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Elsbeth: An Ear for an Ear (2024)
I just had a plot question.
I just had a plot question. What exactly *is* The Reveal? I do get that it's a post-surgical recuperation facility. But is it part of Vanessa's practice? If so, what is Astrid doing there? The opening scene has her declaring she is going off on her own, and then there was a montage more or less showing that, and suggesting some passage of time. Or is there a way a facility like this can belong to more than one practice together?
To respond to another review, I kind of agree they are not using hardball evidence-based investigation, but rather a lot of reliance on personal reactions of whether different suspects are good people, or (as they do say in this ep) relying on gut feelings and how suspects present themselves. Also the detectives who are opposing Elspeth seem to always give in with good grace when she turns out right,
Absentia (2017)
"Oh let me solve it! I'll just pull out my IVs and stumble out of the hospital, and fix it all!"
"Oh let me solve it! I'll just pull out my IVs and stumble out of the hospital, and fix it all!" Because we have to believe she must not trust anybody. Because she's the most important person in the world, and the conspiracies all wrap around her.
Rake: Mammophile (2014)
out of sequence
As another reviewer notes,.this episode clearly must have been planned for release/broadcast considerably earlier in the series. There are plot elements we have seen in the released main sequence of episodes that are not in place yet in this one -- notably the death of (the first) Mayor Barzmann. Also the state of relationships like Ben & Scarlet or Mikki & Harry-sorry-David.
And in consequence, it was really disappointing. The episode now listed as 12, "Man's Best Friend", leaves several lines of plot and character at a low point, and is quite a downer as a season (or it turns out, series) finale. So I played this episode 13 in the expectation it would be a followup to some of those down sides, and would give us a little relief and redemption.
But No! This was the random skipped episode from earlier, and nothing is going to relieve the gloom of the remaining ending.
It also doesn't speak to the coherence of the series plotting that this episode could be excised from the earlier lines of development without much fuss. E.g. this one finishes off the storyline of Keegan's tax case in Bill Cobbs' court, but we hardly felt the loss of that mysteriously disappearing.
Snow Angels (2007)
Superb character/relationships study!
David Gordon Green is, to my mind, the best up-and-coming director we have working in the general realm of realism. This film, based on a Stewart O'Nan novel I've just begun reading, explores the interests, concerns, relationships (family and romantic), and local dramas of believable well-drawn characters. Among movies I've been aware of coming out this season, this was my most-anticipated one; and I felt my trust was very well rewarded.
Not to be pushing realism as against script self-reflexiveness, trickiness, irrealism, surrealism, and so on -- I can get into any of those, too, when well done. But looking within the traditional alternative of character-based stories, convincingly and movingly told, who is more exciting than Green in his first four features? Only Nicky Katt was a bit disappointing among the players in sizable roles. Amy Sedaris, a little to my surprise, was really spot-on as friend/co-worker Barb, admittedly a somewhat comic part, but with dimensions of outrage and sympathy well beyond what I had thought Sedaris capable of.
I've just begun the novel, but can note already that the screenplay (and realized film) completely solves what looks like a narrative problem in the novel -- Artie is a first-person narrator, but allowed to dramatize scenes he did not witness. The screenplay does put him in the center of the narrative, but without any sense of magic or violation when we are shown scenes outside his ken. The young romance between Artie and Lila is handled perfectly in the screen writing, direction, and acting, and is essential to the movie's feeling of full-spectrum life in this small town. (A preliminary scan through the novel suggests that the adaptation has somewhat sexed-up this relationship, but it's all good!)
Physical Pinball (1998)
Accomplished student short
This accomplished short, done as a student project, appears on the Criterion Collection DVD of director Green's first feature, "George Washington".
It's remarkable that this young Southern white boy can make a film with an even younger Southern black girl at its center, and not have it be about race issues, or gender issues either. Probably Green would say it's more about the semi-rural community life.
I didn't understand why the widower father thought he could help his daughter pick out menstrual supplies. Wouldn't his first reaction be to have her talk to the school nurse, or an aunt, or in fact the cousin who does soon enough show up by chance?
A Day with the Boys (1969)
Fine short from a familiar character actor
Clu Gulager is a familiar face as a veteran character actor. I had no idea he had briefly gone in for directing at one time and made this fine short, in the sixties poetic / experimental mode.
