tanysare Reviews

North Country (2005)

The harassment is for real, folks

[8/10 · 30 March 2006]

I have been reading the comments above about the "credibility" of the harassment in "North Country." Admittedly, the movie's script condenses, amalgamates characters, telescopes the time frame (how much time actually passed? If the story began in 1989 was it two years later-the time of the Anita Hill hearings-when the heroine decided to finally complain?) and throws in some typical Hollywood devices. The "stand-up and be counted" climax,in particular, dates back at least to "Spartacus" where et is also a device and not historically true - but it does have impact. Screenplays-and I have just completed a course in screen writing-can't follow the exact flow of actual events. The length of the real-life court case and its resolution wouldn't have lent themselves easily to dramatization. You can't dramatize the gradual trickle of support for the harassment class action,much of which took place on paper. So the stand up" device, while hackneyed, probably seemed like the most effective way to depict the moment when the women as a group supported the action. But the main thing for me was that I felt the depiction of harassment was NOT exaggerated. I have lived through a lot of mistreatment in my own life and one thing I've discovered is that people simply don't believe that certain behavior takes place-unless it happens to them. People are in denial about the behavior leveled against women(and men) who do not conform to traditional gender roles. Always, women have had to take the blame and religion is largely to blame for that. There are so many people who still believe that it is a woman's lot to suffer. That's why we still have people trying to reverse Roe v/Wade and even to make birth control illegal. "North Country" is a sobering reminder that in the "heartland" of America, the forces of reaction are reacting and gearing up to defend the "traditional" roles they think must be preserved all over the country, even in those savage,pagan big cities. I'm just glad that the video of this movie is doing better than it did in theaters. Maybe it's preaching to the converted but it might make a few people realize that we still have to fight for the basic freedoms for everyone in America today.

The Loved One (1965)

It will make you Stiff with Laughter

[11 July 2005]

I am another fan of this film who can tell you younger folks what it was like to see it back in 1965. I saw it with my whole family(I was 15). My mother hated it-especially Mr. Joyboy's gluttonous mother. My father laughed at the bit where Liberace comes out of a coffin to flirt with an Air Force officer. But I sensed that this movie represented a new kind of comedy-something hard for me to define (I was not yet familiar with the work of Lenny Bruce). I know the movie received terrible reviews. Seeing it now, it's hard to believe it was released by a major studio. Much of it plays like the most brilliant sketches from early "SNL" or from a John Waters movie. I can't begin to count all the things that I find side-splitting-from the awful eulogy ("red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue") to Aimee's slide-area house to the refrigerator/crypt at the pet cemetery (with stiff faux animals) to the Blessed Reverend's line: "How do I get rid of all these stiffs?" I consider this to be one of the funniest films of all time. It certainly should be on DVD.

84 Charing Cross Road (1987)

A Different View of Singlehood

[10/10 · 9 June 2005]

I saw this movie in 1987, read the book, and just rented it again in memory of Anne Bancroft. It remains for me a gem-an amazingly done story. What is really amazing however-and a sad comment on where people's attentions are focused-is that in 1987 there were two movies that dealt with married men and single women. This was one of them; the other was "Fatal Attraction." What a difference! People flocked to see the latter film in which (spoilers for "F.A." here) a single urban career woman has a brief affair with a married man, tries to kill herself, tries to kill everyone else, fricassees a pet rabbit, etc. Now in "84 Charing Cross Road," the heroine's finances prevent her from crossing the ocean to actually meet the married man of her daydreams- but even if she had been able to visit England and meet him,I doubt she would have baked his children's pets or kidnapped his children. This was not,thankfully,that kind of film. This was a true story of a single career woman whose life was happy in spite of her being single. She had friends, her writing, the books she was buying and reading. We see at one point a photograph on her bureau of a man in uniform-was this a former boyfriend,a fiancé,who was killed in the war? Possibly-but the woman does not live in grief nor does she go melodramatically crazy. It's too bad that America chose to make the derivative trash that is "F.A." popular while not honoring "84 Charing Cross Road" for its depiction of a brainy adult relationship.

The Pink Panther (1963)

It's not about a Pink Panther and it's not about a detective either.

