macataque

one of the many striking things about "the beat my heart skipped" is the protagonist's seemingly unthinking fearlessness. not courage, really, but rather his feral zest for doing what he feels like doing. very existential, it seems to me. and he isn't even likable, exactly, but one admires him nonetheless. another salient point is that this is a french film as well as a remake of an American film that while it obviously had its points was finally mediocre. it causes me to reflect upon an individual's overriding need to be & do as one wills as well as the current malaise in American film-making: simply put, why can't the businesspeople who make up American film-making put away their demographics & let filmmakers make the films they want to? yes, creating a film of quality is an expensive proposition, but there are lessons to be learned from europeans & indeed international filmmakers, at least as many as they learn from us. i highly recommend this film over the original 'fingers'.

i saw this film before i got sober, remembered it & got another chance to see it after i got sober; i recall distinctly Richard Egan, after slipping into alcoholic despair again miraculously sobering up, seemingly instantly cured of drink & sober -- even after having drank! The director, Harry Keller, is the hack Universal's producers gave "Touch of Evil" to after they threw Orson Welles off the project; anyway, "Voice in the Mirror" just doesn't smack of real, coming across as if Nancy Davis Reagan had directed -- "Just say 'No'"; it is NOT how AA began, only a gussied-up version, the way Hollywood does things; i don't think it was made to help people, for drunks to get sober; it was made to make money in 1958, and must have given people odd ideas about AA & alcoholism; today, it is rarely screened & rightly so being a very mediocre oddity, solely for the curious -- i'd like to waste another coupla hours seeing it again.

am i naive? i don't believe -- nor from the background piece to the film i read by director/scenarist Michael Radford -- that Shakespeare -- whomever he was -- was indeed antisemitic; i believe that if anything, given the breadth & depth of the Bard's canon, his intention was to portray the extent to which the Jew was put-upon in those times; and, furthermore, that appears to be reason enough for resurrecting the play to film now by Radford; in fact -- and, yes, i've read the play, but only once thru -- what i took away from the film mostly was how righteous one may be in this world, but, alas, to no avail, since the world too often rewards the guilty, or, at least, the less than innocent (cf. Albert Camus's "The Fall"); for what really does Shylock in is not that he is wrong, but, rather, his rectitude: he is in the right, howsoever mercilessly so, and he has the oath to prove it -- but he cannot beat the world at its own gamesmanship; think ye anon of thou liege who doth provide thine victuals and how oft thine liege wrongeth thee and yet prove right for, after all, thy liege is thy liege and thus be thy master; in other words, the boss is never wrong even when you know yourself to be 100% right cuz he doth sign thine paychex, fardel.

as for Radford's film itself, i suppose it belongs in a class with Lord Olivier's Shakespearian cinema works & Peter Brook's King Lear, which is to say, it merits viewing & possible re-viewing; Lynn Collins is an able Portia & ranks with Emma Thompson's work as Princess Katherine in then-husband's Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" for astonishing first work noted by this writer; production design, costume, cinematography are of high standards as they should be.

On one level, this film is a failure: It's a fictionalized knock-off of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the making of "The African Queen" with Bogart & Hepburn directed by John Huston. This surface level is not so enthralling. On a second level, the level I believe the artists really wanted to put across, it isn't so enthralling either. Nevertheless, they are to be commended for attempting something unusual: An effort to show the creative process -- and the fears lurking within barring the fruition of art, often at great costs to health and personal relationships. In ranking Eastwood's films, this film falls below "Unforgiven", "Million Dollar Baby", "Bird" or "The Bridges of Madison County", but the subtext here raises its status. A must-see for the serious artist or wannabe.