King of Hearts
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Canada
Movie Reviews of King of Hearts
Movie Review: MORE URGENT THOUGH LESS POPULAR MESSAGE NOW THAN IN THE SIXTIES
Summary: 5 Stars
We in the Sixties cheered this film heartily.
Now it would be as popular as the Dixie Chix.
Such is the collapse of peace and our world cutlure and consciousness.
In the Sixties we understood war to be insane and immoral.
Now we are taught from our first film to kill the Other.
Watch this film from a "kinder, gentler" age and remember your own inner humanity, and how to love in peace.
Why are we here? Where are we? Where are we going? Are we having fun yet?
This film through theatre of the absurd responds to the universal and essential questions. General Geranium has such a finer grasp of questions of war than our Rumsfeld.
Watch this film as an antidote to our current elevated urgent war-mongering for fun and profit.
You may even once again dare to love the French people.
Peace, baby.
Peace will win in the end because war does not create.
Private Pumpernickel convinced us the only way to drop out of an insane and violent society is to join the marginalized and rejected from society. Many of us managed to harm ourselves deeply in an effort to drop out. Seek life first, and peace.
And Love.
Such is to be human, and to live.
This is the best movie from that era and essential viewing for children and other living humans.
This movie frees us from that fear which sells wars.
It is a religious film.
Movie Review: War is Fantasy
Summary: 5 Stars
It is the declining days of the Great War (WWI), the Germans are leaving a small French town but are leaving a little present for the advancing British troops. They have buried the munitions in the town square. When the town hall clerk strikes midnight the bomb will be exploded. The town's people evacuate. During this the barber sends off a message to the British.
The British decide to send a man to check this out. They choose the bumbling Scottish Private Plumpick (Alan Bates). Located on the outskirts of town is an asylum. The sisters who run the asylum escape with the town's people, leaving the inmates to fend for themselves. They return to the town, resuming their lives before being commited.
Plumpick arrives in town but doesn't know that the towns people are actually the lunatics from the asylum. He meets the beautiful Coquelicat (Genevieve Bujold) and falls in love with her. He finally puts everything together and defuses the bomb (of course it's more complex and hilarious than just that.) He also finally puts together that there is something wrong with the town's people. The funny part is he feels the lunatics have a better grasp on reality the sane people. So shall he return to the war or stay with people he loves.
This is half fairy tale and half fable. Alan Bates gives a great performance and Genevieve Bujold shows great whimsy.
DVD EXTRAS: None
Movie Review: A buck-naked skip with birdcage!
Summary: 5 Stars
This gem should hit many different emotions for the avid viewer. A true parade of carnival characters set in an antiwar theme -- this bit of royalty of the heart brings up aTHE enigma: Is the difference between psychosis and psychic just a paper-thin line of cultural subjectivism? Is the lunacy of blowing up yet another vacant city on the path to glory any different that skipping naked down a path with a birdcage in one's hand? This film started the boomers reading subtitles and (hopefully) brought them out of their fears of foreign film. (Don't get the dubbed version, it lacks so much charm.) Its popularity had a great deal to do with the country's mass-consciousness about the Viet Nam war; but I hope it would have found the same audience without such a catalyst.
One feels like dancing in a fountain and blowing bubbles on the back of a bus after seeing this great flick. Keep a kazoo handy; you'll want to have something to toot after the film is over and you are left to your organized sanity!
Better yet, follow it up with the 1972 release of "The Ruling Class" and have yourself a truly insane evening of jocularity.
Movie Review: A charming classic
Summary: 5 Stars
The story isn't particularly new or original, and it gives away nothing to say that the message is that sometimes the sane people are inside the asylum. What "King of Hearts" brings to the screen is a thoroughly delightful and charming presentation of this tale.Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when there was a thriving "Art House" film scene and dozens of film societies on every campus it seemed you couldn't open the papers on a weeknd without finding films like "King of Hearts" or "Harold and Maude" playing somewhere. The economics of the film business has changed since then, and there doesn't seem to be room in the local 24-screen multiplex for charmers like this one. Not that it would play well with a crowd raised on Steven Sagal and Madonna. This is from a different era.
Hopefully the rise of VHS and DVDs in the intervening years will make this gem (and others like it) a fixture on campuses again. If you haven't seen it yet, do so. Invite some of friends over, pop the disk in the machine and pretend it's 1968 all over again.
Movie Review: The 1st Time I Ever Saw Alan Bates--Love at 1st Sight!
Summary: 5 Stars
If you've followed the film career of the extraordinary British actor Alan Bates, this early film role of his is going to surprise you. He plays a very likable Scot soldier who literally comes upon a town in France during WW I that is occupied solely by the inmates of the lunatic asylum. The irony is that the passivist lunatics are the sane ones during the unfolding of a world war. With all of the intense roles that followed in Bates' career, it is amazing to see him play a young, innocent, likable, amiable, romantic lead at its start. He reminds me here of today's Ewan McGregor, someone I would never normally think of in connection with Bates! For those of you who have never seen Geneviève Bujold in her early career, you will be astounded by how gorgeous she is here as Bates' romantic interest. I have seen this film many times, beginning with when it first came out decades ago, and it certainly holds up extremely well as a joyous film experience