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Archive for the ‘THRILLER’ Category

Cold In July

18 Jun

Cold In July – directed by Jim Mickle. Thriller. 109 minutes Color 2014.

★★★

The Story: A small town merchant kills a housebreaker in his home and there are many consequences.

~

Why doesn’t it wash?

We have four wonderfully skilled and properly chosen actors to perform it, Nick Damici, Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson, and Sam Shepard. They all give tremendous value, and one of the problems might be the focus on that value. For the director has allowed each of them the time to reveal themselves in normal fashion in circumstances which are not normal at all.  Has he turned, or tried to turn, the instruments of a Thriller into the personnel of a Tragedy?

And if all this is true, why is the part of the wife a thankless role? Because it’s not well written, that’s why. It refuses to set the wife in anything but TV-acting opposition to the practices of her husband. Instead she whines or gathers her youngster up from the restaurant and walks out. Or canoodles. She is never allowed to be intensely interested in him as a human being. She is never allowed to try to see through him. Or she hasn’t the imagination to do so.

The piece begins in a bloodbath and, of course, ends in one. And very good blood baths they are too. But between them, all I see is circumstances that would play very well in a novel. In a novel you must imagine what you are told, so the focus of your imagination screens off the improbable. In a movie everything’s right there in front of your eyes, and imagination is fatal.  In a novel you can’t see the anomalies.

You can’t see that those men’s leaving that drugged ex-con on the railroad tracks is sure to lead back to them.

You can’t believe that in the dead of night with headlights ablaze a car could follow two other cars out into the country without those other cars tumbling to it.

You can’t believe that the FBI would permit the occupants of a safe house the liberty to consistently make snuff porn.

The secret of a Thriller is that the emotion shown has to be so tight and constricted in its range that you are never allowed to look elsewhere in your mind for human inconstancy.

But these four men’s performances are full of human inconstancy. They are beautiful performances. They are Oscar worthy performances.

But do they belong in a Thriller?

 
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Posted in CRIME DRAMA, Don Johnson, Michael C. Hall, MURDER MYSTERY, Sam Shepard, THRILLER

 

The Collector

28 Jun

The Collector – directed by William Wyler . Suspense. A nouveau rich young man traps the girl of his dreams in the cellar of his country house. 1hours 29 minutes Color 1965.

★★★

I want to praise it highly, for it is the film of a director – The Best Years Of Our Lives, The Little Foxes, The Letter, Roman Holliday – whose work I respect and enjoy, but the film is not as good as it would have been had the script been better than it is. Aside from two minor characters, the wonderful Mona Washbourne being one of them, it is a two-character piece. But the problem lies not with their casting or playing, but with the limited range they are forced to perform in by the script, or rather, the single story element in it they are allowed to respond to. For their choices for capture and escape are merely sexual, merely romantic. This means that the playing field between the two never has a chance to open up into any other dramatic possibility; they never find a common ground other than sex; they never come together as ordinary human beings, discussing Butterflies, say, or one’s preference for scrambled eggs as opposed to eggs over easy or whether they like to sleep on their right or their left side or what they dream of when they do. What we are given instead as the entire thing that divides them is the difference in their social classes, and this is presented as an absolute which neither can breach. And with this polemic the author, John Fowles, strangles the story, which becomes a repetition of identical roadblocks, whereas when people find themselves trapped in the Army or on a life raft or in a 12 Step meeting, no matter what social class they come from, they do find common ground, and in doing so an arena of accessibility, friendship, and accord, in which the need in the girl to escape can tempt her with the opposite, as can the need for the young man to keep her. So the film becomes a set up, a scold rather than a true story, and thus fails. Cast as the two are Samantha Eggar who is super as the red-haired young beauty who is kidnapped. Her casting is obvious: she is lovely, young, and a good actor. The casting of the young man is strange however, but for that very reason it works. No one is creepier than a creepy Englishman, and the person they have cast in this role was the sexiest young man in England at that time, a young man so beautiful and inviting, a sort of James Dean of The British Isles, that he could have any lady he desired. He would be the abducted, rather than the abducted. Terrence Stamp plays the part completely against his natural endowment, without ever making it grotesque to do so. All he does is hold his head to one side, do something odd with his hands, pitch his voice into a Roddy MacDowell alto, and button one too many buttons of his suit. Somewhere he finds his inner prude in order to always find reasons to both keep and repel her. If only she had really fallen for him, ah, what a strange and devastating story that would have made. Would he then be the one trapped? We’ll never know. The music is by Maurice Jarre, and is the best. It was shot in Hollywood by Robert Surtees, a great photographer shooting sets that don’t quite work as real, and by Robert Krasker in England which does quite work as real, because it is.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, DIRECTED BY WILLIAM WYLER, FILMED BY: Robert Surtees, PERSONAL DRAMA, Psychological Thriller, SURVIVAL DRAMA, Terrence Stamp

 

The Devil’s Own

05 Feb

The Devil’s Own — Directed by Alan J. Pakula. Thriller. A young man on a revenge mission boards with the family of a cop, who has to choose between his friendship with the lad and his hatred of what the lad stands for. 111 minutes Color 1997.

