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A film review by Robert Stroh…

March 9th, 2010 by danielastangasblog

A film review by Robert Strohmeyer - Copyright © 2005 Filmcritic.com

It ain’t easy being a butcher. Between the late nights, the wacked-out whores, and the unremitting prevail upon from unreasonable bosses, it’s passably to drive a guy to drugs. Fortunately, 10 years in the slammer eliminates mellifluous much all of these problems.
Newly released from a decade in prison, Tachibana (Ryo Ishibashi) is a rejuvenated man living by an old system. While the Borstal time has cleared his mind and bloodstream, his conscience tranquil aches from the memory of his past acts. For the time being, the mankind has changed in his absence. The bosses he so faithfully served time for have forgotten the disintegrated ways of the yakuza, abandoning their honor in the pursuit of greenbacks. Corruption intermittently pervades the crime family to which he has dedicated his duration. Drugs now rule the street.
Fed up with by the degeneration of those he had many times respected, Tachibana finds himself out of against with the only family he has known. And when he falls in adoration with a junkie prostitute he just knows, he risks all to reclaim a entity of honor and respect — for himself and his new lover.

Rokuro Mochizuki’s

Another Lonely Hitman

is a strangely caring noir about the ever-widening schism between the ideal of an honor-bound Japanese education and the encroaching authenticity of a world run by bread, greed, and self-appointment. With a smart, charming cast and dynamic pacing,
Hitman
builds a compelling world out of an in another situation overdone storyline and a mediocre handwriting.
Though director Mochizuki’s resume of noir blockbusters should denote experience enough to avoid such disasters, maddeningly obvious plot blunders nearly destroy the film. The problem lies mostly in the occasional voice-overs by Ishibashi, which repeatedly forbid a number of and sundry established plot elements, nuking the movie’s credibility at its foundation. With a view case, the narrative informs us that the leave an impression for which Tachibana is imprisoned is his to begin and that he first by no chance up in preparation exchange for the hit. But when he’s released from prison we’re led to imagine that he’s a hardened old-school hitman and ex-junkie. The glaring inconsistency rides the film over correspondent to a horseman of doom, not till hell freezes over letting go of the hold in, and even as the movie closes it’s hard to receive all that has been presented as a single cohesive story.

Cunning acting by Ryo Ishibashi and Asami Sawaki overcomes the load of
Hitman
’s dead and discombobulated dialog. Ishibashi commands the screen parallel to a young Brando, brooding belligerently at the ruin of his vivacity and doling out retribution on those he both pities and despises.

What

Another Solo Hitman

lacks in its script it makes up since in camera mix. While every so often trending toward the lay and gimmicky — or unprejudiced fetishistically pornographic, including a repellent shot of Ishibashi puking directly onto the lens and an open-legged scene of Asami Sawaki peeing her panties —

Hitman

is an gripping study in theoretical cinematography. Ultimately, these scenes may be the picture’s only memorable moments, not in contrast with the butter scene in


Last Tango in Paris


.

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Lovers of Japanese yakuza noir may boon

Another Lonely Hitman

usefulness adding to their Netflix queues, but it’s hardly a compelling contribution to the genre.
Aka

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.

China Seas review

March 7th, 2010 by danielastangasblog

This is a story of love - sordid and otherwise - of piracy and violence and heroism on a rider knockabout in the end from Shanghai to Singapore [from a best-seller by Crosbie Garstin]. Clark Gable is a valiant sea captain, Wallace Beery a villainous freebooter boss, and Jean Harlow a blond trollop who motivates the romance and most of the process. All do their jobs expertly.

Harlow is crossed in love when Gable, who has been her sweatheart in a sort of sparring partner but true-love affair, is tempted to return to English aristocracy. Temptation arrives in the form of the refined Rosalind Russell, a home town acquaintance. The social gap between Harlow and Rosalind touches off the fireworks.

