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Batman (1989)

March 12th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog

All-inclusive

Recommendability
C

Artistic/

Pageant Value

Moral/Spiritual

Value (+4/-4)
-2

Age

Appropriateness
Teens & Up

External Ratings

MPAA
?

PG-13
USCCB
?

A-III

Content advisory: Some profane, crude, and suggestive language; an implied sexual encounter; some gruesome images and much stylized violence.

By Steven D. Greydanus

Tim Burton’s generally well-regarded 1989

Batman

, starring Jack Nicholson as the Joker and Michael Keaton as Batman (in that order), set the stage for a franchise that ran four films, with three Batmans and two directors, before collapsing under its own weight. Unquestionably, the series degenerated with each installment before arriving at the abomination that is Joel Schumacher’s

Batman and Robin

— yet the seeds of its demise were sown in the very first film.

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Critics adored

Batman

for its eccentric, Burtonesque take on a pop-culture icon, for its moody, noirish gothic art-deco Gotham City, and of course for Nicholson’s showy performance. Comic-book fans, meanwhile, appreciated the film for rescuing the Dark Knight from the over-the-top camp comedy of the 1960s series and making him suitably dark and brooding.

For all that, though, the film’s flaws are hard to have as a vista. The story is a difficulty. To start with, the love affair of Bruce Wayne (Keaton) and Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) has no substance or emotional resonance. Bruce and faithful butler Alfred (Michael Gough) are constantly reminding at one another how “special” Vicki reputedly is, in spite of she’s done little to show it, unless you count sleeping with Bruce after their awkward earliest go steady with. (Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s romance in the original

Spider-Man

is also sand bar, but at least MJ is appealing and Peter is credibly smitten. Bruce and Vicki make no chemistry as well as no relationship.)

Scenes and lines of dialogue make no sense. Take the bit where Bruce Wayne, protected only by a small metal tray under his shirt, gets jiggy with the gun-wielding Joker when the latter bursts in on Vicki’s apartment. Forget the absurdity of relying on a book-sized tray as a bulletproof vest — what’s the point of Bruce’s actions? What’s he trying to accomplish?

What’s the point of the Joker’s “Who do you trust?” PR campaign against Batman, as if the two of them were running for mayor? This theme makes sense when it recurs in the Burton-directed sequel,

Batman Returns

, where the Penguin (Danny DeVito) really is running for mayor, but in the original it feels like a private issue of Burton’s that’s been imposed on the story for no reason. (That the Joker is crazy is not a sufficient explanation. As depicted in this film, the Joker is an “artist”; he may be bizarre and sociopathic, but his actions are never simply irrational or pointless.)

Then there are sloppy little things. When Bruce asks Vicki on their first date whether she had “any trouble finding the place,” it’s meant to be funny because Wayne Manor is presumably a major Gotham landmark — but the movie seems to have forgotten that Vicki was

just at his place

for the big cocktail party. Then there’s the bit in the newsroom with Vicki and reporter Knox (Robert Wuhl) musing about who Bruce Wayne really is, how there’s “nothing in his file… no photos, no history, nothing.” Hello? Nothing on Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy? That’s like saying they have nothing on Donald Trump or Paris Hilton.

Then there’s the depiction of Batman himself, starting with the casting of Keaton, seldom anyone’s mental image of an exertion luminary. Years later, when the director was tersely attached to the long-delayed

Superman

movie jut out now in development by Bryan Songbird (

X-Men

,


X2


), Burton made an even odder casting call, tapping Nicolas Cage as the Inhibit of Dirk. Such idiosyncratic choices seem to bespeak not just creative quirkiness, but a deliberately subversionary sensibility regarding these crack-culture icons of fair and square-jawed, broad-shouldered heroism. In a word, Burton seems to get a rebound out of undermining the traditional hero archetype.

An even bigger problem, perhaps, is that Keaton makes hardly any impression in the role, in or out of the mask. Keaton lets his arched eyebrows act for him, and while it may be said that they give a great performance, there’s only so much an eyebrow can do.

As Bruce Wayne, rather than coming off either intense and driven or charming and frivolous, Keaton seems merely distracted, socially stiff and awkward. As Batman, he seems — no, he

is

stiff and awkward, literally — less a lithe super hero than a toy action figure with a limited range of motion. When Batman clobbers bad guys in one swift move, it’s not because he’s just that bad, it’s because he can’t do two moves. The effect is never more ridiculous than when he has to look around; since he can’t turn his neck, he’s left swiveling his whole body, or leaning back to look up. Yeah,

that’s

going to strike fear into the hearts of criminals everywhere.