[8 September 2004]

People who found this movie unfunny, boring, and dated, and those who can't understand why Sellers as Clousseau is not featured more in the film, are probably too young to be familiar with 60s film-making. They have seen the various sequels and have come to expect a faster pace, a movie fixated on one character,and much more vulgarity. The Pink Panther was meant to be an ensemble comedy and closely resembles a French "bedroom farce." Note that there are five main characters and all of them are introduced in separate sequences at the film's start. Inspector Clousseau was not the film's focus;he was a supporting character who happened to get the biggest laughs and was therefore made the subject of the sequels. (You can bet that the ill-advised remake now under way will feature Clousseau in every scene). Yes,I just saw this film again and found the early part of it a bit slow by current standards, though most of it was just as funny as I remembered-and I had not remembered things like David Niven toasting the Princess with "L'Chayim!" or the Princess's incipient feminist retorts to Niven, or lines like "I'll have your stripes for this" (said to a cop disguised as a zebra) and "Get your filthy hands off my asp." But I first saw The Pink Panther when it came out. I was 13 and it was the first movie I went to without my parents. To me, it was a risqué movie, an adult experience, as were the James Bond films. For me,it still rocks

The Miracle of the Bells (1948)

When all you need is a Miracle

[23 December 2003]

I discovered this movie about ten years ago, on TV. The next day, a co-worker asked if I had watched it; I said yes, and we both agreed we had been moved by it. For my co-worker, this was not surprising; she was a Catholic. But for me, a Jewish semi-secular humanist, it was odd to admit I had felt something close to faith because of a late-40s studio picture. The message of "The Miracle of the Bells" is that regardless of one's faith, there is the possibility of hope. The goodness that exists in human beings is not brought out by rigid observance to rules, but by acts of kindness and understanding. I don't want to say how this comes about or whether there really is a miracle in the Biblical sense. That is for viewers to find out. But the film brings tears to my eyes. Alida Valli is amazing-watch her face, her eyes, especially in the sequences where she plays Joan of Arc-she seems lit from within by faith. I love the scene in the Chinese restaurant, a scene of friendship and love. I wish this movie, like its heroine, was more well-known. I try to help it along by mentioning it whenever I can as one of those little gems, a quiet picture that may make you think, a nice example of Hollywood fantasy films of the 1940s, and a movie that will help you feel better if you feel down.I know I just rented it for that reason.

Things Behind the Sun (2001)

Questions Behind The Film

[24 November 2003]

I had hoped this would be good but it took my breath away. It also brought tears to my eyes. I think this movie should be seen by everyone but especially by those involved in rape trials. Someone else on this board questioned whether a boy could be forced into a a rape as shown in the movie. We don't know the answer to that because men's magazines don't run articles about how men feel about rape and masculine conditioning and bonding. And our prison system doesn't cure rapists, it just teaches all the inmates how to rape or be raped. "Things Behind The Sun" is suggesting that we are way behind in examining the victimization of men by the behavior patterns they are taught to accept as "normal." And for those who think women and girls should simply not "get into situations" where rape can occur, the movie shows how difficult it is to avoid such situations-because how can we always know when someone will exploit the situation? I applaud this movie for taking risks and for raising questions about human behavior. And I also applaud the performances and the writing.

The Ten Commandments (1956)

A Visual Guilty Pleasure

[21 April 2003]

I first saw this film in a movie theatre when I was only seven-and I cried! I was upset by the "injustice" done to Moses during the first half, and by the scene where his birth mother gets her sash caught under a stone about to be moved for the construction of the city. Since then, I have seen the film every year on TV-and I continue to enjoy it. But I don't consider it a great film. In fact, most of what once made me cry now makes me laugh. The stagey acting, the awful, pseudo-poetic dialogue, the inaccuracies, are nothing short of camp. Despite four screenwriters, sources ranging from the Passover Haggadah and the Midrash to several romance novels, and the consultation of rabbis and other clergy, the result is a Haroseth(mixture) of sweet, crunchy, bitter, and often hilarious shmaltz! What I enjoy are the visuals. No film I can think of so thoroughly creates what the ancient world may have looked like. Obviously, the costume and scenery designers did more research than the screenwriters. Each time I see this movie, I notice new details: the fanciful game pieces in the chess-like game played by Seti and Nefretiri, the jackal heads as bedposts on the prince's bed, the pyramids and pylons lining the avenue that the Hebrews parade down in the exodus scenes. And the costumes, many designed by Edith Head, look good enough to eat! I especially like Lilia's gold gown "woven from the beards of shell-fish." But the rest is like a bad high school play that you enjoy anyway because you know the actors are doing it from the heart.

The Life of Oharu (1952)

Gentle consciousness-raiser

[6 March 2003]

Mizoguchi's films are capable, I think, of teaching life lessons without preaching or grandstanding. This film could cause a male chauvinist to join a consciousness-raising make sensitivity group. In a simple,understated way, the film outlines the tyrannies that made happiness almost impossible for women, not only in feudal Japan, but all over the world. It comments on the use of women's bodies as sex objects and baby-making machines, with no regard for women's minds or feelings. Notice, by the way, that Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka)is supposed to age from 18 to 50-and she really seems to age although makeup in the 1950s was not as advanced an art as it is now. The aging process is achieved through Tanaka's acting. And if she does not seem to us to be quite the ravaged old "witch" that one of her customers claims she is, then so much the better to let us know that she is being judged by an insensitive society.

