3 Recent Screenings

Alive Inside

Alive Inside is a documentary about Dan Cohen, a nursing home volunteer who discovered exposing seniors with dementia to the music of their youth can relight their memories and personalities.

Here’s the deal:  when we’re growing and our brains are still in supersponge mode (a period that lasts roughly from birth through our mid-20s), the music of our youth gets encoded deep in our brains – way back near the stem.  If dementia sets in, that’s the last part to go.  Thus, it’s possible to light up the brain once more by triggering those musical memories.

This isn’t to imply that iPods cure dementia.  It appeared that patients slipped back into their hazes some time after the music stopped.  Nevertheless, while the music played, these people were themselves again in a fundamental way.

That’s a thing of beauty.

Fury

Fury is a by-the-numbers WWII picture, just like they used to make.  Brad Pitt is the grizzled, fatherly first sergeant.  Jon Bernthal is the hick; Shia LeBeouf the preacher; Michael Peña the alcoholic, and Logan Lerman the New Guy.

They hit many of the same beats as the dogfaces from the great Lee Marvin film The Big Red One, and the film doesn’t have much to offer in the way of surprises.  But if you like war movies, you’re sure to like this one.  It touches all the bases.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

Rude, crude, and mildly amusing, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is the perfect movie to fold laundry by.

The Story of Adele H

Francoise Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H chronicles the descent into madness of Adele Hugo, daughter Les Miserables author Victor Hugo.  While exiled to the (British) island of Guernsey, Adele fell in love with a seducer named Albert Pinson, a lieutenant in the British Army.  When Pinson’s regiment transferred to Nova Scotia, Adele followed.  When it transferred to Barbados, Adele followed.  She simply refused to believe that the man she’d fallen for had not, in fact, fallen for her.  She broke with reality and wound up in a madhouse.  So, kids, there’s your night out at the movies.

Isabelle Adjani, as Adele, is a fine actress who performs creditably in the title role.  Her very casting, however, struck me as a misstep that created a barrier to my suspension of disbelief.  You see, Adjani ranks among the most beautiful women of her generation – not “interesting beautiful,” but “Greco-Roman statue beautiful.”  I simply could not imagine any young man, particularly one so saddled with debt as Pinson was at the time, passing on the opportunity to marry a woman both so beautiful and so wealthy as Adele Hugo.  I particularly couldn’t imagine an ambitious young British Army officer of the 19^th Century refusing such an opportunity.  Ms. Hugo’s beauty, wealth, and connections would have made a star of her husband at a time when a man could climb the promotion ladder simply by purchasing higher-ranking commissions and being generally regarded as a “good fellow.”  Even knowing that The Story of Adele H was based on the historical record, I think I may have had an easier time of becoming lost in the narrative had its protagonist been somehow more average.

Still, this is an engrossing film.  Though its pacing feels anything but brisk, Adjani is so watchable (and so well-photographed) that we can’t turn away from her descent from romantic to obsessive to lunatic.  The Story of Adele H is one worth seeing.