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Vejiita's Spanish Cinema site is updated

 

Deadwood

 Season Three Summary

Robin Weigert, Episode 2
Cynthia Ettinger, Episode 4
Sarah B. Lund, Episode 5
Robin Weigert, Episode 7
Unknown, Episode 11
Paula Malcolmson, Episode 11
Sarah Pacelli, Episode 12

 

 

The Good German

I love the films of the forties, which this replicates and pays homage to. I like the cast (Clooney, Blanchett) and director (Soderbergh). I'm always fascinated with the WW2 era.

So why couldn't I get into this movie?

I don't know. I lost patience with it after about ten minutes of meandering that never drew me in. I captured the nudity and never finished the movie. Here's Tuna's review which, in a nutshell, is "technically brilliant but boring," a review which can be used for many Soderbergh films.

Here's Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane in Deadwood (above), going for a whole different look in The Good German.

 

 

The Silent Partner

This is a 1978 film from Canada which features a cat-and-mouse battle of wits between an immoral bank robber who thinks he is clever and the bank's amoral head teller who is cleverer still. The teller (Elliott Gould) notices a series of clues which lead him to conclude that his mall branch will be robbed by the mall's Santa Claus (Christopher Plummer, who is required by Canadian law to play the smooth villain in all Canadian films), probably on the day before Christmas. Instead of turning the man in or reporting his suspicions, he decides to exploit the situation to his own advantage. On the day of the robbery he systematically moves almost all of the bank's big bills from the till to his own briefcase. When the robber comes in and asks for the money, the teller hands him the small amount on the floor, then trips the alarm late enough to allow the crook enough time to escape. (He can't be caught or the monetary discrepancy would be discovered.) The crook makes off with a few thousand dollars Canadian (about thirty eight cents American, or eleven quadrillion lire, for our Italian readers), while the teller walks off with the serious money, and eventually moves it to a safe deposit box in his own bank, intending to ignore it until the robbery is long forgotten. He hides the safe deposit key in a completely secure place (inside the half-full jar of jam in his fridge), and begins his patient wait.

Unfortunately, the press picks up the story up, and the publicity eventually reaches the robber, who quickly puts two and two together and realizes he's been had. Since he a violent sadist who own the only gun in Canada in 1978, this spells major trouble of the bank teller. The rest of the film is a chess match between the two men, wherein each of the two holds the upper hand from time to time. The wimpy schnook of a teller gradually becomes more and more confident of his moves, and this also affects  every other aspect of his life. As he gains confidence, he also starts to impress the ladies.

Critics of the film argue that the character development in the film is undercooked and the plot is overcooked. There is certainly some truth to that. For example, the teller has a dying father who is a stroke victim. This circumstance is not used to teach us anything about the teller's personality or background, but simply as a plot device. When one of the robber's underlings, a beautiful woman, tries to seduce our hero, she introduces herself as the night nurse at the father's hospital, and reveals how the old man always said he was proud of his son. Since we have already seen that the father can neither speak nor recognize his son, we know immediately that the woman is lying. More important, we also know that the teller knows, and does not let on that he knows, and is thus scheming to use the woman in his own counter-move. Frankly, I think this entire scenario was extremely clever, economical screenwriting, and not a flaw at all. Yes, this is a plot-heavy film, but the characterization is as deep as it needs to be in a plot-driven movie. And the screenwriter did not ignore character. The teller could have just simply manipulated the woman into providing disinformation, but he immediately realized that she would do anything necessary to gain his confidence, so he didn't plant the seeds of his plan until he ... er ... thoroughly plowed all of her furrows, if you catch my drift. In essence, he realized he was getting the "get laid free" card, and he took advantage of it. That told us a lot about how his personality was changing from the unassertive man we saw earlier, who couldn't summon up the courage to steer his obviously willing would-be girlfriend into the bedroom.

There were a couple of times when I though the plot was getting unnecessarily convoluted. For example, the bank teller's perfect hiding place for the safe deposit key got spoiled when his maid cleaned out his refrigerator and threw out the jam. Unlike the other scenario I described above, this one accomplished nothing except to complicate the plot, and it wasn't even remotely believable. (1) How many bank tellers have maids? (2) How many maids would throw out a jar of jam without asking their employer? (3) If it had been weeks-old Chinese take-out, that would have been another matter, but this was just a regular ol' half-finished jar of jam, and there was no reason to dispose of it.

At any rate, if you overlook a couple of too-obvious contrivances and poor performances in some of the minor roles, you should really enjoy this film.

• You'll keep guessing until the end of the clever plot written by Curtis Hanson, who would later win an Oscar for his screenplay for L.A. Confidential.
• It has a slick, psychotic villain played in the Plummer style, employing surprisingly graphic violence by 1978 standards. (Celine Lomez gets beheaded by the sharp glass on the side of a broken aquarium, and Plummer leaves her head in there to sleep with the fishes.)
• It has a rare screen appearance from John Candy in the days before he left Second City for Hollywood, although for some reason the director assigned Candy to a non-comedic role that could have been played by anyone, despite the fact that SCTV had been on the air for two years before this was lensed.
• There is nudity from five different women, including full frontal and rear exposure from the beautiful Celine Lomez.
• Best of all, there's no nudity from John Candy. (Although his girlfriend did get nekkid, they had the good sense to have her get naked while cheating on him. See Gail Dahms below.)

C+. Absolutely recommended if your kind of film. Although the film is all but forgotten, it gets a thumb up from me. It's an excellent example of how a good script can create an inexpensive film ($2.5m Canadian, about the cost of a pack of cigarettes in Canada) that is fun to watch and doesn't look or feel cheap.

(And a very fine 7.5 at IMDb.)

Susannah York	Film clip
Celine Lomez	Film clip
Gail Dahms	Film clip
Nancy Simmonds	Film clip
unknown	Film clip

 

Happy Easter

Joyueses Paques (1984) is a French comedy staring an aging Jean-Paul Belmondo as a philandering husband. In fact, he is so obvious about his infidelities that he jumps off a boat his wife (Marie Laforet) is sunbathing on to meet with another woman from a different boat in the pre credits. We also see him having an assignation on a train, and doing the neighbor while his wife is sleeping. He drops his wife at the airport, imagining that his womanizing will be much easier for a few days, and picks up Sophie Marceau at the airport. He brings her home, and is nearing first base when his wife unexpectedly returns. Caught, he can only think of one explanation - she is his daughter from a first marriage. It appears to be working, then his wife bonds with this new daughter-in-law, and Belmondo's life goes steadily downhill, including messing up an important business deal, crashing into a pane of glass being carried across the sidewalk, escaping the hospital still under the influence of the anesthetic, and walking into his surprise birthday party. Of course, things get worse, and we wonder just how much his wife was fooled by the whole charade.

Sophie Marceau shows her lovely breasts for the first time on film. Marie Laforet shows her buns in the opening scenes. Several unknowns also show breasts.

IMDb readers say 5.7, and the comments would lead you to believe this is the most popular film of all time in Hungry. Belmondo was larger than life, and the film contained his usual quota of stunts and physical humor, but I felt the material would have worked better by giving the other players more of a chance. This is a C, but is only available in an all region PAL from Germany with French and German soundtracks, and no subtitles. I am sure I missed many of the finer points of the film, as I am rusty in both languages.

Marie Laforet

Sophie Marceau

unknowns