tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18877183474777080752024-02-18T22:23:04.921-06:00Art House for Our HouseThe 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.comBlogger167125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-41021308154932462242017-07-08T16:03:00.000-05:002017-07-17T14:40:34.228-05:00The 6 Best Jane Austen Adaptations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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July 18 marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death at 41 years old. Pointless debate swirls as to the cause of death. It was easy to die back then.<br />
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Your reviewer has no course-work or disciplined study of her written output. I like movies. But I managed to get through her big five novels: Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; and, Persuasion. Nowadays she is pigeonholed primarily as a source of romantic longing and generally happy endings, but it was not ever thus. There is nothing to compare with her wit, wickedly sarcastic eye for human behavior, and, on occasion, wrenching pathos. That she could have written the better part of P&P by the time she was 21 speaks to an exceptionally agile mind and perhaps time on her hands.<br />
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As the married father of two daughters: one, an Austen fan, the other decidedly not, I was steeped in the filmed output that began as a BBC swell in the VHS 80s, became a tsunami in the mid-to-late 90s thanks to Emma Thompson, A&E, screenwriter Andrew Davies, Colin Firth's wet shirt, and Clueless, was strung along by a solid P&P soft re-boot with modern young actors in 2005, and then finally reclaimed somewhat by ITV/BBC in the oughts with a re-hash of the big five minus P&P plus Northanger Abbey. It probably reached its temporary ebb with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2015.<br />
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Herewith then, dear viewer, are the best filmed adaptations.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">1. Persuasion 1995. BBC/WGBH/Sony Picture Classics</span><br />
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Everything that men can't stand about Austen is missing from this. Only 107 minutes with good energy and great actors, it adapts Austen's shortest and final novel with beautiful concision. Amanda Root as Anne Elliot begins the movie with the lost bloom of a 27-year-old, too beaten down to be a run-of-the-mill plucky heroine. Her family and friends convinced her to reject the indomitable Wentworth (a still young Ciaran Hinds) 8 years ago when he was just a penniless younger brother to local clergy. <br />
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Her feckless noble-born father, hilariously played by Michael Redgrave, empties the family coffers, and now the family must "retrench" to rented digs in Bath.<br />
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Wentworth returns a swaggering captain in the Navy; newly victorious against Napoleon and newly wealthy from booty, making women fan themselves and drop their hankies in all company. He is initially cool and almost cruel regarding Anne’s reduced circumstances and “greatly altered” appearance, but a series of crises energizes her sharp mind and wide streak of competence and decency. Her progression to a renewed mojo and purpose, and his renewed appreciation of same is a romantic joy to watch. Natural candle lighting imparts intimacy and some measure of realism.<br />
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This trailer is awful. Ignore it’s tone.<br />
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<strong>Hall of Shame, Persuasion BBC 2007.</strong> The reliable Sally Hawkins is wasted on a nearly slapstick ending. This story should be easy to film.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">2. Pride and Prejudice 1995 BBC/A&E</span><br />
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There's no dodging it, much as you may wish. After two previous BBC attempts in the 60s and 80s, and a ghastly 1940 movie version, BBC and A&E finally nailed it and completed the revivification of Austen that started with Persuasion above.<br />
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5 hours and 27 minutes of reasonably modern production values, stately pacing and - in Jennifer Ehle, Colin Firth, and about a dozen memorable character actors - the best television acting you will ever see. Ehle's Elizabeth Bennet is definitive. Her filming schedule lasted 8 months (for context, Vivien Leigh was Scarlett O'Hara for about three months) and she is in almost every scene with countless close-ups. I never got tired of her despite the unfortunate period-appropriate wigs. Colin Firth as the almost irredeemably uptight Mr. Darcy brings facial expressions calibrated like a fine watch. Purists have complained that this Darcy is more revealed than redeemed, but in Firth's performance socially awkward young males may find a worthy model of determined self-improvement.<br />
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I won't sport with your intelligence by recounting the plot, but screenwriter Andrew Davies (who gave us the original British House of Cards and has an Executive Producer credit on the American version) adapts the exhausting novel almost flawlessly if not always faithfully. There is a solid dose of Austen's sly humor and dialog, but also real emotion as the pride and prejudice of the protagonists are ground down to finally make them good and decent enough for each other.<br />
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Another awful trailer.<br />
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Honorable mention: P&P 2005 with Keira Knightley. Hideous Americanized ending, but otherwise time-efficient and almost breathless adaptation with stylishly trashy sets, and beautiful exteriors.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387/</a><br />
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The <strong>1980 BBC version</strong> has some admirable qualities but poor Elizabeth Garvie is completely overmatched in the Elizabeth Bennet role and the production is clunky and one-note with mystifying unfunny additions to the book. Future horror star Claire Higgins was 25 when she was supposed to play spirited teenager Kitty Bennet. It didn't work.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078672/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078672/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">3. Sense and Sensibility BBC 2008.</span><br />
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I don't suggest this to be controversial, since most would probably leap to Emma Thompson's 1995 version, but this 3-hour BBC adaptation is wonderful. <br />
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Austen's first major published novel is hilarious in spots but in some ways has the darkest melodramatic moments. A newly widowed mother and three daughters find themselves disinvited from her deceased's wealthy estate and must go to live in a very modest cottage at the behest of a distant cousin. Here they have to start over with little but their beauty and some good-hearted if rustic friends.<br />
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19 year old daughter Elinor is the kindly and reserved adult of the house, keeping the exceptionally beautiful and spirited middle sister Marianne and their coddled mother in check, until they all fall in love one way or another with the dastardly local nobleman Willoughby who nearly "ruins" Marianne. The hysterical unquenchable sadness of the jilted Marianne is beautifully written by Austen with none of her usual irony and wit, so that one suspects this was either closely observed in another or experienced brutally first hand. <br />
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Hattie Morahan as Elinor and Charity Wakefield as Marianne remind us of Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in the lead roles but they're generally more appealing and come off as the very young women that the characters are supposed to be. Thompson was 41 when she made her version and had to advance Elinor to 27 to make it work. But Elinor is a notable character precisely because of her youthful good Sense. <br />
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The supporting cast is fantastic. Downton Abbey and Beauty and the Beast dreamboat Dan Stevens is acceptable as Elinor's morose and plodding boyfriend Edmond Farrars. David Morrissey of Walking Dead semi-fame is the honorable Colonel Brandon, Dominic Cooper is the best Willoughby by far and even Harry Potter’s Mark Williams is good.<br />
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Andrew Davies is the screenwriter again. This is beautiful dramatic work and I think a little under-appreciated in the canon. And there's even a duel with swords! And it's in the book!<br />
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<strong>Honorable mention: Thompson's witty 1995 version, of course.</strong> Simpering Hugh Grant is all wrong as Edmond, but this is otherwise serviceable.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114388/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114388/</a><br />
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<strong>Hall of Shame: The 1981 BBC version</strong> is barely competent, and dull.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089991/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089991/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">4. Emma A&E/PBS 1996.</span><br />
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There's really not a bad version of Austen's funniest book, except maybe the 4-hour 1972 BBC version. Gwenneth Paltrow’s version is tolerable. The 2009 BBC version with Romola Garai is fine and thorough. It’s hard to go wrong.<br />
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But this 1996 Beckinsale version is superior thanks to its brevity and a lovely natural performance by Ms. Beckinsale before she decided to waste her skills on the Underworld franchise. This Emma is really young and thoughtless and more worth the redemption. Olivia Williams is breathtaking as Jane Fairfax and Bernard Hepton near the end of his career is quite funny. The ubiquitous Mark Strong makes a suitably grown up, brusque, and not overly attractive Mr. Knightley.<br />
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<strong>Honorable mention: Clueless.</strong><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">5. Mansfield Park. BBC. 1983</span><br />
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Conversely, there’s not a great version of what was reportedly Austen’s personal favorite book. Evidence suggests it is unfilmable. Six solid chapters in the middle are an interminably detailed description of rehearsals for a play that never actually happens. <br />
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The story features two female leads; the heroine, wounded and halting Fannie Price, and the anti-heroine Mary Crawford, vivacious and selfish. In her we find arguably Austen’s best character study, and she remains recognizable today. Always on the cusp of genuine kindness and decency but always undercutting her own happiness with a self-written narrative of stylishly damaged worldliness.<br />
If you’re up to it, this version covers the entire book soup to nuts in about 5 hours and features a sublimely weird and sympathetic Fannie in Sylvestra Le Touzel (her real name). Jackie Smith-Wood as Mary is okay but this character demands a lot of charisma and she comes up short, thanks in part to an awful wig, and, as was so often the case with middle-period BBC, being too old for the part. The shot-on-video quality is unfortunate and BBC’s dogged devotion to natural sound and unnatural lighting is a humorous distraction.<br />
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There simply is no trailer available. Sorry. I once wrote an enormous 13-clip video review at my old blog, but BBC and Youtube made me take them down. Even a 23-second clip I uploaded recently was blocked. A completely forgotten shot-on-video footnote can’t stand that kind of free coverage. Someone might actually watch it.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085052/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085052/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3</a><br />
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<strong>Honorable mention: Mansfield Park. ITV/PBS 2007 version</strong>. Cheaply made with a tossed off feel and shoddy character development, but it features flashing-eyed Hayley Atwell as the best Mary Crawford ever put to film. 120 minutes. biddy-bang, biddy-boom.<br />
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<strong>Hall of Shame: Mansfield Park. Arts Council/BBC 1999</strong>. Patricia Rozema’s wretched attempt to teach Austen a lesson about slave rape, patriarchy with a touch of incestuous desire, with egregious slow motion. Frances O’Connor is cast as Fanny Price but she plays the character like a sassy Elizabeth Bennet with one eyebrow permanently arched. This misses every possible point. Avoid.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">6. Northanger Abbey 2007 BBC</span><br />
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I don't know the book. It was the first that Austen tried on her own to publish but it often isn't lumped in with the big 5. There are several filmed versions nonetheless. This has Andrew Davies yet again for 90 minutes of screenwriting. Extremely predictable and light-hearted, it briefly tells the story of young Catherine Morland who is addicted to the 18th century equivalent of “bodice ripper” novels - the sort that Austen probably giggled over as a teenager.<br />
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When Catherine is unexpectedly invited to visit the large estate of a charming second son of a glowering old general, her fevered imagination begins to suspect the general of murdering his wife and she nearly destroys her own chance at romance. This version rides entirely on the fine acting of the two leads, Felicity Jones, 9 years before Star Wars Rogue One, as Catherine, and JJ Feild as Henry. They are delightfully expressive and funny and that's about it.<br />
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30 second trailer. PBS/BBC still don’t understand Youtube as a marketing tool.<br />
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Commence comments.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-65346355998171435472014-09-13T18:16:00.003-05:002014-09-13T18:16:32.070-05:00The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2008. 115 min. PG-13 - adult situations, kinda<br />
<strong><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0467200/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></a></strong> says...Two sisters contend for the affection of King Henry VIII.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... Spoilers below. But I’m guessing you wouldn’t be watching if you didn’t know how it all ends. Based on a novel by Philippa Gregory, which I’ve never read, although seemingly every female I know, has.<br />
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Wikipedia can take the fun out of historical drama. It’s not Anne Boleyn - Vampire Hunter, but the revisionism just wears me down.<br />
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This is visually sumptuous, which isn’t that impressive in this day and age, and everything looks really, really clean. But the costumes are great and seem to be period-appropriate, based on the ghastly paintings of the day. It appears to have been made primarily with fans of the novel in mind. It also appears to have failed to make a profit.<br />
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Americans Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn and Scarlett Johansson as her sister Mary are surrounded with benchmarks of BBC such as David Morrissey (stern but slimy as the Duke of Norfolk), Kristin Scott Thomas, and heartthrobs Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch in small roles.<br />
