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The Hairdresser’s Husband
Half Nelson
Hangmen Also Die!
The Hangover
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The Hairdresser’s Husband 1990 Patrice Leconte (France) 2.5 Jean Rochefort plays adult version of young fellow who dreams all his life to marry a hairdresser, Anna Galiena as the sumptuous hairdresser (she does only men) that he marries for the second part of the film. Rather thin film that seems to be based on Leconte’s sexual fantasies or something akin to them. Rochefot is obsessed with female hairdressers, and he is not satisfied until he marries one somewhere in his forties. Not very much happens. His father slaps him around for his obsession; in adolescence Rochefort wears an effeminate (?) red bathing suit with pompoms (a fetishist object?); after marrying Galiena, they have sex in a somewhat desultory way (he fondles her genitals while she cuts a man’s hair); there are some good comic scenes, e.g. when customers argue about the existence of God in the salon; Rochefort’s practice of belly dancing two or three times in the film comes off as rather bizarre. Rochefort does almost nothing aside from sit around the salon and watch his wife work or otherwise (she is sexy and pretty). In the end, after an “orgy” together, Galiena goes off and commits suicide – for reasons unknown; and life for Rochefort must then resume its slow motion pattern. The world of the couple is very isolated: they barely go outside their shop; only a few friends attend their wedding and the reception. Film is exquisitely filmed and edited producing an obsessive, claustrophobic sense; but it needs more content – action, character and development.


Hairspray 1988 John Waters 3.0 Divine fat, fussy but good natured as Edna Turnblad; Rickie Lake the focus of the film as Tracy Turnblad, Colleen Fitzpatrick as the bratty Amber, Shawn Thompson as Corny Collins. Entertaining, but rather shallow film about teenagers in early 1960s Baltimore. Plot involves the girls’ fascination with the ‘American Bandstand’ type TVshow run by Corny; and the praiseworthy efforts of Tracy et al. to integrate the show – everyone dances to their music, why can’t Blacks dance on the show, boys and girls? Film is party comedy and part musical – the music is nostalgic 60s hits, the dancing is mostly teenage girls doing the twist, etc. in front of the camera. Film is very good hearted – Blacks should have the right to be on the show – it is only fair; it is a bad thing to be mean and petty to other adolescents (Amber, look at me!); it just makes sense to have a fashion shop in town for generously proportioned (fat) women; and everybody is just trying to have fun. Style of the film is over-the-top colors and styles – enormously exaggerated 60s bouffant hairstyles (which of course requires large amounts of hairspray to keep them in place), early 60s dress styles (sacks, etc.), and bright carnival colors everywhere. There are some minor satirical moments – Amber’s parents, who are living through their daughter; the pretentious nonsense of the beatnik couple (one played by Pia Zadora), etc. Pleasant and makes you smile, especially if you lived through the early 60s.


Half Nelson 2006 Ryan Fleck 2.5 Ryan Gosling as an inner city History teacher and girls’ basketball coach who also lives alone and uses drugs at night in his chaotic apartment; Shareeka Epps as a 12-year old student who befriends him when she discovers him on the floor of the girls’ locker room using drugs. Pretty interminable, sluggish movie that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Gosling strikes up his most unlikely friendship with Shareeka, but any indication of change – much less redemption – in either characters is buried way too deep for me to find it. Dialogue is slow, sparse and uninformative: how many times do we get three or fours successive angles of Gosling’s puzzled face as he fails to think of anything to say to his interlocutor, most often Epps. Most of the film is shot with a handheld camera, creating shaky, poorly framed shots that expose the viewer to severe headaches. Film sketches in the background of both characters: Gosling has ineffective liberal parents who support him but drown their failure to stop the Vietnam War (how many years ago?) in several glasses of red wine; Shareeka has a mother in uniform who is never home and a brother who is as (clean-cut!) drug dealer. Much depiction of the contradiction between Gosling’s valiant attempts to teach his junior high kids about U.S. history (and of course he has to battle with benighted school administrators) and his incompetent, aimless personal life. There is little indication, by the way, that he is a good teacher – he spends most of his time in front of the class unshaven, hair disheveled, and rattling on about yin and yang (Where did we get the idea that only the winners matter?) and the clash of opposites. This film is way over praised.