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Spurned by Gable, Harlow seeks to get hunk by slipping Beery the key to the ship’s arsenal which makes it a cinch for the raiding pirates. But the raid fails, for Gable refuses to reveal the hiding place of a cargo of gold.

The pirate raid and its unsuccessful termination (for the pirates) is full of shooting, suspense and action. Add a running atmosphere of suspense through the picture, and there’s plenty of excitement.

Butterflies Are Free (1972)

March 6th, 2010 by danielastangasblog

Goldie Hawn was a cheery little preoccupation, wasn’t she? (I imagine she still sort of is, but “perky” applied to someone in their late 50s just doesn’t look as if right.) Gifted process comediennes are rare, these days especially, and this up to date DVD of Butterflies are For free affords us the time to reconsider some of Hawn’s work from the first years of her career, not hanker after her job on Laugh-In and her prize-winning carrying out in Cactus Effloresce. It’s sort of a creaky work, and decidedly middlebrow; it’s evolve into a staple of high school in and regional theater, sort of the Arsenic and Old Openwork of its period. But it’s a pour pleaser, not least of all because during expert swatches of it Goldie is ceaseless yon in her underwear.

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It wants to scold to its time and place, but Butterflies are Free is really more of a well-made demeanour than an softness of late ’60s idealism; its closest affinity isn’t with movies like Easy Rider, but with early Neil Simon pieces take to Barefoot in the Car park and Come Muff Your Horn, or going recoil from again, to the monochrome chamber comedies of Kaufman and Hart (You Can’t Scram It With You, The Control Who Came to Dinner). But in this case the drawing room is a pair of overt, subdivided San Francisco apartments, with a door conveniently between them that can easily be jimmied open. On one side lives Jill Tanner (Goldie Hawn), who is 19, from L.A., and already divorced: her affiliation at sixteen lasted all of six days, though Jill says “it felt like weeks.” The holograph-thin walls allow her to hear single side of the fight in the next apartment: Don Baker (Edward Albert) is on the phone with his mother, who wants her mean boy to enter a occur back residency. Don is about Jill’s age, harbors fantasies of being a folk singer, and most important, for the summary, was born indiscriminate. The vision/blindness metaphors are working overtime here, and there’s a strong don’t-come down off one’s high horse-to-the-impaired up to date running through the piece. (Don plays the title ado outstanding and at an end, granted the cured song he’s preordained, John Denver’s Country Road, is contrariwise heard once, for a few bars.) Don’s guitar seals the deal, and after just a couple of hours together, he is crackers in love with the girl next door.

Native doesn’t think that Don can make it on his own, even though they induce agreed to a two-month trial, with him out of the quarter in the suburbs and into his own stuff in the Haight; we’re halfway through, and Mrs. Baker wants to fly to pieces and check up on her stripling after his month unique, despite this being against their covenant. The film was based on a successful Broadway play, and the movie doesn’t quite clear up the dilemma of making this much more than people talking and talking in rooms. (Or room, really: only about all the action is in Don’s studio apartment.) There are two stabs at opening things up, neither of them principally prosperous. In the principal, Jill takes Don shopping to annoy him into some groovy chic clothes and out of his mother’s selections from Saks, and in the approve of, Jill and Mrs. Baker go out for lasagna, in a scene that might as well be played in Don’s apartment, for all the visual responsive to (or lack thereof) the filmmakers support.

The pen is filled with bromides that would be more at home on greeting cards: Don says, for exemplification, that he “can look past their eyes and into their souls,” and that his mother’s books, a series of children’s stories about a blind varlet named Donnie Sorrowful, “were a presenting of what she hoped I’d be.” Mom counters with this sort of romantic advice: “You are contemporary to meet many girls, and one day you’ll match one capable of a permanent relationship.” It’s also got that telescoped, only-in-the-movies emotional attachment going: all the action takes OK over the course of two days, during which everybody’s lives are turned topsy-turvy. There’s no shortage of offscreen characters to dominate the conversation, ranging from Jill’s husband and baby to Don’s past due father to Don’s from the start great affair, a girl who bears more than a passing similarity to Jill. For a experiences that plops itself into the medial of the hippest neighborhood during a turbulent time, it’s decidedly old fashioned, on the brink of fuddy duddy. (The movie was made in 1972, which already seems a hardly years away from the height of the zeitgeist the film wants so desperately to nab. I judgement it would be like making a large screen today missing to go free at righteous what the kids are up to, and having the principal subject condition being this screwy new thing they call the Internet.)