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Johansson is made for this kind of movie. She looks like a painting by Holbein just as she looked like a Vermeer in, “<a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/06/girl-with-pearl-earring.html" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;"><em>Girl with a Pearl Earring</em></span></strong></a>”. And she plays the part of Mary here with an innocent kind of gravity, but as capable of self-preservation. Portman probably has the more difficult role as the mischievous and rather unsympathetic Anne. There is no way you can read the history and think that she just fell off the turnip truck, but this is the first time I’ve seen her portrayed as a willing and helpful pawn of her father and uncle’s scheming. <br />
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Now, I’ve seen Henry VIII played as a dashing young man prone to excess, as a bulbous gross old man - although he died at 55 - and as all points in between. This is the first time I’ve seen him played as a big-eared, black-bearded Croation in Eric Bana. He doesn’t project any of what must have been one of Henry’s most notable characteristics – a very bright mind. Ageless Kristin Scott Thomas is very good as the girls' mother.<br />
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Near the end, Screenwriter Peter Morgan and Portman portray Anne as a pitiful kind of cornered animal scrambling for a way out, and she’s pretty effective.<br />
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So what’s my problem? Aside from Bana? We know that despite the presentation of sister Mary as a virginal innocent in love with her callow first husband, she had, in fact, already been knocking boots with the King of France for 4 years, before she birthed two of Henry’s unacknowledged children. And we know that Mary did not, in fact, raise Henry’s eventual successor, Elizabeth I, as the end credits so portentously suggest. <br />
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Thomas Cromwell just kind of flutters into view and back out again. We only know who he is if we care enough to research it. That’s bad historical fiction.<br />
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Near the end, Mary rides breathlessly away from London – no escort – right, to save her own skin, when in fact Henry and Anne more or less kicked her out of town after she married beneath her station. Then she rides breathlessly back to London – no escort – right, to try to save Anne’s skin, when we know in fact she was smart enough to not be anywhere near the place when the heads started coming off. <br />
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Strangely, the one useful feminist message that might be extracted from this movie - when your looks are blown then it’s finally time to settle down with the nice guy who can put up with you - is passed over. The charismatic Redmayne is wasted in the role of Mary’s kindly and sincere second husband, with whom in reality she found a bit of happiness.<br />
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It’s only a novel, after all, and I shouldn’t get my short clothes knotted-up in the devil’s playground over accuracy, but the fiction here just isn’t that interesting. <br />
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And none of this really ever needs to be done again.<br />
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FWIW IMO the best Henry VIII is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382737/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">2003’s PBS Masterpiece Theater version</span></strong></a>, also scripted by Peter Morgan, with Ray Winstone as the sharp, ruthless, and self-aware king with a clear fear for his immortal soul, overridden by his baser needs. Helena Bonham Carter was quite good as Anne.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-29848037068534712122014-08-18T01:17:00.001-05:002014-08-18T01:17:14.031-05:00The Harder They Come<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1972. 120 min. R - some nudity, killings, tamarind switch, you'll need the subtitles.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070155/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... Wishing to become a successful Reggae singer, a young Jamaican man finds himself tied to corrupt record producers and drug pushers.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... The best reggae movie ever made with the best soundtrack; the best black exploitation movie ever made; the best near-documentary of third world darkness and vibrant, buoyant rebellion ever made; and a clear-eyed study of celebrity culture that anticipates Snoop Dog by about thirty years. That about cover it? Forever in my Top 10. Only running about 7.1 on IMDb. Pffft.<br />
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Ivanhoe Martin (singing star Jimmy Cliff) comes down out of the rural hills of Jamaica headed for Kingston to find his mother and to try to make it in the big city. He brings a mango, the clothes on his back, and cardboard suitcases stuffed full. He’s quickly relieved of the suitcases and is greeted unenthusiastically by Mom.<br />
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Recognizing the hazard of being alone and starving in trench town, he drifts toward a local Pentecostal church and, although he has no feeling for Christianity, he develops a passing interest in a comely choir member, who happens to be the pastor’s hand-selected future fruit tree. Like every other youth in town he also hopes to cut a record. With great efficiency, these early scenes establish the day-to-day struggle to survive in an economy and culture rigged against 95% of the people. These people don’t work at beach front hotels.<br />
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But the film is more than just third world struggle. This revival scene featuring an undoubtedly real preacher is just explosive, and the editing is brilliant.<br />
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Since he’s fixed up a bicycle, Ivan gets to deliver the church’s revival music LP to the local record pressing plant, and manages to ingratiate himself enough with the demonic record producer Mr. Hilton to get an audition. This almost uninterrupted recording scene seems to be shot live with just a couple reaction shots, and is more visually interesting than a thousand routine music videos. The subsequent robbery of all royalties was repeated thousands of times in Jamaica and elsewhere.<br />
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While being kicked out of the church he gets into an altercation with one of the caretakers and cuts him up. Whatever you think of the special effects, having Jimmy Cliff in your face with a knife is a fairly effective visual. The judge considers him to be salvageable, which leads to an unpleasantly organic scene where he is strapped over a barrel and has his buttocks lashed with a tamarind switch until he reflexively urinates on the ground. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067741/" target="_blank"><strong><em><span style="color: blue;">Shaft</span></em></strong></a> was never like this.<br />
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Back on his ass, with no money from his soon to be hit recording, Ivan falls in with ganja traders, the ravenous protection marketer “Jose”…<br />
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…and the wise, soft spoken and wildly dreadlocked Rastafarian trader “Pedro”. The unidentified trader smokin’ up and selling matching pistols might as well be old Satan himself. Pedro doesn’t want Ivan to buy the guns.<br />
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And that’s enough plotline. Suffice it to say that while Ivan and his friends are sitting in a movie theater watching some god-awful Italian Western, one of his companions counsels “hero can’t dead ‘til the last reel.” Ivan’s gradual decline through record company greediness and his own ill-formed priorities and judgment bring us to the slightly surreal climax.<br />
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Jimmy Cliff is perfect and charismatic in his role, and the rest of the acting is fine with entirely local commercial actors or delightful amateurs. <br />
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What makes the movie great is, of course, the music, and a nearly documentary gaze into a society that was almost unknown outside of Jamaica. There is also a lot of story here, difficult to follow at times, but fascinating in its depth. And it was all shot on glorious Super 16mm film.<br />
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The soundtrack is famous and there’s not a weak song on it. The album liner notes breathlessly observe that the writer of the eternal “Johnny Too Bad” for the Slickers was on death row by the time the movie came out. This sounds apocryphal and, as they say in journalism, “too good to check”. But as much as we nowadays enjoy having our lines blurred between bad guys and pretend bad guys, these brothers were keeping it real in the truest sense of the word. <br />
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It’s hard to describe in retrospect the impact this had on a group of white college boys in the Midwest in 1979. Still reeling from the mechanical mincing foppery of the disco age, and trying to dodge the ubiquitous urban cowboy movement, - and being too far from the coasts to have much exposure to the punks - we needed heroes. Imperturbable, inscrutable, ganja-smoking bad asses like Jimmy Cliff, Gregory Isaacs, and Burning Spear did nicely, and the weird patina of self-celebrating spirituality and the unspoken but overwhelming sexism of Rastafarianism only added to the aura. These heroes were both more broadening and safer than falling in with the urban cowboy crowd. If I wanted to go somewhere every night, drink beer, get in a fight, fall off a mechanical bull, and wear a hat - that was completely within reach - but I was unlikely to be riding a little motor scooter through Kingston with ganja in my backpack and my .38 next to it - and my new 45 RPM right next to them both – with my weekend wife seated behind me.<br />
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“Ivan” would be name-checked in dozens of English punk and ska music references throughout the 70s. The soundtrack album had a huge effect and was played constantly on what was then beginning to be referred to as “college radio.”<br />
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Jimmy Cliff’s smiling visage occasionally shows up in Jamaica tourism ads and he was in the mostly forgettable Robin Williams/Peter O’Toole comedy “Club Paradise” in 1986, but he remains an international star. He converted to Islam in the 70s, but claims, “I couldn’t align myself with any one particular movement or religion so as to limit myself to anywhere or anything like that”. Hopefully, he won’t get his head chopped off as an apostate for that statement.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-19202997535202029342014-08-02T11:17:00.001-05:002014-08-02T12:45:39.202-05:0012 Years a Slave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013. 134 min. R - demeaning nudity, hardcore violence.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong>IMDB</strong></span></a> says... In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... This could have been a homework movie. Instead, it is complex and immediately engaging.<br />
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The story is well known: In the early 1840s, an upscale, upstate New York musician and leading citizen, Solomon Northrup, takes up with two charming strangers on an ill-advised tour to Washington DC and disappears into the maw of Southern slavery.<br />
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The movie’s darkest moments are wickedly mundane, which serves the dual purpose of making it watchable by diluting out the brute physical horror, and driving home the point that slavery, or any other widespread social evil, requires the acquiescence of huge swaths of decent human beings with decent human feelings.<br />
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There are only a couple sweaty, toothless, leering white trash characters, and one psycho plantation owner. All else is basic greed, avoidance of boat-rocking, and the delicate social construct that allows momentary sympathy for a mother separated from her children, and the breezy admonition that they will soon be forgotten. <br />
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This effect reaches its pastoral peak when Solomon is nearly lynched by a vengeful trio for beating a white man, is then rescued by the business-first overseer, and then allowed to hang with only his toe muscles keeping him alive for hours, while frightened slaves go about their plantation business and give him a wide berth. One terrified girl gives him a drink, but all else proceeds quietly around him, including the plantation’s mistress momentarily checking up on his condition from a far-away balcony. Director Steve McQueen has no fear of still frames and still faces and silence. Much of the scene is almost a photograph.<br />
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On the opposite end of the spectrum, a special effects-laden whipping scene shows the realistic effect of a leather strip as it reaches the speed of sound and cracks off liquefied and vaporized flesh from a slave’s back. Seeing this on DVD is one thing. I suspect there were people in theaters running for the exits.<br />
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Screenwriter John Ridley gives us side characters with deep backstories with only a few strokes. Alfre Woodard’s Mistress Shaw is on screen for about 4 minutes, but her tightrope walk as the pampered house-bound plaything of her slavemaster is expertly described and understood before the story moves on. And for once, southern belles aren’t let off the hook for the enterprise. They’re in on it, top to bottom.<br />
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Despite McQueen’s long close-ups on faces, and his little pauses to study Spanish Moss hanging in trees, the story moves admirably fast. Youtube blockage prevents any clipped admiration for McQueen's fluid moves.<br />
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It feels odd raving about the cast as if this were Ben-Hur, but the masterstroke is casting charming, almost cuddly, non-threatening white actors like Scoot McNairy, Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, and Garret Dillahunt as the greatest evil-doers. Benedict Cumberbatch is also excellent as a kind-hearted gentleman slave owner who is appropriately dismayed by the brutality of the enterprise, while reaping its benefits.<br />
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Elegant Michael Fassbender oozes manipulative malice and borderline psychosis as Master Epps, but only takes it over the top once or twice, and does very well with the accent.<br />
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All these nice guys cast as bad guys force the white audience to identify with them. We can all hate the raving stump-toothed inbred <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068473/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Deliverance</span></a></em> escapees, but now we have to hate Paul Giamatti. And he is us. A neat trick.<br />
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Executive Producer Brad Pitt seems out of place as a not-quite Amish, not-quite Canadian abolitionist handyman. I thought he was great in Tree of Life, but here he’s just Brad Pitt with a beard and an accent he tossed together on the flight to New Orleans.<br />
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Fans of Chiwetel Ejiofor going back to <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301199/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_32" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Dirty Pretty Things</span></a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_22" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Serenity</span></a></em> have been expecting him to become a star for a decade, and it seems to have finally happened. Movies like this can sometimes bury the hero in the larger story (for example, <em><a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2013/09/42.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">42</span></a></em>), but Ejiofor is so physically noticeable and so adept at communicating Solomon’s intelligence and grief that we never lose sight of his story, and the tiniest threads of bravery and cowering that his redemption hangs upon.<br />
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The Pitt-heavy trailer is below.