★★★★

I don’t know if Harrison Ford ever knew how to act, but he certainly has forgotten how by the time he plays this character. He “acts” by “playing stern”. He does this by scowling and drawing down the sides of his lips and staring. That is to say, he makes faces. Too bad, because the result is that his vis à vis, given nothing to play with, takes every trick. The vis à vis in this case is the brilliant Brad Pitt, an actor whose every response seems right. As opposed to Ford whose every response seems righteous. We are presented thereby not with Ford’s character being tortured by his own perfection and the lack of it in others, but by an actor who never questions the foundation of and impossibility of such a rock-faced contrast. Harrison Ford has no way through his own fixed method, and no suggestion of one. We are faced with thickness. Brad Pitt, however, is all wit, susceptibility, openness, and so he makes the most unlikely situations plausible, although in this he is certainly helped by the editor. After all, it is a story with guns going off and no one getting hit. So with no one for Pitt to play against the film lies flat, save when we see him. We side with him wholly and throughout, which is not what we are supposed to do. At first it seemed that the film was set in Ireland, since the opening has everyone speaking the tongue; it was only with forced effort that I understood it to be taking place in Brooklyn. Pitt is running guns to Ireland and is lodged in Harrison Ford’s home. When Ford finds out what he is up to, oh dear! Because of Ford’s acting choice, the wrap-up goes for naught. The supporting people, particularly Treat Williams as the gun middleman, are excellent, and, this being Pakula, the production values are first rate. See it for Pitt – always worth our appreciation in lower-class roles.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Alan J. Pakula: DIRECTOR, Brad Pitt: MASTER ACTOR, Harrison Ford, Julia Stiles, PERSONAL DRAMA, Rubén Blades, TERRORIST DRAMA, THRILLER, Treat Williams

 

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

20 Jan

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — Directed by Guy Ritchie. Action Adventure Comedy. 108 minutes Color 1998.

* * * * *

Bob Hope isn’t in it, but this is a Bop Hope film with his character divvied up into twenty parts. Bob Hope Meets Scarface it would be called if he were in it. Instead it’s a mixed salad full of various greens and surprising veggies and terrific vinaigrette holding the whole collation together. The quality of the humor lies in the plot and the plot lies in the hands of the camera work. It is a story that cannot be told without a camera because the camera is the secret screwball agent of the plot. It is a hugely mixed up mélange of betrayals and deceptions and deals and masterful meanness and young dumb luck. It never drops its comic spectacles from its nose. Even with the corpses decorating every divan, you will see that they do so with a vaudeville gesture of stage exit. Even the Cockney accents are fun, the more so when you can’t tell what they are saying — fun because the posture they assume to say it is so absurdly readable. When perversion takes its final twist it straightens up and flies right. Watch and see if aint so, corblimey.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, CAPER FLICK, CRIME DRAMA, Filmed in England, Gangster Comedy, Guy Ritchie DIRECTOR, THRILLER

 

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy

02 Jan

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy — directed by Tomas Alfredson. Spy Suspense. There is a Russian spy secreted in British Intelligence, but which of the four suspects is it? 127 minutes Color 2011.

* * * * *

You gaze as into an aquarium, and past your eyes many strange things pass, among which one of four identical fish may be poisonous. One is riveted by the strange slow movement of things back and forth before one and by the subterranean places one visits. This particular aquarium stretches from London to Paris to Budapest to Istanbul. Among the hunters and protectors of the poisonous fish is the premier English actor Gary Oldman, playing a man of great reserve, watchfulness, and respect. The barest response. The civillest tone. And a pair of glasses that hide everything or nothing, screening a face as closed as a shell. He is supported by a cast, which is as exquisite and apt as he is, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds (although his character needs to be given more play), John Hurt, Kathy Burke, David Dencik, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbactch. As we move through this aqueous stillness, we are held by the deliberation of the scenes, places, tones, which float the vessel of suspense entirely, for we too know nothing. We too haven’t a clue. So we surrender to that ignorance of the truth upon which suspense is built, if we participate in what is being done to us visually. We wait for it to be announced, not to be fooled but to be revealed as co-agents of the crime. Clearly the director is master hand. Clearly the editor Dino Johnsâter and the photographer Hoyte Van Hoytema are master hands, as are the set designers and art directors and composer. The medium they deliver us into is the jell of suspense itself, so we are not vexed by red herrings but prompted by them. The piece is drawn from John le Carré’s novel set in the cold war, and the movie strikes into the very center of the dirty heart of war, whose mindset is a bureaucratic tenement. We have here the drab underpinnings of espionage, so dandified up in the James Bond movies of fond memory. The film is a gem, a masterpiece, not to be missed or dismissed. Brilliant on every level of execution and a very high entertainment indeed.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH REALISTIC, Ciaran Hinds: Screen God, Filmed in England, Filmed in Hungary, Filmed in Turkey, Gary Oldman: MASTER ACTOR, Hungary, John Hurt, THRILLER, Toby Jones

 

Sherlock Holmes: The Game Of Shadows

18 Dec

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows — Directed by Guy Ritchie. Boulevard Thriller. 129 minutes Color 2011.

