The TV Report

 I just reviewed two shows for Slant Magazine. Both are likable decent shows that are a little less than riveting. United States of Tara (review here) is too quirky for it's own good, and the new Upstairs Downstairs (review here) is too sentimental. Neither are terrible.

Film Frames Friday

Hint: Going to that undiscovered country.

Certified Copy (2011)

Despite a towering performance by Juliette Binoche I couldn't quite buy into this movie. Binoche plays a nameless woman (called "she" in the credits, a bad sign right there), who asks to meet an English writer visiting her hometown in Tuscany. They spend a day together, walking down sunlit streets, and it slowly emerges that they might know one another more closely than we first assumed. It's also possible that about halfway through this film, the characters begin to alter and morph before our eyes. Either way I didn't really understand what was going on and I wasn't mesmerized enough by the film to overlook this fact.

Cannes Poster

The poster for the 40th Cannes Film Festival has just been released and I think it's a thing of beauty. They're going very retro, especially by using a 1970s image of Faye Dunaway. Now if I could just get that invite ...

Where is Janice Gantry (1961)

Decent, if underwhelming, JDM standalone thriller. Sam Brice, ex-NFL player and now an insurance adjuster, searches for a missing ex-girlfriend on the West Coast of Florida. Everything that JDM does well, details of place and time, are present in this novel but the plot in this one is pretty unsurprising; the villain, in particular, is undeveloped and unscary. The best part of this book involves an escape off a cruiser in the middle of the ocean. It's one of the more purely exciting action set-pieces I've ever read in a non-Travis McGee MacDonald novel.

El Dorado (1966)

Starts a little slow and a little familiar, but around the time that James Caan is introduced as Mississippi, this movie starts to cook, and winds up just about as entertaining as a movie can be. It's basically an unofficial remake of Rio Bravo. It has the same director (Hawkes) and the same writer (Leigh Brackett), and John Wayne plays the same character. Robert Mitchum takes the Dean Martin role and James Caan takes the Ricky Nelson one. Less singing and that's a drawback but the characters are beautifully developed and the dialogue is sharp as spurs, and I loved the scene where they take out the bad guys in the bell-tower.

Poetry Monday

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

by A. E. Houseman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.