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/z02Ie8wKKRg?rel=0" width="480"></iframe>The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-29528819643623279712014-07-12T23:47:00.001-05:002014-07-13T00:12:52.590-05:00Dallas Buyers Club<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013. 117 min. R - reflects the times<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790636/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says...In 1985 Dallas, electrician and hustler Ron Woodroof works around the system to help AIDS patients get the medication they need after he is himself diagnosed with the disease.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says...Fine acting and production design in service of a heartfelt and preachy script. Matthew McConaughey as real-life Ron Woodroof and Jared Leto as fictional transvestite Rayon deserve all the praise they’ve gotten, of course. I never lost interest or sympathy for the characters and the recreation of the era is about perfect.<br />
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But there is a moral preening quality to the script that gets a little old. It is careful to make really sure you know who the bad guys are, and over-simplifies the incredible complexity of developing treatment for an infection that no one was even sure was a virus 5 years before.<br />
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Fictional Doctor Eve Saks (bland Jennifer Garner) pisses and moans about pharmaceutical marketers wearing Rolexs but then happily dispenses their drugs to her patients. Who should wear Rolexs? Only investment bankers, Hollywood stars, mullahs and dictators?<br />
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The best scenes follow Woodroof in his pre-diagnosis days as a well-paid but decidedly marginal electrician with an extreme “pussy addiction” as his friend puts it. And McConaughey really shines as the smooth smuggler who crosses the Mexican border 300 times and trolls for HIV patient customers at clubs and city parks.<br />
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McConaughey was born to play this, but in truth he’s not far outside of his narrow if charming acting range. Even with the weight loss and awful hair and bad glasses you never forget who you’re watching. I am in that extreme minority who thinks <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253556/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Reign of Fire</em></span></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106677/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Dazed and Confused</em></span></a> are his greatest achievements. <br />
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I lost track of the ways the pharmaceutical companies and/or the FDA were supposedly overly greedy by rushing products into human testing or overly cautious in not allowing other untested products into immediate human use or overly greedy in pushing the relatively toxic AZT into widespread use or overly cautious in not allowing ddC to be used earlier, and downright wicked in following the kind of cautious protocols that helped keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Thalidomide</span></a> out of widespread use in the US, while it was busily deforming babies around the world.<br />
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In an especially silly scene Woodroof bribes a hospital orderly to steal bottles from the AZT patient trials. Even though these were double-blinded trials with sugar pill placebos, somehow the bottles have AZT printed on them in 72 point type. Did you get that, kids? Director Jean-Marc Vallée is trying to show you something.<br />
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You will also perhaps be surprised to learn that the horrific onset of symptoms and speed of death in the early years of the HIV-AIDS epidemic was not just from HIV but from HIV and <em>PROCESSED FOODS!</em><br />
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Steve Zahn appears as Woodruff’s cop buddy with whom he shares orgies. That’s fine. But in a city the size of Dallas, every time Woodroof runs afoul of the law Zahn is there. Even more than Officer Keough popped up in <a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2014/02/silver-linings-playbook.html" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Silver Linings Playbook</span></em></a>. This just disrespects the audience.<br />
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Michael O’Neill does everything but twirl his moustache as the one-man FDA wrecking crew determined to kill Woodroof. The reality of blank-faced bureaucrats delaying access to treatment because “this is the way we’ve always done it”, would have been more dramatically intense, but would have required more careful scripting and more respect for the audience.<br />
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It could be lots of people could have portrayed Rayon, and of course LGBT activists are angry that the role went to Leto (would I have been upset if Rock Hudson portrayed me? Don’t think so). But Leto is still fantastic and is given the best line:<br />
Rayon’s father on meeting his unrecognizable son – “God help me.”<br />
Rayon – “He is helping you Dad, I have AIDs.”<br />
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That was chilling and hilarious at the same time. I just don’t see why Hollywood’s “<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/16/entertainment/la-et-mn-ca-dallas-buyers-20130818" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">longest stalled script</span></a>” couldn’t have gotten sharper in all those years in development. And the movie never really credits Woodroof with specific accomplishments, other than a vague notion that some patients are doing better. He’s been dead since 1992. Is there NO <a href="http://www.buyersclubdallas.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">summation</span> </a>available?<br />
<br />The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-67780880149390153992014-06-25T22:31:00.001-05:002014-06-25T22:31:45.872-05:00Chaos (2005 – not the notoriously awful horror movie but the somewhat less awful cop-action flick)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2005. 106 min. Rated R for violence and language and incredibly bad aim<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402910/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong>IMDB</strong></span></a> says....Two cops, a rookie and a grizzled vet, pursue an accomplished bank robber.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says...This one’s been stinkin’ up the Recycle Bin for a while.<br />
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Soon Movies Eat the Soul will have a gala review of the great Elizabeth Gaskell chick-flick, 1999’s “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215364/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_10" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Wives and Daughters</em></span></a>”, which features one of the most darling actresses to ever grace celluloid, Justine Waddell. But eyes ever fixed on the completely empty cup, we will begin with a review of Waddell’s sublimely awful 2005 outing, “Chaos”. I never thought I would say that Wesley Snipes is the best part of any movie, but sure enough, he is. <br />
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In an insanely convoluted plot that still manages to be dumb, we begin… with rain…and a chase scene with vehicle pop up and roll over<span style="font-size: x-small;">TM</span>. Black dude has blonde girl hostage (daughter of the mayor! I guess the President’s daughter was booked over at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1887718347477708075#editor/target=post;postID=3687385251878404551;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=66;src=postname" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Lockout</span></em></a>). As credits roll we get Jason Statham’s voice-over with lines like “I don’t apologize for doing my job”. Move over Rainer Wolfcastle, Statham’s here as Detective Connors.<br />
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Now Snipes and his multi-racial gang of gun-totin’ black clad commandos will roll up in a black SUV and park on what appears from above to be an empty, car-less street - but which is teeming with people at ground level – and enter a bank in broad daylight unchallenged. These are at least pleasantly familiar clichés. Snipes is good in some decent action/shootin’ up the place scenes.<br />
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Next, comes the hostage negotiation scenes. Gum will be chewed and snapped; onlookers will stand within a few feet of a full blown gun battle and bank explosion; 80s hair will be worn; people will die. SWAT will jump the gun. Didn’t see that coming.<br />
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Next, an unpleasant cliché arises in the form of Statham as a misunderstood suspended cop who seems to have been a part-time detective and part-time high profile hostage negotiator. Whatever. He was suspended because the mayor’s daughter got shot. <br />
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The bad guys use feints within feints to escape and the not very interesting investigation begins. Ryan Phillipe is pretty good as a slightly newer cliché – the college educated detective. Of course HIS FATHER was a legendary hero cop, killed in the line of duty, who everyone including Statham respected. I’m stuck on a plane and I could write this shit.<br />
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So where is Waddell in all this? She’s detective Teddy Calloway, plaything of both Captain Jenkins (normally watchable Henry Czerny) and Statham. She enters the story in bed, ala Jaqueline Bissett in Bullitt, but she will eventually get out of it and deliver some bland dialogue and the occasional meaningful look. In fact, all the reaction shots are so clumsy and stilted they feel like they were done on different days by Peoria’s Number One Newscam or something. <br />
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We will then follow Statham for nearly an hour and a half as he locks his jaw and drifts in and out of his native accent, and seeks out clues about the identity of Snipes. Guess what? They knew each other.<br />
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As the plot convolutes even further there is money taken from a police evidence room, crooked cops, a suicide, and Waddell gets one slightly funny line at the end, “Did we all get shot today?” As it happens, yes, all four major police characters get shot, each one of them in the arm or shoulder. At least two of them get to boss the EMT around so that he will presumably stop rendering aid before they lose their manhood. Great googly-moogly this willfully, nay - with <em>gusto</em> - sucks ass.<br />
<br />
Here Waddell takes over Sigourney Weaver’s part in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Galaxy Quest</span></em></a>. “According to our computers….” <br />
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<br />
But Galaxy Quest was a comedy.<br />
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A lotta things blow up. Snipes goes through about a hundred high capacity clips, one bullet at a time – and talks a lot. There is a motorcycle chase, two interrogation scenes, an approximately 19 year-old female coroner who instantly hints at oral sex for Phillipe, a discussion of Chaos Theory, a long expository ending, etc. You’ve seen it all before. At some point it ends.<br />
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By the time she was 20, Waddell had starred in three BBC films as Tess of The Durbervilles, Estella in Great Expectations, and the aforementioned Wives and Daughters, which puts her in the same league as Kate Beckinsale. But then she went to Hollywood and was in the very poor <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219653/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Dracula 2000</span></em></a> with Gerard Butler. He wound up a star, and she wound up here. For all I know she’s been off having babies with drummers, but how did it come to this?<br />
<br />
Around this time she was also in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486028/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_4" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Thr3e</span></em></a> which is a slightly better movie but didn’t serve her well. Neither did the kind of interesting, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Fall</span></em></a>, in which she was barely allowed to speak. So what’s left is an <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772980/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_2" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>all-Russian dialogue horror movie</em></span></a> that isn’t available on Netflix or Amazon, and, somewhat hopefully, <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535101/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Killing Bono</span></a></em>, which I haven’t seen.<br />
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Here she is interviewed at 36 – still smokin’ hot – describing how she learned her all-Russian lines more or less phonetically.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4Yq_oAGifuE?rel=0" width="480"></iframe>The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-12133114204873587132014-05-25T22:44:00.001-05:002014-05-25T22:44:03.674-05:00Godzilla (2014)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2014. 123 min. PG-13; intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831387/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_7" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says...The world's most famous monster is pitted against malevolent creatures who, bolstered by humanity's scientific arrogance, threaten our very existence.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says...I’ve never been a fan of the franchise, and I always avoid movies where “restoring the balance” enters the dialog, and I’m suspicious of movies with “an international cast of stars”, not to mention one of the Olsen twins, but director Gareth Edwards made the third-best monster movie of the century (aptly titled “<a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/07/monsters-reconsidered.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Monsters</em></span></a>”, 2010), a low-budget near masterpiece. So I was interested in what he would do with a big budget.<br />
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The cast is a mixed bag. Aside from the wearyingly ubiquitous Bryan Cranston (in a bad hairpiece covering up his Breaking Bad shave-job, presumably), there is 50 year-old international art-house star Juliette Binoche (in a fright wig, perhaps to offset Cranston) as a nuclear plant emergency response team leader and Cranston’s wife and mother to their disturbingly young son, Ford. All-purpose insert-a-Japanese Ken Watanabe is the anodyne mirror image of Raymond Burr in the 1954 original – the furrow-browed scientist from another country, always near the power center but never in charge – along with BBC favorite Sally Hawkins as his furrow-browed English side-kick.<br />
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A blessedly short and creative credits roll offers early encouragement. As we open, it’s 1999 in the Philippines and furrow-browed scientists are exploring a sink-hole which contains an impossibly huge skeleton and something like an egg. From there to a Japanese nuclear power plant which is picking up strangely rhythmic seismic activity. We watch its destruction - one of those destructions where the only radio chatter is between husband and wife - and then we jump to today where little Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now an EOD (explosive ordnance device) expert for the Navy, with a wife and son in San Francisco.<br />
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All set? It will come to light that the exclusion zone contaminated by the power plant destruction is no longer radioactive and is isolated for more nefarious reasons. It seems that ancient monsters actually feed off of radiation. Fair enough. My belief is suspendable to that extent. But then we learn that these ancient monsters that evolved billions of years ago also evolved electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) devices in their front legs. I’m still pondering what selection pressure supported THAT genetic trait.<br />
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Ford will be considered essential to the furrow-browed scientists because he knows the word “echolocation”, and they knew his dad, and he happens to be to hand when the bad ancient monster leaves its nest and heads for San Francisco. Scientists and Ford wind up on the Navy carrier USS Saratoga admiraled by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000657/?ref_=tt_cl_t9" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">David Strathairn</span></a>. Could there be a worse actor to portray an admiral? At least since Anthony Perkins died? A flat-top haircut does not an admiral make.<br />
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Finally, they hatch a plan; use nuclear warheads as bait to draw all the monsters (balance restorers and balance destroyers) to a spot 20 miles off the coast of San Francisco (why not 40?), and then use another warhead to destroy them. But the warheads have to be transported from Las Vegas by train (by the Navy? – not sure) and EOD expert Ford needs to go along to arm, or perhaps disarm, or perhaps disarm and then re-arm one of two – or perhaps three – warheads. So he scrounges up a full uniform and tactical gear.<br />
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Ford’s Navy wife (Elizabeth Olsen) is smart enough to be an ER nurse, but not smart enough to keep her cell phone nearby while watching newscasts of Honolulu’s destruction, in case her missing husband might call. And when he finally reaches her, full in the knowledge that monsters are coming from the west and nuclear weapons are coming from the east, he says something like, “I’m coming to get you”. I dunno. I’m thinkin’ maybe, “get out of there and we’ll talk later.”<br />
<br />
No matter. As my wife observed, there is almost no tension in any of the intertwining stories. Godzilla really is there to “restore balance” as Watanabe is forced to say at least twice. He also intones about “man’s arrogance”, thinking that we can control nature. Or, say, fix global warming by regulating back yard barbecues and lawn mowers.<br />
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But it’s really not awful. The second half gets a lot more action, and director Edward’s skill for mixing big strokes with finely observed side-details begins to overcome the very dodgy script. There is at least a very pretty moment as Navy paratroopers – I think – do a “Halo insert”, that is skydive down into a monster fight to the tune of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”, straight out of 2001. Silent jets, disabled by EMPs, dropping into the ocean is a pretty creepy effect as well. And he allows long sequences of muted sound and music to add some dignity to the proceedings.<br />
<br />
The special effects are good enough that we really don’t need the rainstorm that enshrouds the final monster fight. And the whole mess is only two hours. If you don’t overthink it, as I obviously did, you won’t be too bored.<br />
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But in the end, it just makes me want to see <a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/07/host.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Host</em></span></a> or <a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/04/netflix-sez.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Cloverfield</em></span></a> again.<br />