* * * * *

Better than the first one by a long shot. Firstly because it is more witty, and secondly and thirdly because it is more witty. By that I mean that while it is also more spectacular, the spectacle is witty. I am not going to spoil the jests by describing them; let them come upon you unawares. Then too, the story swans around Europe with uncommon velocity and the picture simply expects you to go along for the ride, which is essentially Dr. Watson’s ride, since that is who we have to be, since none of us can ever be Holmes, can we. When a director or storyteller takes wit for granted in his audience he has done the wittiest thing he could do. And always the director lets us in on the joke, by which is meant that he expects us to finish the punch line for him, Alà Lubitsch. And it also means that the dialogue is witty, and dialogue can only be witty in a film if there is really a lot of it, so that we can sink our ears into it and live with the flavor of it as things unfold. There are mistakes, or rather one mistake, which is that, again, the fight scenes fall prey to scrambled editing so that there is no knowing what is going on or what is doing by whom to whom. But these are over early, and the story opens out into its drolleries and detours amply. The décor, the costumes, the carriages, and the protocols are all Teutonic, the jammed living rooms, the opulent restaurants, the creamy excesses of dress and manner, the expression, the repression – all are Germanic. It is 1891 and Victoria is on the throne and she was a German. Victorianism everywhere always has a German accent. And the designers have made the most of this and played off against it in the person and personality of Robert Downey Junior, who is the most romantic in appearance and affect of any Sherlock Holmes before. He never wears a high collar or a tie. His shirts are always Byronically open at the neck. He never does the prim Basil Rathbone/Jeremy Brett thing of the pinched genius with the long condescending nose. Instead he is all close-up and personal and tousled and Peck’s Bad Boy. Of course, like those others, he is dreadfully neurotic. He also speaks a lot more clearly here than in the first installment. In all this he is ably mated by Jude Law, again as Watson, who almost equals Holmes in magical prestidigitations. Stephen Fry makes an astounding appearance as Mycroft Holmes, Sherry’s brother, and a welcome presence he is indeed. Can we follow all this? We are not meant to. All we are meant is to feel privileged to tag along. I liked doing that. It is a sumptuous ride.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, ACTION ADVENTURE, BOULEVARD THRILLER, DIRECTED BY: Guy Ritchie, High Comedy, Jude Law, PRIVATE EYE, Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD, Stehen Fry, Turn of the 19th Century, VICTORIAN PERIOD

 

Night Train To Munich

17 Dec

Night Train To Munich — Directed by Carol Reed. Boulevard Thriller. The daring rescue of an important Czech scientist brings his daughter and their rescuer into close shaves. 95 minutes Black and white 1940.

* * *

Carol Reed directed four great films, all fairly early on in his career, and so I saw this to see if this early film of his would add itself to this category. It does not. The great films are The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Odd Man Out, and the greatest of them all: The Outcast Of The Islands, a film that I have watched many times, each time adding to its mystery and power. Later on Reed directed big Hollywood films of no particular distinction of content, such as Oliver, which is a lot of fun, and Mutiny On The Bounty, which is an albatross. But this piece is a War Film. War Films tend to fall between two stools: propaganda to raise one’s spirits and a story to harrow them. This divided energy is apparent here, and is understandable. But Reed, who even here is a great technician, stalls the story with Basel Radford and Naunton Wayne, popular from The Lady Vanishes by the same screenwriters, in flat comic interludes whose pauses drain them of humor and dampen the momentum. And Reed also offers us a gunshot finale that beggars credulity. It stars the pretty and accessible Margaret Lockwood, and the mercilessly highfalutin Rex Harrison, who brings his mastery of querulous irritability to play three separate parts, none of them convincingly but all of them entertainingly. He’s not what we would call a responsive actor. Feed him a line and he will wait it out for the next opportunity to attack someone, at which he is a genius. He’s gin and bitters every time. He tips the picture into being a Boulevard Thriller, such as we later so enjoyed being led through by James Bond. Felix Aylmer and Roland Culver make us happy, as do all the British character actors on display. Brilliantly acerbic as a light comedian, Harrison is overshadowed in all his scenes by Paul Henried, who is really good as the antagonist. Watch Henried; look at his attention, his emotional foundation, and his carving of the character he plays into a believable human being, which Harrison, for all his personality, never is. Harrison was not a great actor but a great entertainer, and as such earns a high place in our admiration of human sacrifice. (The exposition by the biographers of Reed and the screenwriters is helpful, kind, and delightful.)

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: STAGE ENGLISH, BOULEVARD THRILLER, DIRECTED BY: Carol Reed, Felix Aylmer, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Henreid, Rex Harrison, Roland Culver, SPY STORY, War Story, WARTIME ROMANCE, World War II

 

Rififi

03 Aug

Rififi – Written and Directed by Jules Dassin. Heist Thriller. A quartet of experts sets to lift 250 million dollars of gems from a jewelry store. 122 minutes Black and White 1955.