Who is Batman, anyway? In the opening sequence, we see a couple with a young boy wandering lost in Gotham’s mean streets, stumbling at last into a dangerous alley where a couple of thugs rob them at gunpoint. The resonances between this incident and the seminal event in young Bruce Wayne’s life, emphasized later in the film by a flashback to the murder of Dr. and Mrs. Wayne, are too striking to be ignored. Yet when Batman shows up, what does he do? Kicks one of the thugs through a door and menaces the other one a bit, telling him to warn his criminal friends about their new enemy. Does he recover the stolen property and return it to its owners? Does he see to their safety in any way? Is this helpless family any better off than the Waynes were when there was no Batman looking over Gotham? If the movie doesn’t care, why should we?

Still more troubling is this Dark Knight’s willingness to kill, as when Batman sends the Batmobile into the factory manufacturing the Joker’s killer cosmetics line to firebomb the place, giving the thugs inside no opportunity to escape. In the climax, Batman tries to kill the Joker, then finally does kill him.

Finally, there’s Nicholson’s celebrated performance as the Joker. Critics of the film have observed archly that it ought to have been called

Joker

rather than

Batman

; and certainly Nicholson, also giving a great eyebrow performance while otherwise doing what he can with his cheeks wired back in a perpetual grimace, blows Keaton off the screen.

But even Nicholson’s performance doesn’t really work, at least not until the final act. It’s a fine Jack Nicholson performance, commanding and dangerous, but even granting the legitimacy of different takes on a fictional character, for the most part Nicholson doesn’t seem to understand the Joker any more than Keaton understands Batman.

The Joker, whoever he may be, isn’t surly and quietly menacing like this fellow. He’s more manic and wild-eyed, and while (depending on the depiction) he may or may not be actually be funny, certainly

he

thinks everything is a riot, whereas Nicholson’s Joker doesn’t really seem to have much of a funnybone. Only in the climax, in a cathedral belfry showdown reminiscent of the climax of


Metropolis


, does Nicholson seem finally to grow into the character — just in time for him to be killed off.

It’s not a complete waste of time. Burton does pull off some striking images, such as the closeups of Batman donning his battle gear, and the closing shot of Batman silhouetted against the Gotham skyline with the Bat-signal in the distance. And Gotham itself, all seamy, steamy alleys and decrepit concrete canyons, is a triumph of art direction. But when the Joker shoots down the Batplane with an unimpressive-looking handgun with a telescoping barrel, or when some anonymous thug kicks Batman around for several minutes in the cathedral climax, it’s hard not to be frustrated with the film.


Batman

’s best conceit is the notion that the Joker, the arch-enemy that Batman helped to create, also happens to be the thug who murdered Bruce’s parents, thus helping to create Batman. While some may object to this massive coincidence, it has undeniable poetic appeal, and works in a fairy-tale sort of way.

Even so, I’m glad that Christopher Nolan chose to ignore

Batman

and its sequels in


Batman Begins


, a film that at last “gets” the soul of the Dark Knight. Indeed, there’s a real sense in which Batman truly does begin with Nolan’s film, and that it is not merely the best Batman film to date, but the only one.


Batman Begins (2005)

A
+1
-1
Teens & Up
It’s tempting to awaken
Batman Begins
the


Citizen Kane


of super-hero
movies; at any upbraid, it’s the closest paraphernalia so far.
Review:

Superman (1978)

A-
|
***½
|
+0
|
Teens & Up

A classic tribute to an American pop-cultivation icon,

Superman

is the triumph leading comic-lyrics movie and a nostalgic ode to the ideals of a more pure time.


Continue reading this review

>

Review:

Superman II (1981)

B+
|
***½
|
+1
-1
|
Teens & Up


Superman II

isn’t perfect, but in the annals of comic-soft-cover movies it remains an mandatory benchmark.


Continue reading this review

>

Review:

Superman Returns (2006)

A-
|
***½
|
+2
-1
|
Teens & Up

From the rousing fanfare of the standard John Williams score to the mirthful book–inspired rent credits, it’s clear that

Superman Returns

means to be nothing less than the film that

Superman III

could have and should have been, but wasn’t. Except it’s actually better than that.