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And the preview...<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vIu85WQTPRc?rel=0" width="480"></iframe><br />The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-67132478453157153252014-03-26T01:45:00.001-05:002014-03-26T01:45:28.952-05:00The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013, 126 min. PG-13 for some disturbing images and (oh, for God’s sake) smoking<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2013293/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_1" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... A look at the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... If you’ve reached an age where you say to yourself, “gosh, it’s been too long since I’ve seen an animated movie about a heroically good-hearted, soft-spoken, near-sighted, Japanese engineering genius who visits Nazi Germany and then designs the fighter plane that terrorizes Asia and the Pacific from 1940 to 1945, combined with a touching gentle love story about his marriage to a consumptive young woman, with dream sequences involving Italian Count Caproni – and lots of Schubert ”, then here you go. It is enormously complex, thoughtful, and shaded.<br />
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A little boy with thick glasses wakes up on a sunny morning and climbs up a hill to a little fanciful airplane powered by tea pots and takes off into the blue sky. He observes above massive fanciful aircraft powered by oars, out of which drop grey lumpen monsters. I’m thinking, “We’ve seen ALL this before Hayao – got anything new?”<br />
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As it happens, yes. I suspect the (forever getting ready to retire) animation director Hayao Miyazaki is winking at us, and saying, “now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…”. <br />
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We will soon be following the very loose approximation of the life of master aeronautical engineer, Jirô Horikoshi, based on Miyazaki’s manga. This is not biography.<br />
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Like all Miyazakis, it’s filled with detailed side-of-the-frame visual grace notes that immerse you more than most computer animation could ever hope to. The classical music playing on the Victrola is next to an empty record sleeve that confirms Beethoven; the record has a red Columbia Records logo. While rescuing a young quake victim with a broken leg, Jiro splints the leg with, what else? A slide rule – with numbers lovingly detailed into place. In an Ozu-like sequence, the young over-worked husband falls asleep in his suit and tie next to his wife’s “floor” bed. The frame is still for a very long time; then she slowly shifts her comforter over both of them.<br />
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Note that this comes out under Disney’s Touchstone imprint with no mention of Disney anywhere on the posters. Maybe it’s the 1923 Tokyo earthquake sequence with thousands of refugees in the foreground and the huge fires that left 100,000 dead in the background. Maybe it’s the matter-of-fact description of Japan’s interwar militarism and off-hand references to their utterly bestial behavior in Manchuria and China. Maybe it’s the girl from the cover art standing on a classic Miyazaki wind-blown sunny hillside suddenly kneeling down and coughing up bright red blood through her hands. Maybe it’s the characters’ constant smoking. The movie has many such moments that should be shocking to our sensibilities but are instead sedate, and not even judgmental.<br />
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There is an extended scene devoted to the aerodynamic improvement of flush-mounted rivets.<br />
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Dark foreshadows abound. The same fires towering over Tokyo after the 1923 quake, re-appear near the end with US bombers bringing the flame. Along the way, Jiro will fall in with a German pacifist who warmly warns him, “Germany will blow up; Japan will blow up.” For this, Jiro now has “the Thought Police” on his tail and has to finish his groundbreaking war-death machine while in hiding.<br />
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In the great one’s canon, I would rate this a little below <strong><em>Princess Mononoke</em></strong> (adult), and <strong><em>My Neighbor Totoro</em></strong> (children), but it's still beautifully difficult.<br />
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It opens with an unfamiliar (to me) quote in French from poet Paul Valéry, “The wind is rising...we must attempt to live.” For Miyazaki and his gentle hero, mission accomplished.<br />
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The pointless, insufficient trailer is below. </div>
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Blathering on and quoting myself from about a year ago, below:<br />
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My first experience with Miyazaki was the children’s masterpiece <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096283/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">My Neighbor Totoro</span></a> from 1988 – before John Lasseter of Pixar and Disney began to make such a fuss over him. Late in his career he was taken under Lassater’s fawning, gushing wing and is now a household name.<br />
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I’ve almost become blasé about the beauty of the Ghibli/Miyazaki movies. In total, my children and I must have watched various chapters of the entire canon 150 times. I’m not kidding. There is nothing to compare them to.<br />
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Those made for small children involved basically happy stories with only modest crises. And in almost all of them, both parents began the movie alive and stayed that way, too. How these came under the parenticidal Disney logo remains a mystery.<br />
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Those made for older children and adults featured fantasy stories, but with complicated flexible antagonists, conflicted heroines, and sometimes quite violent, epic, and doom-clouded storylines, coupled with endings that were still basically happy but left heroines in unresolved conditions, perched between childhood freedoms and adult burdens. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087544/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind</span></a> and Princess Mononoke, have apocalyptically violent climaxes, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092067/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Castle in the Sky</span></a> features a mushroom cloud. Disney productions never came close to these battlefields strewn with bodies of fantastical creatures. Happy endings aside, these were high drama mixed with visuals that still have no equal.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-1848208762850922672014-03-10T23:15:00.000-05:002014-03-10T23:15:04.520-05:00Fearless (1993) now on Blu-rayDidn't do my homework. Fearless came out on Blu-ray sometime in 2013, apparently in wide screen, unlike the 4:3 on the DVD. Although I haven't watched it yet, I did order it. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fearless-1993-Blu-ray-Jeff-Bridges/dp/B00FFFUYCO/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1394511085&sr=1-1&keywords=fearless+1993" target="_blank">$19.79 at Amazon</a>. <br /><br />Go forth and purchase.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-81475868913091319002014-03-02T21:35:00.001-06:002014-03-19T13:09:18.667-05:00Fearless (1993)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1993. 122 min. Rated R – language, no nudity, gore-free airliner crash, one brief charred body<br />
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<strong><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106881/" target="_blank">IMDB</a></strong> says....A man's personality is dramatically changed after surviving a major airline crash.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says...I’ve been fearful of this review and have been skirting around it through these last 3 years. Fearless is running at about 7.2 on IMDB and about 86% percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It is not flawless, but no movie has had a greater effect on me on first viewing than this one. It is almost forgotten by the public. The DVD is in decrepit 4:3 aspect ratio with no sign of being rescued by The Criterion Collection, lo, these 20 years since its release.<br />
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Screenwriter Rafael Yglesias adapted his own novel, which I’ve never read. It’s the only movie I can think of that effectively describes post-traumatic stress disorder in a non-military setting.<br />
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As the movie begins, wealthy San Francisco architect Max Klein walks out of a smoky cornfield near Bakersfield, California, carrying a baby and leading a child by the hand. Jeff Bridges already appears beatific, and in denial, about what he just survived. Three sorrowing angels in the form of migrant workers pray at the roadside, and then director Peter Weir goes to an overhead shot of the remains of a commuter airliner scorched into the cornfield.<br />
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Already this is unique. It is not nighttime; it is not raining; there is no CGI. It is a bright sunny day in Bakersfield and many people have died, but Bridges and a few others have survived. Weir casually uses whatever resources are to hand to do a decent job of re-creating a real crash site. The secondary actors are not all that good, the script even contains an “it’s gonna blow” line just before part of the fuselage catches fire and we see Rosie Perez as Carla dragged away screaming from the fire knowing that her 2 year-old is dying in it.<br />
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Klein hands the infant he’s carrying to its mother, strolls over to a taxi and asks to be taken to the nearest hotel. And so begins his journey through PTSD. At the hotel he observes his Christ-like wound in the side, then hops in a rental car, tears down the highway towards Los Angeles, stops to see an old girlfriend, eats strawberries to which he is supposed to be deathly allergic, and holes up until disinterested police find him. When he returns to his ecstatic wife Laura, luminous Isabella Rossellini, the scene is clouded with the simple question “why didn’t you call”?<br />
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What follows is a series of scenes in which Max’s isolation grows. He is capable of beatific kindness to his business partner’s widow, to the prostrate young mother Carla whom we met earlier, etc. But he insults his family, his lawyers, slaps an airline psychiatrist, and begins engaging in near suicidal behavior.<br />
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<br />
Bridges has recently begun to get his due as the great American actor. He is crippled by his handsomeness. He’s not even an imploding Italian and has never played a gangster. <br />
David N. Meyer on Bridges – “He fearlessly displays his character’s worst aspects: arrogance, insensitivity, panic, and selfishness.” <br />
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In time he will only be intimate (non-physically) with Carla, who is his polar opposite. He, either atheist or perhaps strayed Catholic or non-observant Jew and she, devoutly Catholic, form their own little coping club, and in this fine scene he delivers one of my favorite movie lines, “I’m filled with guilt and shame, how is that old world?”<br />
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Another fine if slightly stilted scene provides the nuts and bolts of critical incident stress debriefing as all of the survivors, minus Max, gather to tell their stories. Whenever I hear a business manager pissing and moaning about war stories in a meeting, I think of this scene. This is how you help people get past something. The stories have to be told.<br />
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Here, as Max locks eyes with his partner's widow, Weir displays his trademark uncanny ability to show how people intuit, and how they wordlessly communicate volumes. Every <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001837/?ref_=tt_ov_dr" target="_blank">Weir movie</a> features it.<br />
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Despite the tragedy, most of the scenes are perversely set in bright and beautiful California where it never even rains. An exception; where Max and Carla sit in a vehicle in the blue gray night-the color of ghosts-and discuss things matter of factly, “he was decapitated. - Oh”, and we learn of their numbness.<br />
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But this can’t go on. Carla remains guilt-stricken at her inability to hold onto her squirming baby when the plane hit the ground at 300 miles per hour, so Max decides to give her an out and to teach her a lesson in the futility of physics by slamming his Volvo into a brick wall while she tries to hold onto a toolbox. This isn’t the end so I’m not giving much away.<br />
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A few Netflix-style reviewers have complained about Rossellini’s performance or that she lacks chemistry with Bridges. I thought that was the point. She is a formidable woman whose beloved has turned into a psychotic child. Her carefully managed life is unraveling through no fault of her own, and she’s determined to fix it. In a notably believable scene Mrs. Klein and Carla finally meet. Rosie Perez was nominated for best supporting actress, deservedly. But I think Rossellini is great, too.<br />
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I admit there are a lot of scenes with people just interacting. I can only guess that Weir knew what he had up his sleeve: just about the most powerful closing scene ever made.<br />
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Exasperated, Laura finally allows herself into her husband’s office and flips through his artwork and designs from the past few months and discovers that they have become obsessively fixated on dark pits and tunnels of light, including-very significantly-Doré’s painting of Dante and his redeemer and bringer of blessings, Beatrice, as they watch the heavenly spiral of Angels from Dante’s Paradiso.<br />
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When Max returns home from the hospital he is ready to be "saved" but they are interrupted by their lawyer (Tom Hulce) arriving with a celebratory fruit basket - including the dread strawberries.<br />
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Cue the music. And brace – brace – brace for impact.<br />
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As Max willfully induces anaphylaxis, and as his Beatrice scrambles to keep him alive, he finally flashes back through his entire memory of the plane crash. In sunlight, with no gore, with straightforward special effects, and limited sound, Weir, editor William Anderson, and Henryk Gorecki’s wrenching “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”, gently and respectfully guide us through the disintegration of an airliner. <br />
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I can think of no other movie scene to compare. I cut this clip short, obviously.<br />
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David N. Meyer in his, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Best-Films-Youve-Never-Heard/dp/0312150423" target="_blank"><em>100 Best Films To Rent You’ve Never Heard Of</em></a>”, states it more succinctly, “A lesser director would have gone for big explosions and rapid-fire editing. Weir keeps it simple, quiet, and terrible. By presenting the crash with religious awe, he honors rather than exploits…”<br />
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Along with all that we are weighted with symbols that all of the preceding scenes have given this story the strength to bear: the fall of Man; Woman as redeemer and life giver; and the agony and terror of birth as Max’s swollen red squalling face fills the screen.<br />
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As with Kurosawa's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/" target="_blank"><em>Ikiru</em></a>, there have been times in my life when I just couldn't watch this movie. A family member with cancer, a death, 9-11, etc. - no I have not seen <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475276/" target="_blank"><em>United 93</em></a>. But Weir's beautiful vision, great acting and an artful script bring me back every few years. Forever in my top 5 or so.<br />
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P.S. Someone has uploaded the final scenes on to YouTube in their entirety. I just CAN’T do that, so my clip is cut short. I hope you see the entire movie, but if you just won’t, it’s out there for the searching.<br />
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P.P.S. The story goes that this movie was receiving high critical praise, but Schindler’s List came out within a month and swept away all competition, leaving this masterpiece – my word – forgotten. And that Weir was so stung by the relative failure that it took him 5 years to find another movie to direct (The Truman Show). The only <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/21/movies/director-tries-a-fantasy-as-he-questions-reality.html?ref=peter_weir" target="_blank">reference I can find on the web</a> sort of supports that.<br />
<blockquote>
Partly because of the commercial failure of ''Fearless,'' a drama starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez about people's varying reactions to a plane crash, Mr. Weir took a break from directing.<br />
''It sort of exhausted me emotionally,'' he said. ''Actually the best of the reviews turned people away in droves, because they would essentially warn them not to see it and say: 'It's so effective, don't go. You're on that plane.' ''</blockquote>
Indeed.<br />
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P.P.P.S. If I had possessed any real knowledge of classical music, then the use of Gorecki’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVITZUQ_uIU" target="_blank">Symphony of Sorrowful Songs</a> during the climax might not have caught me so off guard. One of the most recognized pieces of classical music in the past 50 years reportedly sold over 1 million copies and therefore would’ve been a natural choice for the soundtrack. I just didn’t know it. Known to the viewer or not, this music - and the lyrics in Polish - will take you apart.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-39632445786241405212014-02-11T22:21:00.002-06:002014-02-11T22:29:06.527-06:00Silver Linings Playbook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2012 122 min. R - Language, brief nudity - not Jennifer Lawrence, endless vapidity.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1045658/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... After a stint in a mental institution, former teacher Pat Solitano moves back in with his parents and tries to reconcile with his ex-wife. Things get more challenging when Pat meets Tiffany, a mysterious girl with problems of her own.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... I thought I should review a rom-com for Valentines Day. I’m drinking coffee at 1:45 a.m. trying to finish Silver Linings Playbook which is running 92% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. The only good thing is the acting. The script is just awful.<br />
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It is said that none of us ever really leave high school. Now I have proof, in that this big steaming turd was nominated for Best Picture. And Best Script Adaptation.<br />
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Screenwriter-director David O. Russell is supposed to be a genius, or something. I liked <em><strong>Three Kings</strong></em> and <em><strong>The Fighter</strong></em> well enough, and my friends all tell me that <strong><em>American Hustle</em></strong> is good.<br />
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But THIS is pure critic-bait wankery. A self-branded romantic comedy that displays the elevated taste of very little comedy and limited romance. And long scenes where family members stand in a room and chew on each other with recrimination like a Bergman film – absent any of his insight - not to mention style.<br />
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Pat Solitano has been in an institution for 8 months for assaulting the “tenured” history teacher who has been schtupping his wife. Do east coast high schools have tenured history teachers? Who knew?<br />