*****

A full half hour at the dead center of this masterpiece is given over to the silent execution of the caper, a passage that has never been preceded, equaled, or surpassed in film.  It was made for $200,000, a penny. Expense forbad the use of Jean Gabin, say, in the lead, and so they hired actors virtually unknown to the public, which suits the material right down to the ground. For we have Jean Servais, with his huge, sad, John McIntyre eyes, in the part, and he is riveting. They all are. What the actors lacked in experience, the crew made up for in brilliance, An A- class cinema-photographer, Phillip Agostini, filmed it, an A-class editor, Robert Dwyer, cut it, and the music is by Georges Auric. What luck! Dassin, a lovable man if there ever was one, had been exiled as one of the Hollywood 10. And in an interview in the Bonus Material he talks about those times and the making of this film. It’s all fascinating. And it is the greatest film of its kind ever made.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, CAPER FLICK, CRIME DRAMA, EDITED BY ROBERT DWYER, FILMED BY Phillip Agostini, Filmed in France, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, In French with English Subtitles, Jean Servais, Low Tragedy, MUSICAL SCORE BY George Auric, MUST SEE, THRILLER, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Jules Dassin

 

The Resident

20 May

The Resident – Directed by Antii Jokinen. Thriller. A young female doctor rents an old apartment and finds it is haunted – and not by a ghost. 1 hour 31 minutes Color 2010

* * * * *

Hilary Swank is always cast as a proactive skinny female. A girl who decides to be a boy. A woman who wants to be a prizefighter. An uneducated waitress who decides to become a lawyer to save her brother from prison. Proactive is her inner position, what she brings to the table for us to eat. It’s always obvious, and she is always well cast and cast in interesting well-produced pictures. This is one of them. Because she is skinny she looks susceptible to being pushed around, though, so it’s not an easy ride for her. She is physically strong, muscular, and as convincing as a powerhouse as Barbara Stanwyck was and for the same reasons: she is physically fit. However, as an actress she tends to play up her “helplessness”, which is a mistake, but then so does Jodi Foster, whom she also resembles. Never play fear, Hilary, play determination; it’s more believable.  Especially since she has a face with which, s with Joan Crawford, it is impossible for her to register a subtlety. Here she plays a EMR surgeon, a perfect part for her, and I for one was so glad she knew human anatomy so that she could place her coup de grace accurately when the time came to bring it into play. She rents a dandy old Brooklyn apartment and is immediately uneasy because she feels she is being watched, and, badness knows, she is. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the watcher, the landlord who has a fix on her. You think he possibly really loves her until the point where he pleas for pity, never a safe move for a screenwriter. But we are well on in horror by that time.  The film is magisterially directed by Antii Jokinen and filmed by Guillermo Navarro. The whole picture is much the creation of its set designers, Guy Barnes, J. Dennis Washington, and Wendy Ozolos-Barnes who have made for us one of the most extraordinary series of arteries and secret panels, and peepholes one has ever seen in a N.Y. apartment building– and by its bent score by John Ottman. It is very well acted, and its cast even includes the beautiful Lee Pace (one of the two greatest actors in film today) who has a real-right-on moment with a sling; watch for it. I rented the film because of his being in it; his part is small, but it adds a ruthless and necessary fillip to the coup de grace when it comes.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Hilary Swank, Lee Pace: Screen God: Acting God, MELODRAMA, PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR DRAMA, Psychological Thriller

 

Ghost Boy

12 Apr

Ghost Boy – Directed by Lamberto Bava. Thriller. Two lovers work out their eternal love after death. 97 minutes Color 2006

* * *

Gosh. Laura Harring is awfully good as the beset mother. And Pete Postlethwaite, of course, lends his natural ambiguity to the kindly but incredulous doctor. I loved roaming around inside that huge thatched African mansion among all those artworks, and I liked seeing those African folks, villages, landscapes. I found the movie held me, and the actress certainly was convincing as the woman who was haunted by lust for her husband and whose child becomes possessed by that husband. The African lore and ju ju certainly carry weight here and so does the soundtrack. Melodrama must have melody.

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Posted in Filmed in Africa, Macbre, Pete Postlethwaite: ACTING GOD, THRILLER

 

Storm Warning

22 Mar

Storm Warning — directed by Jerry Wald — Drama. On a visit to her younger sister in a small southern town, a woman witnesses a murder that appears to be committed by her brother-in-law.

