Short Takes Vol 2

Reviews

Wed 8/9

I became aware of The Young Lions through a very positive review I read on one of my favorite blogs, This Divided State. I later saw it for a good price at Shopco and considerd buying it, however fiscal restraint pervailed and I decided to Netflix it instead. The Young Lions is a WWII film staring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin. Martin plays his trademark suave singer character, and Clift his standard heroic outcast, both their performances are solid and they project more depth into their parts then my characterization might indicate. However it is Brando's performance that is Oscar worthy, he plays Lt. Christian Diestl a Nazi with a conscience who becomes a very disillusioned figure by the end of the film. Love intrestes for our three leades are played by May britt, Hope Lange, and Barbara Rush respectively. Maximiliam 'I'm Great At Playing Nazi's' Schell appears as a zelus German Captian.

Thurs 8/10

Finished Gilmore Girls season 3. This season chronicals Rory's final year and Chilton and seemed to have a less direct narrative direction and be more prone to character statues changes then previous seasons. The program also starts to employ flashback and dream squences, which I don't remeber it doing before. This was also the year that Sean Gunn was finally added to the cast.

Guess Who is a film inspired by Stanley Kramer's landmark 1967 racial drama, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Only here the earyler film has been remade as a sort of buddy comedy with the races reversed (instead of white family and black fiance, black family and white boyfriend). Ashton Kutcher plays the nice guy boyfriend, a departure from his characterization on That 70's Show. Bernie Mac, an actor whose work I'm not really familour with, but whom I found fun to watch, is the father of Ashtons girlfriend (played by Zoe Saldana). I liked it, it's a likable film but nothing earth shatering, good enough.

Sat 8/12

Unfaithfully Yours is a later and lesser entry in the directing catalog of Preston Sturges (who was a major stylistic influence on the brothers Coen). The story concerns a famed orchestra conducter (Rex Harrison), who do to the meddeling of his brother-in-law (Rudy Vallee) comes to falsely belive that his wife (Linda Darnell) is having an affair with his secretary (Kurt Kreuger). Not only does the film take an extrodanerly long time to get going, I'd say most of the first 45 minutes was disposiable, but it just felt past its time (Sturges had come up with the idea for the film in 1933, but was unable to get it made until 1948). The last hour of the film is good, but feels like a let down compared with earlyer entrys from the director such as The Lady Eve, Miracle at Morgans Creek, or my favorite The Palm Beach Story. Unfaithfully Yours was remade in 1984 with Dudley Moore, and parodied in the not-so-great Leslie Nelson spoof, Wrongfully Accused in 1998.