Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A sparkling crime melodrama richly steeped in theatrical atmosphere. Much of the film seems to have been shot either at the Broadway theater or at Sardi’s restaurant. It’s directed with style by John Gage and adapted from the story “Annabel” by William Mercer. Leo Rosten is the screenwriter.
Valerie Stanton (Russell ) is a famous Broadway actress who has been associated with successful producer Gordon Dunning (Ames) for the last ten years. The film opens as they are arguing in his theater’s office, just before the closing show of “Escapade” their latest comedy hit. She is tired of doing popular fluff comedy plays and wants to do a serious play, Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” with rival producer Peter Gunther. Gordon seems amazed that she would want to play a tortured neurotic woman who kills herself. The argument gets more heated when they talk about love and their relationship, as Gordon believes love is a business proposition. He tells her, “I created you. I can’t let go of you.” She tells him that she wants to marry the prominent architect Michael Morrell (Genn), someone she has fallen in love with. When Gordon threatens to sully her name with Morrell, the black gloved actress becomes fearful and in the heat of the moment kills him when she conks him over the head with a statue from his desk.
Since Valerie has an iron-clad alibi, suspicions go to a rival actress in the show, Marian Webster (Trevor). The body is found by Marian, an actress in Gordon’s stable who was his girlfriend and star before Valerie moved into the picture. Marian’s fingerprints are found all over the murder weapon, and she has to be hospitalized as she goes into a state of shock and is unable to be questioned by the investigating homicide officer, Captain Danbury (Greenstreet).
The colorful captain is a theater buff, and in his inimical style adds a comical contrast in moods to the other more sober-minded leads. Russell is all fear and trepidation. Genn is the gallant gentleman lover. Ames is the jealous producer who must possess what he creates. Trevor is the bitter woman who feels she has no luck after being jilted.
In this solid production, the tension is kept up until the final curtain call as to whether Russell will confess, get caught, or get away with the crime of passion.
Loaded from her suburban Sydney home, backpacker Ruth Barron (Winslet) is so touched by an Indian guru that notwithstanding Tell no-one turning up with tales of dad’s imminent demise can’t charm her back. Ironically, mum’s own asthmatic reaction to Delhi leads to Ruth escorting her to Oz, where awaits wizard ‘cult exiter’ PJ Waters (Keitel), hired by the family to rid Ruth of her plans to change a certain of her mentor’s wives. His three-step system takes in the right in a cabin in the comeuppance, a suitably scorched, remote arena for a blazing battle of wills that takes them beyond standard power struggles into a heady realm of charity, abhor, worry and wish. With its switches in tone, from searing psycho-drama to broad, in the seventh heaven comedy, its sometimes purposeful, sometimes crooked description and its splendid hues, the film initially seems an efficient if uneven entertainment. As it progresses, however, with Ruth and PJ moving into endlessly murkier territory, it becomes easier to discern a thematic thread: how we’re all conditioned, and how we must interrogate traditional assumptions to discover our real selves. It’s brave, adventurous, refreshingly frank - qualities also marking the performances, particularly those of the leads.
Vivian (Roberts) is not a felicitous hooker. She looks the part, but unlike her feisty baby Accoutrements (San Giacomo) she retains a core of vulnerability. So does workaholic Edward (Gere), fifty-fifty though he’s a millionaire take-’em-and-break-’em merchant prince. In LA recompense the week, he hires Vivian to act as a beautiful, disarming escort while he dines the defiance, grooming and schooling her in the process. Formerly you have knowledge of it, she’s discovering a sense of self-worth, while he’s taking shoes and socks (and time) off to stray in the park and overhaul his ethics. This is predictable Pygmalion stuff, but with prodigality of laughs along the way. Roberts can dissemble, and Gere, yet not renowned for his comic skills, is more than a smoochy foil to kooky Vivian, and justified about manages to look take to a man who has channelled all his reproductive energy into corporate ball-crushing. Retch-making moments (he thinks she’s doing drugs in the bathroom, she’s really - aaawww! - flossing her teeth) are kept to a minimum and the shacking up scenes sweetly restrained. But payment a smokescreen that attempts to satirise snooty materialism, it focuses too pantingly on the schemer labels, and comes down constantly on the side of ‘rich is better’.
