Vivienne_Lumiere

What is this, like the ultimate white male fantasy world or something? The only person of color dies in the first few minutes, and the only woman with an actual role gets two speaking lines and is only there to tempt a man's flesh, get punished, then tempt a man's soul and ultimately be left with nothing. And that makes it sound like her character is something more than incidental, which it is not. Yeah, I get that in 1327, even more than now, the western world was run by white dudes. But in 1986, films didn't have to be made only to satisfy that demographic.

I can't believe this gets a 7.7 on IMDB. Or maybe I can...

Donna Deitch, director of the groundbreaking lesbian romance Desert Hearts, deftly turns her critical eye toward the erotic thriller with Criminal Passion, and succeeds in making a feminist version of this dog-eared cinematic trope.

There's an admirable effortlessness in her execution. She never waves it in our faces that the lead cop is a woman, but at the same time makes you viscerally feel that Detective Melanie Hudson exists in a man's world...and that it does actually mess with her head. Other characters similarly have their genders flipped from the norms within the genre; plus Melanie works with a queer cop, to boot.

All this doesn't merely serve to give us a few breaths of fresh air, but rather informs the very essence of the film. It hits very differently than your Basic Instincts or Last Seductions. It's a highly enjoyable watch, suffused with great atmosphere and memorable characters. Plotwise it may not be the most original thing you'll watch this month, but I don't think that was the point. It feels like Deitch was attempting to give a genre film her unique feminist touch. But I don't want to minimize its craft. Criminal Passion is both extremely capable and very refreshing filmmaking. I'm gonna watch it a second time.

It's far too seldom that a new U-boat movie (or, okay, TV show) is released, so I got pretty excited about this. Also, it combines a story of the French Resistance, another film genre I love. All my excitement was thoroughly wasted on this, though.

The first red flag was that it's touted as a sequel to the 1981 film/mini-series of the same name. If you've seen that version, and recall the ending, how could a sequel possibly be made? They have a few strands of DNA in common, but mostly just a glimmer of a similar scene here and there, and hardly a continuation of the plot.

But my main problems with this series are that it does that soap opera thing of maintaining endless suspense with no resolution; and the music, aside from the few times they quote the majestic main theme of the original, keeps on this constant droning tone of low-key suspense. These two factors combine to make eight hours of one emotional tone, lacking any of the dynamism brought by the cast of memorable characters and acting in the original.

The moment when I knew for sure there was hardly any redeeming value in this series was when a baby appeared. Babies have no place in U-boat movies!!

I'd probably rewatch the abysmal U-571 before giving this tedious, droning piece of soap opera fluff a second chance.