Movies in Brief: Seven, Forget Paris, La Nuit Americaine

Seven (1995).  As characters in film, neither Kevin Spacey nor Brad Pitt have been known for being paragons of sanity.   Pitt has played lunatics very convincingly from "Twelve Monkeys", "Fight Club", to "Legends of the Fall" among just the few I can think of.  Spacey has been in some truly weird shit too, like "K-Pax", "The Life of David Gale" and of course "American Beauty".   Here Spacey takes the prize however while Pitt is only a distant runner up.  Meanwhile Morgan Freeman stands by  like God shrugging, as if saying things like "What fools these white folks be".  

Freeman and Pitt play two police homicide detectives in a thoroughly nasty urban environment where it is raining constantly.  While Freeman is on the cusp of retirement and about to turn his back on this whole unpleasant business, Pitt is the brash younger guy who chose to serve in the crime toilet Freeman exists in, in this precinct.  Meanwhile Pitt's pretty wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) sits at home a little distressed by it all but standing by her man.  She is rather peripheral to the plot until things come to a head in the last act. 

Anyway a serial murderer is on the loose, and the murders are as elaborate as they are bizarre, each one seemingly to illustrate one of the seven deadly sins.  For example a very fat man is force fed until he literally explodes, a corporate lawyer is murdered of a weekend at his office and to ensure that investigators don't miss the point the word "Greed" is spelled out in the man's blood on the plush carpet.  Meanwhile the perp, played by Spacey taunts them.    Indeed this takes the Zodiac murders one better.  This is like Dirty Harry on steroids, and murder as performance art.  

I didn't much care for this film mainly because it seemed pointless except as a vehicle for the ghoulish special effects.  The detectives spent too much time shining their police flashlights into dark corners and really getting nowhere until they remember that class they took on medieval Christian philosophy, and who woulda thought THAT would come in useful?  You never know.  

Forget Paris.  (1995)  This was Billy Crystal's follow-up to the big hit "When Harry Met Sally" and involves a professional basketball referee who is in France only because his dad's dying wish was to be buried with his army buddies who were not so lucky in the D-day invasion of Normandy.  There Crystal is smitten with the American Airline agent (Debra Winger)  who has the unenviable task of informing him that the airline lost his father, casket and all.    Their love affair is recounted by some old friends of Crystal's character at restaurant in a series of flashbacks in a manner similar to Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose".   The love affair has its ups and downs and is moderately funny.  It is the perfect date flick, because, frankly one could expect your date to be in a good mood once it was over, unlike Seven.  

La nuit Americaine or  Day for Night (1973)  is the story of the production of a feature film  and is one of Francois Truffaut's greatest films.  It is a story of the lives of the actors, producers, and technicians as they make a feature film.  If you are a cinema nerd, then this is the film for you, because you get to see a lot of the artifice behind the making of films.  Truffaut plays the director of the film, a role which must have been for him very easy to play.  He is the emotional rock upon which the various actors in their various complicated lives cling with various degrees of success.  One actor, Alphonse,  is having an affair with one of the technicians, who suddenly dumps him and disappears with the stunt man (whose work with the film was done)  to England.  Alphonse then proceeds to seduce the female lead  and then calls up her husband and asks her to "release" her.  The result is that the female lead has an emotional breakdown and won't come out of her dressing room.   

Another actress has a drinking problem and can't remember her lines, and the male character opposite her is killed in an auto accident late in the filming.   While the insurers hover, the script is modified so that they can work around the death, and continue with the film as if nothing much has happened.  

It's a delightful, entertaining and unique sort of film.  I would highly recommend it.