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| Through a Glass Darkly |
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) Bergman). Another great film about a woman struggling with serious mental issues. Indeed it’s among the best of them — Sunset Blvd., A Streetcar Named Desire, A Woman Under the Influence, Requiem For a Dream, Blue Jasmine, Silver Linings Playbook — being others in this category. Harriet Anderson is the young woman who’s recently out of the nuthouse and making a game effort at a normal life at a summer island cottage with her husband, father and younger brother. She seems fine. Until she doesn’t. Her struggles are more internal and we do not have the broad performances seen in many of the other films by the likes of Gena Rowlands, Cate Blanchett, Vivian Leigh and Gloria Swanson. Yet she is no less fascinating and her story is as sad as the others. The picture has a lot else going on with it as Bergman films tend to do. The venality of the father, the son’s desire to talk to his father and the husband/doctor caught in the middle. Of the films listed above I’d only rate Sunset Blvd. higher which is saying one helluva lot. Anderson’s understated yet affecting performance is one reason why.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012) W. Anderson. A month or so ago I panned Wes Anderson’s latest film while extolling this picture as an example of what he is capable of. I loved this, my latest viewing of MK more than any of the previous ones. It’s damn brilliant. This is Anderson at his best telling a cohesive, structured story with a wide array of well-drawn and interesting characters amid brilliant set designs. It’s such a contrast to his later films which seem as much an excuse to give the rich and famous cameos as to tell a story. It’s also a straight forward story: two misfit tweens fall in love and overcome innumerable obstacles to be together. The setting, mostly in an around scout sites on a New England island, is an essential character. The pacing couldn’t be better. Everything, all the craziness, works toward the one goal of telling the story. I hope he can get back to making this kind of picture.
Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation (2025) Burnough. This documentary is, as they say, in theaters now. Here’s a question. Did you like it? Here’s my answer: Yes and no. The parts that were about the book and the author were great. The intermixed stories about three sets of Americans on the road today were fine but should have been in their own documentary. Their relationship to Kerouac and his great novel were hard to discern. More like impossible. There wasn’t even an effort to connect the two. I wanted a documentary about my favorite novel and I got half of one and half of something else. When focusing on the book and its author the film broadened my fascination with On the Road which has had such an impact on me as a writer, a thinker, a reader and as a person. By itself it's a masterpiece but I often think of it as part of a trio with Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels also books of great meaning to me. Kerouac was not only the king of the beats but he helped set the table for the cultural changes of the Sixties. The greater freedoms, the desire to express oneself and the willingness to experiment. I'd have loved to seen a movie that used its ninety minute running time just on that.
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| Mike Myers in So I Married.... |
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) Huston. It’s been a week and I barely remember watching it — I think that sums it up rather well. I had high hopes for the film it being from the great decade of American movies, the seventies, starring Paul Newman and directed by John Huston. But good lord what a mess. The script, such as it was, must have been written by a committee, the directing lacked cohesion as if there was no vision for the film (Huston was a big drinker so maybe....). Newman stumbled through it all as if in a hurry to get on to something else. Victoria Principal in her film debut was gorgeous which is as much as I can say on the plus column. Pity.
Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke (2025). Okay, okay this is not a movie but a three-part television documentary but I wanted to write about so deal it with folks (I flatter myself that there are plural readers for that matter, any at all). This is not exactly the sort of thing I generally watch. But I read something positive about it in the New York Times and thought I’d give it a whirl. Glad I did. Utterly compelling. It’s the story of a woman named Ruby Franke, a young Mormon mother of six who became the most popular family vlogger on YouTube. She had the ideal marriage and the ideal family and lived the ideal life in an ideal community in Utah. She was a handsome woman with a lovely family which reveled in one another’s company. But the dream turned into a nightmare as Ruby became obsessed with her image. She was controlling, manipulative and hell bent on perfection which to her was everything being done her way. Then she came under the spell of a woman who was essentially a cult leader. Ruby and the cult leader are now doing time (up to 30 years) in prison for child abuse. Her children, two in particular, went through hell. The filmmakers had access to all her tapes including hours and hours of outtakes. It’s all there for the world to see. A meteoric rise and a stunning fall. I couldn’t stop talking about to the missus after watching it. Incredible stuff.
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