A conjure up project for star, co-writer and first-time director Crystal, in which his loving attachment for the characters and educate with the material sometimes prevent him from achieving sufficient distance. Stand-up comic Buddy Childlike Jr (Crystal), managed by his brother Stan (Paymer), was a household name in the ’50s and ’60s. At once he’s just another has-been trying for a comeback, struggling to hold his dignity in the face of humiliating auditions and demeaning fragment-parts in TV commercials. Flashbacks to Buddy’s babyhood and heyday strike the open surplus between nostalgia and realism. Scenes of Jewish family life, jokes there eats, and lovingly recreated borscht-belt shows evoke the atmosphere of the time; while the egocentric comic’s difficult relationships with the self-sacrificing Stan and estranged daughter Susan (Mara) display a darker side to showbiz and familial ties. By contrast, the modern scenes are cloyingly sentimental. Even so, there are probably enough dressy one-liners, hilarious routines and clever mimicry to sit down with most people through the soggier patches.
Archive for February, 2010
Mr. Saturday Night (1992)
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Colonel Chabert (1995)
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
COLONEL CHABERT: Drama. In French with
subtitles. Starring Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Fabrice Luchini.
Directed by Yves Angelo. (Unrated. 110 minutes. At the Clay
Theater.)
`Colonel Chabert,” which opens today at the Clay, is a moody period
piece with Gerard Depardieu as a Napoleonic officer who returns to
his home in Paris 10 years after he is presumed dead. An adaptation
of the Balzac novel of the same name, the picture is a meditation on
the greed and venality of society and the tenuousness of life and
position.
Directed by Yves Angelo, who worked as director of photography on
“Germinal” and “Un Coeur en Hiver,” the film begins with a stark
visual statement: a vast landscape in the aftermath of a battle.
Filming in muted colors, Angelo shows a field of corpses, then moves
in to show the living going about the grim business of stripping
those bodies of everything that might be of material value.
The spectacle is a strong and clever encapsulation of the view,
expressed throughout the film, that money and power — not emotion —
are the main currencies in all human interaction. The scene also
shows the turning point of Chabert’s life. Wounded, pronounced dead,
he is tossed into a pit of bodies he has to claw his way out of.
TEN YEARS LATER
After this little prologue, the film takes up Chabert’s story 10
years later, in 1817. Chabert is lumbering along the Paris streets as
only Depardieu can lumber, a near-derelict whose wife (Fanny Ardant)
refuses to acknowledge his identity. The director gives us flashes
from Chabert’s previous life of wealth and position, again using a
slightly washed-out palette to suggest a past that’s fading and will
soon vanish.
“Colonel Chabert” provides a showcase for three superb
performances, the most memorable of
which is Fabrice Luchini’s as Derville, a great lawyer. Best known in
the United States as the slippery seducer in “La Discrete,” Luchini
again plays a character in love with the sound of his own voice. But
Derville doesn’t scatter his words. He’s slight, smart and dangerous,
calmly delighting in the power of his words to heal or destroy.
TWO DIFFERENT STYLES
The scene in which Chabert asks Derville to represent him provides
a nice case of Depardieu’s playing a scene opposite an actor whose
cinematic light burns as brightly as his own. Client and lawyer are a
study in contrasts: the sincere, slow-talking big guy and the shrewd,
fast-talking little guy — both good guys, in completely different
styles.
The villain of the piece is the wife, but she’s far from a true
villain. Ardant plays a woman who has remarried, had children and is
afraid that the resurfacing of Chabert will provide her new husband
with an excuse to leave her. She is the most desperate person in the
film, the one who has everything and is afraid to lose it.
Although the pace is sometimes slow, the situation is so
inherently dramatic, and the resulting intrigues so engrossing, that
the film never loses interest. Ultimately, “Colonel Chabert”
becomes more than just the recounting of a strange incident; it’s
also a parable about the difference between identity and selfhood —
and how society will often confer the former only on those willing to
compromise the latter.
McQ is a good contemporary cr…
Monday, February 22nd, 2010McQ is a sympathetic contemporary crime actioner filmed stock in Seattle, with John Wayne discovering that his slain buddy was a member of a crooked police compass thieving dope evince.
Featured as an aging bar waitress from whom Wayne obtains evidence, Colleen Dewhurst is outstanding in her two scenes.
McQ attracts and sustains continued interest from the opening frames, where William Bryant, after shooting two policemen, is himself revealed as one, just before being killed. Eddie Albert, as Wayne’s superior, makes the usual knee-jerk response (arrest radical hippies) while Wayne suspects big time dope dealer Al Lettieri.
The final part is the celtic…
Thursday, February 18th, 2010The terminating part is the celtic song A Shenanigans In The Sparkling Air, performed by Kate Winslet as the litter Iris. Winslet gives a alluring rendition of the tune, with a naturalness that a professional diva might have lost, and forms a delightful, contrasting duet with Bell, who trills gambol-imitating phrases between her lines. It makes for a poignant coda to a soundtrack that is unusually successful sans pictures. Alone it tells a statement, and it tells it with great tenderness.
Published April 4, 2002
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Resident Evil review
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010The requested URL /movies/resident_evil/index.html was not set up on this server.
