AlaveWall

As a woman, it's especially fun to watch this program. Annika is so fearless and yet so believable a character. There's a twist to the usual family dynamic in that Annika is the more workaholic and absent parent and her poor, long-suffering (and extremely hot) husband is often stuck home with the kids, or lying languidly shirtless in bed waiting for her just as she has to go out and investigate a tip.

All of the acting is wonderful and the direction very natural. One gets completely sucked into the plot and the pathos. You see how Annika steels herself from being impacted from most of it, and yet some cases really get to her. The Kvallpresse newsroom has its amusing cast of characters, from the tubby, barking and be-jowled news chief, to the lovable and mannish old socialist Berit, to the smarmy young toady Patrik.

Some of the crimes are pretty grisly so this series is not suitable for children. I've read reviews elsewhere in which men complain about having to hear about Annika's family life (also with Irene Huss, another Swedish crime solver I love) so this may be more something women and those interested in women's lives would enjoy.

I hesitate to call this film terrible or dreadful or awful as it inspires neither terror, nor dread, nor awe. Babyface Jean Seberg carries less gravitas than Tinkerbell, and is simply unbelievable as a woman who could lead an army. She exudes no power, no inspiration, not even any intelligence. The entire production is painfully stilted. This is a pity, since I do like the play, and Preminger and Seberg have both undertaken much more successful enterprises.

That some people are evaluating this film based on their finding it a validation of their religious beliefs has no bearing on its quality as a work of cinema. If you want to see the best Joan of Arc film, see Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. If you want to see Shaw's Saint Joan, see it in a local repertory theater.

After the hoopla-hype for this film, I was expecting something really moving and worthy of the historical impact of Che Guevara. While the scenes of the countryside and the mountains were beautiful, and the encounters with people mostly believable, I had a very hard time believing the change in the main characters. Mostly, I didn't believe the star, Gael Garcia Bernal, who seemed way too callow and charismatically inconsequential to handle this role. Throughout the film I kept wishing that the fellow who was playing Alberto Granada, Rodrigo de la Serna, were playing Ernesto.

Throughout the film Che and Alberto meet, cheat, eat, dance, and heal the sick. Many scenes are moving, and effectively convey Guevara's sympathy for the indigent, as well as his evolving image of a "just", mestizo pan-America. Nowhere do we get a glimpse of the fire and organizational skill (never mind the charisma) that would propel Che Guevara to revolutionary super-stardom. This is a fault both in the screenplay and in the casting.

Much of the film is superficial, with the final, overly long black-and-white takes of the ostensibly miserable proletarians (the clown-eyed drunk with the horse was WAY over the top) sploshing the icing on this ridiculously over-hyped and often boring travelogue-torta. Someone could and should do better with this material. Also, Robert Redford needs to brush his hair.