* * * *

What about Ginger Rogers? Was she some good actress or not? Boy she certainly is good here. And set her up against Doris Day and you can see what authority and readiness she had. She was, in Hello Dolly, rumored to be hateful to work with, and she may in her personal life have been humorless. She certainly had that peculiar way of ending her eyebrows at the center with an apostrophe. But what a wonderful chin she had. And she is a slender as can can be. She looks wonderful, and here she is already 39. She’s too classy and smart to be the touring model (as if there ever was such a thing), but one passes that over because of the conviction she gives to all her dramatic work, her simply being in the material, walking through a bowling alley, running in the rain. She was a strong athlete and tennis player, and of course was a national star dancer in her teens, touring and holding her own on Broadway, where she first met Astaire, who helped choreograph one of her shows. She had an acid touch, if needed. And here it works well against Steve Cochran, who is gorgeous, but not really a good enough actor to play the part of someone who is stupid. This required someone like Dan Duryea or Richard Widmark who both played stupid people as though they were canny. Doris Day had no training as an actor, and it always showed, but at least she was always fully invested in what she did, and could turn on a dime and come up with it. Here we also have Ronald Reagan, really quite good as the wised up DA who can’t forge a case against the Klan. He is never without a tipped-back fedora and a slangy approach to the townsfolk, none of whom have Southern accents, if you will. The ending is good. One of Jerry Wald’s social statements, and not a moment too soon. Not a bad picture, not a great one, but with what makes a Star a Star, Rogers is worth the ticket.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Doris Day, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MELODRAMA, MURDER, Ronald Reagan, Steve Cochran, THRILLER

 

The Ghost Breakers

23 Feb

The Ghost Breakers – directed by George Marshall – Comedy Mystery Thriller. That haunted island castle in the Caribbean must be explored! 82 minutes Black and white 1940

* * * * *

Bob Hope plays his usual boastful fool, and it is quite welcome. Here again he is sexually overreaching and heroically underachieving, floundering into shallows over his head. Hope is a master at the lecherous coward, (also played by Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis and Charlie Chaplin and many others). No wonder he appealed so long to so many. In real life, evidently Hope was quite intrepid, going into battles zones to entertain the troops, but intrepidity and cowardice go hand in hand, else one would not know one from the other. I saw this picture as a little kid when it came out and the recollection of a woman side-stroking through swampy misty water holding her clothes over her head to keep them dry never left me as an example of practicality under pressure. Also the spooky castle remained with me and gave me nightmares. So did the zombie, my first in film. All these effects now have lost their power; thus the questionable practice of revisiting the past. Ahh, but the film still has its power to entertain. Its effects are low key and innocent but they give us a chance to recover from each while the next one waits in the wings. The film was re-made many years later with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, with the same director and the same sets, but this is by far the better version. Paulette Goddard, she of the dimples, is excellent here. Male or female, every actor who has dimples is a minx, and she sure is. Goddard was one of the brightest women in Hollywood, highly respected as a person, but everyone agreed that she could not act worth tuppence. I don’t know why. Here she’s good, attentive, game, unapologetic about taking off her clothes a couple of times — a good-time gal with a deep resource of pep and very convincing as a brash lass, up against Anthony Quinn at his most sexually dangerous, and adventuring into the haunted castle against all warnings. Go with her. You will be so pleased to be petrified. .

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Posted in Anthony Quinn, Bob Hope, Comedy-mystery, directed by George Marshall, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Low Comedy, MATING, Paulette Godard, THRILLER

 

Crimetime

15 Feb

Crimetime – directed by George Sluizer – Thriller. An Actor playing a serial killer is stalked by the serial killer wanting to be the actor. 118 minutes Color  1996.

* * *

Hitchcock often made thrillers about men wrongly accused, but occasionally he made a picture about a homicidal maniac: Strangers On A Train is one, Psycho another. This picture would be perfectly suited to Hitchcock’s second category, but it lacks Hitchcock’s prime ingredient, the ability to create and sustain an ominous mood. Here, what you see is what you get; in Hitchcock what you see is what you don’t get. The result is a B picture, but one with A level performances — on the one side, Geraldine Chaplin as the blind mad wife, and on the other our own wonderful Karen Black as the dread head of production. Between them are the two major talents of Pete Postlethwaite and Stephen Baldwin. Baldwin, whom I have never seen before, possesses the fantastic Baldwin rump which on occasion we are allowed to dwell upon stark naked, and the film plays off on the obvious general sexual energy of a sexy actor never trying to be sexy. He plays an actor, Bobby– an actor of the sort one occasionally meets in the profession, devoted to his craft so radically that he becomes cruel and obnoxious — as humorless, inconsiderate,  and spiritually intrusive as the dark fundamentalist he truly is. Baldwin is perfectly cast for  these qualities. And he is a bold actor. The story is about a TV show which takes the crime of the hour and reenacts it. Today’s crime is that of a serial killer, and so devoted to playing the part does the actor, Bobby, become that he becomes hypnotized by the killer, who talks to him over the phone. The killer, watching Bobby be him on the TV, recognizes that they have become one another. It is the story of a beautiful and famous actor’s desire for excellence acheiving its desire and the desire of an ugly nonentity to achieve beauty and fame, meeting. Pete Postlethwaite as the killer is remarkable. Every actor in England went to see him perform. (He once toured in King Lear playing every part.) And in this leading role, he has a full canvas to paint upon. His face is a treat to behold, with its big eyes and spike of jaw. His death scene is astonishing. Baldwin in recognition of his own lost life has a crying scene that is beautiful, and other fine scenes as well. The two of them are worth the time it takes to watch this really first class story — true, a story made banal by its director’s treatment of it — but still somehow a vehicle for great acting.

