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Archive for the ‘Donald Sutherland’ Category

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay 1

23 Nov

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay 1 – directed by Francis Lawrence. SciFi. 123 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★★

The Story: A young woman is unwillingly enlisted as the symbol of an underground movement to overthrow a tyrant.

~      

I have never seen such a film before. I have never been to one of these series films, partly because I am not interested in SciFi as a subject of any depth of drama or intelligence of scope and also because I am not interested in violent and mechanical action as a film style. I went to this one because it would be one of the last times to be seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman on the big screen. His appearance is rationed, he looks bad, and he does everything beautifully.

As do Joanna Moore as the president of the insurgents, Stanley Tucci as the evil interviewer, Woody Harrelson as the clever reprobate, and the always praiseworthy Jeffrey Wright. They cannot make a mistake, and they never appear to be slumming. Far from it: they seize every scene they are in with just the right grip. As does Donald Sutherland with his refulgent white hair belying his swinish interior. Only Elizabeth Banks seems out of place here: she seems to be playing a transvestite fashionista or something. Her character seems out of place, which is fine, but her performance also seems out of place, which is not fine. She doesn’t appear to be someone who should be doing this.

The main burden of the story lies with Jennifer Lawrence, who evidently has been in earlier versions of this series. She is not pleasant to look at and she is not pleasant. Moreover, her choice as an actor seems to be to play shellshock. I question it. She seems continually benumbed by something. In the past, she has had great success in playing marginal characters, but for her to play a heroine, a focal character is perhaps not her métier. But the story is hers.

And, for me, the interesting thing about it is how slowly, how leisurely it moves, how scenes are developed, how matters are discussed, how interior toward the characters the pressures of the story are aimed. I sit back in my multiplex armchair and stretch my legs into the aisle and watch in great comfort as this long, slow, story engrosses me – not just because of the satisfactions of its occasional and quite sensational blaps and gallooms but because Story in itself should sometimes invite repose, acceptance, trust, and the ease of the treat of a very expensive entertainment before one.

I took my pleasure, I may tell you. I did not feel cheated because I knew nothing and expected nothing. However, I realized as I left that what I had been watching was one of those Flash Gordon episodes I used to see back in the ‘40s, at the Saturday matinee – a cliff-hanger a week – and that I had started myself on the Perils Of Jennifer. And that I was bound to see the next one, and the one after that, praying only that Donald Sutherland will reach the end of the series before the end of his life. And mine.

 

Horrible Bosses

20 Jul

Horrible Bosses – Directed by Seth Gordon. Low Comedy. The Three Stooges take on The Axis Powers. 94 minutes Color 2011.

* * *

What a disappointment! No wait a minute. I went to it because of the stars, and the stars do not disappoint, which is why three stars are allotted to this. The three stars are actually very funny. Colin Farrell plays a drugged-out dauphin with a comb-over to Donald Sutherland, who is an ideal boss, but who dies in his first appearance, so his chief of staff falls under the crazy sway of Emperor Farrell, and misery ensues. Jennifer Aniston plays a nymphomaniacal dentist who longs to have her otherwise engaged dental technical drill her. And Kevin Spacey who slave-drives everyone around him like Simon Legree plays the CEO From Hell with gorgeous relish. Spacey is given and rewards the most film time of the three. His grandmother scene is almost worth playing money for, except that one would have to subject onesself to the rest of the movie to do so. It is the only time I laughed. Or smiled. Or didn’t feel like leaving. For the problem with the film lies not fall with the three stars who play The Axis Powers, but with The Three Stooges who conspire to kill them. It’s a wonderful premise, especially when Jamie Foxx comes along as a professional hit man to fortify their resolve. He is delightful. As is Bob Newhart as a replacement boss. It is the style of playing of the three victims which I find distressing. What they do is actorish, indeed acteroid. You would call it hammy if it aimed at a high style, but since it aims at a low style, you would call it improv. They never shut up and they never stop Rube Goldberging responseses to the situation and to one another that read like the contents of a trash basket. That is, their collective playing is a conglomeration of what any good actor would throw out.  They drain every ounce of humor from the premise by trying to make everything, and I mean everything, funny. And as a result we the audience can find nothing funny. I didn’t laugh. Neither did the other three people in the movie house.  The only three people having fun were those three actors. They found one another infectious. So did I, except in a quite different way.

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Start The Revolution WIthout Me

14 Jan

Start The Revolution Without Me – directed by Bud Yorkin – a farce in which two sets of identical twins plot to cut off The Terror at the pass. 1 hour 31 minutes color 1970

* * * * *

Farce requires the stage. It requires a static set, back and forth through whose doors characters race. Physical dexterity is its sine qua non. Motion pictures move. In film, the set is never static because the camera isn’t. Therefore the necessary contrast is lost. But given this limitation, farce on film can work, not through physical comedy, but through verbal comedy, through situation, and through what passes across the characters’ faces. Thus we have Hugh Griffith, whose loony visage always promises the embarrassing human folly of dirty underwear even when he is dressed with monumentally glittering daft royalty as King Louis XVI. The film is vaguely a parody of The Corsican Brothers or some Ronald Colman swashbuckler or other, it doesn’t matter which, because the film is a parody of films like that, and as such it works like gang-busters. Everything is fabulous here. The whole piece was made in France, in real French Chateaus, in their real interiors, with real French extras, and a real English cast to lend authenticity to France and to two real North American actors who play the four French leads. The settings are breath-taking, and the costumes, by Alan Barrett, are the finest funny period costumes you will ever see, all run up for a nickel, the Special Features tell us. Gene Wilder plays one set of separated twins, and, as he admits in the Special Features, while he thought he would be wonderful as the peasant, he is far better as the crazy, vicious, sadistic, me-first noble. Donald Sutherland has the cunning to make both the peasant and the noble similar, which they would have been in real life, one slightly out-to-lunch and the other above-it-all. He is delightful to watch. His hauteur is preposterous because he is already so tall. In film, all farce is farce of the face, and the only movement is that of the audience’s eyes to the next visage treat. When people start running about, film farce tends to slow down. You can’t make motion out of what is already motion, only what is not. As Orson Welles remarks in it, this is a film in which he does not appear, so we know from the start that we are in the sacred land of irreverence, impudence, and idiocy, and can take out our Monty Python Toby-mug, fill it up with ale, sit back in our armchairs, and chuckle.

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