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Archive for the ‘ESCAPE STORY’ Category

Victory

12 Feb

Victory – directed by John Huston. Action/Adventure. The Germans want to beat the British at soccer, so they enable the WW II POWs to practice for a big public game. 118 minutes Color 1981.
★★★★
What an interesting actor Sylvester Stallone is! In many ways he is marvelously equipped for his profession: he has a fine figure which he keeps in condition, he has a well-placed speaking voice, and he brings to every role a natural determination, a quality which is rarer in actors than one might suppose. In fact, this determination is the basis of his being cast in every role he plays.

He also has a visage freakishly difficult to look at, and the camera does not dwell upon it at any length, although the camera does have to dwell upon it often because he is the star. He has eyes which seem to float around in his face meaninglessly like frogs in a pond, and he has a thick-lipped mouth weak with aggression.

Surely he knows this. But he presents himself as a gutter Italian as an over-riding principle to everything else. This is not pleasing, although his purpose as an actor is not to please, but to impress. Many of his facial and emotional moves are over-the-top, but the top they are over is so low it is one’s natural request that he be dismissed as an actor. That would be a mistake.

For he presents his being and body, to the mentality of his fans, as a male not to be caged, and therefore a challenge – a challenge which can be met only in a fantasy of caging him. This makes him ideal as an action-adventure hero, unlike say, Harrison Ford, who is domestic in every way. Sylvester Stallone will not be brought low, and certainly not by the chains of good manners. He is a wild animal. He is not a very bright one, but that is scarcely the point when his wildness is so dominant, overreaching, and sure. When it is such a commodity. And certainly when he is in a prison-break movie, which this is.

I have seen him only once or twice in films and if I found him repellent that was because he reminded me of Italian boys whose bullying of me when I was a boy was so expert in its cruelty and crudeness there was no answer to it but murder. But not assassination. Stallone does not appear in serious films, but he does take his craft seriously: he took 30 pounds off his fighting weight to become limber enough to do the soccer moves the role requires.

He makes a very good stand-in for the ego of the director, John Huston, whose bushwah of personality well-accords with the arrogance of the Stallone character, an arrogance derived from no talent for soccer whatsoever. It’s the job of Michael Caine to keep Stallone off the team at the same time as he trains the team. So Stallone provides a certain comic quirk to the material just as Max Von Sydow provides a wit. The soccer games are staged by (and Stallone was trained by) the wonderful Pelé, whose unearthly skills and modest personality grace the picture at every turn.

I enjoyed the film a lot. It’s one of those action/adventure escape-from-prison movies we’ve all seen before and like to see again. This is our fifteenth chance.

 

Two Women

01 Aug

Two Women – Directed by Vittorio De Sica. Low Tragedy. As World War II ends, a mother and her daughter seek shelter from destruction. 100 minutes Black and White 1960.

* * * * *

One of the great humorists of film and a master of many styles, De Sica was the most gifted, varied, and accessible of all the neo-realist film-makers of the New Wave. He made more films than any of the others, many of them before the War, and they ranged from White Telephone movies through neo-realistic movies like Bicycle Thief, to The Garden of The Finzi-Continis. Why the neo in neo-realism? I dunno. It was the first and only realism since silent pictures. Anyhow, this is a remarkable picture. Sophia Loren was slated to play the daughter, but when Anna Magnani was asked to play the mother she said, “Let Loren play her own mother!” and slammed the door on the role that won Loren The Cannes, The BAFTA, The Donatello, The Italian National, The San Jordi, The New York Film Critics, and The Oscar for the Best Performance By An Actress for 1960. She well deserved it. She plays a cunning, susceptible shopkeeper intent on preserving her 12 year old daughter from destruction from the bombing of Rome. They strike out for her native village in the mountains. There they live and survive. There she meets a student revolutionist, an intellectual wearing glasses, cast, in a stroke of genius, with the most sensual actor in films, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Loren is 25 when she does this, and is completely convincing as the widowed mother protecting her daughter like a tigress. Both Neapolitan, she and De Sica make wonderful film together. She has the energy and internal power of the lower classes from which she came, their knowledge, passion, strength, humor, and forgiveness. Moravia wrote the novel, Zavattini the screenplay. In all of this De Sica is never without humor, most of which is gestural and therefore all the more telling. See it.