Hallelujah 1929 King Vidor (MGM) 3.6 Dan Hayes as Zeke, light-skinned, deep-voiced, emotional, handsome sharecropper with big extended family including Mammy and his brother Spunk; Nina Mae McKinney as Chick – also light-skinned, diminutive, very cute and seductive as no-good girl who manipulates men for her own advantage, leading them to be fleeced by her lover Hot Shot; Zeke’s devoted mother Mammy, very big, wearing white and a head scarf. High quality film made for MGM with an all-Black cast by Vidor despite the studio’s reservations about its marketability. In part a musical – Blacks singing spirituals in chorus, McKinney dancing the shuffle, some boys dancing tap, some songs written by Irving Berlin for the film, etc.; part melodrama and morality tale – Zeke is sorely tempted by the devilish wiles of Chick but he is always struggling against them by becoming a preacher and by moving toward marriage with the good girl Rose. Film moves toward very melodramatic conclusion – Zeke catches Chick two-timing him with Hot Shot (the gambler and con man), Chick dies fearing the devil when she falls off a wagon, Zeke then pursues Hot Shot through the swamps like a zombie, finally killing him; film has happy Hollywood ending when Zeke returns home on probation to reunite with his family and marry Rose. Film has a vivid and sanitized view of black agrarian culture in the South: Blacks are presented as naturally happy, always singing, dancing and smiling; Zeke’s family are sharecroppers who earn $100 from their harvest – the boys visit a cotton gin, Zeke works later in a sawmill, and he breaks rocks a while during his second prison term; religion is very important – the family falls to its knees to pray that they get a good price for their cotton and it seems like the whole town goes to the revival meeting held by Zekiel the Preacher; Blacks are very emotional easily shading into hysteria – much crying, raising of arms and wringing of hands when someone dies or they are baptized or when they feel the power of the Lord or the Devil in a revival meeting; everyone is poor – dressed in dirty work clothes, white smocks and head scarves that are near rags, living in sharecroppers shacks all sleeping in the same room; everyone speaks in ungrammatical dialect that is however not difficult to understand; nearby is a town where nice boys can go astray with gambling and bad women. Hayes’ and McKinney’s performances are both excellent – he serious and conflicted, she cute, seductive and very emotional, her sexual high spirits turning into evangelical hysteria under the influence of Zeke. Not a single White character in the film, and absolutely no reference to Blacks’ problems such as discrimination, suffering from poverty, or bad health. Because it was not a big box office success, the film had virtually no successors; it did however influence the rise of the Race films of the 1930s and 1940s.


Halloween 1978 John Carpenter 3.0 Jamie Lee Curtis as long-faced, innocent, virginal, sincere, resourceful babysitter threatened by the evil force – she has no boyfriend and is interested only in the well-being of the children she is babysitting; Donald Pleasance as the distinguished doctor from the psychiatric hospital who keeps warning the viewer that Michael Myers (known by the filmmakers as “the Shape”) is pure evil; Nancy Kyes as the cute brunette fried of Curtis who makes the mistake of having sex with her boyfriend and walking around in her underpants; P.J. Soles as another cute blond friend who has quickie sex with her boyfriend, shows her breasts to the camera, and is then quickly murdered; Charles Cyphers as the more or less clueless sheriff ineffectively assisting Pleasance in his hunt for Myers. Famous, often overrated horror film made on a budget of $300,000 that starts the rash of kill-the-promiscuous-babysitter movies that populates US movie theaters in the 1980s and 1990s. The narrative is the simplest: after a prelude in which the child Myers murders his sister after she has sex with her boyfriend, he escapes from a mental hospital and begins to stalk female adolescents in his Midwestern town (actually filmed in West Hollywood), murdering two of them and finally focusing on Curtis (no idea why he picks on the three girls aside from the obvious sex angle); after several of Curtis’ narrow escapes, Pleasance shoots the Shape several times, he falls off the balcony onto the lawn, and when Pleasance comes downstairs to view the body,… he is gone; setup for the sequel, one supposes. Film is painstakingly made: it is well acted with generally believable teenage dialogue. The cinematography stands out – many scenes that take advantage of darkness, menace, and suspense: the opening sequence in which the child Myers murders his sister that uses a long steadycam shot from a first person perspective – homage to the opening scene from Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil’; the escape sequence in a driving rain in which Myers climbs on top of the doctor’s car and then smashes a window with his fist as the nurse screams bloody murder; as Curtis walks across a darkened room, Myers’ blank white face slowly appears glowing in the dark of a closet (no idea why Myers chose to wear the Captain Kirk mask when he is up to no good); after she has narrowly escaped being trapped in a closet, Curtis stands with her back to Myers on the ground and through the mirror the viewer sees him rise again behind her. Film has an extremely uncomplicated narrative. Its deliberate, even slow, pace is covered by the buildup of suspense as various characters spot Myers lurking in the shadows observing them and then climaxes in the murders and the pursuit of Curtis. Atmosphere is effective, if a bit artificial – the streets depict a traditional middle-class community, but almost no one but the sheriff is present; the murders take place in a deserted setting where there is no one but the good doctor to come to your rescue. Perhaps the film’s exalted reputation comes from its founding the genre of teenage ripper films.


