The Baker’s Wife (La femme du boulanger) 1938 **

(There may be spoilers in this post.) The French always display such superiority when it comes to making humanistic comedies about philandering spouses in small, provincial towns.  I think it’s a cultural thing, as many Americans are off-put by how blasé the French are when it comes to adultery.  A French woman I know explained this to me quite simply: Americans equate sex with love, the French do not.  By now I suppose you are wondering...

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Flaming Creatures (1963) :(((

Sometimes I wish I were dead so I wouldn’t have to watch films like director Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963). No, I’m not one of those people who would have rioted in the 60s and 70s whenever there was an underground showing of it—I could care less about transvestites, homosexuals, and graphic nudity.  No, I’m one of those people who like a movie to have a plot and make some kind of sense—Flaming Creatures was beyond my comprehension....

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Das Boot (1981) ***

(This post probably has spoilers.) World War II lasted approximately six years. Perhaps Das Boot (1981) didn’t last quite as long as that, but at times it seemed as though it did. I watched Wolfgang Petersen’s director’s cut, which was a long 209 minutes (which really is not that long when you compare it to the 300 minute BBC mini-series version). Don’t get me wrong, I like the film—I just wish it were a tad shorter.  I expect this taut war...

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Pepe le Moko (1937) ** 1/2

(There may be spoilers in this post.) Director Julien Duvivier’s atmospheric depiction of a Frenchman trapped in the Casbah by his own criminal undoing was the inspiration behind Graham Greene’s novel and screenplay, The Third Man (1949), as well as the 1938 English remake, Algiers, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr. All three films share an undeniable element of fatalism and entrapment, but only one truly represents 1930s French poetic realism....

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Enter the Dragon (1973) **

This is a martial arts film.  Anything that doesn’t involve Bruce Lee using his fighting skills to decimate an entire legion of minions is bad…real bad. I’m not sure if director Robert Clouse envisioned Enter the Dragon (1973) as a Hong Kong version of a James Bond film or not, but it sure seemed as though he did.  Let’s star with Lalo Schifrin’s musical score. If you’ve heard both it and the Bond theme, then you must see some similarity....

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) **1/2

While Sweden generally does not suffer from extreme heat temperatures,  I can find no other explanation as to why so many characters in director David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) are so diabolically demented than this: Satan sleeps in Sweden.  While the film is cloaked in a rather riveting plot about a serial killer, there is no getting around the fact that that the story is filled with graphically disturbing scenes...

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A Matter of Life and Death (1946) ***

  (This post was a participant of “The Archers Blogathon” hosted by The Classic Film & TV Café. To find other wonderful blog entries on this subject please visit the CMBA website.) The Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, collaborated on eighteen films over a thirty year period (1939-72). Usually, it was Powell who did the bulk of the directing and Pressburger who came up with the story ideas and handled most of the production...

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