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The Road

23 Jun

The Road – Directed by John Hillcoat. Escape Drama. A father and his 11 year-old son head for the salvation of the ocean after an apocalyptic scourge. 111 minutes Color 2009,

* * * *

Scriptwriter’s failure. The father is sentimentalized with hugs and kisses and fond looks at his son, and the language which, as him, the remarkable Viggo Mortensen is obliged to speak makes one turn away in shame. The emotion of apocalypse never needs to be spelled out verbally. We do not need to know verbally what survivors’ feelings are. We can see it for ourselves and we can imagine it for ourselves. For the task, the pleasure, and the raison d’etre of an audience is to supply 50% of what is going on. And a picture of this kind, in its desolate tracts, needs to be mute. At other times, the script is darn good. As witness by what power Charlize Theron invests with it in her key scenes, and what Robert Duval brings to it as a decrepit vagrant. The two actors are remarkable in their daring and their clarity of statement. Guy Pearce fares far less well as the deus ex macchina at the end. He appears out of nowhere, as all good D.E.M.s should, and he is abetted in his role by his adoption of yard-long locks and bad teeth, which make him look like no expected savior – a very clever strategy because of its ambiguity. But then Pearce’s family is unnecessarily dragged in, his kindly wife, his same-age children, and a fumbled finale which we, having gone along through this film’s difficulties, must stumble off with. The director should have left Pearce alone on the screen with the boy, for the boy is the thing. Pearce’s scenes lie on the cutting room floor and we can see them, and they are no better than what is included. The cast is international: Mortensen is from South America and Denmark, Theron from South Africa, Duvall from USA, Pearce and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays the boy, from Australia. Master Smit-McPhee is simply amazing throughout the film. Not only does he physically resemble Theron, who plays his mother, but he is entirely open and responsive and full – qualities any fine actor might envy. The film as a whole is beautifully produced, scored, edited, and directed. It’s a film about a very hard journey. I would embark upon it if I were you.

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Casablanca

07 Jun

Casablanca – Directed by Michael Curtiz. Escape Drama. A husband and wife seeking to escape fall into the hands of the wife’s former lover. 102 minutes Black and White 1942.

* * * * *

As everyone knows, none of the stars wanted to do it. There was no script when it started. Paul Henreid turned it down; his pal Bette Davis had to convinced him to perform it. When Bogart and Bergman met for a meal, they didn’t like one another. The director had a violent temper. The set was afire with arguments with the writers. They did not know how to end it, and so wrote two endings, shot the first, and when they saw it, knew it was right, and threw away the other one. The movie is a masterpiece of the balance of forces, particularly in the handling and placement of the supporting players. And it is also a masterpiece of Warner Brothers professionalism. Max Steiner wrote a big score which is fortunately suppressed by the inclusion of a good many songs. The lighting and photography by Arthur Edeson and the editing by Owen Marks are first class. But Bogart’s apparent character, sharp tongued and defiant, is countermanded by the affection and respect of his staff and what others will put up from him, how Peter Lorre sees him, how Sydney Greenstreet sees him, how S.J. Skall sees him, how Dooley Wilson and how Claude Raines see him. They create half of Bogey’s character. The drama is carried by these relations, all created by the dialogue, which won an Oscar, and not by the acting, which is plain, flat, direct, Hollywood crisp. All this gives Bogart a center from which his terrified eyes seek danger and give him a latitude wider than his staff, his night club, Casablanca itself. He seethes with supressed power. He is not a good actor, but he is a most effective one. Knocked over glasses prevail throughout the film as over and over again life threatens to be empty of wine. Bogart is introduced playing chess without a partner. Ingrid Bergman walks in with a partner, and Bogart does not resume the chess. Bergman is a good actor and brings variety and roundness and liquidity to balance Bogey’s Easter Island visage and Henreid’s Teutonic stone. Set off against them all is the glittering Conrad Veidt determined to eliminate them all. All these forces are held in perfect suspense as the escape works itself out. As we wait to see who will be on that plane and who will not. Nothing could be better.

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The Lost World: Jurassic Park

21 May

The Lost World: Jurassic Park – Directed by Steven Spielberg. Sci-Fi Action. Dinosaurs, still hanging around on a tropical island, draw competing scientists and developers. 2 hours 7 minutes Color 1997.