Note: this short is on the Criterion Collection DVD of "George Washington", evidently because David Gordon Green felt influenced by it. I'm glad it has been retrieved from the archives and made available to viewers of today's independent cinema. Green comments on the painterly visual effects (cinematography by László Kovács!), but the more obvious similarities are thematic: the world of kids in the semi-rural south, and how the world of adults impinges on them (and vice versa here of course).
People I Know (2002)
Answer to "Reality Check"
The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in 1965. The dialogue says that Victoria was a 12-year-old. So she would have been born in 1953. Checking Kim Basinger's bio, what was her year of birth? Ah, also 1953. So there is no particular oddity about Victoria's age. I can't agree with the sarcastic remark that "The only way she would have been around Selma at the time of the march on that city would have been in the womb of her mother, if that was so!" No, all she need be is 12 at the time of the march.
This is by no means a great movie, but the complaints in the "Reality Check" review are somewhat off base, most pronouncedly in the matter just explicated. (Ahem, IMDB wants 10 lines...)
The People's Choice (1955)
Memorable for inventing the "secret marriage" ploy
Okay, it was the fifties. You couldn't suggest that attractive, favorable characters, you leads, could be having unmarried sex. But wait! Suppose they're *secretly* married! Then it's okay that they sneak off and do things that don't get explained, but provide opportunity for comedy as they perpetually are almost getting caught.
Celebrity (1998)
What kind of a director would ...
What kind of a director would take a pretty good actor like Kenneth Branagh and make him sound like an early Woody Allen character?
Really, they could have done the situation and some of the character tendencies, without getting stuck in the precise rhythms of the stammer, hesitations, rewinds of the speaking manner. Those are mannerisms, not something to adopt so wholesale.
Carla's Song (1996)
(SPOILER) Resolution of Carla's situation is too PC
(SPOILER) So Carla will stay there, with her disfigured, mute ex-lover. This was not a surprise, and was not interesting. When I say not a surprise, I don't mean it in a praising way or to call it organic or inevitable given the rest of the story. It's inevitable and predictable only from the viewpoint of the script's very dutiful political consciousness. It wouldn't be noble, uplifting, inspiring, etc. etc., for Carla to opt out of the struggle and go back to Scotland with George.
Please let me be clear, I am not objecting to the script's sympathy and engagement with the Sandinistas. I am not objecting to a film having a political outlook, nor do I object to that outlook being on the Left (which is my own standpoint anyway). What I do object to is conditioning the characters' choices according to an imposed external view of what is okay, rather than what has been developing in the story.
Fait Accompli (1998)
A disappointment from a promising package
As previous comments have noted, this has hints that it could have been a serious, superior thriller, what with the talented cast and some quite good writing in-the-small. But the story lines never really cohere and it finally makes no real impact.
Henry & June (1990)
Refreshing reminder, and a club to beat on Moulin Rouge
I saw this in theatrical release when it came out, and just recently on home video. As others have commented here, seeing it now can clarify some of what changed in the assumptions of filmmaking during the 90s. This film isn't apologetic about taking its subjects fairly seriously, even while not getting too solemn or "taking *itself* too seriously" in the bad sense. What I'm trying to say is that it isn't flip, and doesn't feel that it has to elevate cool to the ultimate virtue.
If my code words there haven't made it clear, what I was objecting to was how Tarentino has influenced attitudes. But there's an entirely different kind of crummy moviemaking that actually came to mind as a contrast to Henry and June while I was watching this, and that was Moulin Rouge. Please excuse me for using one movie as a club to bash another, but while watching H & J I really felt this connection and contrast.
Even though the 30s (H&J) was a quite different era from the 1900s (Moulin), they're both distant enough from us to raise similar questions about how to handle that sort of milieu. And they have in common being set among artists and aspirants. "Moulin Rouge" presents Erik Satie and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as characters on the fringe of the story, tossed in for spice perhaps, but gives us not a hint about what Satie's music sounds like, nor a glimpse at any Toulouse-Lautrec canvas (though I credit the production design with getting something of his feel into how the film looks.) We are told the hero is an aspiring artist but have no idea what his work is like, what he thinks, what the artistic times were like -- except a vague profession of "all for love".
