KimB-3

I loved this adaptation and found it really captured the romance, violence, and power of the novel. I thought the leads were excellent, although I didn't like the fact that Juliette Binoche played both Cathy and her daughter (with blond hair). But the real star of this picture is Ryuichi Sakamoto's haunting score. I've been looking for it on CD for years, to no avail.

I had high hopes for this film, but ultimately found it unsatisfying. Like many pictures coming out of Hollywood today, it was too long and bloated -- it needed to be much tighter and more focused. There were many intriguing ideas in the picture -- the value of pornography, de Sade's amoral nature, madness/genius, man's struggle against his base urges -- but the film never picked one theme to focus on. As a result, I came away confused by what the film was trying to accomplish. In addition, the purported villain, Dr. Royer-Collard, never actually does anything particularly evil, and as the film winds on, he become more and more divorced from the plot. The climactic scene in which de Sade's words become reality happens largely off-camera and is upstaged by the chaos unfolding in the rest of the asylum.

Geoffrey Rush and Joaquin Phoenix turn in very good performances and I would have liked to see a more intense, tighter study of their relationship without the distraction of the many minor and irrelevant characters who pop up.

"This Could be the Night" is a charming fish-out-of-water story about a straight-laced girl who becomes a part-time secretary at a seedy nightclub in New York. Jean Simmons plays Anne, the self-possessed college grad who's trying to expand her horizons by taking a job where she's surrounded by "characters." The club staff quickly find out that she's a "nice girl" -- that is, a virgin -- and tacitly conspire to keep her that way. No-one takes this task more seriously than Tony, one of the owners, and a well-known lothario. Naturally he's falling for her and is determined to keep her out of every man's clutches, especially his own.

The chemistry between Simmons and Fransciosa sizzles and all the characters' tiptoeing around the word "virgin" definitely gives the movie more sexual overtones than you would expect. The club staff are a likeable bunch -- from busboy Hassan, whose father won't let him change his name until he passes algebra, to strip-dancer Patsy, who really wants to be a cook. The dialogue is snappy and intelligent and the characters stay true to the end.