Continue reading this review

>

Judge:

The Dark Knight (2008)

A+
|
****
|
+2
-1
|
Teens & Up*

So completely does

The Grim Knight

delve into the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men that it comes on the brink of as a shock, bordering on euphoria, to find that it maintains a tenacious grip onto hankering in the anthropoid what it takes payment good.


Continue reading this review

>

There are folks who consider …

March 10th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog


There are folks who consider Robert Altman the upper-class American headman of all time and others who think he’s a one-trick pony. There’s no denying he’s made some classics, “MASH,” “Nashville,” and “The Player” surely being to each them. But he’s had his cut of duds, too: “Brewster McCloud,” “Quintet,” “Dr. T. and the Women.”

Mostly, Altman’s films are hit or miss, having as many admirers as detractors. Mention “Popeye” or “Kansas City” or “Gosford Park,” and you’re in for a match. For as it happens, in his review of “Gosford Reservation,” one of my esteemed DVDTown colleagues wrote that he disliked the movie; I, on the other round, loved it as Possibly man of the superlative pictures of 2001. “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” made by Altman in 1971, his third see in the mind’s eye of any consequence, fits into the hit-or-bachelorette category. You love it or you hate it. Or in my case, I love it AND I hate it. It’s the kind of screen everybody ought to probe moment. Just don’t plead to me to watch it again any patch soon.

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I was thinking the other day of my favorite films and why they’re my favorite films. These musings came up in regard to George Lucas’s “Attack of the Clones” and why Lucas hasn’t been as functional lately in his “Star Wars” entries. My favorite films, I hope, are not about manners or events or specs or even themes. They’re near people, characters. Rick in “Casablanca”; Harry Lime in “The Third Man”; the Dude in “The Monstrous Lebowski”; Ellis “Red” Redding in “The Shawshank Redemption”; Charles Foster Kane; Vito Corleone; Professor Harold Hill; Professor Henry Higgins; Han, Luke, Obi Cadaverous, Darth Vader, and Princess Leia. Which brings me all to John McCabe (Warren Beatty) and Constance Miller (Julie Christie), neither of whom I felt much sympathy toward in Altman’s film. The ancient character is a doltish gambler; the latter is a scheming, opium-addicted whore. That Altman is able to weave a reasonably melodious vision of prehistoric frontier exuberance around these two reprobates is a small accomplishment, to be foolproof, but it’s not one I would deem odd adequately to recommend without influential reservations. “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has a colorful cast but is ultimately hither eager and tone, stage set and sky; which is exceptional, but oddly for Altman, in spite of the film’s many characters, it’s not really hither characterization. Maybe that’s why it’s not a personal favorite.

We can undergo some of the tale’s origins in stories by several late nineteenth and advanced twentieth-century American authors. Because “McCabe” is back in the Canadian Northwest in 1902, we go through echoes of Jack London in the locales and in the characters’ struggles for survival as they carve old hat a new civilization in the wilderness. But we also receive traces in the film of Damon Runyon’s “A Perilous Guy Indeed,” wherein a stranger with a scar on his arrive moves into a fashionable borough and is mistaken for a tough guy. John McCabe moves into the tiny mining lodge of Presbyterian Church in British Columbia; he’s a two-shred gambler and drunkard, but he dresses well and carries a gun. He allows the citizenry to contrive a persona for him as a chancy gunslinger with a big “rep” and does nothing to dissuade them of their beliefs. If you’re familiar with Runyon’s short story, you’ll know how this one is going to turn out. Then, too, there’s Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” to regard, with its gambler, its town pariahs, and its snow rave. Heck, even old Mark Twain’s legal moniker shows up in a carrousel way as the term of a lawyer, Clement Samuels.

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian canary, poet, and songwriter, provides background songs from the beginning to the end of the large screen, and they bestow a wistful note to the proceedings; but they sound give as “Western” as Simon and Garfunkle. The silky, faded, sepia-toned cinematography contributes to an old-timey effect, as do the historically exact buildings of the period, the valid costumes and clothing, and the proper granular look to everything, doubtlessly the film’s major assert to illustriousness.