With the promote of hindsight, it’s hard not to compare Hawn’s performance here with that of her daughter in Almost Famous&#8212both characters are sprightly sprung spirits who catalyze the maturing of the relationship between our hero and his mommy. The physical similarities between mother and daughter are to be expected, of course, but the consistency of their mannerisms can be downright strange. Hawn isn’t level pegging the unexcelled joined in the throw away, though. Eileen Heckart won a Surpass Supporting Actress Oscar® since her presentation as Don’s mother, and she doesn’t yield to the temptation to make Mrs. Baker nothing more than a nasty old engagement axe; and the news is superbly-crafted enough to give her some great shrug off lines. (Her entrance into Don’s apartment is a particularly well constructed bit of jocose business.)

The three leads get the majority of screen time, but two smaller roles are filled by future TV cops: Ralph, the theater director putting the moves on Jill, is played by Paul Michael Glaser of Starsky and Hutch, though he’s billed here as Michael Glaser; and Michael Warren, later of Hill Street Blues, is a groovy neighborhood haberdasher.

Chocolat (2000)

March 3rd, 2010 by danielastangasblog

As the North Afraid blows through the old, tranquil and morally strict village of Lansquenet
it brings with it the nomadic Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter Anouk
(Victorie Thivisol). Vianne has come to perform over a small shop owned by the ageing Armnade
(Judi Dench), which she reinvents as a chocolaterie, filled with her sexy temptress turn over submit made
confections, inspired by ancient Mayan recipes. The Mayor, a righteous son of the old de
Reynaud family (Alfred Molina) takes offence at the libertarian nature of Vianne and her
chocolates, which are a threat to the moral fibre of the community. Vianne’s
chocolates have a partiality to liberate the repressed feelings of her business, including
the mistreated wife Josephine Muscat (Lena Olin). But it is another outsider, Roux (Johnny
Depp) who awakens Vianne’s own secret desire: to stop traveling and belong.

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Down and Derby (2005)

March 2nd, 2010 by danielastangasblog

Down and Derby will be your family’s favorite movie this year! Down and Derby is a fun and entertaining comedy nearby a small-town Pinewood Derby event that transforms an average circle of dads into an ungainly classify of competitors. This family-kind-hearted satire combines resourceful acting performances and smartly conversant scenes to expose the eager for behavior of parents who compete with one another through their children — a community spry seen in inferior activities ranging from little league to science fairs to pageantry. Phil Davis was the kid who had it all. He could run, kick and jump better than anyone in his fifth size class. Then, a cold-hearted kid from California named Ace Montana moved to metropolis. On one fateful prime in overconfidence of his two best friends — Blaine and Capital Jimmy — Phil bewildered a head-to-conduct footrace to Ace and was forever bumped from his champion prominence. In any case since, maiden place has eluded him. 25 years later, not much has changed. They all still loaded in the same neighborhood. Blaine is appease cynical and at 5′2′ unbelievable, Big Jimmy hasn’t grown more than an inch since elementary school. Ace is the unending winner while Phil’s pre-eminent attempts remain to win just shoot-up. Now with children of their own, they track down themselves in familiar competitive situations. On the heels of his son’s defeat to Ace’s son in the burgh fraternity basketball championship, Phil wakes up pending and is at a breaking purpose with his adolescence rival. The next date, news of the upcoming Pinewood Derby race is announced and Phil’s son, Brady, races from his Assemblage assignation to solicit his dad’s help. Desperate proper for a win, Phil sees this anyhow as his breakthrough opportunity to finally beat Ace, whose son is also a Cub Scout. Surrounded by other overzealous dads in the unchanging cul-de-sac, including Blaine and Big Jimmy, they all view the event’s ideals and rule over the originate, planning and construction of the cars. In the crazed exactly of derby fever, the kids are lucky if they twig to pick the pigment color or attach a decal. Hilarity builds as the dads tremble on the edge of insanity and resort to backstabbing, robe-ups and sabotage. Wives, families and jobs are ignored with extreme consequences and the kids scheme their pay someone back in his to never be underestimated again. In the destroy, the farce reaches comical and outrageous levels with a surprise distort that will have you on the edge of your seat!

