, wise, and overall very positive. The feel-good hit of this week, for me.

Apropos of nothing: this is the third movie time travel movie I've seen which starred Rachel McAdams. Isn't that odd?

Neighbors

I'm getting tired of Seth Rogen. He's everywhere, doing everything. And I'm sorry, he's funny and talented, but not that funny and talented.

I chuckled a few times. The only thing that made me laugh out loud was a running gag in which airbags stolen out of Seth's wife's car turn up in the darnedest places (you'll see).

And speaking of the wife....oh my!  I had never seen her before, but I hope to see more of her. Nudge nudge wink wink. Rose Byrne is her name.

Divergent

Republican propaganda, but still mildly entertaining. In the (post-apocalyptic) Midwest, a plucky young woman challenges the powerful forces that deny human nature and want to control everybody "for their own good"....and she finds a hot guy in the bargain!

Kate Winslet is wonderful as the Hillary/Obama bad guy character.

Ashley Judd is wonderful as the Christ-like mom.

Shailene Woodley is...okay, I guess. Her hair is wonderful.

The star of this movie is actually Shailene Woodley's hair.

Taken

How do I loathe this movie? I can't even count the ways: it's racist and sexist, and has gigantic plot holes. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect much from an action movie. But it can't be so fucking stupid that it detracts from the action itself!  (Which in this case, was adequate.)

But the worst thing is that it's not really an action movie. At heart it's basically a throwback to a type of revenge porn that I thought had died. In this case, the hero (no, the protagonist) is totally justified in perpetrating any outrage, because he's got to rescue his virginal daughter from white slavery. The movie makes sure you understand that she's a virgin. It makes the bad guys that much worse, and that much more deserving of the violence they receive. Look, I understand violence in self-defense, I really do. But what we have here is a character who is not above gratuitous torture and murder, even when it doesn't help him get his daughter back. In one particularly gruesome scene, he tortures a bad guy to death. In another, he shoots an innocent woman to force her husband to give up some information.

This kind of thing is not really about self-defense, or justice. It's not really even about revenge. It's about blood lust. Blood lust comes first for the people who like this sort of thing, but they can't admit it to themselves, so they cover their nakedness with the fig leaf of revenge.

There are lots of bad guys in Taken, and of course the worst ones of all are Arabs. Of course they are. It's like every single trope was calculated to pass muster with Sarah Palin.

Oh, I almost forgot, the one girl who actually likes sex? She gets killed, just like in some stupid horror movie from the 1970s.

Who are the poor unfortunate females who got enmeshed in this crapfest?  Famke Janssen for one, who I must admit I used to have a huge crush on.

"Used to"?   Sorry, Famke, it's not you, it's me.

And a bunch of other people. I don't have the gumption to write one more word about this dumb movie.   But don't listen to me. If you want to buy this movie, here's a helpful handy link: BUY.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

I think Steve Coogan is very very funny. His Alan Partridge character makes me laugh out loud. And I have a tender spot in my heart for Alan's longsuffering personal assistant Lynn, played wonderfully by Felicity Montagu.

But but but. I always have a big "but," don't I?

The characters are great, but the story is not. In fact, it's kind of a hard movie to watch. Alan is easy to laugh at when there's not much at stake, but I felt very uncomfortable watching someone with a shotgun pointed right at his head through half the movie.

But hey, I have to feed my kids, so buy this movie right now by clicking on this link.

Paddington

Went today with wife and three kids. I was expecting to hate it, and I loved it! Very visually inventive, nice story, excellent cast. And it's set in London. A sort of hyper-realistic steampunk London, but still.

The story? It's basically The Blind Side meets The Golden Compass, with a sprinkling of Nanny McPhee.

The female cast are uniformly wonderful. There's Julie Walters as the elderly aunt, and Madeleine Harris as the teenage daughter.

But the standouts are Nicole Kidman as the villain, and Sally Hawkins as the mom. I love them both, for different reasons.

Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned

No time for a proper review, here are some notes:

• Only a few years between these two movies, but what a difference! Two different worlds:
• Village of the Damned: 
• genteel (George Sanders, for God's sake)
• bucolic (set in a picture perfect English village)
• male supremacist (face slapping)
• heteronormative (despite Sanderss's gay-osity)
• traditional gothic plot (the good guys triumph)
• a fabulous dress, with a bustle and a huge bow
• Children of the Damned:
• oppressive (strangely deserted London)
• sex is confused and dangerous
• the two main characters appear to be gay
• the first mother is a shrieking harridan, all the other mothers are weak or otherwise problematic
• loss of agency: the primary female character is most often an automaton
• inability to communicate: the primary child character speaks only twice, both times briefly
• random events are more important than character (the accident that resolves the conflict)
• the plot is gothic stood on its head (the monsters turn out to be the good guys and we turn out to be the monsters)
• weird plot hole: why did the children return to their embassies, only to kill and then go back to the church?