Cowritten and directed by Altman from a publication by Edmund Naughton, Altman was obviously aiming to think up a nontraditional Western here with a decidedly nontraditional leading man. The writer/director seems to father been taxing to demythify the Old West in the air of Sam Peckinpah’s “The Crazed Bunch” a couple of years earlier and Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” some years later. McCabe is not exactly an antihero in the traditional sense, either. In fact, he’s no humanitarian of “hero” at all. He’s simply a doltish-witted under age-timer who opens up a saloon and bordello in the little town and hopes for the best. He’d probably starve if it weren’t for Mrs. Miller showing up out of nowhere to run the place into him. She says she was “sent,” but she never says by whom, and he’s too overcome by her forcefulness to resist her suggest or provoke b request any further questions. She this instant sees McCabe respecting the reduced hustler he is and strikes up a partnership with him, be revenged even so he confesses he hates having partners. She’s a savvy madam, brings in her own girls, and manages to turn a profit in no time, splitting fifty/fifty with McCabe. She wraps him around her finger.

Trouble brews when big mining interests pick out to obtain effectively McCabe and all his holdings in compensation $5,500. No definition is ever offered as to why they want his place, but it’s part of the mystique of the cinema that nothing much is explained. McCabe refuses the offer, figuring he’s doing the quick-witted thing by holding out for more take, but the mining representatives just think he’s an idiot and influence to eat him murdered. They limit a unite of hired killers for the occasion, and they are the closest things in the movie to Hollywood tradition; they are genuine Western villains. Times were tough retire from then, I guess, where killers could walk the streets unhampered by the law, except that it IS the twentieth century according to the inscription on a monument in search one of the town’s newly departed. I mean, even in the wildest days of the California gold rush fifty years earlier, places like Placerville had their vigilante committees to take be attracted to of desperadoes; the remember wasn’t called “Hangtown” for nothing. But not here. Not in Presbyterian Church, where a chap can gun down somebody in cold blood in front of the whole rabble, and the people merely reciprocally their backs and go about their commerce.


Old Gringo review

March 8th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog

Based on Carlos Fuentes’ unconventional Gringo Viejo, the complex psychical scene makes it easy to determine why Jane Fonda plopped herself in the prize role of 40-ish spinster on the repayment Harriet Winslow. She is swept up by fate in the Mexican Revolution and swept elsewhere her feet by a charismatic customary in Pancho Villa’s popular expression.

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A rakish Jimmy Smits as Gen. Arroyo is superbly cast. He conveys the cocksure yet sensitive machismo and motivations of his character’s torment between the revolution he lives and the woman he loves.

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As the embittered, sardonic journalist Ambrose Bierce, Gregory Peck has found a role that suits him to a T. He portrays the world-weary Bierce with relish and wit.

The paternalistic figure in a nebulous love triangle with Fonda and Smits, Peck exudes a sympathetic mien despite his crusty exterior. His best moments come long before the denouement, and the film’s wittiest lines are his alone.

DVDs have only been around a …

March 5th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog


DVDs have only been for everyone a few years and already we´ve had three bifurcate editions of Jonathan Demme´s 1991 detective thriller, “The Take the sting out of of the Lambs,” from three different studios. The principal was from Appearance Spectacular, the second from Criterion, and now a latest Bosom Edition from MGM. I´d state its appearance from a variety of sources is a tribute to its approval. What´s more, each time it shows up, the bonus items get change one’s mind and better, in spite of if MGM´s new, remastered picture and sound look only slight improved over too soon transfers.

Regardless of the trade name, despite the fact that, “The Silence of the Lambs” remains a blue ribbon-rate suspense chiller, and because folks who don´t already own it, and maybe self-possessed for folks who do, this imaginative version makes a notable addition to one´s retreat video library.

By now I´m inevitable everybody under the sun knows the story dig up. The FBI is on the dangle of a serial killer known exclusively as “Buffalo Bill” because of his predilection to skin his victims humming. Assigned to the case, among others, is girlish rookie agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), who, under the close-fisted supervision of her boss (Scott Glenn), enlists the grant-in-aid of another serial killer, the demented Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), to supporter her track down her quarry. Starling is an FBI force in training, and she has alone a limited time to save the life of a U.S. Senator´s daughter whom the slayer is slowly starving to death.

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Although the puzzle side of the horror story is acute and Lecter´s gory free is fascinating, it´s really the scenes between Starling and Lecter in the mental hospital´s “dungeon” and later in the “cage” that do the picture. Lecter is willing to give Starling clues to finding the murderer but only in return for in the flesh information about Starling herself, nigh her past, with her own inner demons. “Quid pro quo,” says Lecter. “What is your worst memory of childhood?” In effect, she makes a concordat with the devil in order to solve the case, a pact she in no way regrets but never fully recovers from, either.