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Posted in Backstage Drama, Geraldine Chaplin, Karen Black, Pete Postlethwaite: ACTING GOD, Psychological Thriller, Stephen Baldwin, Uncategorized

 

The Phantom Of The Opera

30 Jan

The Phantom Of The Opera – directed by  Rupert Julien – Melodrama. An understudy at the Paris Opera is lured by a lurid beast in the basement. 92 minutes black and white with color scrims, silent with orcheatra sound track, 1925

* * * * *

I can understand why this is such a popular story. On the surface is beauty, sexual attractiveness, talent, popularity, successful employment, love, youth, and innocence. And underneath, in the dungeon of one’s being, is an isolated crazy monster who believes himself unlovable and who wants to control the whole show.  What a model of the human individual in adolescence. One is always drawn to sympathize with the monster, of course. At least, in Claude Raines version one was. But this is the Lon Chaney version. It had color scrims to enhance certain scenes, and it is well-augmented by the Montreal Symphony, with vocals from Gunod’s Faust. For it seems Mlle. Deea has made a pact with the devil, or at least is happy to be hypnotized by him and drawn into his scary sewer lair. So far so good, until, Psyche-like, she strips off his mask, and then, ugh! This is a silent version, and the story lends itself well to silence and to the style of acting silents used. For silent films were not movies. For the camera never moved. It was stationary, and, within static sets, the actors alone moved. This led actors into compensating with big gestures. Olivier called it The Bent Wrist School Of Acting, and there is a lot of big bending at the waist here, heads thrown back, wrist to brow. It may look corny or hammy or old-fashioned, but the question really is: is it well done, and here it really is. Lon Chaney throws one arm behind him, extends one up in front of him in and stalks out through the exit. Such gestures were meant to capture and convey big emotions, and they do. There is nothing small in anything here. Mary Philbin, the soprano, is very beautiful and Chaney, The Man Of A Thousand Faces, is really evil looking. He uses his hands so beautifully you think they are beautiful, for every detail here is advanced into the realm of spectacle. We begin with a zillion ballerinas, the huge foyer of the Paris Opera House, tons of extras in astounding costumes dancing with flagrant abandon, and mobs of  audience inside the theater and out of it. The story has many variations, and this is a highly professional one of them.

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Posted in Backstage Drama, Lon Chaney, MELODRAMA, Period: 19th Century, SILENT PICTURE, THRILLER

 

The Tourist

06 Jan

The Tourist – directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck – an international thriller in which two casual acquaintances must elude their assassins together. 103 minutes color 2010.

* * * * *

An Angelina Jolie picture guarantees luxe. Creamy photography, svelte closeups, and the promise of ineffable lips. And so it proves here. This is not a picture such as Changeling, where she is required to create a character. No indeedy, that is not in her gift. What we get is Angelina Jolie once more in one of her power-beauty roles, and boy is she good at it. We see her walk down the street in a fabulous dress, and everyone makes way for her to the right and the left and everywhere else in the picture — which is an international intrigue show. She sits at a cafe table — and the entire film rotates around her, spies, detectives, gangsters. For what more could one ask? The film really delivers your money’s worth in the realm of elegant mystery suspense along the lines of To Catch A Thief– and set in Technicolor Venice, to boot! Grand Canal, grand palace, grand hotel – wow! Johnny Depp plays the stranger she meets on a train, and it’s good to see him play such a gormless chap, a Midwestern, community college math teacher. She comes on to him, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself, and which of us would? Depp doesn’t miss a trick in playing this part. This is high praise for an actor who has seemed to become over-exposed of late, and given to performances which have not been worked through properly beforehand or mistakenly accepted, such as the demon barber of Fleet Street. But here the whole film is a fancy latte. It cools off a bit at the end as it becomes under-edited. But never mind; that’s what happens with a latte. Until then, you sip slowly and in a civilized manner, and you don’t ask for anything more than to be beguiled by the tasty confection presented.

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Posted in Angelina Jolie, CRIME, Filmed in Italy, Johnny Depp, MATING, THRILLER

 

Silver Streak

08 Nov

Silver Streak –– directed by Arthur Hiller –– romantic adventure comedy in which nefarious doings get let loose on a speeding train. 113 minutes color 1976.

* * * * *

Gene Wilder’s eyes are of such a pellucid teacup blue that you know their innocence must be polluted before long. And so it comes to pass. I wouldn’t call the great Jill Clayburg pollution, but she does seduce him with an ease smoother than finesse and swifter than the swift at dawn. Ned Beatty a great actor who must have won three dozen Oscars by now, or none, plays, as usual, a person who wandered out of a Sinclair Lewis novel. Presently, the skullduggery starts to boil up, guided suavely by the person of Patrick McGoohan. Into the train wreck he plans for these person’s lives, zooms Richard Pryor, and the bullets start to fly to the right and to the left, but never, O never, to the heart of our hero which is preserved by his ironclad devotion to our Jill. The film starts as a leaden streak until Mr. Pryor’s arrival, but watch his invention, his imagination, his beautiful, restless, and exquisitely beggarly dissatisfaction driving every scene to glory. Have there ever been any more than five elegant leading women to appear in American film? Was Kay Francis one? Gwyneth Paltrow is certainly one. Jill Clayburgh is absolutely one, and it is a treat to know it as a rare fact right here in this amusing escape by train.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, BROAD COMEDY, CRIME, Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh: screen and acting goddess, MATING, MURDER, MYSTERY, Richard Pryor, THRILLER

 

Batman Forever

07 Nov

Batman Forever –– directed by Joel Schumacher –– the caped superhero is beset on all sides, of course. ––122 minutes color 1995.

