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| The Commitments |
The Commitments (1991) Parker. I love this movie. Doesn’t everybody? It’s nigh on impossible to watch without a broad grin on your face interrupted only by singing along with the film’s original and wonderful music. The Commitments is the story of an ambitious young man named Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) in Northern Dublin who decides to form a soul band. To him the Irish are the blacks of Europe and Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland and Northerners the blacks of Dublin. He pulls together a seemingly motley crew including a lead singer with a temper and attitude, three female back up singers, a trumpeter with years of experience, a sax player, two guitarists, a pianist and a drummer who can’t get on with the lead singer so leaves and is replaced by their security guard who is also a hooligan with an even fouler temper than the singer. They make marvelous music together. The movie is about their rapid rise and even faster fall. The coming apart is inevitable rather than sad. They had a great ride and for many the group was a springboard. Just wonderful fun to watch rich with humor and great music.
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Panahi. So many movies that are released these days are they kind you forget about seconds after you leave the theater. However they’re still making pictures like It Was Just an Accident that stay with you for days after. It’s a difficult one to write about without tossing up spoilers. It’s a story of revenge. Can you extract it when given the chance? Can you do to him what he did to you ? Is it justice or lowering yourself to his level? How far will you go to right a wrong? And it’s not just one person wrestling with these questions, there are others involved too. Achieving a group consensus on such thorny questions is difficult. The highly acclaimed Jafar Panahi directed. He knows of what he speaks having been a prisoner of the repressive Iraqi regime. Iraq forms the setting for a movie that the word compelling was coined for.
Rachael Getting Married (2008) Demme. Seventeen years and one day after seeing this movie in a theater I watched it again. Anne Hathaway stars but does not play Rachel. She is the bride’s sister, Kym, on leave from rehab. Goodness me but Ms. Hathaway played an addict to perfection. It takes one to know one so I’m quite confident in this assertion. Kym is only newly sober and being with her tempestuous family on such a big occasion is not ideal. But here we are, it’s a wedding and despite the fractiousness that plagues some of the family (much of it caused by Kym) she’s obliged to be there. Kym’s an addict. It’s all about her. She’s a coked up bovine in a china shop triggering everyone around her. But she was the character I most related to. The others were weirdly normal with all of their mundane idiosyncrasies, issues and agendas. When speeches are made and Kym’s goes on too long and becomes all about Kym -- I backed her all the way. Jonathan Demme directed this fine film which is — as much as anything else — an exploration of the personality of the addict. He got it right. Here’s what I wrote about when it was first in theaters and I last saw it in 2008.
The Battle of Algiers (1966) Pontecorvo. I’ve watched it twice recently and after this latest viewing promptly put it on my top 100 films of all time list. No, I don’t know why it wasn’t there before. As indicated in a recent post it’s a great film for us revolutionaries. You’d be excused for watching it and thinking that was part documentary or that actual footage from the revolution in Algeria in the late 1950s was used. As I said in my recent post on “Films to Inspire you in the Coming Revolution”: "By giving voice to the French army it broadens the scope of the story and puts it into greater historical context. Insurgency, occupation and resistance have never been more compelling on the big screen."
In a Lonely Place (1950) N. Ray. I got a strong recommendation to read the book of the same name upon which this film is based. Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel from 1947 is one of the better noir novels of its time and its time included the works of Raymond Chandler. The book is highly original, a captivating read and superbly told. The movie version is watered down, a pale comparison, badly altered, stripped of the book’s brilliance and a shallow husk of a movie. I don’t know that the great Humphrey Bogart was the right choice as the lead. I know that Gloria Grahame, as fine an actress as she was, was miscast. I also know I had a delightful time reading the book and was bored senseless by the movie. A lot of people like the film. No idea why.
The Mastermind (2025) Reichardt. The title character is not mastermind but he is smart. He’s also self-centered and thoughtless. He’s something of a misfit, a failure and you could get away with calling him a loser. He steals a few paintings easily enough but this is not a well-planned heist and he did not surrounded himself with the best and the brightest. It’s no spoiler to say the law is soon on to him. This is a helluva good film. I could tell when I looked at Rotten Tomatoes and saw that it had a 91% from critics and a 38% from the hot polloi. Your average Joe and Josephine no doubt were expecting to see a slick heist carried out by a daring hero with a gorgeous lover and eccentric and savvy accomplices. Instead they got a movie about a failure. It may not be for the mainstream but I think it another terrific film from director Kelly Reichardt whose got a slew of excellent films to her name (such as First Cow, Certain Women, Showing Up and Meek’s Cutoff).
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