Hamlet 1990 Franco Zeffirelli 3.5 Not a Hamlet for the ages, but a good version stripped down and made cinematic for the 90s. Mel Gibson first rate with a robust performance as a son outraged at the betrayal of his mother, but with incestuous motivation in the background. Alan Bates and Glenn Close excellent, with Close as a bit too studied. Dynamite scene when Hamlet confronts his mother after death of Polonius. Glorious photography set in a rugged castle on spectacular Scottish coastline. Play much trimmed and manipulated to make intelligible and to focus on main plot line – 2:15 in length. Most lines cut, even some of most famous ones; at least one scene invented (first one of father’s funeral); lines moved to different character or mixed with others in different scene. Final sword scene very effective and exciting.


Hands Across the Table 1935 Paramount (Mitchell Leisen; head of production was Lubitsch) 3.5 Carole Lombard as cute, peppy, and down-to-earth hotel manicurist who doesn’t like being poor and wants to marry rich man; a thin, young Ralph Bellamy as nice-guy millionaire confined to a wheelchair and who says constantly “She’s a lovely girl” —too nice for Lombard, one supposes; McMurray as supposed millionaire who plays hopscotch in the hotel corridor (?) and makes nonstop cynical wisecracks and shows up late for a date; he is screwball, off-the-wall, with a sense of the ridiculous, and a way with words; he spends a lot of the movie in his underwear or with his shirt off; Astrid Allwyn as hard-boiled rich fiancée of MacMurray. In first date with McMurray, Lombard and he have a great time trading wisecracks and playing practical jokes. The plot turns when Lombard discovers that MacMurray is as broke as she is and has to move into her apartment as a boarder, and the two have to confront one another as poor people. It is fun watching them gradually fall in love with one another: they both have the same absurd sense of fun; Lombard’s vulnerability is moving. We realize of course that for the two to get together they will have to change – they will have to stop being “heels”. She of course has a period of resistance when she realizes that she is falling for him. Their first kiss is photographed very tenderly. In the climax MacMurray makes a resolution to go to work and quit being a ‘gigolo’. After she acceptsr proposal, they are on a bus; he flips a coin and says that if it lands on the edge he will get a job! When it falls in the street, they stop all the New York traffic looking for it and finally find it – on its edge! Camera pulls back to the huge traffic jam. Since Lubitsch is production head, the film has Lubitsch touches: e.g., when Lombard is ready for a hot date with MacMurray, she looks at her bankbook, then a whirlwind of preparatory activity, and then another shot of the ledger showing a balance of just over a dollar; when the two are told that because they are dressed informally they cannot enter a club “in those clothes”, they start to take them off and the frightened maitre d’ lets them go in. To frighten away rival suitor, MacMurray goes into next room, fakes beating her, coaxes her in making suffering noise effects, makes a show of looking for his gun, and of course the suitor (William Demarest) runs out the door. Lombard calls the house of MacMurray’s snooty fiancée, and we cut to a woman standing in a mink coat, the phone rings, she takes off the coast, and reveals her maid’s uniform! Then pretty hilarious bit with Lombard pretending she is the Bermuda long distance operator, MacMurray struggling to make himself heard over so much interference, and the two cracking up because of the fun. Lombard is pretty adorable – she is pretty (although not extremely), down-to-earth, and fairly worldly: she doesn’t get embarrassed when McMurray is walking around in her apartment in his undershorts. The film embraces social mobility – the humblest girl can marry the richest guy; and the loafing millionaire playboys eventually have to learn to work for their living. Almost ideal romantic comedy with only a touch of the screwball. A little bit of quiet cruelty in the treatment of the phlegmatic Bellamy.