"Henry & June" makes pretty clear what Miller's and Nin's aims were in their writing, and even some of the flavor. It also fills in the artistic surroundings, with for instance some of Brassai's photographs as well as using him as a minor character, and a clip from Le Chien Andalou. The score (with the filmmakers realizing the not everything is of-the-moment, and the avant garde of the 30s would still be "processing" the avant garde of the 20s, teens, and before) gives us snippets of Le Sacre du Printemps and some of Satie's piano pieces. (It was hearing the Satie that triggered the comparison for me, since -- as above -- I've been using the absence of his music from Moulin Rouge as an indicator of the shallowness of its approach to its setting.)
The makers of Henry & June figured out that the best way to show us exteriors for Paris of the 30s is to selectively show us Paris of today. This would have worked also for Moulin Rouge, better than the gratuitous and grating special effects. True, some landmarks of the (18)90s and 1900s are gone, but that doesn't call for wholesale resort to animation.
Perceval le Gallois (1978)
The best film made in the Twelfth Century
I've been on a long Rohmer kick this year, and while I greatly enjoy almost all his work I have to admit there are ways they're all rather alike. With two tremendous exceptions: "The Marquise de O." and "Perceval".
I'm glad I read the earlier-placed IMDb comments, it's very helpful to think of this, as someone suggests, as what Chretien would have produced had he had access to filmmaking rather than narrative poetry. 20th Century narrative manners had not yet developed, and what would be quirky (or downright incompetent) structuring in a late 20th Century film are entirely normal in this 12th Century film.
The Pornographer (1999)
Lucky error
I rented this from my local video store under the impression it was a different movie I've been hearing about, listed at IMDB as "The Pornographer: A Love Story (2000)" http://us.imdb.com/Details?0246157 . O fortunate fault, this was quite a good piece of work. I agree with the earlier comment which compared this favorably to "Boogie Nights".
Among the actors, I was particularly impressed by Katheryn Cain and by veteran Craig Wasson. His was a rather familiar face, though I hadn't previously really noted his name, as I will now. (I thought he looked like Bill Maher, and was thus briefly intrigued to see a Maher listed in the long list of "special thanks" credits.)
I guess it's unlikely that in 1999 Kimberly Williams (http://us.imdb.com/Name?Williams,+Kimberly+(I)) would still have been doing a nearly invisible bit part in an indie production, but I thought that was her as the new hire Paul is introduced to in the first law firm scene.
Criminal (1994)
Okay atmospherics
I rather liked the insistent bleakness, and the presumption that the movie can get by on enough of that and not too much else. For that matter, I liked the fairly flat acting, which to my mind was particularly realistic: that is to say, most acting after all is over-acting. The flat, absurd plot (how could he not even give a moment's thought to whether he would conceivably get away with it?) leaves our attention on the "how this sort of thing could happen" aspects, which are actually interesting. I mean "absurd" there rather like "Absurdist", and in case you can't tell, this is meant as a *positive* comment!
Joan of Arc (1999)
Other films on the Jeanne story
Another viewer says:
" I watched this movie mostly because me and my brother have a small argument over which Joan of Arc movie we bothered to pick as our fav. The Leelee Sobieski version or this version. "
Along with these recent films, it's worth mentioning two major icons of film history that deal with Jeanne: Dreyer's 1928 "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc" (http://us.imdb.com/Details?0019254), and Bresson's 1962 "Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc" (http://us.imdb.com/Details?0059616).
Sans toit ni loi (1985)
Looks simple, grows complex and nuanced
I don't know what it was about the first few episodes that turned me off, but something did. -- Perhaps the (mistaken) impression that the film and its author were entirely embracing and espousing Mona's philosophy. But I was won over by the middle, and quite positive about it after re-viewing the beginning sections.
I somewhat disagree with a previous comment about the documentary-style scenes. They might have turned out badly, indeed, if done mechanically, for instance always showing the "interview" scene with someone just after showing the narrative scenes involving that person with Mona, and making them all just about the same length. Instead, the connections and handling of the "interview" scenes are varied, and become interesting, even rather intriguing as when we start getting the story of Yolanda (maid to the half-blind old woman Aunt Lydie), told directly to the camera, *long* before meeting her in the narrative with Mona.