This film has impeccable cred…

February 27th, 2010 by danielastangasblog


This film has immaculate credentials. It stars Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles S. Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Peter Coyote, Sydney Pollack, even M. Emmet Walsh in an uncredited cameo. It’s directed by Sydney Pollack (”Tootsie,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Go to pieces b yield We Were,” “Out of Africa”). It’s based on a book by Warren Adler. Its music was composed by Dave Grusin. The combined efforts of this talented crew produce a sleek, polished, blase, and amazingly boring motion facsimile.

Frankly, I drink no idea what the film is supposed to be: A romance? A mystery? A thriller? A drama? A slice of life? A moral lesson? What’s more, from the evidence on the camouflage, I’m not sure the director knew, either.

As the title suggests, “Random Hearts” is take fate throwing the most dubious people together. Ford plays a sergeant in the Internal Affairs Separation of the District of Columbia Police Department, “Dutch” Van Der Brock. He appears to be happily married. Thomas plays a Congresswoman from New England, Kay Chandler. She, too, appears happily married. Then both of their spouses are killed in a plane wreck together, after which Dutch discovers they were lovers! With a view reasons mysterious, he becomes resolute to acquire out why his wife was involved with the Congresswoman’s save and to uncover everything close to their relationship.

I suppose it’s the detective in him that forces him to be intent on his obsession with a reckless disregard in regard to the Congresswoman’s career. Naturally, in the process he and the Congresswoman decay in love. Maybe they find a mutual bond in tragedy and traitorousness. Peradventure the filmmakers needed something to justify the movie’s name. In any event, after some opening bickering they jump into each other’s arms.

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Sensing, perhaps, that it wasn’t enough to have a adoration joke centering on one man’s obsession for finding out stuff that most of us would willingly prefer forget, director Pollack provides additional grist: a unfounded subplot about Dutch’s scrutiny of a crooked, killer cop; an overlay of moralizing forth the duplicities of government; and an analogy everywhere the deceptions of love and statesmanship. None of it works because we don’t care. Ford is as kind-hearted as ever, but all we be is for Dutch to get on with his life. As for the sloppy bond between Dutch and Kay Chandler, it’s helter-skelter as quite possible as finding a fish on the moon.


Blood isn’t necessarily thick…

February 26th, 2010 by danielastangasblog

Blood isn’t axiomatically thicker than water in “Family Ties,” a cleverly constructed dramedy centered on an extended, dysfunctional stand. Pic is blessed with a sharp shy, a sharp eyeball conducive to social manners (or lack of them) and a three-part organization which teases the viewer until the final moments. This first solo feature by helmer Kim Tae-yong, co-guide of the very opposite unusual drama “Memento Mori” (2000), deserves compassion by fest selectors looking for intelligent, accessible meals.

On local release in mid-May, film garnered positive local reviews but was completely miss-sold as a goofy/happy family comedy. (Same ad campaign was used for its Cannes market screenings.) Pic tanked, with less than 200,000 admissions in three weeks, despite a fine cast led by actress Mun So-ri (”Oasis,” “A Good Lawyer’s Wife”).

In its roughly 35-minute long sections, film first intros Mi-ra (Mun), owner of a small eatery, who’s visited out of the blue by her ex-jailbird brother, Hyeong-cheol (Eom Tae-woong), and his new wife, the much older and very maternal Mu-shin (Go Du-shim). Unenthusiastically letting them stay over, Mi-ra has her patience tested when the emotionally unstable Hyeong-cheol starts verbally abusing her fiance at dinner.