 

Nightmare Alley

We had to get rid of cable TV, but at the same time we joined a gym, and the recumbent bikes have screens which feature live TV, including TCM!

So last night while exercising I caught part of Nightmare Alley. An odd little movie about carnies. I loved it, and I especially loved Colleen Gray, who I've never seen before. Very cute and pretty.

The Invention of Lying

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
- John Barth

I wanted to like this movie, and I didn't hate it, but.........it's really an example of heartfelt ineptitude. Sorry. The script, the production design, the sets, all bad bad bad. It's funny how you don't notice some things unless they're absent.

Jennifer Garner was unexpectedly...bearable.

Gravity

Warning!  Spoiler alert! If you haven't seen this movie, you should not read the rest of this post.  This is your last warning!

Only people as old as me will remember what a big deal the movie Alien was when it came out. For many reasons: the gritty realism of the ship, the "it's just a job" attitude of the crew, the biological, visceral horror of the monster(s). But the main thing was the fact that there was one survivor, and it was a woman. As hard as it might be to believe nowadays, that was a first, and it was a Big Deal.

Right from the first minute, Gravity invokes Alien.  There is a little prologue text, just a few lines, but it plays on the Alien catchphrase "in space, no one can hear you scream." Even the visual design of the title of Gravity is meant to remind us of Alien. Lots of space between the letters suggests the isolation of outer space.

The movie stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts. They're doing their astronaut thing, when suddenly and unexpectedly disaster strikes! Everyone else is killed, and Our Two Heroes are marooned in space. So far so good. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly Clooney dies! What a shock, we're only about a half hour into the movie!  We thought this was going to be the story of this gorgeous Hollywood couple, lost in space, overcoming the odds and triumphing....together.  But no.

So, but, here's the thing. He doesn't actually die. Or rather, he floats away and we're not sure what happens to him. We expect him to pop back up any minute. This is Hollywood, right?  And of course he does (suddenly and sort-of-unexpectedly), about an hour in. But that turns (unexpectedly) out to be just a dream.

So in the end we have a story of a terrible tragedy in space, people die one by one, the female character is the lone survivor at the end, and it's due to her smarts and determination. Sound familiar? It's the same story as Alien.

So that's the trick of the movie. It starts off as a story about multiple people, and ends up as a story about one person. One woman person. And the trick only works because of the casting. The male lead had to be a big star, so that we are expecting a love story. If it had been a minor star, someone on a lower tier of stardom than Sandra Bullock, we would have been prepared for the fact that the movie is a solo act.

But that's not what's remarkable. What's remarkable is that the story managed to surprise me, just as Alien did, all those years ago.

Here's a little eye candy.  I include it partly because I'm a Very Very Shallow Movie Reviewer, but also to show one more feature of Alien that's reproduced by Gravity. This is the scene in which Our Hero, after much struggle and hardship, reaches the (seeming) safety of an escape pod, strips down to her undies, and finally triumphs over her demon(s).

This is 40

My wife made me watch it. The things we do for love.

Or so I thought, as we were settling in. But right off the bat, this turned out to be one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. We were both laughing so hard at some points, we were gasping for breath. Just incredibly funny.

(I should mention that if you haven't been in a long term-relationship for years and years, it might not seem as funny. Which is one of the things I appreciated about this movie: it's for grown-ups. And which is probably why I didn't hear much about it. All the marketing budgets are aimed at a demographic that doesn't include me.)

This is 40 has an intriguing structure. The first half hour is just a bunch of vignettes, short character-driven scenes that have no past and no future. I was thinking you could have taken this whole section of the movie and rearranged the scenes, and it wouldn't have mattered. But as I'm thinking that, I'm also thinking that it's probably going to be like one of my favorite books, The Rains Came. In that book, and in this movie, the whole first part is all character, and no plot. It goes on for so long, you start thinking it's just going to character all the way through. Which would be fine, since I loved the characters so much. But then, when the plot finally does hit, it's like an earthquake.

