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ivrydov
Reviews
I Love You, I Love You Not (1996)
Tour-de-force
At this date so far from the event, if some young person asked me what movie they could watch which would give them the essence of the Holocaust, this is the movie I would recommend.
I watched it because Jeanne Moreau was listed in the credits and she is worth the price of admission on any movie. She didn't disappoint.
The Holocaust theme was played perfectly. It starts off with the lecturer sketching out the event for those never exposed to it, having her field a mix of serious and stupid questions, and introducing the sole Jewish girl in the class, Daisy, obviously assimilated.
Her emotional attachment is with her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor Nana, played by Moreau, and the parents are never introduced; they would have just been clutter. Nana told her stories which conveyed the feeling of one having lived through the Holocaust and they affected Daisy psychologically to the point where she had nightmares. Why would she tell the girl such stories? Don't look for a rational explanation. She is a Holocaust survivor. If you think Nana should have had better sense relate this to The Pawnbroker starring Rod Steiger.
Perhaps 50 per cent of Jews in the fourth and fifth generations in America, certainly of the upper classes, have no feeling of being different from anyone else, which is a healthy and normal state of affairs, but anti-Semitism is still out there, and Daisy was touched by it in the locker scene. This was the result of these students having had the Holocaust shoved down their throat by that lecture and that's what some got out of it.
Her boyfriend Ethan did not dump her because she was Jewish, that is never stated explicitly, but she was too strange for him. It looked like this would be a case of opposites attract, but he was too shallow for her, and too immature. She was a prolific reader, an introvert, and possessed of a developing Jewish consciousness, which she got not from her parents, but it sprung on her from the relationship with her grandmother and the grandmother's tragic life. Daisy knew this influence had something to do with her losing Ethan and that's why she blurted out that she hated her grandmother at one point.
The utter evil of the Holocaust is conveyed in the scene where the Nazi takes the two little girls. For what purpose, we need not even guess. Two among 1,500,000 million children who met horrible endings.
Cinema has never really solved the problem of how to show life in the camps. The people were much too thin and too sick with a multitude of ailments and injuries, walking corpses, the milieu a babel of languages, and none of this can be portrayed by mere actors and actresses. We are left with the written word if you are looking for realism. Given the extreme restrictions anyone attempting a Holocaust theme faces who wishes to tell this story in a movie, this was a tour-de-force.
The Promise (1999)
Realistic mostly but not the events surrounding the fugitive
I can accept the fact this guy wasn't abusive throughout the marriage but grave money problems and a mid-life crises when he could not fulfil his dream to be self-employed doing whatever drove him around the bend. Obviously their standard of living had plummeted and he regarded the meal she served him as dog food.
The shortcoming of the movie was the police side. A man shooting his wife with the three kids in the house would have been a major news story in almost all communities. His picture would have been on TV and in the papers. The guy is striking in appearance with long blond air. Yet he avoids capture, and there is no mention even of sightings, without his changing his appearance, to close-cropped hair, beard, mustache, a few tattoos, a baseball cap. Living from hand to mouth, he would start to appear quite seedy as well. He even walks onto to the school yard and no one pays attention and the teacher who finally chased him didn't seem to recognize him.
Otherwise it was solid dramatic effort from all concerned, and having been a kid who listened to Ozzie and Harriet on the radio, and then a teenager who danced to Ricky, I was happy to see the next generation making her way in the business.
Sphere (1998)
Worst Movie Ever Made?
I'd rate this movie about two steps below Giant Hair Lice And The Revenge Of The Dodos.
Of course that movie was never made. The would-be producers were against abortions.
I thought watching two elevators go up and down on a surveillance camera was the most inaction I've ever seen on screen. This was like watching one elevator go up and down.
The level of acting reminded me of an amateur stage group reading a script for the first time in a group. By the second time the amateur group would have left the Sphere cast far behind.
I actually came to believe that the scriptwriter experienced this in real life. He entered the sphere and what we are seeing is his nightmare of what might happen if he tried to bring the experience to film.
I think is the worst movie ever made by a big studio in the sci-fi category. I've been trying so far without success to think of one that would beat it out in the general category.
This film may have a value though. The Saturday Night Live producers should piece together some clips. Then if one day a power failure knocks their studio off the air, they could run this and no one would know it had happened. This is as funny as it gets.
The Château (2001)
Vive Sylvie Testud
The movie was on cable here in Israel and I thought it had potential -- clash of cultures, conflicting interests between the heirs and the staff, but it went absolutely nowhere. Too bad. It was a half-baked writing effort.
But coming from Canada and knowing how francophones who don't speak a lot of English react when bombarded by anglophones who think they do, I must rate Sylvie Testud's performance as a tour-de-force. She was clicking on the English words she might have been expected to catch, and straining at the rest, just as would happen in real life. This is not easy to achieve and she must be an actress of considerable skills. I would love to see her in a remake of Madame Bovary or something of that nature in English. This girl is as good as they come.
There was one very funny scene in my book so it wasn't a total loss, when the Rudd character reads the fractured French letter he wrote to the staff who could not understand a word of it, except the main one, vendre, causing an uproar.
The Love Letter (1998)
Riveting
With a zillion channels to choose from today and only so much time, the first thing I do when I click by is check the actors. I came in today five minutes into this one and saw the name Campbell Scott. Everything he does is worth a look so I was tempted. I'm also a sucker for Jennifer Jason Leigh since I still vividly remember as a teenager enjoying her father Victor Morrow in Blackboard Jungle and of course feeling enraged later at his death due to someone's negligence on a set. I don't have much patience for romantic love stories but I said okay, I'll stick with it for a while.
What a brilliant effort all the way around. I expected soap bubbles and got glue instead on the seat of my trousers. Riveting. I had long despaired of American-produced sci-fi -- the aliens always speak and understand English not Cantonese and their "future" values they seem to have gleaned reading yesterday's Los Angeles Times. This was sci-fi at its best, unobtrusively raising the deepest questions touching reality and in this case arriving at the answer that one of the greatest scientist of all times gave. Pierre Laplace postulated that if you could acquire sufficient knowledge, you could then know the position and movement of all the atoms in the universe, with all that implies. But on his deathbed he is reported to have put knowledge in perspective in terms of defining reality. He said all science is trifling, nothing was real but love.
I'd give this a 10 but what bothered me were the stamps. Anyone who handled the letters would have noticed something curious about them and asked questions. Or did they change form in transit? And if that happened, why did Corrigan (Scott) go to the trouble of using pen and ink? Oh well, can't be picky, and perhaps in the original story by the Invasion of the Body Snatchers author, this was explained.