Hangmen Also Die! 1943 Fritz Lang 3.5 Hans Heinrich von Twardowski the very model of the arrogant, sadistic, ruthless, leering Nazi chief with a monocle; Brian Donlevy stocky, square-jawed, and unflappable as Heydrich’s assassin on the run (name ‘Svoboda’ means freedom); Walter Brennan looking frail in understated but firm performance as Czech professor active in the Resistance; Anna Lee starring but a bit predictable as Brennan’s daughter who is drawn into the campaign to protect the assassin; Dennis O’Keefe as harmless, sweet tempered fiancé of Ann; Gene Lockhart as pusillanimous, simpering, weasely, wealthy brewer cooperating with the Germans for the benefit of his company; Alexander Granach colorful, bon vivant, lucid, sarcastic and tenacious as Czech police inspector Gruber helping Germans in aggressive, focused investigation of the assassination; Reinhold Schünzel as obsequious, amusing, nervous, fidgety Nazi inspector, Lubitsch style; Lionel Stander as taxi driver who throws himself out of the window of Gestapo Headquarters rather than reveal secrets. Pretty good patriotic propaganda World War II thriller about the Gestapo police investigation following the assassination of Czech Reischprotektor Heydrich in 1942. The assassination is fait accompli at the beginning of the film, which deals with the search for the killer, played with dull seriousness by Donlevy; subplots include Anna Lee’s accidental involvement and the tension with her fiancé O’Keefe when she is in unavoidable compromising situations with Donlevy; Brennan is taken hostage (although he appears one of the hostages that escaped execution), Czaka is introduced as the slimy, hand-rubbing traitor who informs for the Gestapo; in the end the patriots reverse the tables by setting up a fantastic and scarcely credible plot to incriminate Czaka with the support, it seems, of the entire city of Prague; he is framed, arrested, and then “shot while escaping”. Granach, the colorful police inspector mostly in charge of the investigation, is almost too attractive and efficient to keep the viewer’s sympathies on the right side. The film is well-delivered world war propaganda: Czechs are always defiant of the Nazi occupiers (one Nazi gets beaten up in a movie theater when he chides the other patrons for breaking into applause when the news of Heydrich’s death is announced) and almost always cooperative with the resistance, as seen in the overwhelming number of false witnesses who come forward to incriminate Czaka; Nazis are presented as either sadistic martinets, womanizers, drunkards, or sexual degenerates (the Gestapo chief inspector as a sore on his face suggesting venereal disease); the Nazis show no compunction about executing innocent hostages until the guilty parties step forward. The narrative is fairly twisty but methodically organized with clear exposition and no loose ends left untied. Several memorable scenes, some of them recalling Lang’s German films: Anna Lee hidden behind a door observes Donlevy escaping from the police and then sends the police in the wrong direction; Donlevy is revealed surprisingly as a doctor, when he finally turns toward the camera after a long shot of his back; the testimony of a chief surgeon that Donlevy was present at an operation when Heydrich was shot is explained by a later scene in which all the doctors emerging from an operating room look the same because of their gowns and surgical masks; Czaka is unmasked by the Underground as a Gestapo agent by establishing that he understands German through telling a Hitler joke in German; the eventual killing of Gruber is depicted by a shot under the table where his bowler hat is rolling back and forth. Some grating patriotic posturing (the poem written by the hostage!), but the indignation of the German exiles responsible for the film (Lang and Brecht) is palpable and sometimes moving.