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You could enthusiasm a truck via the plotholes in Directorty Harry, which wouldn’t be so importance were the movie not a likely, phony glorification of the fuzz and criminal brutality [from a testimony by Harry Julian Fink and R.M. Fink]. Clint Eastwood, in the title role, is a superhero whose antics suit almost satire. Strip away the detached garbage and all that’s left is a fine-made but surface running-and-jumping meller. Don Siegel produces handsomely and directs routinely.
Andy Robinson plays a mad sniper who attempts to hold up San Francisco for money to stop his random carnage. Mayor John Vernon is willing, police chief John Larch goes along, police lieutenant Harry Guardino unctuously follows the prevailing wind, and the work falls to supercop Eastwood.
Eastwood is dedicated - to his own violence. Perhaps his anger at Robinson is more at the delay in capturing him; after all, between bites on a hot dog, Eastwood foils a bank heist at midday, talks down a suicide jumper, and otherwise expedites assorted ‘dirty work’. The character nearly drools, but Eastwood is far too inert for this bit of business.
There are several chase sequences - before the sadist-with-badge dispatches the sadist-without-badge. Thereupon, Eastwood flings his badge to the wind and walks away. At least Frisco is safe from his protection (but think of the rest of us).
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IT ISN’T just any actress who can age 23 years convincingly ¿ and move you at every step of the way.
Meryl Streep? Sure, with an arm tied behind her back. But how about Michelle Williams? (Yes, I’m talking about that kid from "Dawson’s Creek" and the throwaway comedy "Dick.") In "Me Without You," a decades-spanning drama about growing up while growing out of a suffocating friendship, Williams does just that, playing a British woman who blossoms in slo-mo, starting out as a mousy teenager in the punk-steeped 1970s and only arriving at adult independence in the new millennium, all the while turning in a performance that is seamless, canny and artistically mature.
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Not bad for a girl from small-town Montana who just turned 22.
As directed and co-written by Sandra Goldbacher ("The Governess"), who has called the film semi-autobiographical, "Me Without You" is the story of Holly (Williams) and Marina (Anna Friel), childhood friends so close they refer to themselves as "Harina," a hybrid name whose asymmetry mirrors the imbalance in their relationship. "Some people are pretty people," says Holly’s mother, "and some people are clever people."
Fleshy and bookish, Holly is clearly in the thrall of Marina, the popular, thin and streetwise party girl. Oh, Marina may envy Holly’s Jewishness, finding it exotic when compared with her blandly gentile absence of religion, but otherwise Marina is the gravitational force here, setting the agenda, issuing orders, stealing boyfriends ¿ notably Kyle MacLachlan as a sleazy college professor ¿ and undertaking other casual betrayals so numerous they leave Holly numb.
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For a while. It’s a long time coming, but when Holly finally has her epiphany and angrily tells Marina off, in a scene that will be painfully familiar to anyone who’s had to cut a destructive friend loose, we are so into Holly’s character that she feels like an extension of ourselves.
With on-screen chapter titles and era-defining musical selections ranging from Wreckless Eric to the Cowboy Junkies, "Me Without You" feels like a late-baby-boomer family album. The memories are fond and embarrassing.
In addition to the obvious allusion to Holly and Marina’s gradual separation, there are a couple of additional meanings to the film’s title. On a second, perhaps superficial, level, it can be read as referring to Holly’s longing for Marina’s older brother Nat (Oliver Milburn), a mostly unrequited love that forms a kind of spine for the film’s plot. On yet a third level, "Me Without You" suggests not merely Holly’s journey toward becoming her own person but Marina’s definitive emptiness.
"There’s no me without you," whines Marina during the big "divorce" scene with Holly. It’s a telling comment from someone who feels she doesn’t exist without Holly to tell her so. And it’s a measure, ironically, of Holly’s wholeness. In the end, it’s Holly, not Marina, who has real, solid presence, after a lifetime of living in the orbit of another.
ME WITHOUT YOU (R, 107 minutes) ¿ Contains obscenity, drug use, sexuality and partial nudity. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle 5.
Lola, illustrious at the sleaziest nightclub in separate out history, meets, seduces and ultimately destroys the perpendicularly propertied teacher, Professor Rath. A tragedy? A comedy? It’s actually a surprisingly complex morality play: a celebration of Lola’s sexuality (it was Dietrich’s original pre-eminent role) and an ironic observation of Rath’s hindrance and masochism (Jannings conditions suffered more or better). The film looks and sounds its age, but remains enthralling. Sternberg shot English and German versions simultaneously.
