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Archive for the ‘David Thewlis’ Category

The Omen 666

24 Jan

The Omen 666  -– Directed by John Moore. Creepy Thriller. The Devil Wears Buster Browns when a bad seed starts growing and growing and coming toward you. 110 minutes Color 2006.

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There is a difference between a role and a character. A role is The Mother, The Husband, The Child. But the writer must also make characters of them or all we have is cutouts. The character allows the actor to create humans out of and inside those roles. It’s done with words said by a character that make him alive, human, and particular. Dickens was a master at this. A character should be like no one else on earth. A character is also created by actions which also define him, by the term Part we mean the action the actor who plays the role takes. “I play the role of the boyfriend. It’s the part of the boyfriend who kills the ogre.”  In Omen 666 there there are roles but no characters, save two. They are not, however, created by the writers, but by the sheer eccentricity of the actors who play them, David Thewlis and Pete Postlethwaite, actors also of a rare  power — by which I mean freedom in their craft. Each brings such particularity to his work because of his voice and appearance, that they come alive, immediately. Julia Stiles as The Mother, however, has no such personality. She is a good actor, of course, but that’s all you’re left with. Not a human being but an actor. Liev Schreiber is another good actor, but the same is true of him. He has a fine figure, a beautiful and well-placed voice, and an interesting face which has no bad camera angles. But he has no lines. Nothing that he says rings true, not because he is unconvincing but because the lines are empty. He has no character to bring to life; he has nothing to work with, but himself, and he himself is not A Role, not An Ambassador, not The Father Of That Boy, not Someone in that situation, because the writers have not made that Someone into an individual. Give an actor as good as Liev Schreiber the merest clue, and he will make of it a memorable creation. Not here. It’s not his fault. The script is clueless. Millions have been spent on this production. You notice it because that’s all there is to notice. When Postlethwaite died, I turned it off.

Michael Gambon, Mia Farrow

 

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.

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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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