“What Alice Found” (+)
This is a superbly-crafted movie with three terrific principal actors. The rather simple storyline depicts a moving and poignant slice of life at the lower depths.
Alice (Emily Grace) is leaving her home in New Hampshire where she had been living with her mother, a single parent. She is driving an old car to Miami, hoping to meet up with a friend and enroll in college. When her car breaks down, she is assisted by two “good Samaritans” driving a camper who offer her a ride to Florida which she accepts. We learn a lot more about Alice from the film’s flashbacks, and it isn’t all nice.
Alice soon learns that her two companions, Sandra (Judith Ivey) and Bill (Bill Raymond), are engaged in prostitution at truck stops. At first Alice is repelled by the idea, but she is ultimately drawn to the money she will earn from each encounter. Ivey’s acting and accent are magnificent and Raymond’s taciturn manner exactly what is required.
The sex scenes are tawdry and believable, and the denouement is also believable. This sleeper movie, probably made for next to nothing, will provide you with an evening of great pleasure and, in most cases, with an appreciation of your personal good fortune, assuming your life is okay. Life is unfair.
“The Statement” (-)
Not very good at all. Based on a book and true story, the film covers an event in Vichy, France, when the local French collaborators in the Vichy government cooperated with the Nazis in the roundup and murder of Jews.
The movie opens with the roundup of seven French/Jewish males who are lined up and commanded to drop their pants to verify, by their circumcision, that they are Jews. They are then shot. The story moves 50 years ahead with the French police commander, Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine), on the run and hiding in monasteries. When he shows up at a bar to have a drink and collect a check sent there regularly by mail, we learn of a conspiracy to kill him.
The conspiracy group referred to as the assassins are ill defined and unsuccessful in their efforts to kill him. A French judge, Annemarie Livi (Tilda Swinton), and the French Colonel Roux (Jeremy Northam) are also looking to arrest Brossard. The questions are who will get to him first and is the second group made up of political assassins or a Jewish group seeking justice for the past murders.
The story should have been exciting, but there was not one moment of anxiety for me nor I suspect for anyone else in the theater, which was only 15 percent full. The acting was without distinction.
The storyline is anti-Catholic in that while many church people helped war criminals escape justice, there were Catholics who helped save Jews. This film does not depict one single Catholic fighting against the Nazis. If I were Catholic, I would be incensed. The film is, intentionally or not, anti-Catholic, and those who expect others to speak up when the victims are Jews or blacks should speak up on behalf of Catholics.
– Ed Koch
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