the Girl on the Bridge: (2000. dir: Patrice Leconte) This is a romantic fantasy for men suffering midlife crisis. Sex, for which Gabor (Daniel Auteuil, mesmerizing as always) seems to have lost the knack, is replaced by the throwing of knives at a nubile, writhing, highly-sexed and much younger woman who eventually forgoes her emotionally unsatisfying but passionately constant sex life in order to devote herself to life as his pin-cushion. The girl in question is played with oh-so-French-innocent-but-really-not charm by pop-star/actress/WAG Vanessa Paradis.
Calling it a venture in Style-over-Substance is misleading in two ways: first, it suggests there is some substance in it to be overshadowed, and secondly, the style is accomplished so gorgeously and with such charm that to many, the cotton-candy-melt-in-your-mouth emptiness at its core will surely not matter. In some slight, unpretentious way, it pretends to be an examination of the wily workings of Luck as a force in our lives, but, with an insouciant, Gallic wave of the hand, it does not really care. (Its single "insight": "Find your soul-mate; there you will find your luck.")
For a truly fascinating examination of the vagaries of fortune, I highly recommend Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intacto from around the same time.
Drive Angry: (2011. dir: Patrick Lussier) I tend to enjoy Nicolas Cage when he's being droll, turning away when he gets serious. If I'm going to watch him as an action hero, he's damn well going to be returning from the dead with a demon-accountant on his trail, looking to save his infant grand-daughter from Satanists who want to sacrifice her at the next full moon. And, hey! Here's that movie!
It's got beautiful old muscle cars, all of which get utterly destroyed, and it's got the silliest violence you'll ever see, including one protracted shoot-out that happens DURING a similarly protracted sex act. Strangely, it's also got stand-up performances: Amber Heard, for one, is very good as the formidable side-kick. William Fichtner and Billy Burke are kind of brilliant as, respectively, the Hellish Accountant and the Evil Satanist Cult-Leader (who, in an inspired choice, talks with a Cajun accent, which always makes an evil cult-leader sexier). Tom Atkins is on hand for a few scenes, too, as the cop in over his head.
Outside of that, it's a lot of explosions and gratuitous maimings and bare-legged sexy girls.
*SPOILER ALERT*
We Were Strangers: (1949. dir: John Huston) It might have been an examination of how well-intentioned rebels descend into the same evils as the fascist regimes they fight, and Huston does dip a toe or two into those interesting and muddy waters. On the whole, though, it is far too respectful of its subject to be successful as a movie, its subject being Cuban rebels fighting a burgeoning dictatorship in the pre-Castro '30s. The acting is good: John Garfield, Jennifer Jones, Pedro Armendariz, Gilbert Roland, and the dark, noir-chiaroscuro lighting is terrific. The script is only fair-to-middlin', and in the end, takes itself too seriously. These poor kids spend the whole movie digging a tunnel into a graveyard and kill a well-loved national figure in order to pull a Guy Fawkes at the funeral, taking the President and the whole cabinet, too, only to find the funeral is moved to a different city and the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. The most interesting roads the film might have trodden are the ones it did not; the road it did take ends in predictable machine-gun fire and a sappy Tom-Joadish speech forced on poor Jennifer Jones which sounds very much like it was written by Barton Fink.
Movie trivia time: They say that Lee Harvey Oswald watched it some six weeks before the fateful day in Dallas. They also say that Huston's first choice for the female lead, a Cuban girl named "China" Valdez for her "slanted eyes", was allegedly the unknown starlet Marilyn Monroe, whom he would cast more aptly in his next film, the Asphalt Jungle.
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