* * * * *

“Was that over-the-top? I can’t tell,” utters Jim Carrey, and one wonders at the question. Has Jim Carrey ever been under over-the-top? Certainly not in this film. He is clearly a great film creature, and give him a gilded cane and stand back. The picture itself is overloaded with focal possibilities. First we have Tommy Lee Jones miscast as someone who is not a genius and therefore cannot be played by him. All Jones can do is howl with gruesome laughter. He plays a petty thief running a covey of red capped robbers, but he is at once supplanted by Nicole Kidman, whose blond hair brings the only daylight into the night-owl doings of the Batman milieu. God helps anyone who commits a 9-5 crime in Gotham; Batman only saves the night, never the day. Kidman, no matter how ever-glorious, is soon supplanted by Jim Carrey as a sedulous inventor employee of Bruce Wayne. Carrey consumes every scene he is in, with his brilliant physical comedy and hyperbolic acting style and range of invention. He’s wonderful of course. But his Niagara turns everyone around him into a trickle. He is followed but not supplanted by Chris O’Donnell who enters as a fledging Robin. The whole film is all quite lovely, and gives full satisfaction to one’s longing for midnight draughts. Val Kilmer is Bruce Wayne, and why not? The part is cast for the mouth showing under the mask. He is a very good actor and perfectly at ease in the role of the adult orphan. Complaints are irrelevant. So is praise. Who could critique a mud bath at a spa or champagne fountain at a wedding? Not I. Over-indulgence is at times the only proper rule of law. All I can say is that Jim Carrey fifteen years ago was at the perfect age to have played Hamlet, and should have done so. He had the antic temperament, the innocence of eye, and the pain.

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Posted in ACTION, ANIMAL LOVERS, bank robbers, BROAD TRAGEDY, CRIME, FANTASY, Jim Carrey: Acting God, Macbre, MATING, MURDER, MYSTERY, Nicole Kidman: SCREEN GODDESS, NOIR, THRILLER, Tommy Lee Jones

 

The Town

27 Oct

The Town –– directed by Ben Affleck –– a gangster crime-flick: a bank robber falls in love, which sorely threatens his career. Color 1020.

* * * * *

Boy is Ben Affleck a good actor. And a good director. And a good writer too. Given the grace of a regional accent to execute, he comes alive like nobody’s business. It’s really not possible not to watch him while he’s on camera, and, unlike most actor-directors, he wisely does not hesitate to give himself proper screen time –– wise, because the internal life he endures is what molds the plot, and we need to be privy to it at all times. The picture is a bank-heist piece, with three, count them, three robberies, all done in costume, and all executed with charming finesse. Jeremy Renner plays the Joe Pesci part, a man addicted to his profession, just as he was in The Hurt Locker. Chris Cooper and Pete Postlethwaite come in as ruthless old geezers, and Postlethwaite’s final scene is something to write home about. Actors, come and rejoice! Pete’s a treat. You completely believe in his power to intimidate. It’s never played for evil. Nope. The romantic lead is Rebecca Hall, and I find it hard to take an interest in her much, but the character is very well written. The whole picture has the virtue of its sources in the gangster films of the 30s with Lawrence Tierney and Pat O’Brien and James Cagney and Edward G Robinson, and it’s fun to think back on those movies and how simple they were in telling the same story. I like the relentlessness of that simplicity. And I like the searing spectacle of such modern elaborations as this. And I particularly light the sight of The Town of Boston, in which the director feels fully at home and alive.

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Posted in ACTION, bank robbers, Ben Affleck, CRIME, Directed by Ben Affleck, MATING, THRILLER

 

Possession

24 Oct

Possession –– directed by Simon Sandquist, Joel Bergvall –– a psychological thriller in which a young woman believes her ne’er do-well brother in law is her husband. 86 minutes color 2008