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Anyway, Pat is being released into his parents’ custody and refusing to take his meds, until he does and then gets magically a lot better without any of the side effects that he’s been complaining about. I don’t claim to know the ins and outs of bi-polar disorder, but Bradley Cooper as the afflicted Pat is the only convincing character in the movie. Until he’s not.<br />
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Here’s the large print script’s way of showing you that he’s not as valued as his older brother.<br />
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And I didn’t believe a word of the dialogue. Nor did I believe that a psychiatrist, who knows Pat has a history of violence when he hears the song, "My Cherie Amour", decides to magically make it play the minute Pat signs in for his appointment, even though there’s a waiting room full of innocent bystanders.<br />
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Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany is fine but her motivations are incomprehensible. She likes the dirty, slutty side of herself so much that she will fall for the first person who does her a single favor, and then set up in a monogamous relationship with him. So help me understand what her motivations are again? Sure, if you get involved with an unstable widow who looks like Jennifer Lawrence, you’re going to forgive a lot for the pleasure of her company, but what is her reason for tolerating him?<br />
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And so many plot conveniences and contrivances.<br />
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Early on, we meet the local beat cop who tells us we will be seeing a lot of him.<br />
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No shit. Hold that thought.<br />
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When the Solitanos have a 3 a.m. fight, all the lights in the neighborhood come on and, lo and behold, Officer Keogh is there IN SECONDS, in uniform and clean-shaven. No partner. Best Script Nominee.<br />
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Then when Tiffany and Pat have a tiff outside of a theater, (and Pat’s trigger song is magically playing again – how cute!) look who shows up again IN SECONDS. No partner. Best Script Nominee.<br />
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And then when Pat’s asylum buddy (Chris Tucker) escapes and is found watching football at Pat’s house, who does the State of Maryland send to a house in Philadelphia (PA) to pick up a convicted felon? Why, it’s Officer Keogh again. No partner. Best Script Nominee. Oh, and great acting there, Bob (also nominated). I feel your pain.<br />
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And the Philadelphia, (PA) cop is going to drive the inmate back to the Baltimore, (MD) asylum. For God’s sake. Best Script Nominee.<br />
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Chris Tucker will mystifyingly show up later – maybe after his third escape from the asylum - as the shortest short-hand script device ever devised: the soul brother who teaches the white kids how to dance. At least he’s funny enough to teach them poorly. Is Russell clever enough to have inserted parody here? I don’t think so.<br />
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And then there is the silliest and sorriest contrived conflict I’ve seen in a while. Pat can’t practice for the big dance competition with Tiffany because he promised his dad he would go to a Philadelphia Eagles game. Why? Because he’s good luck for the Eagles, and Dad is the first bookie in history to bet only on his home team. I’ve never met a bookie like that. Best Script Nominee.<br />
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All this followed by an absolutely interminable living room scene, with about 15 characters shouting at each other, in which we will eventually learn that Dad’s financing for his new restaurant will be won or lost on a bet regarding the Eagles vs someone, AND, whether or not Pat and Tiffany can score high enough at the big dance-off. Two side characters are inserted into the scene for no other reason than to carefully explain to the audience the inexplicable. Best Script Nominee.<br />
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If it occurred to you to wonder how Tiffany kept magically ambushing Pat while he’s running early in the movie, well, it occurred to Russell to wonder the same thing, so near the end he tells us that Pat’s mother has been calling Tiffany to let her know when Pat will be running by. So the mother of a bi-polaroid with a history of violent jealousy is calling the unstable sex addict widow in hopes that they will hit it off. Zany rom-com. Best Script Nominee.<br />
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Finally, they have the big dance-off (Pat’s psychiatrist violates professional ethics by showing up). And Officer Keogh is there too. I give up. Cheap, cheap, cheap.<br />
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It has one funny scene – thanks to Lawrence. Spoiler alert.<br />
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Oh, and did I mention it’s Christmas and Pat will run through the street to finally catch his true love? Just like <em><strong>Bridget Jones’s Diary</strong></em>. There. Now it’s a romantic comedy Best Picture Nominee.<br />
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America, we should not go around confusing insultingly contrived drama, with lots of f-bombs, with romantic comedy. It makes the rest of the world think we’re stupid.<br />
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I think I’ll go watch <em><strong>Real Housewives</strong></em> so I can remember what a good script sounds like.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-85523343537143549202014-02-08T13:31:00.001-06:002014-02-08T13:39:44.663-06:00Owning Mahowny<br />
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2003. 104 min. Rated R – brief nudity, adult content, mild language<br />
<strong><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285861/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></a></strong> says... A bank manager with: (a) a gambling problem and (b) access to a multimillion dollar account gets into a messy situation. Based on the story of the largest one-man bank fraud in Canadian history.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says...This isn’t one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s most notable performances, mostly because he is playing a real-life near savant banker-gambler-schlump-nerd. But it shows his skill with zero histrionics. In other hands, it would be a caper movie a la Catch Me If You Can, but director Richard Kwietniowski, the moody neo-jazz-ish score, and Hoffman make it something different.<br />
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Dan Mahowny is a chubby, disheveled, inward and downward-looking - but up and coming - young bank executive. He drives a smoking wreck of a car and wears cheap suits to the bewilderment of his co-workers. He also flies from Toronto to Atlantic City every weekend, gambles incessantly on any sport available, and fends off the slightly threatening bookie to whom he owes at least $10,000. By crossing the border, there is little way for Canadian banking authorities to make the connection.<br />
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Then things start to get bad.<br />
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Mahowny is promoted to a position that will allow him to create fake entities, inflate their credit worthiness, loan them money, etc. All while seeking the one big day at the casinos. The viewer can appreciate how this decent, even kind man can make the one false move that will enable his bad habit to become an all-consuming self-destruction.<br />
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Hoffman develops the hook of holding his head and/or slippy 80s glasses in a way that projects deep concentration and deep self-hatred in equal measure. He is also mic’d or recorded in such a way as to pick up every nervous breath.<br />
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But in this scene he smoothly deflects a bank auditor like a pro, which he is.<br />
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Minnie Driver, in the unfortunate hair and glasses of the time, is memorable as his utterly devoted girl-friend, Belinda, who – dim as she is – can still see his problem from a mile away.<br />
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John Hurt plays casino manager, Victor Foss, with as much high viscosity oil as the role can tolerate. If you only know Hurt for his wounded roles, his garish rapacity is refreshing.<br />
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The script brings admirable detail to the casino’s patented process of landing a whale. When he travels with his uninformed friend, and takes out $100,000 in chips, the earth moves. Only this whale doesn’t want prostitutes, fancy European meals, or a big room with three fireplaces. He wants to gamble, and he would like a plate of ribs, no sauce, and a coke. We get to see how, when he’s winning, management will do ANYTHING to keep him playing, and when he’s losing, the genuine affection they have for this guy and his foibles. The mob has been corporatized, but it still knows the levers and fulcrums of addictive behavior. They feel kinda bad about crushing people, but it’s what they do.<br />
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Listen to Hoffman’s voice at the end of the clip.<br />
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And it’s all pretty closely based on a true story.<br />
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Second-line supporting roles, script and acting are workmanlike but not altogether believable. We get a laugh out of the Toronto police obsessing over how this guy moving so much money around MUST be a drug dealer.<br />
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This is no masterpiece and it wasn’t a hit obviously, but it is engrossing in its detail and occasional humor. Other Hoffman roles can be set up as monuments to the actor, but this final scene with a shrink provides perhaps a fake-but-accurate epitaph.<br />
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I am personally very sad. RIP.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-18779360133928129752013-12-24T11:10:00.003-06:002013-12-24T11:13:04.783-06:00Christmas Movies RecapToo busy/lazy for new reviews so here are all the Christmas movies I've reviewed in the past. Three of the four are uniquely funny and the <strong><em>Nativity Story</em></strong> (Amazon Instant View) is 73rd Virgin-certified to offend none but the touchiest ant-Christian and none but the touchiest biblical absolutist. <strong><em>Christmas In the Clouds</em></strong> (DVD purchase only) is a little weak actually, but it's heart is in the right place. <strong><em>Rare Exports</em></strong> (on Netflix Instant View, and Amazon Instant Video) is about as inventive as it gets: a comedy in which a vengeful Santa buried in ice in northern Finland is thawed out by aged evil elves, and fought off by a little boy in hockey pads and fiberglass insulation taped across his butt. Indescribable.<br />
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I back down to no one in my opinion that <strong><em>Tokyo Godfathers</em></strong> (on Netflix Instant View!!!) is the greatest Christmas movie ever. Based slightly on the old western Three Godfathers, this anime has three homeless persons adventuring around Tokyo on Christmas Eve to save a stripper's abandoned baby. It sounds maudlin, but it's wickedly funny and unpredictable.<br />
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<a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/09/tokyo-godfathers_04.html" target="_blank">Tokyo Godfathers</a><br />
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<a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2012/11/rare-exports-christmas-tale.html" target="_blank">Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale</a><br />
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<a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/12/nativity-story.html" target="_blank">The Nativity Story</a><br />
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<a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2012/12/christmas-in-clouds.html" target="_blank">Christmas In the Clouds</a><br />
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<br />The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-80838858422047824572013-12-05T22:24:00.001-06:002013-12-05T22:24:05.891-06:00The Hunger Games: Catching Fire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013. 146 min. PG-13.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951264/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark become targets of the Capitol after their victory in the 74th Hunger Games sparks a rebellion in the Districts of Panem.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... I haven’t read the books and I saw the first of the franchise on DVD, but I was reasonably impressed. In the endless chain of futuristic dystopian fantasies stretching all the way back to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">1927’s Metropolis</span></strong></a>, this movie falls in the upper 25th percentile. I don’t know what Suzanne Collins had in mind politically, but her vision of a fabulously wealthy and power-centric Capitol surrounded by impoverished subject districts seems more realistic with every lobbyist that moves to DC, and with every small town SWAT team newly decked out in army surplus body armor and M-4s.<br />
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I stayed interested and entertained, but those who are <a href="http://www.showbiz411.com/2013/11/19/review-hunger-games-catching-fire-is-an-empire-strikes-back-for-2013" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">comparing this to The Empire Strikes Back</span></a> need to go re-watch that movie. Still, this was great fun with lots of enjoyable acting, action, flawless effects and convincing evocation of overwhelming glitz and glamour in the Capitol.<br />
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To recap: Katniss and her boyfriend #2, Peeta, were the first contestants (or “tributes”) in 74 years to survive The Hunger Games as a team. A clever plot device forced them to declare their rather ambivalent love for each other and win over the public. Their newfound status as the empire’s favorite sweethearts has afforded them some celebrity-based political clout, which immediately puts them in the sights of President Snow. The early focus on Katniss’s conflicted feelings about her status as a celebrity and victor are all necessary, but they take quite a while, as does her sorting out her childhood sweetheart from her public-pleasing official boyfriend.<br />
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As this begins – and admirably, the movie just begins; no credits, no backstory – the decision is made to bring surviving victors out of luxurious retirement and force them to compete again in the 75th Hunger Games. Killing all but one of the victors will presumably nip any nascent cults of personality in the bud.<br />
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But enough about what you already know. Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss is of course very good. However glamorous her off-screen image, those apple cheeks and little nose will always make her convincing as down-to-earth. Her two boyfriends and their interchangeable hairstyles seem pallid although Peeta is always there for her in the trenches. There are lots of old actors who could play President Snow. Bearded Donald Sutherland seems rather too blatantly malevolent and maybe unpolished when the character would be more effective with more charm. Ralph Fiennes would’ve been a good choice.<br />
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Stanley Tucci is essential as the toastmaster general of celebrity death culture, Caesar Flickerman, all over-bleached teeth and swirling hair, but Lenny Kravitz as fashion designer Cinna appears to be sleepwalking. Jenna Malone and Jeffrey Wright are very effective as smart victors returned to the game.<br />
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Finally, one does not introduce Philip Seymour Hoffman as the new game designer Plutarch Heavensbee without a good reason. As soon as you bring an actor this major into the mix, you know that he will be a significant part from this point forward, which preemptively robs the story of some surprise. Also, either intentionally by production design or because Hoffman didn’t feel like wearing a lot of makeup, his character lacks celebrity zing in a role that seems to call for it. You won’t find a bigger fan, but Hoffman may have phoned this one in.<br />
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At 146 minutes, even with very impressive action sequences and special-effects, the ending feels rushed, with boyfriend number one displaying a slight scratch on his face beneath his still perfect hair to exemplify the destruction of an entire district. It doesn’t seem to carry the weight of tragedy. It’s as if Princess Leia witnessed the destruction of the planet Alderaan and just got kind of mad. The fact that the last book of this trilogy will be covered in two movies does not bode well for efficient storytelling. But for now, great fun.<br />
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The episode ends with a close-up on Katniss’s suddenly determined and empowered eyes. As such, it ends right about where 1975’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073631/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Rollerball</span></strong></a> ended and, upon reflection; I realized that so far this franchise has covered almost exactly the same ground. At much greater length. I’m sure I’m not the first to notice.<br />
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Whereas Rollerball envisioned a future run by regional corporations with a fatality-strewn version of roller derby as a means of keeping the population be-numbed, distracted, and focused almost entirely on “the team”, The Hunger Games offers the slaughter of individuals and the impermanence and distrust of alliances as an ongoing message of submission. Both explore the false and corrosive pre-packaged celebrity culture very effectively. <br />
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....and the trailers.<br />
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The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-55068545680679942762013-11-17T10:21:00.001-06:002013-11-17T10:21:16.280-06:00An Education<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2009. 100 min. PG-13 – sexual situations, no nudity, very little language.<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1174732/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong>IMDB</strong></span></a> says... A coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in 1960s suburban London, and how her life changes with the arrival of a playboy nearly twice her age.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... Some mild spoilers below.<br />
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Great acting in service of a coming-of-age story that chickens out at the end.<br />
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Carey Mulligan is engaging and precise in her brilliant depiction of a whip-smart and precocious 20 year-old. Unfortunately her character – Jenny - is supposed to be 16. It is no secret that 16 year-olds can be lured into relationships with older men, and it is even believable that her striving parents would allow such a relationship to occur if they thought it would get their daughter ahead, but Mulligan’s dialog is so savvy, so mature, so devoid of stumbling innocence that my eyes just kept rolling. She’s not a 16 year-old imitating maturity – she’s just a flat out mature virgin with a school girl haircut and no makeup.<br />