The Banger Sisters (2002)

Missed It By That Much!

[18 February 2003]

The good thing about this movie is that Goldie Hawn plays a woman who is middle-aged, single, has no kids, and still rocks. The movie clearly takes her side, too(Spoiler?) For those of us who are tired of seeing all women over forty cast as somebody's mother, Hawn's turn as the ageless groupie Suzette was refreshing. The bad news is that writer-director Bob Dolman couldn't come up with a script to support his premise of two former groupies reuniting. The movie is full of contrivances, some of them almost Rube-Goldberg-like {spoiler} (why use a candle as a lamp in this day and age except to start a fire that will set off a fire alarm which will wake up the whole family so they can accidentally come upon Suzette and Mom acting like two naughty girls?) On the other hand, much exposition is missing from the story line. The most important detail that is never examined is how Susan Sarandon's uptight feminine-mystique housewife became that way. The other members of her family come across as two spoiled brat daughters and a cardboard husband. Geoffrey Rush's eccentric writer is so quirky he could be the subject of a movie of his own but he gets tossed to the wayside, only to return to the film's storyline in order to give the women a way to "redeem" themselves. Hollywood has not yet dared to take on any story of a real groupie's adventures (Ie; Pamela Des Barres' "I'm With The Band,") nor have there been too many movies that really examine the 1960s from a sympathetic viewpoint. "The Banger Sisters" could have been much better but one suspects that major-studio moralizing and script-altering got in the way.

Bliss (1997)

Ignorance Is Not Bliss

[27 September 2002]

I am appalled at some of the comments made by other viewers about this film. The ignorance many people have about sex is flaunted by them as "morality" or "sensibility." What "Bliss" illustrates so clearly is that sexual ignorance and the patriarchal system are the things that are killing both good sex and understanding between the sexes. It's unfortunate-and yes, it's probably true as someone else here said, that for the sake of commercialism, the movie had to get an "R" rating and certain scenes and bits of dialogue were apparently trimmed. From what I read, one of the things left out for the sake of not getting that much-feared "NC-17" was the word "clitoris." (Can I say that here?) It's hard to believe that a mere clinical word could cause that much censorship trouble-in a movie dealing with orgasms, at that. The movie should have left out the word "frigid" since the psychiatric profession no longer uses it that much, preferring "pre-orgasmic" instead. But there you have it. The male-dominated society we live in indeed makes certain rules-and it is those rules and how they affect sex and the destinies of the sexes, that are nevertheless gently skewered in this film. If Maria has been "damaged" by her past, her husband and most men have been damaged by simply being men-by playing the male role. To me this was a courageous movie, despite the censorship, because it showed a man gradually unlearning his traditional male conditioning, to the point where (spoiler) he admonishes a friend not to speak of women as body parts. True liberation means that men spread the word to other men. Did you also notice the difficulty with which at first the husband speaks about sex to another man(the therapist?) He learns to take sex seriously. We don't know how deeply he has been damaged by his upbringing as a "normal" American male, but at the beginning, his reactions are close to violence-while at the end, he seems to be able to accept reality without raging so much. These are important messages-and those who commented that this was just a "sex" film are not watching the appropriate film.

Days of Wine and Roses (1962)

Source of the Title

[20 September 2002]

I saw this movie recently at a screening of "Films of 1962" (a very good year for films). It moved me and I felt tears in my eyes. But I didn't get the chance to explain to the audience and the guest speakers (film critic Stephen Farber and the film's producer) the source of the movie's title. They knew it was from a poem that Lee Remick recites in the movie but they couldn't remember who wrote it. The poem is "Vita Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam"by Ernest Dowson. The title translates as "The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes." The same poem was also quoted in "Laura" by Waldo Lydecker on his radio show. Dowson's other famous poem "Cynara" was recited in "The Chapman Report," one of 1962's less notable movies. Seems 1962 was a good year for Ernest Dowson. He was himself an alcoholic who died at the age of 32.

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

How Freudian Can You Get?

[21 May 2002]

Having seen this film when it came out, but not having realized that Hugh Grant was the hero, I decided to see it again and rented it. What a Freudian hoot-fest! I love the things other people hate Ken Russell for-his excesses are cartoon-like and never more so than here. The phallic symbolism is so extreme that even the movie's characters comment on it. Amanda Donahoe's dominatrix costumes are great (but I won't spoil it by mentioning what she wears in the climax!) and I treasure Grant's answer to someone who wants to know what he's saying: "I don't know what I'm going to say!" This movie should be shown at cult-film screenings with its obvious companion "Anaconda."