Speaking of characters: first, there's the married couple whose relationship is at the heart of the movie. Played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (the wife of director Judd Apatow), who are both perfect at capturing the crazy mood changes that make up every marriage. Well mine, anyway. You hate each other, then you love each other (often simultaneously). Rinse and repeat. Then the other characters are added in, one at a time, like new themes in a symphony. Albert Brooks, John Lithgow, Megan Fox. All brilliant and hilarious. And two kids who are also wonderful (they're Mann's and Apatow's real life kids).

This is 40 is a sly movie, because first you get sucked in by the comedy and pathos, then everything you thought was about character turns out to drive the plot (it's what I like to call "good writing"). Finally, there's a big climactic party scene. In a lesser movie, this is where everything would have been wrapped up. But in this movie, it's just a feint, a deceptive cadence. It's as if there are two movies, and that's where the first one ends. Now the real deep shit begins, as characters begin to break down and go off the rails. Real life stuff. It's funny one minute and shitty and tragic the next. And of course everything resolves, a real cadence this time. And that's the end of the second movie.

Go, watch it.

The Innocents

I'm currently reading Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, a psychological ghost story. I love me some Victorian novels. This whole modern thing...I don't think it'll last. And post-modernism? Puh-lease. I guess I'm just an old poop.

But reading the story is making me remember the movie it was based on, which leads in turn to other movies, and other ideas, and I want to talk about those.

Cast me back down the years and the days of my youth. I'm eleven years old, and I want to ride my bike to the movies with my friend Billy Jewell. My mom says yes and draws me a map. To this day I remember the route we took through lovely El Cajon, California. I have that kind of mind. I can't remember the name of someone I met yesterday (or even their face), but I remember something random from 40 years ago, because it has to to with a map.

It must have been a Sunday. We ride and ride and ride and we finally get there and buy our tickets and go in. The movie comes on, it's called The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This is not a movie for kids. I don't know what me or my friend or my mom or the theater was thinking to let kids into this movie, but whatever. The movie is way over my head (as I know from having seen it a couple times as an adult). But there's one scene that is burned into my memory: the schoolgirl protagonist Sandy has gone to the house of her lover, a married painter, to sit for a portrait. Suddenly we the audience see that Sandy is modelling nude! She has lost her clothes and is lying on her side, her head resting on one hand. Naked. A beautiful naked teenage girl right there for all the world to see, including my eleven year old heterosexual self. The shot only lasted for one second or so, but needless to say it made a huge impression on me, and I've never forgotten it. Oh, and I got a traffic ticket on the way home, for riding my bike on the wrong side of the road. Who knew that was a thing? All in all, quite a day.

As is my wont, I became a little obsessed by the actress who played Sandy, and sort of followed her career, trying to catch every movie she was in that I could find. This was pre-internet, remember, so such opportunities were few and far between.

One such opportunity came a few years later, when my mom convinced my brother and sister and me to watch The Innocents, a black-and-white movie from 1961. We were scared shitless. It's a great movie, all old-fashioned suggestion, nothing overt or violent. It was also my first exposure to the idea of psychological horror. The protagonist, a young governess, starts seeing the ghosts of the previous governess and her lover, the valet of the absent master. Or does she? Maybe she's crazy. You get the idea. Deborah Kerr is just wonderful, as usual.

So, the governess has two young charges, a boy and a girl. The girl is played by...Pamela Franklin! It's her first movie role.

There's another movie I remember when I think of The Innocents. It's called The Haunting, and it's another one my mother persuaded us kids to watch. Another brilliant psychological thriller, shot in black and white (although it was made well after the start of the color era). Like The Innocents, The Haunting features a female protagonist who may or may not be mad. (I think of these movies in terms of "madness" rather than "insanity" or "mental illness." "Insanity" is a legal term and "mental illness" sounds so clinical. In these movies, the state of mind of the woman at the center of the story is above a social phenomenon. It's either a result or a cause of the sickness in her relationships with other people.)

Where were we? Oh yeah, so The Innocents is based on the book I'm reading now, The Turn of the Screw.

A few years after seeing The Innocents, I happened to stumble upon an odd little movie called The Night Comers. It stars Marlon Brando, and is a prequel to the events of The Innocents. It features lots of kinky sex. The two young children witnessed this, and that's what made them so twisted in the later, more famous story. It is not a great movie.

A few years after that, I watched another deservedly obscure little movie called The Night of the Following Day. Another non-very-good-movie, I only mention it because it starts Marlon Brando and Pamela Franklin. So there are three otherwise unrelated movies, each pair of which shares an actor or a story.