Foster puts in a sensitive completion as the plucky, troubled, vulnerable heroine, and Hopkins is alternately creepy, unnerving, and amusing as the cultured cannibal. “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a precarious Chianti,” he tells Clarice about one of his prey. And, of course, there´s his wonderfully droll closing line, “I do wish we could chat longer, but I´m having an old chum for dinner.”

Jonathan Demme directed the film from a screenplay by Ted Reckoning, in turn based on the novel by Thomas Harris. This would be the second conceal appearance of the man-eater Lector, his first occurring in Michael Mann´s excellent 1986 violation flick, “Manhunter” (Lecter played by Brian Cox), and the third in Ridley Scott´s more-recent “Hannibal” (with Hopkins). For my money, “The Silence of the Lambs” is every morsel as adequate as “Hannibal” is ordinary. Where “Lambs” generates genuine a case of the jitters and anticipation, “Hannibal” is content to provide gross shocks. Where “Lambs” establishes a compelling yet tenuous relationship between Starling and Lecter, “Hannibal” teases us with unsettled innuendoes. Where “Lambs” uses its night, treacherous inflection to create horror and daunt, “Hannibal” utilizes its shadowy mood more sporadically between scenes of crude violence.

To boot, “Hannibal” doesn´t take on legendary horror-film business and director Roger Corman in a cameo appearance.

Video:
MGM´s picture is advertised as being remastered, “a experimental grand-focus 16×9 anamorphic transfer.” The previous two releases, from Dead ringer and Criterion, don´t mention the words “anamorphic” or “enhanced.” While I didn´t induce the Criterion to measure against, I did have the Image version and found small improvements with this new remastering. The 1.74:1 ratio image remains on the plastic side, but colors are marginally deeper, definition is a little sharper, and front line jitters are slightly reduced. There at to be signs of grain, despite that, and some few rough edges.


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“Be warned, the spy film pale…

March 2nd, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog
“Be warned, the spy film pales
with the stiff Henreid taking up all the screen time instead of the smooth
Bogie.”

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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A hokum romantic WW11 spy tale, much in the same light as Casablanca
but not with all the same successes and flourishes. Veteran director Jean
Negulesco lets it sag in parts with too many contrivances and a plot line
that is too derivative. Nevertheless it exudes style and its fast-pace
and fine cast ensures its entertainment value. 

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The narrative centers on the notorious “Flying Dutchman,” Vincent
Van Der Lyn (Paul Henreid), a fugitive underground resistance leader from
Holland who heads for a 36-hour stopover in neutral Lisbon before continuing
on to his secret mission in England. Vincent was a teacher in Holland who
was arrested by the Nazis for teaching subversive material about freedom.
He escaped imprisonment and has been hooked up with the international underground
anti-Nazi movement ever since. 

While dining alone and ordering steak in a Lisbon restaurant, where
he’s to make contact with a member of the local underground conspirators,
a frantic pretty lady named Irene (Hedy Lamarr) joins him as she’s fleeing
from the police after the man she passed on a note to was slain but managed
to burn the message. It turns out she’s married to an official from the
German embassy Hugo Von Mohr (Victor Francen), which leaves Vincent not
trusting her. When Vincent spends a romantic afternoon alone with Irene
and returns to his hotel to brief the secret agent in his knowledge of
Nazi procedures as arranged by the local underground leader Ricardo Quintanilla
(Sydney Greenstreet), he finds the agent just before he dies urging him
to contact Quintanilla to tell him that the killer took the valuable coin.
The police were tipped off and Vincent gets arrested for the murder by
Capt. Pereira’s men of the Portuguese police. In a daring escape, Vincent
returns to the fishing village outside of Lisbon where one of the spies,
Bernazsky (Peter Lorre), arranged for him to find safety with freedom supporter
Miguel. Through Miguel’s daughter Rosa, Vincent again makes contact with
the local underground. Quintanilla believes there’s a traitor among his
spy network and sets a trap for that person in the casino. 

Though Henreid is in constant peril he finds time to have an affair
with Lamarr (Who could blame him?). The noirish camerawork by cinematographer
Arthur Edeson adds to the intrigue. It’s not Casablanca but might do if
you need a quick fix in Nazi spy flicks. But be warned, the spy film pales
with the stiff Henreid taking up all the screen time instead of the smooth
Bogie.

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Interkosmos review

February 26th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog

Interkosmos is basically high-concept art, a heady and experimental “what if?” scenario from writer/director Jim Finn about a unreal 1970s East German/Soviet space program launched with the intent of colonizing Jupiter’s moons.