That Cold Day in the Park (1969)

Better With Age

[24 April 2002]

I remember that reviews of this movie were mostly negative when it came out in 1969. Critics were disturbed by the (spoiler) incestuous vibes and the sex-violence mixture. Years have passed, movies have focused on all sorts of unthinkable things, and "That Cold Day In The Park" no longer seems unusual. Kids from dysfunctional families do run away from home, sometmes feel lust for their siblings, and exhibit strange mannerisms. The sadness of the film is that the different ways in which the two main characters are dysfunctioning keeps them from communicating their individual needs. This is a more sympathetic study of a repressed and unstable woman than more recent garbage such as "Fatal Attraction." And of course, Altman is already spicng up is film with colorful minor characters and background conversation(the conversation in the women's clinic is very funny). Notice also how much of the film is shot through windows-making the viewer the "voyeur?"

The Horse's Mouth (1958)

A Good Adaptation

[18 April 2002]

It's interesting that Alec Guiness adapted the screenplay for this film as well as portraying the wacky protagonist. I've read the book(for that matter I've also read "Herself Surprised" by Cary, which tells ex-wife Sara's story) and I must say that it is a good adaptation although Guiness softens the characters a bit, leaving out among other things, Jimson's physical abuse of Sara. I first saw "The Horse's Mouth" on a double bill with "A Hard Day's Night!" And it fit-the same looney pace and attempts to make sense of creativity. Not to mention the sense of anarchy. I always remembered the sequence with the "duplex studio" accidentally created (spoiler alert) by Jimson and his sculptor friend. And I love that line when he looks at one of his paintings and says "Why doesn't it fit the way it is in my head?" or something like that.

Strange Interlude (1932)

Cut Down To Size

[1 February 2002]

The movie "Strange Interlude" cut out a lot of dialogue, especially from the "inner monologues." Curiously, the line that explains the title was cut, along with a great speech of Nina's about God as a mother, that helps her characterization, not to mention an early inner monologue of Charlie's that helps us understand why he's so afraid of sex. On the whole, though, I thought the trimming helped move the story along-it still had all nine "acts" as the play does. I see this story as a black comedy-a predecessor of "Seinfeld" in that the characters do so much lying that they weave an ever more tangled web. But I could throw a brick at that Nina! She was just too neurotic-a good example of the "feminine mystique" that Betty Friedan warned us of.

Memento (2000)

?yhtapme eht si erehw

[26 December 2001]

I'd say Memento was interesting in concept but strangely devoid of empathy for its characters. Film Noir usually deals with characters who are hard to have sympathy for but this film seems colder than most. Compare Leonard with the car salesman played by William H. Macy in Fargo. That character planned and perpetrated a terrible crime but because the script and Macy's performance gave us a full portrait of the man and his weaknesses and situation, we could have actual feeling for him. I couldn't really feel for Leonard much less for any of the other characters. Interestingly, for a film that runs backwards, certain aspects of the development of the characters still ran true to the conceits of regular movie story arcs. The first (ie: last) scene with Natalie the barmaid has her being very sympathetic to Leonard. Later on (I mean "earlier") in the story, Natalie lets out (spoiler alert) with a lot of venom toward Leonard that would be appropriate during the last third of a normal movie-except that at this point she has only just met him. Since female characters in movies invariably start out by hating the guy, then liking him, then getting mad at him, then forgiving him again, having a female character go through these changes backwards doesn't really break any new ground, does it?

The Big Sleep (1946)

If You Read The Book You May Figure Out The Movie

[23 November 2001]

Regarding the confusing nature of The Big Sleep-it helps to have read the book and to realize that the Production Code made some of the plot details difficult to dramatize. In the book, Marlowe finds Carmen at Geiger's house with Geiger dead on the floor and Carmen sitting in a chair stark naked. She's been posing for porn photos-the photos that in the movie are sent to Vivian by Brody to blackmail her. It is amusing to imagine such a fuss, drawn guns and all, over photos of a fully clothed Carmen, but that's what the production code did to these scenes. In the later scene where Carmen sneaks into Marlowe's apartment, she is again supposed to be naked-but not in the movie. The annoying gunsel, Carol Lundgren,in the book, constantly uses a familiar profanity,leading Marlowe to observe that he doesn't have much of a vocabulary. Carmen, in the book, tries to shoot Marlowe, but (spoiler warning!) wets her pants! The book doesn't really help to understand who killed Owen, the chauffeur. If Brody did it, how did he get back to Geiger's place in time to remove the body?