The son following in the famous father’s footsteps. The woman that comes between them. A rivalry played out among the sun-dappled seashores of the South of France. The end of one startling career and the burgeoning promise of another. These are the elements that make up the nobly intended biopic Renoir. Helmed with a kind of holy reverence that borders on the inert, Gilles Bourdos look at the last few months in the life of painter Pierre-Auguste and the inspiration for son Jean’s desire to enter filmmaking feels like a glacier glanced through a prism of practical hero worship. There is nothing wrong with the narrative or actors, overall, but the film as a whole fails to engage us since the catalyst for our caring - the arrival of a bohemian actress/model redhead named Andrée Heuschling - is, in truth, a psychological cipher.

When did horror fans become so persnickety? When did they determine that only a certain type of scary movie, made within a specific set of dread central parameters, was worthy of paying their neo-nerd attention to? This seems to happen a lot recently. A deliberate and effective work like the Evil Dead remake is dismissed because it’s not “funny enough” while outings such as Kiss of the Damned are condemned for being too respectful of the Hammer Horror past. Now comes No One Lives, a weird WWE-produced byproduct of the wrestling giant’s desire to broaden their media meaning and there are genre-specific websites crowing about how it’s unbelievable, brazen and too bloody. Right, like celebrated classics like John Carpenter’s The Thing should be dismissed to a similar set of standards. You’d think something this gory would get a bit more modern macabre respect.

Perhaps the best indictment of prejudice doesn’t come from a think tank report or some scholarly consensus. All lyricist Oscar Hammerstein III had to do was name his classic South Pacific show tune “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” and the truth was out there for all to hear. Indeed, as the song progresses, the famed name behind such stage (and screen) classics as Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music argued that parents, and the part they play in raising their children, are the source of almost all the hate in society. After all, it’s innocence tarnished and stained that lead to bigotry, racism, and the horrific acts associated with same.

Perhaps it’s too entrenched in our cultural zeitgeist to find a successful translation. Along with A Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby is part of our literary mass hysteria, a right of middle/high school-college passage which predicates our understanding of the novel as artform. We have it beaten into our uneducated heads, reimagined and reconfigured as everything from a revisionist American Dream to the myth of the self-made self made man demystified. So if PhDs can pull apart the many layers of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slight third novel like so many flakes in a fine croissant, imparting their ivory tower wisdom on a barely waking student body, why can’t Baz Luhrmann? Why, exactly, does his masterpiece of multimedia reinterpretation deserve scorn, while your favorite university professor earns tenure?

Alternative titles: The Island of Dr Girard; The Scientists Are Revolting!

POSITIVES:

Helpful “warning” tells you to close your eyes when you hear the bell.

Atmospheric location shooting in the Philippines.

Nifty POV camera work & inventive angles throughout.

Solid no-nonsense performances.