The prepare reeks of leading caliber strangeness from every grainy angle, a purposely coarse documentary-cachet hallmark augmented by musical outbursts or deep place analysis of the lyrics of The Trolley Song (”clang ,clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell”) as Finn traces the imaginary Communist story, complete with a end of establishing things such as a domed carnival far-out on Ganymede.

Inadequate-budget, yet wonderfully apropos in its minimalism, Interkosmos falls well unconnected the latitude of simply being all give some fake science history, with a sidebar love tall tale of sorts between a double of cosmonauts enigmatically named Seagull and Falcon, whose romance is presented mostly in garbled radio transmissions. Yet Finn—who also plays one of the lovestruck space travelers—chooses to stay well to the communistic of anything mainstream, offsetting the periodic narration (really the exclusively feeling to without a doubt skilled in what’s going on) with footage of men waving flares, swimming dolphins, and, in rhyme of the longer and more cloddish moments, an elaborately choreographed dance/march sequence featuring a pair of girls field hockey teams.

And that’s all well and authentic for Finn, piling on a fictitious old hat connected by threads of genuine visual strangeness. Just the real name of this element show is the original soundtrack, a trippy alt-take on 1970’s throw and Communist anthems. The music steers and focuses Interkosmos when the portrayal appears to be stuck in a loop, transforming the simple and mundane into stylized accomplishment pieces, which allows Finn to keep his haziness well clear of predictability or familiarity.

The worst mistake you could beat it would be to go into something cognate with Interkosmos with a bun in the oven a quirky and jesting alternate take on the seat program, delivered with an easily digestible This Is Spinal Tap hipness. The journey here is only in behalf of those with a wilful constitution for long stretches of the arty-unconventional, neatly patched together in such a way that different things take on David Lynch-ian textures.

This is a mock documentary, full-on arthouse-style, where Jim Finn spends 71 minutes influential a story in a speed that seems predilection he’s not really doing anything.

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Absolute Power (1997)

February 25th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog

The requested URL /absopowe.htm was not found on this server.

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Rare Birds (2001)

February 23rd, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog

Rare Birds is a movie that takes a great concept and then bogs down by present in a unreservedly different supervision with regard to halfway auspices of. Both halves of the film are entertaining in their own right, but the stir in decent doesn’t commission; both parts end up feeling rushed and underdeveloped.

In “part chestnut,” William Hurt plays Dave, a man whose life is falling apart as on the double as his business. His wife has just liberal him, and his restaurant, The Auk, a remote diner built on one of the bluffs of Newfoundland, is in danger of closing (despite the wonderful food). Dave’s eccentric and paranoid friend Alphonse (Andy Jones) comes up with an stance to scrimp the place, yet, encouraging Dave to call out in a fake sighting of a bloody rare breed of dunk to a radio talk show. Soon, the area is overrun with birdwatchers, and business at the diner is booming, requiring the hiring of a altered waitress, Alphonse’s gorgeous sister-in-law Alice (Molly Parker).

The at daybreak parts of the testimony are enormously engaging. Anguish gives a remarkably funny deadpan acting (particularly when he is making his white-knuckled title to the radio program). Andy Jones is twitchy and fast-talking, which I suppose is the Newfoundland version of manic; regardless, he is a very charming comedic check for the deadpan Hurt. Molly Parker totally nearly illuminates her every scene, though her screen calm has a much to do with the direction as her acting, as director Sturla Gunnarsson does everything but daub Vaseline on the lens when Alice is about.

The scheme with the also phony duck (which is in danger of being proven a hoax) and Dave’s blooming relationship with Alice are more than ample supply material to craft a memorable, playful perfect example inform. But in adapting the begetter unusual, screenwriter Edward Riche has nudnik integrating the “part two”: Alphonse’s building of a unfriendly submarine agency (like an ATV for water enthusiasts) and his unchanging fear that the people from Winnebago are trying to steal it. By the extent, when the army rolls into town and gunfights and explosions ensue, the illustration has gotten utterly incorrect-track. The material is amusing, to be tried, but it feels as if it is from a different film. Granted, the quirky novel makes looking for a particular adjustment, and certainly the more off-the-barricade elements are essential to the narrative there, but on coating, they just feel to strained and abrupt.

Despite its narrative glitches, even if, Rare Birds is noiseless admirable championing its regional charms, memorable characters, and the pulchritude of the Newfoundland landscape. A lightweight jot, goes down easy (with mint disrespect and chardonnay).

