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The Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull was highly touted by The Times "'Neon Bull,' With Creatures Great and Small," 4/7/16) and there were intimations of exotic sexuality to boot. With all that's appeared on the screen from Blue is the Warmest Color to Gaspar Noe's Love, that’s a pretty tall order. Actually Neon Bull might better be titled Fashion Designer in a Bullpen, as the central character Iremar (Juliano Cazare) is a cowboy by day who dreams of being a fashion designer by night. He draws his designs on the centerfolds of pornographic magazines and his scavenging for mannequins in a muddy dump recalls Waste Land, Lucy Walker's film about the artist Vik Muniz and the Jardim Gramacho. Iremar has an ambiguous relationship with Galega (Maeve Jinklings) an exotic dancer who dons a horse’s head and hooves as part of her act and looks like she'd once been extra in Eyes Wide Shut. In the course of the movie Iremar has an affair with Geise (Samya De Lavor), the pregant security guard in a panties factory. It is shall we see say Iremar’s backdoor entry into the world he aspires to and one can't help think of Annie Leibovitz's famous Vanity Fair cover of the pregnant Demi Moore. Lautreamont's "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" is often used as a definition of surrealism. (Was Iremar and Gelse's lovenest with its sewing machine a reference to the Lautremont quote?) So any film dealing with unlikely appositions or oppositions, in the service of a surrealist esthetic, is going to be jolting. Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou was one of the most famous illustrations of jarring contrasts with a nude woman, a bicyclist in a nun's habit and the famous slit eyeball providing the requisite cocktail of humor, sexuality and aggression. But what is missing in Neon Bull is the weaving that characterizes great surrealist works. Mascara's scenes are mini homiletics that end abruptly, with lots of fervor, but little elegance or flow from one to the other. The movie is fragmented and jumpy and after a while you wonder what all the fuss is about. Even the sex, which does succeed in adding one more color to an otherwise crowded palette seems to have a take it or leave it quality. Are we supposed to be shocked, titillated or enthralled and to what end? Even though the point that men and animals have something in common is hammered out in almost every take, the film ultimately seems disjointed, with most of the incipient drama foreshortened and dissipated by film's jumpy and often jagged cutting and pacing.

Love in the Time of Cancer

So great is the power of infatuation or what we might call romantic love that even a dying man or woman might succumb to its torments and delights. Let’s say the end is nigh and a chronic condition has reached a critical level where a patient’s days are numbered. If they’re Catholic, their priest has been alerted and last rites will imminently be read. However, let’s say the knight in shining armor, in the form of a hematologist, or La Cicciolina, in the form of a fetching hospice nurse, saunters into the room. While the senses of the sufferer may be dulled, it’s love at first sight. The dutiful husband or wife who has loyally trudged from doctor to doctor, from one hospital to the next, ever faithful to the beloved whose condition has reduced him or her to being a faint shadow of their former selves, finds his or herself summarily cast off by an invalid who dreams only of escaping into the embrace of what John Donne once described as “Oh my America!my new-found-land.” Love, as we all know, is a temporary form of insanity. It’s nature’s way of creating the idealization which enables sexual attraction to surmount the shoals of consciousness—with its built in reality checks. Now it dabbles with a very dangerous substance which is hope, hope that love will conquer all, and, in specific, debilitation and disease, hope that some romantic agony itself with its diminution of the present and familiar and its “love” for that which has yet to be will metastasize through the body causing the dying and dead to be resurrected from their own ashes. Remember the title of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, Love in the Time of Cholera?

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a classic romantic comedy, a vehicle for stars like Marisa Tomei, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell to strut their stuff. When seeing an all-Hollywood product like this, one is reminded of Dorothy Parker’s famous quip, "Katharine Hepburn delivered a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B.” But there are odd things  that push the envelope. For instance, a 17-year-old babysitter sending nude pictures of herself to her charge’s father. And in an otherwise milquetoasty comedy of this sort, based on the simple premise that a husband left by his wife of twenty-five years has to reinvent himself, the viral nature of Oedipal complexes should also be noted. A thirteen-year-old is in love with his babysitter, who meanwhile pines for the boy’s father. The boy’s older sister falls for the smooth-talking lothario who has, unbeknownst to either of them, been her father’s Mephistopheles, coaching him in his efforts to reinvent himself. To make matters even more complicated, the father eventually ends up repudiating his prospective new son-in-law, who had been his mentor in promiscuity and thus a father figure of sorts. Anagnorisis is the Greek word for a scene of discovery, like the one in which Oedipus confronts the reality that he has murdered his father. Crazy, Stupid, Love, a movie with not all that much to recommend it beyond its Dr. Feelgood effect, has anagnorises in spades.