Jolson Story (1946)

RATING:	40%
FORMAT:	DVD

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Sentimental beyond belief, this refuses to analyze any complex issues, especially the essentially racist nature of minstrelsy when practiced by Whites. Unlike Sacher Cohen's Ali G & Borat creations, this is extremely politically simplistic. Yet Larry PARKS is very good in the central role that briefly made his name and the music is very enjoyable.

Al Jolson's gift was in acting out his songs and not just in singing them. He successfully undercuts the simpering sentimentality of much of his material with light humor and spontaneous wit. At his best when connecting with a live audience, his Freudian mammy fixation becomes a plausible entertainment where you stop asking the uncomfortable questions about a grown man seemingly unable to connect with a woman his own age.

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This is a White American Dream type musical where success is achieved with little effort or struggle with the result that the characters are correspondingly thinly drawn. High octane acting only partly compensates for the lack of dramatic conflict that was no doubt motivated by the fact that Al Jolson was still alive when the film was made and contributed to its voice. This fear of defaming a living person also may have effected the film's pacing because it is all on a top note - with very little variation for nearly two hours. The downbeat ending is far too little; far too late in the verisimilitude stakes to compensate for the cloying nature of the proceedings.

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Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

80%

A visually-impressive old-time sci-fi movie hampered by leaden direction and somewhat banal acting: More money was obviously spent on the SFX than the performers. The only exception here is Anne FRANCIS who really enjoys her role of both ingénue and virginal intriguer.

The story is an old one of the alleged subconscious having an effect in the actual world as an old man's daughter discovers her sexuality upon meeting fit young men from the space corps. His id wants to destroy them and tries to prevent them from taking his daughter away because his unconscious mind will not let her go. This leads to an explosive climax that can be beaten by only few modern movies of its kind.

Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Apartment (1960)

80%

A vigorous and satirical critique of the materialistic hypocrisy usually associated with sexual promiscuity and marital infidelity. Most of the married men here are completely incapable of keeping their hands off women half their age and most of the girls delude themselves into thinking that they will divorce their wives for them. Also a solid satire on the regimentation and routinisation of office life.

As you would expect from Billy WILDER, the humor is sharp and witty and the satire focuses on the choices we all must make between love and career. Much of the comedy centers around a neighbor's belief that Jack LEMMON is sleeping with all and sundry when his apartment is actually being used by five of his senior office colleagues for their amorous trysts. His meteoric rise to the executive suite is purely the result of this sexual sub letting not any relevant business acumen on his part and he finds himself in love with one of the kept women which could upset the whole cosy arrangement. Deep down this is one of the finest romantic comedies ever made because it is grounded in solid monochrome reality rather than fantasy.

LEMMON is his usual nebbish self; while Shirley MacLAINE steals the show with a performance of great subtlety as the depressive elevator girl with a heart of gold. Fred MacMURRAY plays against type as her amoral, married lover.

Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Salò (1975)

100%

A vivid depiction of the depravity attendant upon using others as means rather than ends as well of unthinkingly following orders. This movie does not shy away from the implications of its theme: Humanity volitionally cut off from a positive purpose. It skillfully skirts the border between accurately analyzing degeneracy and being degenerate itself; its sordid catalogue of sexual perversions making it a profoundly repellant experience. However, given the charnel house that was the twentieth century, it is not without exceptional cinematic brilliance in its execution in being a film great power to haunt the mind of anyone who sees it.

The extreme content demands to be seen as a serious indictment of the Western world. Its excesses depict a materialistic and wealth obsessed culture that both consumes rubbish while producing great piles of it. The politically powerful have no power over their own desire to evade genuine political issues in favor of the vapid (& issue evading) freedom to consume anything in ever greater quantities. The relationship between sexual promiscuity and consumerism is here made explicit as people metaphorically and literally consume each other's bodies – especially the waste products.

A deeply and profanely political work, it is a call to action for Communists like its director (Pier Paolo PASOLINI) to see what the West as it really is and to do something constructive about it. However, this is the movie's partial failing: It presents the world in all it unpleasantness but without offering a credible alternative. An obsession with attacking the allegedly sacred can often mar great works such as this, nevertheless, the satire on the modern Western bourgeoisie is a devastatingly accurate one.

If ever there were proof that the Marquis de Sade and his followers were fools, madmen and the morally bankrupt, then this is it. It understands the insatiable–because never satisfied nature of those who find no pleasure in human warmth; hence, the emotionally distant shooting style that matches the depraved emotionally distancing themselves from others. They busily conflate pain with pleasure to vainly abolish the difference: 'When I see others degraded I rejoice' – yet they want to be both 'executioner and victim'. They cling to existence because they can achieve worldly success by blackmailing others to betray one another in exchange for preferential (or, at the very least, less harsh) treatment. Here "Rational" means "Unempathetic" in this masterpiece on the essential depravity of social engineering.

The work stands as a heartfelt plea from a man who personally experienced some of the events portrayed in the dying days of Mussolini's Italy. A strangely poetic drama – part self loathing; partly an expression of rage at a world that does not meet ones high ideals – that even the most jaded viewer will find shocking.

Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Chungking Express (1994)

40%

A great sprawling mess of a film that starts badly and goes nowhere from there.

Two lovelorn police officers are on the lookout for love but are unable to find it for looking in the wrong places. Their various girlfriends are hard to pin down, as they tend to leave at a moment's notice or without giving any notice at all; reflecting the general fecklessness of the central characters, themselves.

The travel metaphor of one of the policeman's two girlfriends being air stewardesses - who search for fulfilment but only find it at home - is well done, but little else is. The drug smuggling scenes are poorly integrated with the overall design and we appear to be watching two completely different films.

Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.