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What you most need to know about the older man, David Goldman, is that he’s played by American Peter Saarsgard (with a pretty good accent). There can’t be many actors who could play a part so brazenly hazardous but still seem so believably sweet, soft-spoken, thoughtful, etc., with no hint or shadowing of menace. Director Lone Sherfig probably deserves credit for this as well. David uses his Jewishness as a way to disarm any early sufferers of WASP-guilt who might be suspicious that his motives are less than noble. Otherwise, the script avoids any short-hand Jew clichés.<br />
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Even more great acting comes from a small slice of BBC royalty in Emma Thompson’s cameo as Jenny’s school mistress, elegant Olivia Williams frumped up as a spinster teacher, Dominic Cooper as David’s more matter-of-fact sidekick, and especially Rosamund Pike as his girlfriend. Watch the interaction of the four main characters and how perfectly Pike’s remarkably expressive eyes, and the direction and editing, show her character’s insecurity in the presence of this schooled and worldly girl.<br />
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David’s weaknesses as a man are only revealed slowly. In this fine scene we get our first glimmer of his insecurities as his buddy puts very mild moves on Jenny, featuring the undervalued eternal hep-cat Mel Torme on the soundtrack.<br />
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In the end Jenny’s attraction to David is more about her boredom and exasperation with middle-class suburban England, and her parents, than it is about a deep if immature love.<br />
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...well that’s how life is in most socialist utopias chicky. The criminals are the only bold and interesting people left.<br />
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As her disappointments mount, she is rather more upset about the loss of life opportunities than the wreckage of her first love.<br />
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I’m glad to find one story of teenaged missteps that doesn’t involve instant pregnancy. Even so, the price of Jenny’s disregard for her teachers, her gender, and her capacity for extraordinary achievement is only briefly paid – and then almost magically wiped away while resorting to that hoariest of script clichés – the musical montage.<br />
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At the closing voiceover (yep) she offers that she goes back to dating “boys…and they really were boys”. The odd moral calculus of the movie is that a thirtyish small time crook and operator who: is attracted to teen-aged girls; is so insecure that he offers marriage at the first threat; has premature ejaculation issues; uses baby talk, is still the worldly “man”, while the polite, nervous, anxiously loving young college men are the “boys”. Only modern-day feminism could squeeze that baby out.<br />
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See it for the acting and the music but be prepared for a letdown.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-42250711109061874632013-10-31T02:18:00.000-05:002013-10-31T02:31:44.792-05:00Dawn of The Dead (1978)<div style="text-align: center;">
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1978. 127 min. Rated X at the time; brief topside nudity, shocking gore in its day; not now; some language.</div>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong>IMDB</strong></span></a> says... Following an ever-growing epidemic of zombies that have risen from the dead, two Philadelphia SWAT team members, a traffic reporter, and his television-executive girlfriend seek refuge in a secluded shopping mall.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... George Romero made a lot of bad movies. His original classic Night of the Living Dead was always a little bit overrated and is now dated. This impressive looking sequel filmed in color is by far his best. Apparently most of the mall scenes were filmed over a holiday weekend and therefore in a pretty big hurry. Given that it’s in color and on a low budget, it looks good. The makeup blood is perhaps a little too bright red and the blue gray zombie makeup is unevenly applied here and there, but it is still a pretty scary movie.<br />
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Better than almost any movie, horror or otherwise, this establishes a feeling of how things fall apart and the center does not hold. Like all great horror fantasy it doesn’t waste time on scientific explanations or exposition. The first 10 minutes or so are set in a TV newsroom where a few dedicated semi-professionals argue over whether to take down lists of rescue stations that they know have fallen to the zombies. This lacks the frenetic sense of panic of so much modern horror but it nicely shows the sort of slow motion disintegration and especially the failure of communication that occurs in real-life emergencies. It’s almost like Romero has been a fire fighter or something or knows this intuitively.<br />
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He then cuts to a SWAT team in suspiciously crisp uniforms set to invade a housing project where the tenants have been refusing to turn over their undead for disposal. Although the scene is too brightly lit, it otherwise conveys the claustrophobia and disorder of a violent situation soon to spin out of control. The gunfighters are almost laughably bad but it still works. From these two scenes we collect our 4 protagonists; Peter, a very large bad-ass black dude, Roger, his little white and amazingly athletic sidekick; Stephen, a television news helicopter pilot; and his TV producer girlfriend, Francine.<br />
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They steal a chopper and head off into the great unknown. There is a brief funny sequence as they watch Pennsylvania rednecks turn zombie hunting into a sport. Like Peckinpah, Romero doesn’t like rednecks, or at least his idea of rednecks. My college roommate at the time was God’s own original redneck and he thought it was a great scene, with no sense of irony.<br />
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At the time, the gore was infamous with squibs blowing blood out of the back of heads all over the place, one head vaporized by shotgun blast, and the requisite zombies-tearing-living-torsos-apart scenes. Now it seems only middling gory.<br />
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From there they take over a Pittsburgh(?) shopping mall, which at the time was a completely novel idea for a horror movie. The script is smart in so many ways. It respects the audience enough to know that we will be interested in the logistics of blocking all the mall doors; the logistics of herding and misdirecting zombies, and the eventual culling of the zombie herd in the mall. For some reason it’s all just kind of interesting.<br />
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Along with all of these admirable traits Romero provides a sly take on crass late 70s mall-based consumerism. It’s not a novel idea now but it was then, and his use of authentic background mall music and public service announcements in the service of this slyness is funnier than you might expect. Romero had also made a living doing mundane tasks like safety videos and local television commercials. The camera angles he uses as the protagonists drive a bland little sedan up and down the mall evoked giggles in the theater where I saw it all those years ago. He just knew how to put a commercial image on-screen in a way that you would know that’s what it’s supposed to be. There is also a Hare Krishna zombie.<br />
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Then there is a slow but believable sequence showing the onset of boredom, dissolution, dissipative living, and time passing in their private mall. We know what must happen; sooner or later roving gangs of survivors must decide they want this jewel for themselves.<br />
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And that’s pretty much the story. There is a fair amount of pathos as one of the team gets a little sloppy and the rest of the team must deal with his illness and eventual demise, before an extended very well done, funny, and pretty exciting shoot out with the bad guys, followed by an open-ended conclusion.<br />
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Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger are both very good as the SWAT team members. They move with physical competence and quickness of professionals, and Reiniger is convincing when his character begins to display symptoms of battle rattle.<br />
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As I thought about this movie in the abstract I assumed it would be 5 stars all the way. I guess it hasn’t worn that well or maybe I’ve seen it too often, but it is still one of the richest horror experiences that I’ve seen. Mostly because of the human drama, solid acting, brisk but not frenetic pace, and convincing background detail.<br />
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Ken Foree had a small speaking part in <em>Water For Elephants</em>. I always thought he should have been a bigger star. He was a way better actor than OJ Simpson or Jim Brown and, man could he fill a doorway. Scott Reiniger acted in daytime soaps and is now a career coach. They both had small parts in the 2004 re-make. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0743417/?ref_=tt_cl_t4" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Gaylen Ross</span></a> (Francine) is a widely-hailed documentary filmmaker.<br />
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Happy Halloween.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-69264654777507106702013-10-20T22:07:00.000-05:002013-10-20T22:07:26.594-05:00Kyle Smith on The 10 Best Criterion Collection Movies on HuluI'm behind on reviews, again. Kyle Smith summarizes <a href="http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/09/13/the-10-best-criterion-collection-movies-on-hulu/?singlepage=true" target="_blank">ten Criterion Collection movies available on Hulu Plus</a>. I've seen two of them - both documentaries - Burden of Dreams and Hoop Dreams. I have not confirmed any of the ten as available, partly because I don't have Hulu Plus.<br />
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Elevator to The Gallows has been on Netflix Instant View for a long time. Guess I need to see it.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-42795388150176809442013-10-10T00:38:00.001-05:002013-10-10T00:38:17.024-05:00Gravity<br />
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2013. 91 min. PG-13. Scary. Very little language or blood.</div>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... A medical engineer and an astronaut work together to survive after an accident leaves them adrift in space.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Let’s get that out of the way.<br />
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Sure, all the normal space clichés are in place; pre-disaster ground control chatter so bad that you’ll think you’re watching a Michael Bay movie; yes, the hero’s name is Kowalski, one of those focus-grouped Hollywood names intended to convey just the right amount of jaunty ethnicity and blue-collar competence (I guess <a href="http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/McBain" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">McBain</span></a> was already <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102422/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">taken</span></a>); yes, it’s Kowalski’s last mission AND he listens to country music. When disaster strikes, ground controllers inform them that debris is coming at them at something like twice the speed of a bullet. Physicists/astronauts/pilots don’t talk like that.<br />
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It’s almost as if writer/director Alfonso Cuaron is making fun of us. The opening screen even goes so far as to explain to us that space is a vacuum that will not transmit sound, and that space is rather dangerous. This at least prepares the Star Trek/Star Wars crowd for realistically silent, and thus enormously effective, explosions.<br />
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But Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and the special effects produce unbelievable images and a sense of distance and isolation comparable to <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>. A scene in which Sandra Bullock faces the audience and works feverishly on a small bit of equipment while behind her an entire space station ignites and disintegrates with no sound or shockwave should become as iconic as Kubrick’s waltzing space station and space plane.<br />
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And what a joy to discover that the entire movie is only 91 minutes long. And if you have to spend 91 minutes with anyone, it might as well be Clooney and Bullock. Clooney is Clooney and his personality is pretty much indistinguishable from <a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2011/11/fantastic-mr-fox.html" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Fantastic Mr. Fox</span></em></a>, but Bullock is worth all of the $20 million or whatever. In an extended scene of maybe 5 solid minutes that seems to be a single take, Cuaron points the camera at her as she drifts in and out of consciousness, listening to and trying to interact with AM radio broadcasts from obscure parts of Scandinavia, hallucinating about her child and her fate, and talking to herself. These are the kind of scenes that occasionally make me realize that acting must be really hard.<br />
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Cuaron jumps breezily back and forth between first person point of view – like the most nausea-inducing video game you’ve ever played – and then to close-ups of the actors in their helmets as all the scenery spins maddeningly around them – and then to shots of bodies and machinery twirling away to just a speck. And he holds these points of view with only Bullock’s terrified gulps for sound effects for loooong sequnces. I know there was music, but I don’t remember it.<br />
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The 3-D is definitely worth it, and listening to the very precise sound design in a quality theater is as well. To acclimate us to the space and isolation the movie starts with a long sequence of barely audible radio chatter to your right that slowly gets louder. Hopefully, this also helps get the audience to shut up. I saw it in a nearly empty theater on a Tuesday night and that helps too.<br />
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Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/08/gravity-science-astrophysicist" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">bunch of tweets</span></a> devoted to all the things wrong with the movie from a scientific standpoint but indicates that he likes it very much. That’s just one more thing I have in common with physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson.<br />
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For homework, all of us should dredge up 1969’s <em>Marooned</em>. <a href="http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/240304/Marooned-Original-Trailer-.html" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Here's the Marooned trailer</span></strong></a>.<br />
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But Gravity is still unlike anything you’ve ever seen.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OiTiKOy59o4?rel=0" width="480"></iframe><br />The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-15360625783295868132013-09-30T02:39:00.001-05:002013-09-30T03:02:39.203-05:0042<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013. 128 min. PG-13 - Mild violence, sexual/racial innuendo, no sex, extensive use of "nigger", which, regardless of modern strictures seems appropriate to the difficulty of the hero's situation.</div>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453562/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... The life story of Jackie Robinson and his history-making signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers under the guidance of team executive Branch Rickey.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... Brian Helgeland made the best baseball movie in quite a while with <em>Money Ball</em>. This isn’t quite that good, but it’s still a rousing, positive, and old-fashioned baseball drama with a nice feel for what it must have been like to play the sport professionally in the 40s and 50s.<br />
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As far as Jackie Robinson is concerned, it quickly establishes him as somewhat uniquely qualified for his historic role. By having Harrison Ford as Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey essentially read off Robinson’s qualifications, it hits on what was unique about the man; touching on his impoverished background, his status as a military officer, his attendance at college and success there, his trumped up court-martial, later dismissed, and as Rickey says “Robinson’s a Methodist; I’m a Methodist; God is a Methodist”. In fact, Rickey’s Christian motivations are placed in a positive light several times. <br />
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At first I was put off by Ford’s mannerisms and speech patterns, but it’s a pretty good evocation of Rickey’s charismatic and singular style, and I grew used to it. After <em>Cowboys and Aliens</em>, I didn’t think Ford had it in him to be entertaining ever again but he’s very good throughout.<br />
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Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) and his wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) are presented with almost no drama. They are obviously smart and aimed at establishing themselves in the postwar black middle class. The apparent solidity of their relationship spares the audience many tiresome minutes of the semi-obligatory courting scenes that appear in most biographies. But it leaves Rachel with not much to do except be supportive and brave, although she was a formidable and accomplished person on her own.<br />
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There are only four major black roles. Robinson, his wife, journalist Wendell Smith, and a kindly community leader who puts Robinson up in his house while he’s playing in Florida.<br />
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Perversely, this opens up the field for a string of skilled white actors to jolly-up and carry much of the narrative forward. Christopher Meloni as Leo Durocher, Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese, the prolific voice actor and beloved <em>Firefly/Serenity</em> veteran <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0876138/?ref_=tt_cl_t8" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Alan Tudyk</span></strong></a> as the viciously racist Pittsburgh manager Ben Chapman, and a host of others.<br />
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And whoever thought of having John McGinley as Dodger’s radio announcer Red Barber deserves a special nod. This scene comes after an old-school full-length version of the national anthem, with Rickey grumbling along off-key, further adding to what my wife simply described as the “old fashioned” feel of the movie. <br />
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If you’re old enough, you may recognize Max Gail of 1970s “Barney Miller” fame as aged replacement manager Burt Shotton. I don’t focus on the scene because of Gail but because of the expert way the character endorses Robinson with humor and gentlemanliness.<br />
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I guess the overall dramatic affect might be what Helgeland intended. That is, Robinson is the (relative) calm at the center of the storm. He gets to display his temper and the crushing pressure he is under here and there, but in a fine late scene he is beaned by a pitcher and both benches empty onto an on-field brawl, but all the fighting goes on around him as he sits bewildered in the middle of it. I don’t know if it’s historically accurate but it shows the racist attitudes surrounding him as well as the extent to which some of his teammates have adjusted to his presence and are determined to defend him.<br />