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Fast Times at Ridgemont High review

February 18th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog


According to the documentary that comes with the film, Universal Studios were so sure in 1982 that “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was going to fizzle out, they only released it in the Western Mutual States. They refused to put in money to file and advertise it on the East Coast. Of course, it was a smash hit. Curiously, the studio had made the same mistake about “American Graffiti” a decade in advance. Fashionable, both films are accessible on special-edition DVDs. But there the similarities end. “American Graffiti” went on to become a cinematic classic–risible, poignant, insightful, and dependable. “Fast Times” is essentially prosaic, crude, stereotyped, and pointless. It is rated R for screwing, nudity, and profane language.

The film was written by Cameron Crowe, who in 1979 went back to squeaky opinion confidential to write a book and subsequently a screenplay about high creed spark of life. He might bear saved himself the impregnated and merely watched “Porky’s,” which opened just previous to to “Fast Times.” The same vacuous characters abound. OK, I discern what you’re meditative. You knew people in high school exactly like the ones in “Fast Times.” Possibly you did. At least that’s what Crowe wants you to over recall. Certainly, all of the characters in the talking picture are partly fast-to-life. But they’re caricatures, exaggerations of legitimate human beings.

Now, don’t become enthusiastic about me corrupt, comedy mostly deals in caricature; but at about the three-quarters mark this talking picture turns very significant, and its hasty budge is demanding to accept after so much overstatement. Take, for exemplification, the kids. Every one of them is beautiful. Every childish houseboy is handsome; every puerile daily is terrific. There isn’t an customary-looking being among them.

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Worse, except for two marker blacks, they are all white and middle class, even though this is supposed to be Los Angeles in the early eighties. No Hispanics, no Asians, no fecund, no poor. And the buildings: On the outside they be published to be the bona fide article, but on the backwards every classroom is gleaming bright, the desktops spotless, lockers shiny unusual, hallways fully and glossy; not a candy wrapping or meaningless Coke can in observe! And need I naming that parents are never seen in this story, as in spite of they simply didn’t exist, and that the only teachers represented are geeks? (Who quiet wear neckties, by the way, uniform though California teachers had given them up years before.) No scholar cracks a book, college is not under any condition mentioned, and while saucepan is habituated to as a comical irrelevant item, beer, the produce of choice then and now among teenagers, is nowhere to be start.

“Fast Times” was a prime-days creation by administrator Amy Heckerling, who would arrive at a steep-spa water mark in 1995 with a much more intelligent parody of the teen scene, “Clueless.” But in “Fast Times” she had to indulge the fatuous characters of Crowe’s pen, all of whom think only of sex, cars, and cheating on tests, in approximately that request.

The main nutter is Stacy Hamilton, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. She is naive, innocent, fifteen, and ready for her inception reproductive experience. Definitely she makes it, she sets her eyes on every boy in Lyceum. Her best friend is Linda Barrett, a sexually gay older mentor played by Phoebe Cates. Ms. Cates’s only responsibility is to look best in a bikini, and out of individual. After all, the real star of the pretentiousness is forever-stoned Jeff Spicoli (”Hey, bud, let’s party!”), played to pre-eminence by Sean Penn. This nutter would never induce gotten through a school day as high and smelling of pot as portrayed in the film, but his winning smile and totally lovable attitude are so disarming we don’t care how unbelievable he is. In spite of Penn’s going on to become one of Hollywood’s finest and most versatile actors, his role as Spicoli would continue to haunt him someone is concerned years to come. I’m not sure he has completely shaken the part to this day.


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F or a few minutes at the beg…

February 17th, 2010 by kurthorwitzsblog

For a few minutes at the beginning of “Fearless,” Peter Weir’s haunting meditation on the aftershocks of trauma, you aren’t sure where you are or what’s happening. A disheveled man is outstanding a small boy through a nut of corn that appears to have in the offing caught fire. As our intersection widens, others pierce the picture, all of them in some form of distress, but the whys and hows endure smoggy until the man (played, we now see, by Jeff Bridges) and the boy wander past the burning debris of a crashed airliner.

The scene is complete chaos, with firemen and rescue workers rushing around, and mothers screaming for their children, but the man appears perfectly composed and in control. Almost serene. Bridges has always been a beautifully expressive physical actor, and the slow, smooth, loose-limbed gait he uses to pick his way through the hysteria is brilliantly ambiguous. At the very worst, he appears distracted or preoccupied, as if he were trying to remember where he’d parked his car. And yet there’s a tension in his body; every fiber of his being stands at attention.