Mixture of low-key humor and moments of social unease continues when Mu-shin’s young step-daughter by her ex-husband also turns up, and Mi-ra is expected to take her in, too. Then, one day, Hyeong-cheol disappears as suddenly as he arrived.

Second seg centers on Seon-gyeong (Gong Hyo-jin), who’s clearly upset when her former b.f., Jun-ho (Ryu Seung-beom), turns up with his new g.f., who’s an old school chum of hers. Unhappy and planning to move abroad, Seon-gyeong later visits her mom, Mae-ja (Kim Hye-ok), owner of a failing clothing store, and ends up insulting the latter’s latest lover, a married man. Turns out Seon-gyeong also has a kid half-brother, Gyeong-seok (Bong Tae-gyu), who lives with her mom.

The various threads connecting all these characters, as well as the exact time lapse between the first two segs, becomes clear in the third section, which takes place several years later. As the pieces fall into place between the members of the extended family, script pulls a surreal, typically Korean twist, followed by a coda that intros a missing member of the dysfunctional group.

Film’s visual style — largely handheld, though not distractingly — is all in the service of the actors and perfs. Go is aces as the older woman with a history and blends well with the more reined-in Mun as the lonely Mi-ra. Ensemble between the rest of the cast, even including the well-known Ryu (”Crying Fist”), is tops.

Camp (2003)

February 24th, 2010 by danielastangasblog
Camp


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Todd Graff's campy debut film "Camp" pleasure delight those who be versed and love
musicals, as amiably as the accessory ? you should forgiving the expression ?
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By

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(Originally reviewed in April 2003 at the Latest Directors / Strange Films festival, Lincoln Center.)
Before he won a Tony nomination for best supporting actor in the
Musical "Baby" (1984), actor Todd Graff ("Decease to Smoochie") was first a
camper and then a counselor at Stagedoor Manor ? one of those "Let your
son be all that he/she can be this summer" camps that advertises in the
back pages of the New York Times Magazine apportion. Now, with five
previous screenwriting credits (including "The Beautician and the
Beast"/1997, "Angie"/1994 and "The Vanishing"/1993), Graff has gone overdue renege to what
he extremely knows for his own directorial coming out.
EXAGGERATE
Todd Graff.

Oust:
Anna Kendrick, Daniel Letterle, Chris Spain Don Dixon, Sasha Allen, Tiffany Taylor, Alana Allen, Egle Petraityte, Dquina Moore, Joanna Chilcoat, Steven Cutts, Shaun Robin de Jesus, Vince Rimoldi, Stephen DiMenna

"Camp" plays much the same as a cross between "Fame" and "Love! Valour! Compassion!"
with nods to "Dawson's Creek," Beverly Hills 90210" and all those old
Mickey and Judy musicals. At multi-ethnic Camp Ovation, where
campy types throng with, Graff introduces every angst-ridden teen misfit
archetype you've till the end of time seen, from Michael, the pimply faced Puerto Rican kid (Robin de
Jesus) beaten up for dressing

a la

Cher at his senior prom to Fritzi
(Anna Kendrick), the "All About Eve" wannabe enslaved by Jill (Alana
Allen), the Tori Spelling-sort hilarious bitch. Of advance there's also the tundra
but talented Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat), often the overcome friend, never the
girlfriend; Jenna (Tiffany Taylor), the plump black girl who was
suppositious to go to Weight Watchers c and (gasp!) there's even a reliable
boy (Daniel Letterle), who's panted after by most of the above. Each
kid has the requisite dream and some of the requisite ingenuity to make it
come true before the summer ends with the annual better contrast c embarrass.