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It is probably not that expensive nor technically challenging to digitally place modern players in ancient baseball parks, but I still appreciate the effort. One can see what it must have been like to play or sit in The Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, etc.<br />
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There are a couple of scenes that are so ham-fisted in their racial lessons for the young audience that one can almost imagine a study guide for the film. And it spends probably too much time on Robinson’s positive effect on one young black boy who will grow up to be a baseball player of modest importance.<br />
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A dramatically perfect movie might have found time for his post baseball life rather than white text on black screen focusing on all the great things baseball has done for racial equality since he left. Granted, his stint as an executive at Coca-Cola would not have made interesting viewing, and his tragic early death from diabetes complications would’ve been a downer. His social conservativism and his support of the Vietnam War, and his rather, shall we say, “non-urban” speaking style would’ve been problematic as well, I suppose. Here is video of him addressing a civil rights rally in Birmingham, Alabama.<br />
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Like other racial ground breakers of his time, such as Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, he was looked upon with some suspicion by at least some in the more vocal 60s civil rights movement, but that’s just the way of things and social movements.<br />
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But these are minor quibbles. Oh hell, I guess it’s better the movie stops when it does. Fine acting and special effects all around, a jaunty and entertaining soundtrack from the era, and obviously made by people who cared.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-49700061872098617462013-09-22T00:28:00.001-05:002013-09-22T00:51:07.774-05:00Take Shelter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2011. 120 min. Rated R and I really don't know why. No nudity, very little language, scary dream violence.</div>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1675192/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... It’s taken me 6 weeks to slap this review together and I’m not sure I got it right, so it obviously got under my skin.<br />
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The tone is set early and never really changes. Curtis stands in his front yard and watches as storm clouds, that only flatlanders can appreciate, roll in. But as rain falls on his hand it looks like motor oil. But not on his face or shirt, significantly.<br />
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Curtis and Samantha live an idyllic middle class rural life in Ohio. He works for a drilling contractor; she sells handmade goods at her “booth” at the weekend flea market. They have a darling 3 or 4 year-old daughter who is deaf (as is the natural actress Tova Stewart). Their lives revolve around their neighbors and family and work - and his health insurance. With enough cajoling, it may pay for a cochlear implant for the girl.<br />
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Director/writer Jeff Nichols already shines here. The whole effect is affectation-less. These are not Spielberg-style garishly hyper-ordinary Californians sliding into extraordinary circumstances. These are not Norma Rae - style redeemed white trash. These are as close to genuinely ordinary as Hollywood can get. Despite the IMDB overview, this is not a prepper fantasy. Instead, it’s a slow-motion tragedy that combines media-fed obsession with economic instability and formless fears of environmental catastrophes with delicate family politics and abiding familial love.<br />
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Nichols has a neat grasp of the non-conversational way that old neighbors, friends, and spouses communicate. Here Curtis brings his work buddy Dewart home way too late after a night of beer. Dewart’s wife has seen it all. The boss’s quandary the next morning is equally well-observed.<br />
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Jessica Chastain as Samantha may be slightly too pretty, but her gaunt face could have wandered out of the Kentucky hills a generation or two back, and she is so natural that she could be your sister. These clips don’t really do her or Stewart justice. Kentucky native Michael Shannon as Curtis is playing in his own league. On first viewing his performance seems one-note, but as his sleep is further disrupted by ghastly dreams, as he slowly disengages, as his decision making and prioritizing skills decline, all natural ease exits his performance, and his ticks and facial tension increase incrementally. When Nichols wants to drive it home, he shoots Shannon from the front to accentuate his asymmetrical face and somewhat drifty right eye.<br />
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The cumulative effect of watching each scene and expecting the worst, based on every other movie you’ve ever watched, is that you begin to appreciate the tension and paranoia of the protagonist who manifests his condition in dream archetypes formed mostly by popular culture. It’s a very skillful way of sucking you into Curtis’s deteriorating state of mind.<br />
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Curtis begins to endure one horrible dream after another, waking up in worse condition every day. They always involve weather, often tornados – (been there myself) – sometimes strangers at the windows. Finally he decides to fix up the storm shelter in the back yard. Not a good sign. And it will become our visualization of Curtis’s increasing isolation and obsession.<br />
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The tragedy is compounded by watching this good reliable man with good common sense at war with himself. He knows that compulsively buying canned goods and gas masks and adding a room to the shelter is nuts and could cost him everything including his family, but he can’t help himself. He even methodically tries to self-diagnose.<br />
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Nichols again gives us the way people don’t talk, as Samantha discovers what he’s been up to, followed by perfectly artless life in his staging of one of those darkest dark nights of the married soul – sitting at the kitchen table – with exhausted stillness. These are the only two people in the world, but there is no romance.<br />
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We are 90 minutes into a very stately 2-hour movie – there may be one too many dreams – when Nichols finally lets all the built-up tension fly. In order to do something normal they go to a Lions Club supper and in a scene almost every reviewer mentions, Shannon gets in his wheelhouse. The body language of the extras is so convincing you wonder if they even knew what was supposed to happen.<br />
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And even a broken clock is right once in a while. There is an eyes-looking-through-your-fingers tension as we wait to see if Curtis can allow himself or his family to try normal again.<br />
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The final, final scene has caused a storm of spoilers and discussions on the web. If you care at all, avoid them. Nichols remains ambiguous about the intention. If for no other reason, it is brilliant just for Curtis’s momentary glance and Samantha’s almost imperceptible nod of her head, speaking volumes about their relationship. A closing shot of the back of Chastain’s red head as she gazes out on a landscape belongs in a museum for its color and composition alone.<br />
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If your family stayed up for hours figuring out <em>Inception</em>, then you may be up ‘til dawn discussing this ending. My best guess is that it’s an oddly positive manifestation of just how committed this little family is. I may have missed something. Hope I didn't give away too much. <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/take-shelter-2011" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Ebert</span></a> gave it his highest rating, <a href="http://bunchedundies.blogspot.com/2012/05/signs-and-wonders-take-shelter-2011-12.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Starland</span>,</a> 4 1/2 stars. Talk amongst yourselves.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-14112818288672206262013-08-31T20:02:00.001-05:002013-08-31T20:02:45.045-05:00Shotgun Stories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2007. 90 min. PG-13. Some language, mild violence<br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0952682/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... Shotgun Stories tracks a feud that erupts between two sets of half brothers following the death of their father. Set against the cotton fields and back roads of Southeast Arkansas, these brothers discover the lengths to which each will go to protect their family. Written by Jeff Nichols<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... Director/writer Jeff Nichols is from Arkansas and star Michael Shannon is from Kentucky so this story of a modern-day feud between two half-families set in the “dead ass” town of England, Arkansas ought to have some bona fides. There are some, but it seems like there’s less here than meets the eye.<br />
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With admirably lean and clean scripting we learn there are three Hayes brothers, casually named Son, Kid, and Boy by their alcoholic father and hateful mother. Daddy Hayes takes off, finds Jesus, stops drinkin’, marries a good-hearted woman, and has four more Hayes brothers, Cleamon, Mark, and the other two.<br />
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Eldest son Son is played by the towering and glowering Michael Shannon, who is 6 foot 4, ruggedly handsome with a slightly lopsided face, uneven crazy eyes, and hair that is waaaay to good for southeast Arkansas. I like him. He was later a supporting actor Oscar nominee for Revolutionary Road and is given Special Thanks in these credits, so maybe he worked cheap. I read he is now appearing as General Zod in Man of Steel. I can wait. <br />
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The movie opens with Son discovering his wife has packed up and left with their boy due to his gambling habit, which he tries to justify as “a system” that he just hasn’t quite cracked yet. As Son walks around shirtless we see his back pock-marked with, one assumes, birdshot scars. That much buckshot and there would be no story. The movie derives its name from all the stories circulating around his fish farming job about how he got the scars. Needless to say he hates his parents and his mother raised him to hate his half-brothers. He knows he needs to get his life together. This is driven home perhaps once too often.<br />
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In a believable plot detail, the moment his wife moves out his two brothers move in. As Officer Cartman observed on South Park, “poor people tend to live in clusters”.<br />
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Hateful mom drops by one night to tell them their dad is dead. No she’s not going to the funeral.<br />
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But the brothers do; just long enough for Son to diss his father, spit on his casket, and launch a feud with the Hayes II brothers that will drive the rest of the movie. Drive it very slowly at times. If you’ve ever followed a combine down a highway…that kind of slow.<br />
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Nichols has a neat trick. Every scene begins calmly, or downright flatly, so the viewer is left anticipating that <em>THIS</em> is the scene where the revenge cycle will finally start. Strange trucks pull up in the background but someone else gets out. He always makes us wait through one more scene. Otherwise, why are we watching these somewhat dreary lives in slow-motion? I suspect in part it’s because bi-coastal movie critics like to see us this way and respond in a Pavlovian fashion. Southeast or Midwest = dull life = critical salivation.<br />
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Middle son Kid has real Arkansas hair and a ball cap and a devoted and shockingly attractive girlfriend whom he wants to marry, just as soon as he gets out of the tent in his brother’s yard. She longs for his next raise at the fish farm so they can finally be happy. This is driven home perhaps once too often.<br />
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And never forget: best looking girlfriend = biggest target on your back. You might as well be the married police veteran with five days to retirement.<br />
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Younger son Boy is a puzzle and quietly devastated by his upbringing. He coaches basketball, and presumably teaches, but lives in a nasty van with his dog and busted tape player when he’s not crashed on Son’s couch. I’m not sure why he’s this poor. He is upset that he is being pulled into this feud and responds with something like cowardice when the fists finally start to fly. He seems the least happy and most frustrated with his life. This is driven home perhaps once too often.<br />
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Everything escalates. A dog gets killed – that’s big trouble in Arkansas – then a man or two. The remaining protagonists now have to decide just how far they want to take this. The relative beauty and believability of the script comes through when the eldest brothers of the two clans are the first to resort to revenge and threats, but are not the ones who pay the highest price.<br />
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In an absolutely perfect detail the youngest brother, already suspected of cowardice, already the least in favor of further violence, is the first to reach for the big iron when things get out of hand. Like a lot of youngest brothers, he wants this shit over with so he can get on with his life. He has been following orders and it has led to THIS.<br />
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But the same script has the incomprehensible twist in which everyone goes back to fists after there are deaths (it’s as if the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055614/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Jets and the Sharks decide to have a dance-off after Tony gets killed</span></a>). Apparently Son never allowed guns in the house. Now, I’ve known some of these people…a few birdshot scars is NOT a good enough reason to have younger brothers who have never handled a shotgun. Even if Nichols is from Arkansas, I’m from Kansas and Texas and you need to trust me on this.<br />
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Also, in a town where everyone knows everything about everybody down to every detail, it somehow escaped the police’s notice that the original killing involved more than just two people.<br />
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And you can always tell male first-time story tellers by their female characters; two of them are utterly angelic in their attractiveness and devotion to their rather slipshod beaus. One is a monster-mother.<br />
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But this scene is beautifully done.<br />
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The pacing and plotting improve near the end. Hopeful decisions are made that everyone will have to live with. It is tense, delicate and nicely done.<br />
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Despite this movie, and the more recent <em>Take Shelter</em>, which <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/take-shelter-2011" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Ebert</span></a> also gave four stars and described as “masterful filmmaking”, I’m still not quite ready to embrace Nichols as my auteur of my fly-over country. I love his love for flat horizons shot at a low angle with lots of sky. I love his ear for how real people talk and his willingness to linger on conversations a few beats after they seem to be over. But even an art house fan like me can wish for a little snappier editing and crisper story telling.<br />
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Could be I’m just jealous.<br />
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Nichol's most recent movie, <em>Mud</em>, is running <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mud_2012/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">98% at Rotten Tomatoes</span></a>, so I'm there soon.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-59285513210067366852013-08-31T16:18:00.001-05:002013-08-31T16:29:42.502-05:005 Smart Comedies You Haven’t Seen On Netflix...I'm behind on reviews, obviously. Kyle Smith summarizes four <a href="http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/08/21/5-smart-comedies-you-havent-seen-on-netflix/?singlepage=true" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">little-seen comedies and a rather old one</span></strong></a>, all available on Netflix Instant View. I have not confirmed their status as available.<br />
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Couldn't agree more about <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1887718347477708075#editor/target=post;postID=5277252561240876205;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=39;src=postname" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Bernie</span></strong></a>. Jack Black should've gotten an Oscar nomination.<br />
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The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-48793220425907187252013-08-11T22:17:00.000-05:002013-08-11T22:18:01.065-05:00Water for Elephants<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2011. 120 min. PG-13. Language. Adult situations, if not plotting. Disturbing implied violence against an elephant. Murders are mostly okay, apparently.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067583/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says… A veterinary student abandons his studies after his parents are killed and joins a traveling circus as their vet.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says… I haven’t read the book. There is an admirable amount of effort put into recreating Depression-era colors, makeup, atmosphere, etc. The majority of the movie looks fantastic. But the nighttime train riding and railcar-hopping scenes are almost as convincingly realistic as Harry Potter’s. Not quite.<br />
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This is my first exposure to the Robert Pattinson <em>smolder</em>, which approaches Brando-esque quality early on, but near the end the director appears to have run out of ideas and has him walk into scene after scene with dull eyes looking at some disturbing detail or another in the middle distance. Could be a sun rise; could be someone humiliating a woman; could be someone thrown off a train. It all smolders the same.<br />
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And the smoldering soft-spoken romantic Jacob apparently undergoes genetic manipulation worthy of Resident Evil to turn into Hal Holbrook in full cantankerous Mark Twain mode for the intro and outro. I was completely unconvinced.<br />
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Witherspoon is fine as the damaged and fairly hard-bit heroine, Marlena. And if she didn’t do her own stunts it was hard to tell, thanks to special effects. There is one shocking continuity problem, involving eyebrows that seemed tweezed to look like Jean Harlow in the first scene, but from then on, they’ve grown back in to more or less what we expect. The Harlow look would have been more convincing. But she’s good. There’s no cuteness shining through and physically she looks like her part.<br />