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Lee Woods (James Spader) and Dosmo Pizzo (Danny Aiello) are hit men who kill Becky Foxx’s (Teri Hatcher) ex-husband, Roy (Peter Horton), to collect on his insurance policy. Lee then shoots Dosmo, but doesn’t realise he’s wearing a bulletproof vest, nor does he realise that Becky, also in on the murder outline, forgot to get money from her safe. Lee has to return to the contain, while Dosmo takes wealthy snob Allan Hopper (Greg Cruttwell) and his underling a ally with, Susan Parish (Glenne Headly), hostage while he tries to figure out what to do next. Interval badness cops Alvin Strayer (Jeff Daniels) and Wes Taylor (Eric Stoltz) have picked up Becky and reported the crime, and later she meets with Lee’s girlfriend and accessary, Helga Svelgen (Charlize Theron). In a subplot that leads finance to the situation at Allan’s home, his sister Audrey Hopper (Marsha Mason) meets the suicidal Teddy Peppers (Paul Mazursky) who wants to find out his dog a skilled in so that he can kill himself. Eventually everyone comes together in song lst uncontrollable area where everything is resolved.
It’s funny how such an anodyne filmmaker as Jean-Pierre Jeunet can provoke such controversy. The French director’s last glaze, ‘Amélie’, had some quarters of the French press up in arms about its perceived twee – and suspiciously cadaverous – portrayal of modern Paris. Now, his latest flick has already been dragged through the French courts to determine its official nationality (though made in France in French, it’s financed by an American studio, Warner Bros). Jeunet lost the case: ‘Not French adequate!’ cried the surmise, as to the ground four million of Jeunet’s compatriots flocked to see the glaze in its firstly month.
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This kinetic love dispatch orbits the Gold medal Crowd Engagement and re-introduces us to Jeunet’s favourite elfin angel Audrey Tautou, who plays Mathilde, a brood little woman whose veracious appreciate, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), is called up to the trenches. Once there, he is found answerable of mutilating himself in order to take French leave the frontline and is sentenced to demise along with four other soldiers (including a man who accidentally triggers his gun while banishing rats from his bed, so blasting off his hand). The ceasefire comes and goes, and Manech’s fate remains unknown, until now Mathilde clings to an irresistible belief that he is brisk, despite a cataract of information suggesting differently. The film is built on flashbacks, rapid mises-en-scène, many of them prompted by differing testimonies, memories, hunches and desires both from Mathilde and witnesses she speaks to. Nothing and everything is true, and it’s a delicious swindle on the nature of storytelling itself. It’s dizzying, mushy stuff as Jeunet employs wonderful colours, allusion and a dark wit to catapult us through the story.
The war scenes are degenerate and brutal. A certain minute we’re immersed in the whimsy of teenage be captivated by, the next we’re in the shit and piss of the battlefield. It’s happiness and pain, both coming at you in turn, courtesy of Jeunet’s tasty and unique visual language.
Five Friendly Pieces cavalcade by Tom Blain
Nicholson's First Star
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Five Easy Pieces is a brilliant little film that seems to have lost steam with current audiences but shoud not be forgotten. For whatever reason it is not as popular as other Nicholson films of the time. It doesnt have the cult following of Easy Rider , and or even Chinatown but it stands on its own and even above the other two films in some ways.
In the first part of the film, we explore the life of Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson). He is an average Joe, working an average Joe job in an oil field in California. In his spare time, he bowls with his friends, plays poker with his paycheck, complains about his job, and occasionally cheats on his girlfriend. His girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) is a little Southern bimbo who is filled to the brim with blue collar personality traits. Tammy Wynette is her gospel as she often waits at home for an angry Bobby. Drowning in her self pity, she forgives Bobby everytime.
The second part explores the life Bobby ran from three years earlier. Back then he was "Robert" Eroica (named after the Beethoven Symphony No. 3) Dupea a trained classical pianist from a wealthy, cultured Washington family. His sister Tita was also a pianist and his brother Carl Fidelio (Beethoven once more) was a violinist. Bobby returns home to visit his father; who is now just a shell of a man after his stroke. His speech and much of his movement are diminished.
At home Bobby shys away from conversation. He looks around and studies his former surroundings but rarely participates. The only person he finds some sort of interest in is Catherine (Susan Anspach), his brother's fiance. In Susan he sees something passionate, intelligent, but moreover someone he wants to understand and appreciate. The two sides of his life come into greater conflict when his girlfriend Rayette (who he had been keeping away from his family) visits unannounced. More of Bobby's current life becomes unveilled to his well-to-due family. Everytime Rayette opens her mouth, Bobby looks on with contempt.
