Charles Michener

It's hard to take this film seriously if you've read the book on which it's based. Chistopher Isherwood's 1964 novel "A Single Man" is not just the piercing study of a middle-aged man's grief over the death of his long-time male partner, it's a cry of rage from the minority that "dared not speak its name" against a smugly disapproving majority. Isherwood charts the last day in the life of his protagonist, a semi-bohemian, British expat college professor in Los Angeles, with a pitiless, mordant honesty that makes the heartbreak just under the surface truly devastating. Tom Ford's 2009 adaptation of the novel is something else. His grieving "widower" is all caved-in sorrow and round edges, virtually indistinguishable from the tony, softly lit trappings of his elegant modernist bungalow, his slick, GQ wardrobe, his super little Mercedes coupe. Flashbacks to his dead lover are lifted straight out of an arty ad for a very expensive men's deodorant. The basic outline of the story is there (minus a few of the book's harsher, less sympathetic scenes), but the cry of pain is muffled. Whatever merit the film has is due mostly to the beautifully shaded performance of Colin Firth as the Single Man. His struggle to remain impervious to the disturbing gaze of the outside world is so keenly subtle that for those who haven't read the book it may be enough.

Watched #1. God-awful. How did Kate Winslet allow herself to get involved in this arch, witless nonsense? When the F word is uttered in every other line of dialogue you know the screenwriter’s desperate. Get the hook, as they used to say in vaudeville.

Herman Melville's short novel, "Billy Budd," as well as the Benjamin Britten opera adapted from it, are both far more potent explorations of repressed homosexual desire in military close quarters and its potential for violence. Two decades after its release, this French iteration of Melville's classic tale remains a visually captivating document of the stoic tribulations of a French Foreign Legion outfit in East Africa, but dramatically speaking, it's as arid as the moonscape-like setting. Full of sweaty male torsos under a torrid sun, numerous sidelong glances from the pug-ugly, sexuaally repressed sergeant, and cryptic dialogue, it may have been homoerotically arousing when it was released two decades ago, but today, when gay porn is as available as Fruit Loops, it's about as titillating as a bowl of the just-mentioned cereal and far less satisfying.

Like all of Michael Mann’s movies “Ferrari” is pure cinematic eye candy - as sleek and visually enticing as the fabled racing machine of its title. Unfortunately, its chassis - the story of a troubled year in the life of Enzo Ferrari, the machine’s master builder - is a lemon, a soap opera that oscillates without much dramatic buildup between the car maker’s fine tuning of his automotive baby and his attempts to maintain a precarious balance between wife and mistress. The dialogue sounds like wooden English dubbed from bad Italian and the performances, chiefly a robotically macho Adam Driver with a variable Italian accent in the title role and Penelope Cruz as his relentlessly bad tempered wife, are monotonous. My next door neighbor has two Ferraris. There’s no comparison between the real thing and this plodding biopic, which never gets out of the starting gate.

"Maestro" is a superficially engaging soap opera about a famous marriage going off the rails thanks to a famous musician's promiscuous bisexuality. That the musician happens to be Leonard Bernstein, the most charismatic figure in American classical music in the second half of the twentieth century, gives the film a certain allure, enlivened by the virtuoso performances of Bradley Cooper (also the director) as the maestro and Casey Mulligan as his sparkling, long-suffering wife, Felicia. Like all Hollywood biopics of such figures, the film is more interested in the great man's personal foibles than what made him so celebrated - i.e. his musical genius. The film, shot partly in black-and-white (the heady, glamorous early years) and hyper color (the troubled later years), skates through the prodigious career with an occasional cinematic flourish, a great deal of incomprehensible, overlapping dialogue and little regard for what propelled it besides the hero's manic energy. (No one seems to mind his chain smoking amid irrepressible hugging and kissing.) The film's climax is double-barreled: an uncomfortably invasive account of Felicia's fatal struggle with cancer and a protracted segment showing the maestro outdoing himself in podium theatrics while conducting Mahler in a vast English cathedral, apparently so transporting that Felicia is able (once again) to overlook the less appealing side of their union. If the filmmaking becomes tiresomely overwrought, while evading true insight, well then so did its subject.

Watched this last night and it was even better than remembered - an ”unbelievable” story about a political Messiah plucked from nowhere that has become all too believable thanks to a recent ex-president with orange hair. As Chauncey Gardiner (aka Chance, the gardener), Peter Sellars gives a master class in comic subtlety. Behind implacable blankness he suggests with the tiniest facial movements a full humanity that is close to heartbreaking. He gets sterling support from Shirley MacLaine as a bewitched benefactor, Jack Warden as a President bewildered into impotence, and best of all, Melvyn Douglas as a dying tycoon whose unshakeable belief in the holy imbecile sends him straight to heaven. Masterful, understated direction by Hall Ashby.

Watched the restored director’s cut of “Amadeus” last night (with live accompaniment by the Cleveland Orchestra, no less!) and after about half an hour, found it tedious. The costumes (17th c. Vienna) are beyond extravagant. Performances (especially F. Murray Abraham as Salieri)) are broad but energetic (too much so in the case of Tom Hulce’s manic, giggly Mozart). But the pacing is glacial and the central conceit - a mediocre composer’s obsessive jealousy over the genius of a greater one - is hammered home till your head aches. What was a lot of fun as a play many years ago became overbearing and tiresome as a 3-plus hour film (notwithstanding multi Academy Awards). I love Mozart, but we bailed at the intermission.