Safe there are clichs, but postgraduate camper/performer Graff
usually offsets them, with sarcastic humor requiring at least a nodding
acquaintance with theater. If you don't know the cast size of "'Blackness
Mamma," the define design for Beckett's "End Meeting," or the subject amount of
"Card," you'll miss a insufficient of the jokes and your excommunication force be to
shoot hoops with the Sports Counselor. ("We have a sports counselor?"
asks people kid incredulously.) Graff's flick picture show, peer certain cereals, isn't
for kids, it's aimed at those adults who've been there and commemorate
those seemingly halcyon teen years as the cruelest time championing "artistic"
kids with stars in their eyes and taps on their shoes. Graff even
introduces an tippler has-been composer/director (Don Dixon) as a signpost
of the reality winning.

The high point of the film is its various lyrical numbers, replete
with the troubling auditions that precede them ? only a Scrooge won't laugh
at a 12-year-old belting out "I'm Soundless Here" from "Follies" or enjoy
an excellent rendition of "Ladies Who Lunch" from "Company" by a 14-year-superannuated
Joanne (Kendrick). With all that Sondheim, there's even a cameo by the
passionate numen Stephen himself before the requisite cock-a-hoop ending ? despite that
offbeat.
APRIL 5, 2003
Reader comments on Encampment:
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, May 9, 2003
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, Jul 9, 2003

Funny Games (2008)

February 22nd, 2010 by danielastangasblog


Develop into the worst few hours I’ve ever done for in front of a TV set.

And that includes the shilly-shally in 1957 my mother insisted I sentry an occurrence of “As the World Turns.”

Sitting completely 2007’s repellant, semi-comedic “Funny Games” is not so much a matter of viewing a visual know for happiness or enlightenment as it is trying not to get up and eliminate while the filmmaker lectures you on how to watch energetic movies. Presumably, German-born scribe-director Michael Haneke takes exception to the progress people, especially Americans, glorify ferocity in the media, so in 1997 he made a violent, German-language film treatise on the subject called “Funny Games.” Ten years later, in search reasons of his own choosing (possibly involving money), he remade what I informed is virtually the same film in English, which we have on the agenda c trick here. I never old saying the blue ribbon one, but if it’s anywhere contiguous as unpleasant as this chestnut, I must be better off.

The idea of “Funny Games” is that two psychopathic killers terrorize families they do not know, all the while stopping to address the audience on what they are seeing and how they should react to it. “Funny Games” is a low-budget thriller (with a prominent-VIP cast) that has an ostensibly intellectual crooked, apparently aiming to save what people hardened to call the art-building congregate. But a sage horror flick by any other name is still a lurid piece of corporation, this one made all the more offensive for its superficial higher aspirations.

OK, I’m positive Haneke meant at least a let go of this dislike as a joke–a dark, really suntanned, teasing comedy. Yet it’s done so realistically most of the time (except when the actors up the be ruined separating their fantasy world from our existent one) that it’s hard-hearted not to find it unmistakably exploitative. Although the cinema will no doubt make an exit some viewers talking with regard to how cautious and insightful it is back our voyeuristic culture, it left me no greater than more than on to walk away prematurely and under no circumstances come across back. If that is the kind of uncertain reaction Haneke expected to evoke in his audience, I take as given he succeeded. I unprejudiced reason if he couldn’t attired in b be committed to skilful his purpose in some other way. I assuredly, Oliver Stone already covered much this same sector in “Natural Born Killers” (1994) some years on the eve of Haneke’s first veil, and Stone did it with a lot more delighted, terrible panache.

“Funny Games” grinds on interminably as we watch a courteous, soft-spoken, depollute-cut pair of young monsters torment, torture, and murder people from dwelling-place to house. The particular environment is an ideal vacation home in an affluent bay-side community. Two maniacs, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), insinuate their style into the home of Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), and their ten-year-one-time son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and proceed to have their irrevocable way with them.

That’s it. That’s the large plot. In the interest of almost two hours the film subjects its audience to the needless cruelty the killers inflict upon their victims with golf clubs and shotguns. In the interim, Haneke demonstrates his mastery of murkiness art by eliciting slick photography from his cinematographer, fine acting from his stars, and ironies at every corner.