* * * * *

Pete Postlethwaite devours the screen like a brontosaurus rex whenever he is on it. This is wonderful to behold, because his ruthlessness outstrips the passion of any other character in the movie, and so one loves him for it. The others fare not so well. For the “action sequences” devour character as well as characters. This is true of all such films. David Koepp has written a brilliant script, which means that its wit compliments the wit of the director, and he has made for us characters who have a living eccentricity, in scenes that are beguiling and actable. But all of that is in the beginning of the film. As soon as the dinosaurs start competing with the humans all character is lost as the film bogs down in spectacle, escape, acts of derring-do, mayhem, terror, clumping and munching – in fact, in story- behavior in which, because it is minimally verbal, character, charm, eccentricity, and even motive are devoured. It’s no one’s fault. It’s simply a characteristic of the genre. They all end up this way. The chief consequence of this is that one ceases to love the characters – because they are characters no longer. And too bad too. Because we have the glorious Jeff Goldblum as one of a group of four heros (really five until our beloved Richard Schiff becomes an ors d’oeuvre for a rex). With his bright and wonderful face, and endearing tallness, and supple intelligence, he plays a character who disapproves of everything, in a role which almost becomes thankless because of that. Julianna Moore is delightful in a love scene walking away from him in the middle of a river; she plays a character who approves of everything. And the dewy Vince Vaughan plays a kind of side-car part which is actually underwritten and functions really only to make a certain defunct radio work to save the day (it’s actually night). Never mind. It’s a director’s film, and Spielberg has a witty mind. Never is he unprepared to entertain us. The action sequences unravel with imagination and care and stunning execution. And in this is he ably abetted by the camera of Janusz Kaminsky and the surprising editing of Michael Kahn, who will supply us with a sterling close-up of Moore’s face, for instance, just when you would never expect you would need the relief of it from the action in play. Spielberg always gets his endings wrong, and he does not fail us in this one. It’s a failure of value in him, as, for the wrong reason, he brings the tale around to a city he has not previously established, and so the big bus-wrecking sequences, and so forth, have no connection to us. The ending comes out of nowhere into nowhere. His wit does not fail him, as the rex clomps by an Animal Control vehicle, but his thinking does. This means that the value of actions floats free of the value of settings, streets, a harbor, a ship, and, most important, human inhabitants. However, the film has delivered so much “entertainment” one has to forgive him once again, simply on the grounds that our exhaustion forbids us from sustaining anything more than a sigh of relief that the entertainment is finally over.

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Traitor

11 Mar

Traitor – Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff – Spy Action. A CIA agent tracks down a Muslim demolition expert. 117 minutes Color 2008

What makes makes an actor excellent – sometimes without our even knowing it? Why does the appearance of Guy Pearce on the screen of this picture elevate the level of everything going on in it? Judy Garland had this ability and so does Alice in Alice In Wonderland. I do not know the answer, but certain qualities are worth considering and watching for. Let’s set aside his technique. Technique, it has been said, is the ability to make things right when they are going wrong – but this does not apply to film acting, because if an actor of the level of stardom of Pearce goes wrong, they just reshoot, so you never even begin to see the crash. There are other aspects of technique besides the ability to adjust in an emergency. For instance, Guy Pearce is a master of vocal disguise. It’s a gift, meaning he has a bent for it and it’s easy for him, once he has husbanded a particular accent, to sound natural in it. In this case, listen for President Jimmy Carter, softened. Also listen to his voice production; he doesn’t whisper; he’s fully audible; he is playing a balanced, soft-spoken, even-tempered character. You never have this played out for you; Pearce arrives with it, before he gets to the door. So you are given a certain character tuning, and a certain Southern accent, and a certain vocal volume. So much present are these that they fall by us unnoticed, as they should. For Pearce does not present himself as a virtuoso performer – as Frederic March does. He is not here for his craft to be noticed. He is here to do an honest job and play the role. One wonders how he can sustain a performance of this tactical moderation opposite the over-acting of the other actors, all of whom conventionalize their parts. The film is quite bad, bad direction, bad music, and bad script by the director who should have not done this to us. An absurd film, unconvincing at every point. An action-adventure spy story which is meant to whitewash Muslim devotion, and does the opposite because its hero is basically fanatic; one wonders why Don Cheadle engaged in it. Cheadle seems to have elected himself the heir of Morgan Freeman in the moral black male role model line. It is ruinous for an actor to be “good”. Pearce, although he is out to get the bad guys never strikes that note. There’s honesty in the gaze of his rectangular eyes that skirts all pretense. It looks, it searches, it responds. It allows us to be there. Watch for him, whenever he appears, and see him.

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127 Hours

22 Feb

127 Hours — directed by Danny Boyle — Sports drama. A young deserteer/mountaineer finds himself trapped in a canyon. 94 minutes Color 2010.

* * * *

I found myself detached watching this. Let’s assume it’s not because of a piece of undigested cheese, for the film is filled with a thousand felicities. But I have three questions. The film turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be: the story of a man escaping, played by a good-looking actor of some talent. James Franco plays him as a Merry Andrew isolate. I question the choice, not of an isolate, but of a man who is essentially volatile. The volatility may be inherent with Franco, but I wonder if the actual man, Aron Ralston was so. For Franco the desert is a lark. But if Ralston were actually a fellow of serious humor and of steady temperament, what would have happened to him in that canyon? As it is, on the soul-level, nothing happens to him. All he learns is: Always tell someone where you are going. Then, there is a problem with narration, by which I mean editing. In such a story it seems necessary to put the audience, not in the shoes of the main character, but in their own shoes in that perilous place. But that’s not what we get. What we get is the editing machine in that perilous place. So the editing takes over our job for us, without our saying we need it to. There are five million cuts, none of them necessary for our entry into the tale. So we end up with a virtuoso camera and editing, of which we never cease to be aware, and which, in my case, keeps me aloof from the events and from the actor playing him. For the actor is left with no single scene that is his own. Every scene is the camera’s, the editor’s. Franco is always on camera, but we are never allowed just to be with him. This is sad, because the story is remarkable, and because the list of things done well in this film would have no end: the desert shown, the meeting with the two girls hiking and their adventure, the kissing of the staple, the trailing of the rope, the handling of the rock-fall, the great last ten minutes of the picture. Another problem with the picture, just at present, is that too much is known about it beforehand; its publicity has killed it. But it is well worth seeing; it is not depressing; it is harrowing only when it needs to be and less harrowing than a thousand horror films. Expect the expected, and you won’t be disappointed.

