For all that I dislike the younger version of me, it’s nice, sometimes, to be reminded I wasn’t completely off my beam.
Right from the opening credits, in which Henry purposefully strides onto screen, while protagonist Simon Grim listens to the road, like an animal sensing an approaching earthquake, I figured I was in pretty good shape. Henry is not just a fool[1], but he is more dramatic than Poe in The Pale Blue Eye. He doesn’t smoke so much…
Whatever else you want to say about Hartley, he dreams big; the fairly complicated plot brings together an ex-nun who wants to be a pornographer, a pornographer who wants to have been a journalist, a couple of hitmen that want to be businessmen, and an ex-criminal (of some sort) who just wants to have been a decent guy.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find the main couple (the defrocked nun and defenestrated criminal played by Isabelle Hubert and Martin Donovan respectively) particularly…
Ok, raise your hand if you had a trilogy that began as a meditation on artistic creation, transmogrifying into a spoof, and then transforming into a parable about how redemption occurs (only?) through acceptance of personal responsibility.
There are elements of 12-step thinking in this last entry, but it is by no means the slog that that philosophical logline might imply. Instead it has almost a Kevin Smith-like dedication to resolving loose ends from what turns out to have been…
Over the last few of decades of film, it has often been the case that a director will take a person with whom he is in love and create a movie that is a cinematic monument to how beautiful that person was at that time.
Examples include Woody Allen creating Annie Hall for Diane Keaton, Luc Besson creating The Messenger for Milla Jovovich, and Quentin Tarantino making the Kill Bill movies with Uma Thurman.
But not a single one of…
I mean, it is not particularly persuasive as documentary, but Yankees owners as Mephistophelean masons dominating the occultic ritual that is baseball by way of a blood-sacrifice is a story worth my 8 minutes.