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Since I am pathologically unable to watch Hollywood win World War II one more time, I never saw Christopher Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. Here he has the movie’s only really interesting and well-written character and it’s almost enough. As the circus owner August, Waltz has manic energy and pathos and real physical threat built-in. <br />
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But the story is thin and has some dodgy ethical and moral quandaries for its characters. Basically everyone on the circus train knows that in order to make payroll, August will occasionally toss a couple lesser employees to their presumed deaths from a moving train. Wife Marlena knows it. Beloved old codger Camel knows it. Kindly, hulking body guard Earl (the great Ken Foree) knows it. Kindly dwarf Kinko knows it. Moral center and romantic hero Jacob knows it. Hell, I think even the elephant knows it.<br />
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And yet the only character who responds appropriately is – the elephant.<br />
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This makes it really hard for me to find a character to root for. And after Jacob has stolen August’s wife and made whoopee with her at a seedy hotel, August’s henchmen <em>DON’T</em> kill him. Umm, why? Is train tossing their only skill? Are they confused by the hotel room not being a rail car?<br />
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Speaking of moral center, there is this doozie of a line, “you’re a beautiful woman Marlena, you deserve a beautiful life.” So, let’s not discuss all the dudes that got murdered by your husband. And I guess that’s why the happy ending left me kind of cold. <br />
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My 86 year old mother liked it and she generally has superior taste in movies, so maybe I’m just needlessly pissing on your cornflakes, but when you gotta go…<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_6b2XhXkPpg?rel=0" width="480"></iframe><br />The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-28349641770091233982013-07-14T23:42:00.001-05:002013-07-14T23:42:19.004-05:00Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2012. 122 min. Rated R – brief full frontal - male, rather explicit sex, language, violence, blood. It’s all good.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053425/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong>IMDB</strong></span></a> says… Put in charge of his young son, Alain leaves Belgium for Antibes to live with his sister and her husband as a family. Alain's bond with Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, grows deeper after Stephanie suffers a horrible accident.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says… This comes with a four star review from the <a href="http://bunchedundies.blogspot.com/2013/05/rust-and-bone-2012.html" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Starland blog</span></strong></a>. I liked it more but I’m a sucker for romance. It is great Hollywood movie-making, only better. Sitting on this side of the water and only occasionally gleaning French movies from Netflix, one could get the impression that they make only grim slice of life navel gazers or bright and sparkly sex comedies, generally involving men too old for their partner. I was unprepared for a bawdy, brutal and pretty entertaining popular drama that energetically combines elements from every available genre; From Lifetime Network disease-of-the- week, to Overcoming-All-Obstacles sports drama, to downtrodden working class employee rights, to quiet art house character study, to Jaws. It’s all here, crammed into 122 minutes. <br />
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Despite the genre-mashing, the script and dialog by director Jaques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain are things of delicate beauty. There is no exposition about what these people are. They just are. And despite the straight line narrative and unlikely story, not a scene is wasted and every scene contains elements that are so recognizable and well observed that these characters make sense.<br />
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And the film just looks great.<br />
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I suppose it cheats a bit by having one of the most beautiful actresses in the world as the damaged goods, but Marion Cotillard can go from expressively cute to threatening to a little worn in an instant. Director Audiard loves to stick his camera right into the middle of the action making us a third member in every conversation, and the close-ups serve Cotillard well. It’s nice to see her back in action after the dreary <em>Inception</em> and <em>Dark Knight Rises</em>.<br />
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Audiard also makes his actors and audience look into blinding sun shots to serve, I guess, as harbingers of major character growth and development. But when the scariest foreshadowing is called for, he pulls back and lets us see our worst fears remotely.<br />
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The movie starts with Matthias Schoenaerts as Ali (per Rotten Tomatoes and the subtitles) or Alain (per IMDB), a down on his luck bouncer, petty thief, and kick boxer who is traveling through France with his five-year-old son to flop out with his sister somewhere near the Riviera. I don’t know if his name is meant to reference back to <a href="http://movieseatthesoul.blogspot.com/2012/02/ali-fear-eats-soul-angst-essen-seele.html" target="_blank"><strong><em><span style="color: blue;">Ali: Fear Eats the Soul</span></em></strong></a>, but there are similarities to the disenfranchised hero of that story. Given his name and downtrodden status, I thought maybe he was supposed to be an impoverished light-skinned Algerian, but IMDB says he’s Belgian. Since he casually tells a woman he hardly knows that she “dresses like a whore”, I thought maybe he was Muslim. That’s what I get for thinking.<br />
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As father and son ride the train they scavenge left over food and water from trash bins, and Ali occasionally thieves along the way. He lands with his sister and brother-in-law who work service jobs and make money on the side any way they can. The chilly reception from Sis indicates there is some history, but we never explore it.<br />
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We first meet Cotillard as Stephanie at the end of a bar fight from which she is escaping with a bloody nose, in a black miniskirt, with nifty foreshadowing of her legs. Ali is the bouncer and he offers to call her a cab and then drives her home. There is a testy exchange with her bossy live-in boyfriend, but Ali is smart enough to not start fights. He leaves his number.<br />
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The next morning we find that Stephanie is, of all things, a star trainer of orcas at a water park. Not having ever been to a European water park, I was surprised to discover they feature cheerleaders like college football. Anyway, perhaps she is a little hung over; perhaps her slightly jealous assistant is a little slow getting the fish to the exhibition stand; perhaps it is just bad luck; but today everything goes wrong. Audiard uses beautiful slow motion of the three orcas, beautiful music, and beautiful point of view underwater shots to build tension while still admiring the nature and intelligence of these friggin’ huge predatory dolphins. I can’t think of any scene like this from any other drama.<br />
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A few months later Ali is jogging, working security, and parenting very badly when his cell phone rings. In a brutal but believable scene he finds Stephanie in her dark apartment, and the characters are defined for the rest of the movie. Rather than showering her with condescension and false concern he just asks if she wants the window opened and then hauls her down to the beach for a good bath.<br />
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As they get to know each other there is no particular regard displayed between them. He is bullish and thoughtless and always on the make, but benignly so. She is a little bossy and needy but knows she can’t push his buttons. He doesn’t have any.<br />
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She invites herself along to his illegal ultimate fighting competitions, where the bettors create an informal ring around the combatants and they continue until someone is unconscious. We realize that the same woman who is attracted to bar fights and huge predatory sea mammals might also enjoy this kind of thing.<br />
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When Stephanie finally works up the courage to wonder if her lady parts still work, Ali declares himself “OP”, that is, operational, and offers his help. Whatever his sexual predations and his bloody part-time job, he doesn’t really have a mean bone in his body. Women are for sex. Handicapped women are for slightly different sex. No big deal. Why would one stop long enough to be concerned?<br />
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Audiard pokes fun at our expectations by having Stephanie begin practicing her training moves again to a pulsing, uplifting pop song. Of course, we expect her to return triumphant to the show. Instead the music stops and we get this languid scene of something like forgiveness – computer aided or not, this is lovely - followed by her sad reunion with co-workers. There’s no going back, and besides she’s wondering if Ali is “OP”. Perfection.<br />
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Another scene involves Ali getting his head handed to him in a fight and finding inspiration, not in a woman tearfully screaming his name, but in this rather hard-faced cripple. The old joke is that men built great civilizations to impress women. The scene starts with a bloody tooth spinning on the pavement. And there’s that blinding light off the car door again.<br />
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They later go to the bar where they first met and with precise characterization Audiard and Cotillard have Stephanie demurely cover her injury, NOT because she is surrounded by men, but because she is surrounded by beautiful young women. Perfection. As she becomes more and more isolated in the noisy crowd, watching her face go from cautiously happy, to agitated, to bored, to lonely, to ornery, to letting her cane do the talking, is acting school in about one minute.<br />
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I could hyperventilate about scene after scene but we would never get out of this.<br />
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Ali finally reaches his own level of incompetence as a parent, which sets up the final conflict. The resolution and coda would have been miserably clichéd in almost any Hollywood production. Here they are keenly observed, dramatic, mature, cautionary, and satisfying – and then a fade to blinding white screen.<br />
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I couldn’t care less if the French consider Americans to be noisy, monolingual, fat and tasteless. I'm not tasteless. English is our language and so be it. But for a nation of movie fans to miss out on a story so good and images so stunning simply for fear of having to read subtitles is just sad.The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1887718347477708075.post-71990618108596622242013-06-30T23:56:00.002-05:002013-07-01T00:15:52.411-05:00Day of the Outlaw<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1959. 92 min. Rated “Approved”. Very, very weird dancing scene with an edge of brutality, implying more than just dancin’.</div>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052724/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">IMDB</span></strong></a> says... Cowboys and ranchers have to put their differences aside when a gang of outlaws, led by army captain Jack Bruhn, decide to spend the night in a little Western town.<br />
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<strong>The 73rd Virgin</strong> says... This comes recommended as <em>Essential Viewing</em> from the prolific <a href="http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2013/06/day-of-outlaw-1959.html" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Cinemascope blog</span></strong></a>. I don’t know if I would go that far, but it’s one of the stranger westerns I’ve seen this side of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047136/" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Johnny Guitar</span></em></a>. <br />
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There is much clumsy soap opera-ish dialogue that makes you acutely aware you are watching acting. People don’t talk like this – not in NYC parlors – not in Oregon bunk houses. But there are beautiful snowy and windy exteriors, a solid story with noir-ish fatalism, and editing good enough that even I noticed it. Director Andre De Toth made many other westerns. Cinemascope says this was his last.<br />
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The production looks inexpensive; from the opening credits which lists the bland as dishwater production company, “Security Pictures Inc.”, to the costuming which is either far more realistic than I imagined or whatever the hell the costume department could put together. Shot in black and white in real snow and ice way up in the mountains of Oregon, the exteriors look genuinely challenging. Especially Burl Ives’ poor horse trying to cut through four feet of snow.<br />
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Most Robert Ryan movies are worth a look. He projected up-front squinty-eyed menace whether he was playing good guys or bad, and he was often cast somewhere in between. Although he started acting in the 30s, he was a Marine drill sergeant and boxer in the 40s, but reportedly a pacifist and reliably liberal in his politics. His early 50’s noirs are great and his supporting role in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065214/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Wild Bunch</span></em></a> is for the ages. He was a so-so John the Baptist. Avoid <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058947/?ref_=sr_1" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Battle of the Bulge</span></em></a>.<br />
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Ryan is Blaise Starrett, a rancher and cattleman who is prepared to go to war with the local farmers who have begun to show up in droves now that he and his roughhewn friends have cleared the wilderness of Indians and outlaws. He’s also been involved with the wife of a newly arrived farmer. She is played by a very understated Tina Louise, later of Gilligan’s Island fame. Believe me when I say she does not appear in this pose or in this outfit. And the phallic pistol font is probably not accidental either.<br />
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This long scene is pretty good, until the lovey-dovey talk starts. The pinstripe is interesting. Ryan’s entire direction appears to be sit, look down, and listen. It seems weird now, in these days of overt nut-flexing, flaring nostrils, or beta male geekery, but believe it or not there was a time when men were supposed to act like this, especially if a lady was speaking of things that made them uncomfortable. It is very period-appropriate.<br />
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Here we see Ryan and all of his menace and power blowing out years of rage about these intruders. I don’t know if the emphysema was catching up with him or if the soundman decided to hang the microphone a little too close, or if it was all intentional, but you can hear him wheezing and panting as he tears into this. Lee Marvin (another Marine) could project menace but mostly just through his voice and laconic physicality, but Ryan was more actively scary.<br />
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So far it’s just another war between ranchers and sod busters until Burl Ives shows up with his gang of miscreants. Ives is supposed to be cavalry captain Jack Bruhn on the run for some unknown offense, but it’s apparent that not all of his men are former cavalryman. They come to town intent on rape and pillage. In that regard this is an unusual Western. There is a blatant sexual menace throughout.<br />
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Ives is basically playing the same character he did in The Big Country, right down to his eyebrows, but he is still very good - if 30 years too old and 100 pounds too heavy to be a cavalry captain. There are dark intimations of a slaughter of innocent Mormons. He is also rather King Lear-like in that he actually believes his men will follow his orders once he looks away, while the entire town can see that his men are going to do whatever they want and that he doesn’t have nearly the control he thinks he does.<br />
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One of the strangest scenes is Bruhn sitting on a veterinarian’s operating table waiting to get a bullet pulled out of his chest and fingering his shirt as if he doesn’t want to remove it in front of everyone. One wonders.<br />
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And he plays this character in a way that implies some need for redemption. I could go way out on a limb here and observe that Ives was among those who testified and named names during the House Unamerican Activities Committee testimony and Ryan was among those who defended the so-called Hollywood 10. That may have made for some interesting times on the set. <br />
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To the extent possible the farmers and Starrett pull together in dire circumstances and begin trying to get rid of the gang even after they’ve been disarmed. Fans of the Second Amendment such as me find something to tsk-tsk over in how easily the town is disarmed. <br />
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With Shakespearean vibes, Bruhn will allow himself and his gang to be led off onto a “secret” trail through the mountains to get away from the pursuing cavalry. It appears only Starret has knowledge of the trail and Bruhn knows it’s a ploy, but he will go anyway due to what? Guilt? Nihilism? Maybe weariness?<br />
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There is a side story of a pretty young shop girl determined to get married to almost anyone, who develops an eye for the youngest and perhaps the only salvageable outlaw. Most movie symbols tend to slide right by this reviewer; I’m afraid I’m just not a visual enough creature to spot them in time. But here we watch the outlaw on the threshold, literally, of civility and redemption going in and out of the door. Director De Toth likes to frame faces within structures. The girl's motivations in telling the secret are ambivalent at best.<br />
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There are long scenes of Ryan and the gang pushing their horses through real snow in real bad conditions before the rather brutal climax. I think modern Humane Society film observers might have noticed some of these scenes, although no horse gets killed.<br />
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and so it goes.<br />
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Now about that weird dancing; after the gang gets to town two of the characters are obsessed with gettin’ a hold of some women. In this scene that goes on and off for roughly 7 minutes, Louise gets tossed around like a rag doll by different men. I suppose that’s as close as the script and director de Toth could come to a creepy kind of sexual menace. Or maybe I’m just creepy for observing it. Either way it makes for uncomfortable viewing.<br />
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and so it goes.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0211964/?ref_=tt_ov_dr" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">De Toth</span></a> lived 90 years, married 7 times, and had 19 children. I guess he knew a thing or two.<br />
<br />The 73rd Virginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18258466661853533731noreply@blogger.com0