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James And The GIant Peach

15 Feb

James And The Giant Peach – directed by Henry Selick – Fantasy Fairy Tale. A ten-year-old boy desires to escape from his ghastly aunts. 79 minutes Color 1996.

* * * * *

Miriam Margolyes and the great Joanna Lumley play the venomous aunts in the live-action portion of the picture, the usual Disney horrible relatives which we all have. This story is a male version of Cinderella. In this case the little boy is worked like a slave by the wicked women, but salvation comes in the person a fairy godfather, played in the tattered uniform of a Napoleonic soldier by Pete Postlethwaite, a wonderful choice for the role, because you don’t know whether this is a poison pirate or a putative parent. For the pumpkin, which is the vehicle of salvation, we have a fruit of similar hue, a giant peach. Within this vessel and in animation now, our hero, well played by Paul Terry, is transported to The Ball, which in this male version is, of course, The Big Apple, a different sort of ball than a ball. He is accompanied by a gaggle of bugs: a centipede from The Bronx voiced by Richard Dreyfus, a seductive spider played by Susan Sarandon, Jane Leeves as Mrs Ladybug, Simon Callow magisterial as Sir Grasshopper, and David Thewlis voicing the Earthworm. They provide us with some merry songs and witty entertainment.  Whereas Cinderella is an important tale of sexual selection by a female assisted by no one, James And The Giant Peach, its male version, is the story of a resourceful boy headed for the commercial headquarters of the modern world and assisted by many. Make of that what you will, the piece is fine for anyone of any age, provided you are not a ten year-old boy who might take it to represent something true.

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Man On A TIghtrope

05 Feb

Man On A Tightrope – directed by Elia Kazan — Drama. The owner /ringmaster and his small touring circus fall afoul of The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. 105 minutes black and white 1953.

* * * * *

Kazan was a high Virgo and while that means that he understood what was crucial, what was critical, it also means that he was highly critical of himself and his own work, and not always accurately. Thus his put-down of this work – an action adventure piece that actually comes alive completely in the bumbling escape attempt with which it ends. Man On A Tightrope is the best circus picture I have ever seen. Kazan adores the circus folk and their life, and really gets down with them. You see their color, their gypsy soul, their absurdity, their dignity, and their crazy fun. The story is based on the actual escape of a real circus from the Communists, and Kazan actually filmed this in Europe and actually uses that very circus in the film. He brings in Hollywood actors to play the principals, Alex D’Arcy, touching as the bashful lion-tamer, Gloria Grahame, once again as the girl who doesn’t want to say no, Richard Boone as the lumpen-heavy, Adolph Menjou covered with cigarette ash lying on a couch as he plays the bureaucrat out to outwit the owner, , and Frederic March as that owner. Kazan originally wanted March as Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman, which is strange because March is no more Willy Loman than my cat. He has too much inner stance. He is too middle-class. But he had used him in the original stage production of The Skin Of Our Teeth, a Kazan early triumph, when March told him, “Be careful with me. I tend to over-do,”  and which Kazan loved him for. It’s just wonderful how wonderful March could be. He is often miscast. He is not a sexually exciting actor. He doesn’t offer romance, even when young. But he can offer pain and its discombobulation and weakness. He can offer doubt. He offers the promise of middle-age, even when young, which means that he offers the values of a grown-up; at no point is he ever an adolescent. You have to take him seriously, even if you don’t particularly like him or don’t particularly like looking at his face, which is one thing you don’t have to do with a stage actor but do have to do with a movie actor. And you have to respect his technique which is displayed here with no showiness. Kazan, good naturedly said about March here that he had to keep Freddy from hamming it up, but March never seems in danger of doing that. Terry Moore, though, pushes it as the love interest with Cameron Mitchell, but that was the way she always was, and you wonder why Kazan allowed Zanuck to cast her. She’s a false note in a bad plot move, but the rest of the material is right on. What do you have to sacrifice to escape oppression is the theme. Perhaps Kazan didn’t quite realize it, but it’s a great theme. Too bad, but it’s still a marvelous piece, typical of Kazan in his love of actors, his spacious sympathies, and his phenomenal understand of human nature.

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