Waste of time

Some things I liked some I did not.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The play absolutely deserves every award it has received. It's a serious but blackly humorous -- or humorously black -- discussion of politics, philosophy, and just what constitutes sanity, with enough madness to hold our attention and enough roots in the real world that we can't easily dismiss the points it makes.In the film there are few directorial choice that I might quibble with, and there is one (not very important) change I definitely disagree with... but overall it's a surprisingly good job of translating the first Broadway production to the screen.(I have both the Caedmon complete recording of the Broadway production and a copy of the film, and I've played de Sade, so I'm a bit more aware of the details than most viewers would be. Alas, I can't read German so I can't compare any of these to the "real" original.) If you can find a good live production of Marat/Sade, see it. If you can't, or if you want to revisit it, the film isn't too far behind.

This movie is about a play the inmates of a Charenton lunatics asylum are supposed to perform in 1808, under the direction of the former marquis De Sade, one of them. The main character is Marat, a nobody, who became one of the most blood thirsty leaders of the French Revolution. He was himself murdered by Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen in Normandy, who was supposedly a descendant of the great Corneille, who wrote "Le Cid", probably the most famous of French tragedies of the Golden Age. This is filmed theater, not very interesting, and even rather boring. But one has to acknowledge that Glenda Jackson's performance is stunning. She probably never was a pretty woman, just average, and now, as she grew older, she's quite ugly. But she had that flame in her eyes...

This takes place in 1808 in an insane asylum. The Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee) puts on a play of an assassination for an audience. He uses the other inmates as actors. Things slowly get out of hand leading to a truly horrifying ending.I first caught this way back in 1980 at a center for adult education. It was a video of the movie shown for free. The picture was murky and the sound was terrible. Still I sat through it. I just caught it again (over 20 years later) on cable. This time I could see and hear it clearly. I'm not going to pretend that I understand what this is about, aside from the basic premise about a bunch of inmates putting on a play, and I do know it was based on a stage play. Still, I watched all 2 hours. The acting is great across the board but Magee, Ian Richardson and Glenda Jackson (in her major film debut) are exceptional. The movie is disturbing--I realize these are all actors playing roles but they're so good that you believe everything you're seeing. The direction also is masterful--it opens up the play cinematically. It has an R rating but that's mostly for subject matter and a brief nude scene with Richardson. This isn't for everybody--some people will be bored silly by it--but for those who like challenging movies this fits the bill. The ending is very disturbing. I give it a 7.

So I get off work late and I'm sitting in the big chair around 1:30 a.m., flipping around, looking for something to fill a half-hour gap until a rerun of the X-Files comes on. Next to me is my wife, passed out on the couch. Normally, I choose a benign History Channel doc on Hitler or something and my wife sleeps through it all until about 4 a.m. when her maternal instincts take over and we go to bed. But tonight was different. Tonight I came across this movie in the TV guide. Not only had I never heard of it, it was supposedly a four-star job. I did not think those last two things, in conjunction, could be possible, so I tuned in. Soon I'm manipulating the volume control -- louder during the quieter parts to try to make out what they're saying, or softer because my wife wakes up, shrieking, asking me what the hell I'm watching.I could not make heads or tails of it, and I'm a college grad-u-ate (albeit it from the Jethro Bodine School of Brain Surgery). The 'Glenda Jackson and the knife scene' made me edgy. The odd partial close-ups were a technique I never had seen before in cinema. The longish (in movie time) commentaries had me falling asleep. A couple of reviews here helped me understand what I was watching a lot more than any opinion I could conceive from having watched it that half hour. In conclusion, I know for sure only this: It's not a date movie. After a half hour, I switched to the X-Files, so it didn't enthrall me to any acceptable degree. However, during the half hour of viewing time, I kept hitting the summary button in order to write down the long, wacky name, in order to investigate further. But most telling was the fact that my wife went to bed without me -- for the first time in 12 years -- because it disturbed her in/out dream cycle to the point of pushing her over the edge.I can't recommend this movie. I also can't stop thinking about it.