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towsleysteven
Reviews
Brightburn (2019)
Not for these times.
Occasionally there really have been media that aggravate kids' emotional problems. Stephen King withdrew his book Rage for that reason -- three of the first four well-known classroom hostage situations by children name the book as a declared influence of the perpetrators.
Having worked in the entertainment biz (studio films and tv) for a couple decades, I'm not going to argue this point which I now make. I'm going to recommend to parents and mentors of kids that this is not healthy viewing for a child with an emotional challenge. The days when psychologists thought people with anger management problems could lessen their feelings by beating on pillows were over years ago. For many years now the feeling is that pounding on things simply reinforces the feelings. This movie is such a pressure cooker of violent, remorseless feelings for 90 minutes.
If there is such a thing as a red flag for media, giving this movie one of those is the responsible thing to do. If you're not going to preview this and make your own mature judgment regarding your child's case, better simply leave it on the shelf and choose something else less risky.
It's not that the movie is badly made or acted, by the way, that's not the point of this review. But it has ugliness in it, and it's certainly not excellent enough to be a filmmaking essential regardless of what someone may contend. If you have a troubled child obsessed with this movie, take this as your alert. Pass.
Danger Man (1960)
Premiered two years before Dr. No.
It is well worth noting that this high quality secret agent series with theme music rather similar to the Jerry Goldsmith theme for The Man from UNCLE 6 years later premiered on television two years before Dr. No was released to movie theaters, making Danger Man NOT a knock off, copy, tribute or homage to the James Bond films. It was already here well in advance.
By the way, the half-hour Danger Man episodes of the first season were of superior quality to the one hour retooling called Secret Agent with the theme by Johnny Rivers.
The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)
Claire Foy is Worthy of Lisbeth Salander
The appeal of the Dragon Tattoo series is in no small part the character of Lisbeth Salander, a survivor of child abuse who has become a young woman, a misfit loner with a genius for computers and mathematics. Her exotic and anti-social nature were perfectly captured first in a Swedish language trilogy by Noomi Rapace and then in the feature film of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Rooney Mara.
The primary question for Girl in the Spider's Web other than production quality was whether the actress to play Salander this time around was up to the task of inhabiting the role. We needn't have worried. Claire Foy does a spooky job of recreating the character in the same tradition as Rapace and Mara.
The earlier films had worked through and disposed of Salander's own history of abuse by men, and we didn't need to mine that history further, so it is gratifying that this film smartly carries the story into fresh territory -- without completely losing that element of Salander's driving force.
This means of course that Spider's Web need not be quite as hard to watch in terms of details of Salander's own violent debasement. The mystery is not as complex nor the tone as Fincher-dark, but still moves along at a clip and thank God avoids the mistake of so many movie sequels by turning the Salander character into a soulless superhero mechanism. In fact, future sequels can continue to let Lisbeth stretch and still pull her back moment-to-moment to her proper milieu, the seamy side of a real world.
Let Salander be Salander, a damnably clever girl with a vulnerable heart caged by mistrust, pragmatically devious and almost always the smartest person in the room. That's more than enough dimensions to admire in a strong woman.
Mother! (2017)
Unnerving, disturbing, enraging, confounding
Mother! begins like a Peter Weir film, with increasing unease as unwelcome guests proliferate in the young wife's large home. Then it begins to resemble Polanski's Rosemary's Baby as her husband seems to join the Dark Side of the crowd of intruders mistreating her and making increasing shambles of her house. In the latter stages this becomes like a Ken Russell film of Grand Guignol or the seventh level of hell.
Jennifer Lawrence is excellent, and that is apparent since the camera holds so tightly on her throughout that it seems almost her POV if not her hallucination. In any case, this is on some level a fable with a moral, but I wish it were clear what it was. I offer no spoiler because I'm not sure what to conclude.
The film as a metaphor is not without worth but it is challenging if not irritating to sit through, especially if one is sensitive to exotic violence and an infuriating level of repeating chaos in a helpless wife's life, with a husband who is of no real help to her or us at all.
Perhaps this was about a victim of mental cruelty who needed to leave her husband and seek a safe house, but that's not what happened and I really couldn't say. I'm sure the filmmakers would disagree with me on that deduction.
As an audience member I can stand some abuse as long as I find out what it was all for at the end. I can't say that here. I suppose the pointlessness could be intended to tell me the God of this world is mad. It would certainly please Ken Russell. Maybe polonsky too.
But again, I have no idea if I'm near the mark. Mainly, I praise Jennifer Lawrence's courage for toughing this one out.
A Town Like Alice (1981)
Excellent series with a moving love triangle.
Bryan Brown, Helen Morse, and Gordon Jackson star in a first-rate mini-series adaption of Nevil Shute's novel. Originally aired in the US on Masterpiece Theater in 1981. It's an engaging drama with a first rate love story that still compares well with the best of today.