* * *

Lee Pace, in the Extras, remarks that Possession is the story of two people who are addicted to love and will not let it go. What a fabulous idea! She is addicted to love of her husband. And he, Lee Pace, her brother-in-law, is addicted to love of her. It’s just this sort of acting promise that lures a talent of the order of intelligence of Pace to accept the lead in a picture. But that’s not the movie we have here at all. We have it instead only in the deleted scenes, all of which, if included, might have added up to a compelling film. But they have been cut, haven’t they, so what do we have left? –– the dregs –– a film based on the cheap suspense of If And When the sociopath brother-in-law will show his true colors and the young woman wake up. I don’t know if it would have worked if it had been left uncut. The fact is, part from the theme, the script is lousy, meager, unhuman, and its story paltry. Interesting movies can result from poor scripts, but they depend always on actors of tremendous presence or talent to lure us to attend to them. The young woman is no such actress. Her face is petulant and unvarying and uninteresting. Human facial expression is the pallet of acting-narrative for a director, and this young lady does not have the quality of an actor who will carry such a film nor does she have the talent. (Maggie Gyllenhall, where are you when we need you?) Everyone else in the film is of the same ordinary order . They’ve learned acting not from watching life or themselves but from watching TV. Except for Lee Pace. If you want to see a great actor operate in full force, see Possession. He captures the volatility, the temper, the sexual allure of the rotter brother-in-law, and also the sweetness and lyrical heart of the brother he becomes possessed by. Possession would be one of Lee Pace’s many offerings that remain on the periphery because of a failure of the producers, script-writers, directors. Can this great actor become a star? He should be playing Hamlet somewhere right now. He needs a great role.

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Posted in DRAMA, Lee Pace: Screen God: Acting God, MATING, MYSTERY, Psychological Thriller

 

Peeping Tom

24 Oct

Peeping Tom –– directed by Michael Powell –– macabre drama about a photographer who kills with his camera. 101 minutes color 1960

* * *

Not as bad as it was said to be at the time of its release, and not as good as it was in later years claimed to be. Its interest does not lie with Powell’s famous sense of color, which is really simply bad taste in Technicolor. Nor does it consist of our interest in this film as a noir, for it cannot be a noir, since it is in color and since it was made 10 years after 1950 when the era of noir ceased. No, a picture of this kind must depend upon our interest in the personalities of the principals, and here they are not sufficient to the task of holding it. Carl Boehm is the leading actor, good looking, blond, and very German, which indeed he was; he was the son of a famous conductor. But why is a German called upon to play a role perfectly suited to Dirk Bogarde? Anna Massey his opposite in the film is the daughter of Raymond Massey, and she resembles him when in profile. She also has the habit as did he of an over-articulating mouth, which she cannot help, but she also delivers her lines from the same inner place her father did, which is that of well-projected unbroken recitation. This wrecks vulnerability. She is costumed oddly, also, for one cannot understand how she can afford such smart clothes when her circumstances are shabby genteel. The direction of this material is skewed throughout, particularly in the film studio scenes, which are handled with contempt as burlesque rather than as serious attempts to make a commercial film. Powell hated the studio system at Pinewood and this hatred sabotages these scenes and displaces the drama going on in them. Worst of all, the film is mis-titled. It has nothing to do with a peeping tom. It has nothing to do with voyeurism, so, if the slimy title did not disgust the reviewers of that time, it certainly must have disappointed them. It is simply a picture about a peculiar maniac. The commentary which accompanies it is numbingly dumb. It reads into the picture symbols where there are really only cymbals. Let us preserve a disrespectful silence then and say no more.

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Posted in Backstage Drama, Directed by Michael Powell, DRAMA, Macbre, MATING, MURDER, Psychological Thriller

 

RED

23 Oct

RED –– directed by Robert Schwentke–– an action spy comedy adventure in which a bouquet of experienced old-time CIA assassins come out of retirement when a past score starts to be settled against them. Color 2010

* * * * *

Ernest Borgnine at 94 is in fine form here as the keeper of the very most secret of all the files in the world. And our acting staff is all over 50, or is it 60? ––  and, like him, at the top of their game. Bruce Willis, always an excellent actor in the right roll, is particularly droll in registering the humor of the situation. Morgan Freeman plays the old reliable, and Helen Mirren and Brian Cox play former lovers rekindling their oomph amid the flames and firestorms of the genre. What makes the piece worth seeing is its unfolding until those firestorms start, at which time the wit stops, for it is impossible to be quite jolly and lighthearted while the Uzis fire. Or whatever that weaponry is. And besides the story then departs the arena of the possible and dashes into the arena of the improbable, and from that quickly seethes into the arena of the impossible, when Richard Dryfuss enters the picture and introduces the Vice-President of the United States as the man behind the man behind the man behind the woman, whom Rebecca Pidgeon plays with her usually chilling affect. It’s more than the comedy will bear. For the film is one step away in its fine early stages from an Abbott and Costello film, with Freeman, Willis, and Mirren all playing Costello and John Malkovich playing Abbott, the only serious lunatic in the bunch. Mary-Louse Parker is particular responsive and funny in the Dorothy Lamour role –– or is that from another series entirely? Oh, yes. But what then? She could have been in an Abbott and Costello film, couldn’t she? The piece is well written in its early stages of the preposterous, by which I mean in terms of narrative and dialogue and editing, and very well told by the director. It is when it devolves into the preposterously preposterous that expectations drop. But, never mind. Just expect them to.

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10 Comments

Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, Bruce Willis, Farce, Helen Mirren: acting goddess, John Malkovich, Light Comedy, MATING, Morgan Freeman, MURDER, Richard Dreyfuss, SPY STORY, THRILLER

 
 
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