The movie's name is a bit mysterious and may offer up some sort of clues as to what Bobby is running from. Five Easy Pieces refers to five piano pieces, although the only mention is when Bobby plays "an easy piece" for his love interest Catherine. Bobby says he played it better when he was eight and felt no inner spirit while playing it. From these comments one can assume that this path of classical music was thrust upon him and he feels no passion towards it. With many years wasted down a path he doesn't enjoy, he ran away from home without contacting anyone for years (as to not disappoint his father). This new path he chose was easier; it took little mental work and was probably the simplest thing to get into at the time for someone that just knew how to play piano.
His brother and sister seem to be a pair of odd birds as well. His sister Tita, acts completely sheltered from the outside world, and compulsively sings (poorly) as she plays piano. Carl Fidelio is awkward and goofy. They sacraficed societal normalcy for musical apptitude and peaceful serenity. Personality-wise they couldnt be farther from the loud and adventurous Bobby. Running away was not only an escape from his musical background but an escape from their tight sanctuary. Bobby desired freedom from everything and tried to bury his past, (family, hobbies, piano, class, etc.) tried to start his life over completely.
Director Bob Rafelson achieved cinematic success with Five Easy Pieces that he was no longer able to produce. He worked with Nicholson two years earlier on the Monkees psychadelic movie, and two years later in The King of Marvin Gardens , eleven years later in the remake The Postman Always Rings Twice , and once more in 1996 with Blood and Wine . In Five Easy Pieces he creates many stirring moments (ie Nicholson appologizing to his mute father, dinner scene, final scene at the gas station) and wraps them up into a complex character driven movie that is not to be missed.
Tom Blain Rating: 9 Review by : Tom Blain Classic vapour buff within the JAC stratosphere. (Warning: he took film classes.) Average Rating :
5.757600
Always interesting to hear an opinion on someone who would fit into that category for that period.
It is often said that assassins of civic leaders are difficult to depart attention to themselves, as ooze as to initiate some monstrous exchange that is believed to befall in the aftermath.
But what of the potential assassin whose plans are not impartial balked, but also go unseen, as well?
That “woulda, coulda” premise is the underlying tenet of this 2004 Niels Mueller scenario selection in 1975, where the would-be killer is an everyday joe named Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), pushed to the ill at ease by a contrast of things—including a failed matrimony and job he feels is built on a underlying of lies. Bicke has convinced himself that Richard Nixon must hunger in out of whack to help reshape the tomorrow’s of the American Dream for the rest of us “grains of sand” out there in the actual world.
The closing credits indicate that the haze is “inspired by a true story”, and of sure history tells us Nixon was never assassinated, so it’s cleanse from the outset that the plot’s master plan was somehow flawed, and as Mueller slowly dismantles Bicke’s life prior to our eyes, it is almost practical to literally sensation the squeeze of the imaginary vise around his skull as everything he holds dear and important in a flash evaporates, leaving him to crack to fulfill a destiny that had its roots in a throwaway comment made over drinks by his bluff sales boss Jack (Jack Thompson).
Penn’s Bicke seems adulate a hospitable plenty fellow, though a bit hazardous and impolite on prime conversational and people skills, which briefly stretches the believability factor that he could have till doomsday been married (unsuccessfully or not) and have three kids with his soon-to-be ex, played wonderfully with for ever-increasing waves of exasperation by Naomi Watts. Bicke’s on the contrary real friend is the level-headed Lovely (Don Cheadle), who runs a dilapidated car repair shop and has plans to partner up on a purchase-ample scheme to blossom a facile take it out of delivery concern, but that too becomes a chink in the armor of the marvellous plan.
Like him or not personally, when you get a Sean Penn film these days, it’s hardly a guarantee that there will be some soprano-caliber acting histrionics. Check, check, and magnify check here, as Penn does a terrific slow burn through the initially hour or so being dumped on before beginning that dramatic tumble over the sidle, where sudden outbursts, uncontrollable sobbing or acts of distort ration out him allowance to show why he is one of the most watchable actors working today.
Mueller interjects some offbeat elements of comedy, as when Bicke feels a connection with the sweeping Raven Panther Party, and tries in vain to encourage them to change their name to the “Zebras”, in order to increase their quiescent membership with whites. But The Assassination of Richard Nixon is more drama than thriller, a powerful and moving story of the fact another man who would not take it any more, anchored by a great Sean Penn performance.
