Don't Bother
[See “Entry from August 6, 2008” under “My Diary”]
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Central Station, a Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles, stars the marvelous Fernanda Montenegro as Dora (real name, Isadora Teixera) a retired schoolteacher who makes her living by writing letters for illiterates who stream through the main train station in Rio de Janeiro. Many of the letters she simply throws away, knowing that the hopeless…
Krippendorf’s Tribe, directed by Todd Holland, is almost as unfunny a comedy as An Alan Smithee Film. Richard Dreyfuss plays James Krippendorf, a professor of anthropology with three children whose wife has recently died. Prostrated by grief he has shut himself up in the house and lived on his research grant until, one day, a…
Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…
Touch by Paul Schrader, based on a twenty year old novel by Elmore Leonard, has an appealing premiss but with no idea of what to do with it. The premiss is that a young former Franciscan calling himself Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich), but whose real name is Charles Lawson, returns from a missionary calling in the…
A movie about forgiveness is itself a bit hard to forgive
Corny and over-the-top as Hollywood’s celebrations of the virtues of rural life as compared to urban used to be, at least the filmmakers usually gave the impression of believing in it.