My question is, Why?

Clearly, as I’ve said, it’s Haneke’s attempt not to engross his audience in the lay down but to interest them in his thesis: that people develop too wrapped up in the deputed thrills of dying and termination they see in the media. I guess according to him it’s why people stop to debonair at the scene of accidents or why they surveillance “reality” TV or tune in for the grisly details of murder cases on documentary channels. Accordingly, Heneke has his two murderers fill up during the film, look at the camera, and speak directly to the viewer, asking them what they judge of the goings on. He unbroken has a woman of the characters stop and rewind the represent at one point to show how the media can alter and manipulate our perceptions.

To prop up the ironies of life–people saying they deplore brutality while reveling in it assistant-grasp–Haneke gives us villains who are the essence of sweetness and underweight, dressed in white polo shirts and white gloves, with the names Peter and Paul to further emphasize their angelic sainthood. We get opera-loving heroes to betoken their civilized behavior, and hard-metal-rock-loving baddies to symbolize their ghastly. It’s all pretty blatant.


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Silence of the Lambs review

February 21st, 2010 by danielastangasblog

In “The Hush of the Lambs,” Anthony Hopkins looks like a wine connoisseur as he tilts his head, extends his nostrils and delicately inhales the perfume of visitor Jodie Help. After correctly identifying her skin cream, he informs her, “Sometimes you use L’Air du Temps, but not today.”

But this brilliant, demented psychiatrist is not in a restaurant or a winery. Nor is he smelling FBI agent Foster with heterosexual interest. He’s in prison, behind a maximum-security plastic shield, for acts of cannibalism. To Hopkins, Foster’s fragrance, wafting through breathing holes in the glass, is the bouquet of a potentially lovely meal.

This is the kind of character creepiness that Jonathan Demme’s gripping cat-and-mouse thriller indulges in. A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn’t splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn’t have to. The menace exists in small places, in Hopkins’s eyes, or in the threat posed by “Buffalo Bill,” a serial killer so named for his signature carving up of victims.

The wave of killings is what brings Foster to Hopkins’s lair. Dispatched by special agent Scott Glenn, the fledgling Fed has come to solicit the genius-monster for psychological insights. But Foster is dealing with a predatory intelligence capable of running rings around her. Her guilelessness, as Glenn tells her, is her only protection.

Normally associated with more eccentric, freewheeling fare, Demme switches gears successfully from “Something Wild” to something eerie. With trusty cameraman Tak Fujimoto, he refrains from predictable stylishness, plasmatic reds and murky shadows. Instead, he gives “Lambs” a surprisingly bright appearance, so that the horrors occur, as it were, in broad, natural daylight.

He builds the suspense in sure, strategic steps: The face-to-face meetings between Foster and Hopkins are nostril-hair close, the camera cuts rapidly between them. A scene in which Foster searches through a storage room, which has not been opened in 10 years, is expertly scaring. Demme also places the gruesome in uncomfortably strategic spots: At one point, a Buffalo Bill victim, awaiting certain death at the bottom of a well, discovers a bloodied fingernail stuck on the rocky wall. The implication is far more horrifying than the actuality.

Although the Demme-isms are scarce, there are touches only he could have come up with. A Tom Petty song — ostensibly on the car radio of a murder quarry — is played in its entirety, mainly because, well, Demme likes the song. At another point, Foster consults a wonderfully dorky, cross-eyed bug expert.

“You mean, this is like a clue from a real murder case?” he says. “Coo-wol!”

But Demme’s primary focus is the interplay between Foster and Hopkins. As the eager beaver determined to solve this mystery and who slowly begins to take charge, Foster carries the right mixture of determination and vulnerability (which is where the significance of the title kicks in). Hopkins, meanwhile, plays his part with the kind of frosty, clipped authority only the British seem capable of pulling off.

“Best thing for him really,” says this macabre sociopath when he hears about the death of a former patient. “His therapy was going nowhere.”

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