Hanna 2011 Joe Wright (Britain) 3.0 Saoirse Ronan as Hanna, blue eyed, blond, and looking maybe 15 as naïve killer machine trained by her father; Eric Bana in rather colorless role as her affectionate “father” speaking with a German accent; Cate Blanchett as ruthless CIA supervisor determined to destroy both father and daughter; Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng as colorful British couple touring in their camper through Morocco and Spain trying to teach their children about life; Jessica Barden charming as the British daughter who befriends Ronan. An interesting film composed of disparate parts: a thriller plot with silly thugs pursuing the good guys (Hanna and her father), a bit of bourgeois family warmth that shows Hanna what her education has missed; and a lot of off-kilter decay imagery giving the end of the film a quizzical German quality. Having grown up in the frozen woods of Finland, Hanna feels that she is missing most of life; she escapes out into the world, where she finds some comfort and some education at the hands of the British family, but mainly danger as she is chased across Morocco (beautiful landscapes resembling the American desert West) to Spain and finally to Germany by Blanchett and her henchmen. She is more than willing to kill when necessary and her martial arts skills are extraordinary. The viewer gradually discovers that she was the only survivor of a gene experiment that the CIA had conducted in Poland to breed more efficient hitmen; when Blanchett had decided to shut it down, Bana had refused and then taken the girl – now his daughter – to Finland to train her to resist Blanchett’s inevitable attack and to survive. The showdown occurs in an abandoned amusement park apparently in Berlin: Blanchett and Hanna battle it out; Blanchett is wounded with a spike, and since she does not die, Hanna shoots her in the head saying “I missed your heart”, thus recalling the first scene of the film in which she had brought down a deer with an arrow but had had to finish it off with a pistol since she had “missed your heart”. Plot resolved: Hanna survives for a life in the world, and her evil godmother is dead along the lines of a Grimm fairy tale. The thriller plot is entertaining and keeps the viewer guessing just the right amount until the truth is revealed. Ronan is a wonderful subject for the camera – thin, frail body, expressive light blue eyes, pale skin, flowing blond hair; so fragile seeming and yet so ruthless and strong when needed. The most entertaining set piece is a cat and mouse scene she plays out with the thugs in a container storage yard with Hanna leaping along the tops of the containers and the men scurrying around underneath, all to the pounding minimalist rhythmic music of the Chemical Brothers. The significance of the clown and decayed amusement park imagery is difficult to decipher. The film is also based on a false premise, since father and daughter have been out of the world for so long that there is no motivation to reveal their location to Blanchett by pressing the red button. Nevertheless, entertaining thriller with a different, fantastic sensibility.


The Hangover 2009 Todd Philips 3.0 Justin Bartha as the more or less normal guy who is getting married; Bradley Cooper as smart-mouthed, good-looking high school teacher who is the leader of the group; Ed Helms hilarious as the group dweeb – a dentist who is constantly reminded that he is not a real doctor; Rachael Harris in one-note performance as Helm’s abusive, dominating girlfriend; Zach Galifianakis as the heroically stupid brother of the bride-to-be; Heather Graham as the gentle, pretty hooker that Helms marries. Very funny, pretty insignificant comic film about a quartet of young male LA types who go to Las Vegas for a no-holds-barred bachelor party experience, but end up living the ultimate catastrophic nightmare, although no one really gets hurt (they are however scarred, filthy, and exhausted by the end of the film!). They check into a luxurious hotel suite; the film then cuts to the next morning – the suite is completely trashed; there is a chicken and a tiger present, and a baby in the closet, and the guys have no memory as to what happened. The rest of the film proceeds something like a whodunit as the guys record clues and race from Las Vegas venue to venue trying to figure out what happened the night before. Many absurd, comic moments involving the tiger (he belongs to Mike Tyson), a wedding chapel (Helms has married a prostitute that he met), the baby (it belongs to the prostitute; she had forgotten him), Helms’ missing eye tooth (he had pulled it out as a macho stunt for his new wife), an effeminate Asian gangster who wears a penis-less crotch patch in his nude scene; when the quartet gives their parking check to the hotel doorman, he comes around with a police car that the guys had stolen the night before. Perhaps the funniest scene is the photographs that are shown under the end credits; they give a blow-by-blow of what the guys really did. By far the most interesting character is played by Helms, who is hilariously reluctant to do anything too extreme and yet when he does, he is obviously experiencing a cathartic rejection of his hyper-bitch girlfriend. The film reminds one of the Athenian Dionysian revels, for which responsible Athenian citizens abandon the shackles of civilization to experience a few days of no-holds-barred carousing; but then you have to return to family and the nine-to-five, as do all our heroes at the end of the film. It also falls generally into the film category of the slacker, irresponsible young male brought to perfection by Judd Apatow. Very entertaining, sometimes intriguing, film.