Gomby

I love European cinema, including a number of those films which deal with the lives of artists ("Wolf at the Door" and "Caravaggio" are two favorites that come to mind), but this was one of the most infuriatingly dull and pointless films I've ever seen. Perhaps it's trying so hard to have the quality of everyday life and avoid biopic clichés that it doesn't do anything BUT display the quality of everyday life while avoiding biopic clichés. I never thought I'd see a movie where a character stops in the middle of a conversation, notices her husband has a blackhead and pops it for him before going back to the discussion at hand. Well, fine. But the conversation bracketing this bit of everyday business was dull as dirt anyway. In fact, the popping of the blackhead was the most interesting thing in the scene, which should tell you something.

In terms of the characters, the women are particularly annoying. Every once in a while one of them talks about the suffragettes, or the fact that they're not taken seriously because they're women, but each of their parts seem to have been written and directed by someone who's never even met a woman. One female character gets over a traumatic moment in a heartbeat and goes back to inanely smiling, another shows one mood and one mood only; petulant.

Toward the end, when the audience was looking for their coats assuming, with Vincent dead, that the film was about to end, Pialat throws in a minute or two bit where a minor character has a heavy trap door fall on her foot, which nearly breaks it. She gets upset, yells at the person who dropped the door, is taken outside to soak her foot in water, has a guy massage it. You think: "what the hell is this doing here in the last two minutes of the film? Why didn't they cut it out of this already overlong movie?" Well, the answer might be that if they cut out all the unnecessary stuff like this, there simply wouldn't have been anything left to release.

P.S. I saw this with a friend who is an Art History professor, and he also thought this was the most pointless film about an artist he'd ever seen.

"Straight-Jacket", despite it's horror film title is one of the best comedies, gay or straight, that I've seen in a long, long time. The sharp-witted script is a delight and the look of the film is great. You really feel like you're watching one of those old 20th Century Fox Cinemascope films from the Fifties (with color by DeLuxe, of course!) Especially wonderful is the new heartthrob discovery Adam Greer, who melts both the main character's heart as well as the audience's. It may seem hard to believe that a vain Hollywood movie star like Guy Stone (the film's protagonist) could fall in love with a Marxist novelist, but Greer makes that plot twist seem not only plausible, but inevitable. Veronica Cartwright (who I loved vomiting up all those cherries in "The Witches of Eastwick") gives another memorable performance as Stone's agent, Jerry. I can hardly wait until this film comes out on DVD so I can buy it.