Odd, huh? These are the kind of things I think of, when it's late at night and I'm reading a ghost story.

Foyle's War

I love all things British. Or most things, anyway. I'm especially interested in Britain during and after the Second World War. So when my sister mentioned Foyle's War a year or so ago, it stuck in my mind, and I've finally got round to watching it. Foyle is a police detective in a small English town during the war. Last week I watched the series opener and last night the second episode.

I love this series. Love it, love it, love it. The characters, the acting, the pacing, the atmosphere, the period details. And the fact that the story is actually about values, about morality, about things that matter. The protagonists are real people, but above all they are decent people in a world that's full to overflowing with indecency.

There, that's my review.

Not really. First, I want to mention that one of the reasons I love the series is the cast. The star, Michael Kitchen, is absolutely brilliant. He does that understated English thing perfectly. And I like his driver, Samantha, played by Honeysuckle Weeks (what a name!). I like the character and the actress. (Can we still say "actress," or is everyone an "actor" now?) She's fresh-faced and plucky.

So, Britain during the War. Toward the end of the episode, one of the suspects is released from jail temporarily to help evacuate retreating British soldiers from the beach at Dunkirk in France. Apropos of nothing, I want to mention two other works which feature this famous incident of the War: the movie Mrs. Miniver, and the book The Snow Goose. I have some affection for both these works, but each is also problematic in interesting ways. If you haven't seen/read them, do so now.

One more thing. So...Foyle's War is ostensibly a police procedural / murder mystery. In last night's episode, for instance, there are two murders, lots of suspects and clues, even uncertainty about who was the intended victim. At the end, our hero Foyle solves the mystery with his brilliant mind, confronts the killer, blah blah blah. All very satisfying, I suppose, to people who like that sort of thing. But I don't. It seems to me the mystery is just a framework on which is arranged the fascinating and compelling stuff I mentioned above. So it's a mystery in which the actual mystery element is just an excuse to give us something more, something better. In this, Foyle's War reminds me of my current favorite book, An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears. Buy it, read it, love it. Trust me on this.

Friends With Kids

The title does not refer to other people with kids. It's a play on "friends with benefits." It describes the relationship that the movie is about. A man and a woman are best friends. They both want a kid, but they don't want to get married. After much hilarious hoopla, they eventually realize they are right for each other and end up together. Good movie. Whatever, who cares?

Megan Fox plays a complication. I'd heard her name for years, but I had never seen her before I saw this movie. Jesus God, that woman is good-looking! She's like, overly good-looking. Too good-looking. Imagine your favorite food. Now imagine being forced to eat so much of it that it makes you sick. That's Megan Fox. She so good-looking it makes me want to throw up.

Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

I recently watched The Trip, and loved it. English countryside, talented comedians, sexual anguish. Maybe you've seen the "duelling Michael Caines" part:

But there are no women to speak of in The Trip, so I'm not reviewing it (because there are very few scenes with women). I just mention it because it led me to the movie I am reviewing. I had high hopes for Tristam Shandy, because it stars the same two incredibly funny guys who were in The Trip. But after about ten minutes in, I gave up. I am old, and I don't have time to waste, and I'm increasingly aware of opportunity costs. Two hours watching I movie I don't love is two hours I could be spending doing lots of more entertaining stuff.

And, listen to this: Tristam Shandy features two of my absolute favorite women: the achingly beautiful Kelly Macdonald and the gorgeous and classy Gillian Anderson, and I still gave it a pass.

The Black Power Mixtape

Come for the history, stay for the most incandescent, incendiary young woman you'll ever see. I could not take my eyes off Angela Davis. The rest of the movie is fascinating, too. A period of our history we've forgotten.

Yes, I know. I'm trivializing a people's struggle by focusing on the magnetic attractiveness of one woman. I'm like that white middle-class suburban punk kid in Office Space who loves gangsta rap.

What-evah. The name of this blog is "very very shallow movie reviews." You want substance? Go read Cahiers du Cinema and cut me some slack.

I'm Not There

I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan, and this was an incredibly great movie. I suspect non-Dylan-fans would not agree. But everyone with an ounce of humanity would agree that Cate Blanchett is just...fucking...incredible in this movie. I love her now. She plays Dylan at a particular phase of his life (New York City, Warhol, drugs, sex, drugs, fame, drugs). I've always hated him during that phase; he was an asshole. A very, very talented asshole. Blanchett made me see the vulnerability beneath his assholishness.