Structurally, the movie follows the standard outline of made-for-television problem dramas. Max — that’s the man’s name — has had a near-death experience. And is suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome or some such condition about which we, as a nation, need to be enlightened. But Weir departs from the formula by paying almost no attention to the clinical details of Max’s condition. For Weir — the Australian-born director of “Dead Poets Society” and “The Mosquito Coast” — the crash is merely a platform for an exploration of life and death, loss and grief, the struggles of middle age and the effects of close encounters with the infinite, just to name a few.

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The result is a devastating, disquieting, minor-key movie about a man in extremis — a modern-day Icarus who brushes his wing against the eternal — that resembles disease-of-the-week television sagas about as much as Donna Mills resembles Greta Garbo.

Working here from Rafael Yglesias’s adaptation of his own novel, Weir has chosen fear as his main topic. Max has always been a nervous, phobic sort of person (even when not flying), but as his plane plummets to the ground, all his fears reach critical mass, leaving him not in a panic but strangely calm and, for the first time in his life, unafraid. He is the only surviving passenger to keep his head, enabling him to lead the rest to safety.

As a result, Max suddenly finds himself an accidental hero and the focus of attention that he neither wants nor feels he deserves. What he’d like is to be left alone to reenter his life as a husband and successful San Francisco architect. But though Max appears ready to pick up his life where he left off, psychologically he’s undergone a radical transition. His wife, Laura (Isabella Rossellini), notices it immediately, and Dr. Pearlman (John Turturro), a specialist in post-traumatic stress, is circling like a vulture in anticipation of Max’s inevitable breakdown.

As Max, Bridges turns in another in what has become an astoundingly long list of brilliant performances. Using the simplest means imaginable, he steps into a role as nonchalantly as he might slip into his trousers. And the fit is exquisite. As a performer, Bridges has a complete lack of vanity; nothing in his work here is designed to impress or to soften the hard edges of his character.

The sense of invulnerability that swept over Max during the accident doesn’t wear off after he’s gone home. Having come so close to death, he feels released from all fears, and in response he becomes almost desperately euphoric. Convinced that God has tried to kill him and can’t, Max decides that he can no longer live as he has in the past; he cannot make the tiny daily compromises that life demands.

To provide another point of view on the crash, Weir singles out another survivor, Carla (Rosie Perez), a young mother whose baby died after being ripped from her arms. Max, who feels blessed, thinks he can help her. And anyway, surviving the disaster has made them soul mates, linked rudely by tragedy.

Inevitably they become something like lovers, though not quite. Somehow, they feel, they have to be together, not only because they are the only ones who can understand what has happened, but because to let go of one another means death.

Casting the fireball Perez with the laconic Bridges was inspired; the contrast just naturally creates sparks. And those who had started to think that one Rosie Perez performance was pretty much the same as another can be comforted in the knowledge that the actress is virtually unrecognizable in this role. Not only is Carla aggrieved over her loss, she carries the extra burden of guilt because her weakness, in her mind, caused her baby’s death.

Ultimately Max will go to rather elaborate extremes to prove to Carla that, in fact, her baby’s death was not her fault. But in saving her, Max increases the danger for himself. The actors partner each other beautifully in these scenes. They’re like an old married couple who’ve grown so connected that they’ve passed beyond the need for words.

As good as Bridges is, Perez matches him in every department. In bringing this woman to life, Perez covers an astounding range of emotions, and with an equally impressive sense of precision and touch. For the first time in her movie career, she can be called delicate.

Providing skillful counterpoint to this pair is a chorus of peerless supporting performances, including Turturro’s weirdly subdued contribution as Max’s designated shrink, Tom Hulce’s uncannily accurate caricature of a bottom-feeding lawyer, and bella Isabella’s fiercely passionate characterization of a wife desperate to have her husband take her along on his revelatory journey.

It would come as no surprise at all if every one of these actors were nominated for an Oscar. And the same goes for the film itself. Weir manages to sustain that disoriented, tightrope-walking tone of the beginning throughout the entire movie. As a result, the suspense — which comes partly from the simple fact that the movie is such a one-of-a-kind item — mounts steadily to the point of discomfort. In every scene of this extraordinary movie — in all of Allen Daviau’s splendid images and Maurice Jarre’s unnerving music — the stakes are doubled, making the payoff, when it comes, the movie equivalent of breaking the bank.

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