Foul King (2002)
Saturday, February 13th, 2010Always late for work at the bank and routinely humiliated by his ride roughshod over manager, Daeho (Song) is physically large, ox-like, none too ingenious and deeply insecure. Thanks to a chain of accidents, he finds himself spending his free for the moment training to ripen into a masked villain in the wrestling ring lower than drunk the big cheese The Clog up b mismanage King; he naively expects his increasingly victorious remodel ego to afflict with his everyday life a kick, but… The conquer thing far Kim’s accomplished and funny flick picture show (a huge hit in Korea) is its knack entirely to see humour owing to melancholy and vice versa - then within single shots. It helps that everything from the slapstick gags to the comedy of awkwardness is rooted in a indulgent of realism, and that Song gives a indubitably phenomenal performance in the lead.
Remember how much “Jurassic P…
Friday, February 12th, 2010Recollect how much “Jurassic Park” wowed us with its breathtaking shots of what simply had to be real, live dinosaurs, they looked so authentic, and we wanted to go back and watch the membrane again and again because the graphics were so amazing? Correctly, if a few dinosaurs could have that much impact, why not obtain a whole movie devoted to them. Trouble is, this is Disney, not Spielberg. “Dinosaur” is basically a kids’ picture, not an full-grown adventure. These dinosaurs are wonderful to look at, but once they offer their mouths, it’s over for most anyone past twelve. It’s a defamation, too. This could have been a thrilling be borne for children of all ages.
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Let’s get an individual thing straight from the source, for all that. The Disney computer animators would rather created one of the most visually stunning motion pictures of all time. This 2000 movie is spectacularly spectacular on basically every height, from the photorealistic give form to and technique of the animated dinos to the honest-life background shots they’re set in. The intermingle of computer graphics and alight action is seamless, the animals appearing to emerge b be published to life before our eyes as though we were viewing them on some earliest safari. That said, the filmmakers couldn’t come up with anything even resembling a story borderline that would keep a grownup interested for more than a insufficient minutes at a resiliency or create characters that weren’t orderly from the Disney archives of stock cartoon stereotypes. “Dinosaur” is excess to look at, and children intention no doubt enjoy it; but I daresay adults will find mean to care relative to here.
Video:
In combining to the intimate-looking animation, the transfer engineers at Disney have also done a fine vocation. Colors and textures in this THX-certified, 1.74:1 ratio, anamorphic widescreen carbon copy are sufficiently rendered and pass over the fusion of computer-drawn characters and actual landscapes a most natural appearance. That being said, don’t expect the kind of razor-needle-sharp definition inaugurate in the “Toy Story” features. It isn’t like that. There’s a kind of soft mist pervading approximately every scene, I’m prevalent to assume done intentionally to provide an atmosphere of crave ago, that may appear as an ceremonial blurring or fading of hues. One must learn to live with it.
Audio:
The sound, too, is good, if not of the stunning mix again ground in the “Toy Story” efforts. The Dolby Digital 5.1 (DTS audio is also available) signals are robust and loud, to be inescapable, but they are not notably strong the ocean and always lean toward the bright side of the sonic spectrum. Nor is directionality as handily discerned in the left and rational behind speakers as in the “Toy Story” movies. The audiovisual results for “Dinosaur” are quite not bad but nothing you would presumably categorize on to demonstrate the capabilities of your home theater to anyone but the uninitiated.
And Now, Ago To Our Movie:
Conditions, about that slender fib line. It concerns the adventures of a lovable material named Aladar (voice by D.B. Sweeney), a huge herbivore, a plant-eater, something on the order of a smaller brontosaurus. The oldest few minutes of the film show his kidnapping as an egg and his eventual deposit in a far-off land where he hatches. These minutes are in the film’s trailer and comprise some of the best bits in the show. Once hatched, Aladar is adopted by a family of monkeys, lemurs it would appear, and the plot begins to take on the side of Disney’s “Tarzan” from a year earlier. (A assign of the story’s originality is that in another sequence Aladar pretends to make one’s hair stand on end the lemurs and then rolls over and lets them make out him, an idea stolen in chock-full from “Toy Summary II.”)
In his new upon, Aladar is a one-of-a-kind animal, but he finds felicity with his adopted brood, especially with one ragtag primate named Zini (Max Casella). Next, a shower of meteors falls and destroys their homeland, forcing them to flee. It was in all directions time, too. By twenty minutes into the picture I observation I was going to die of boredom from the terminal cuteness of the various critters. As in so tons Disney animations, the animals are given sweet, lovable voice characterizations or gruff, lovable characterizations as the case may be. Frankly, I would have been happier if the animals hadn’t spoken at all. I’m used to animals talking in cartoons, but these animals are so authentic, they aren’t exceptionally cartoons anymore. In any situation, the story could sooner a be wearing been as well told, perhaps even more forcefully told, with no dialogue whatever, exclusively sound effects and a musical background keep an eye on. Well, at least the dinosaurs don’t break completely into performance and leap, which would would rather further spoiled the illusion; but you can bet more than a few folks in the Disney camp in all likelihood backed the idea.