Also intriguing are the almost-last-minute revelations of pre-existing connections among many of those who have encountered Mona -- e.g., when the agronomist (former student of the electrocuted professor) turns out to be Aunt Lydie's nephew that Yolanda has been discussing.
Incidental note: there is at least one additional comment on this 1985 Varda film misfiled in the IMDB comments for a different, 1992 film also known as "Vagabond", at http://us.imdb.com/Title?0105718 .
Question for other viewers [perhaps a slight spoiler]:
Can you please explain what's going on in that town, when Mona (and apparently others) are attacked by the mud-covered men wearing trees??? Are those grapevines? Are these guys agricultural workers, like Assoun? Is it a spontaneous riot, or some sort of semi-recognized local ritual?
Kiss or Kill (1997)
Truly exciting movie with damn near perfect control of tone
The comments from "Niro" have really got it right. This movie seems to belong squarely in that niche genre, the couple caught up in violence, lovers on the run. And it *is* that, and does as good a job of it as I've seen, even while breaking out of your expectations for that story line.
Some of the plot development is worth reserving as a surprise; so I can't be specific about my satisfaction that this movie does not, after all, celebrate or justify violence -- as some other entries in this subgenre callously slip into doing.
All the performances were carried out well. I particularly liked Barry Otto in a smallish but crucial supporting role, and am fast learning to stop confusing him with Geoffrey Rush.
The Jackal (1997)
The 1973 "Day of the Jackal", directed b...
The 1973 "Day of the Jackal", directed by Fred Zinnemann from the Frederick Forsyth novel, while not a masterpiece in the general scheme of things, was nevertheless quite an above-average thriller, written and carried out with considerable panache, wit, and style. It remains a pleasure to rent and watch now and then.
In adapting that for the 1997 "The Jackal", it seems that at every turn the writers and director made the worst possible choice, making it all quite leaden, overdone, unsuspenseful, unsurprising, unsexy, and unthrilling. If we put together a catalog of all the specifics that went into this movie, big and small, I could give you a mini-essay for each topic on how the 1997 adaptation ****ed up.
Item: the weapon.
In the original, there is considerable intrigue over how the assassin is going to smuggle it onto the scene, how he intends to disguise it, and why it needs custom work from his underground craftsmen. In the remake, they apparently thought that today's action-flick-raised audiences wouldn't tolerate a small rifle whose point is precision and would demand the lugubrious off-the-shelf machine gun, which needs a minivan to transport it, and whose point is to shout Macho. The whole involved and interesting business about disguising its components, has been reduced to showing us (repeatedly, like this is a difficult point to follow?) that the joystick for his absurdly high-tech remote-control system has been in his pocket as a pen.
Item: the conspirators and motive.
Without resorting to dry lecture, the original still manages to give us a good understanding of the historical situation of the "pieds-noirs" [ "blackfeet"], the French-Algerian irredentists who could not accept that the century was moving away from colonialism, and formed the view that De Gaulle had betrayed them. This gives the whole plot some historical weight. The remake seems to leave it as a gangland-shootout revenge story, minimally spicing it up by making them Russian gangsters. Note please that I'm not opposed to updating: they could have done this intelligently and come up with something more current but non-trivial. Certainly Russia and the rest of ex-USSR have been through huge changes of late, and an updated story could have been situated there in a way that would make us feel that it *matters*.
Item: the relationship of the assassin on the run and the police hunting him down; and the complex steering of the viewer's sympathies from the bad guy to the good guy.
Above I hesitated somewhat at calling the original a masterpiece overall; but in this aspect it really was one. We follow along with the assassin for much of the first portions of the film, and having seen his cleverness and resourcefulness we begin to admire him, and not want to see his plan thwarted or see him caught -- at least, not too soon! Then we meet the policeman who gets pushed into heading up the investigation / protection efforts, and bit-by-bit we take to him, and see he is not the sad-sack his domestic troubles may have suggested. By the time it matters, we have been won over to his side.
In the remake, perhaps Poitier could have handled that sort of development , but Gere sure can't. And the absurd "48 Hours"-derived gimmick of the con brought out to help the police should have been left in those comedies where it came from.
The remake has the assassin and the assassin-hunter *talk* about how they 're like players above a chessboard, communicating indirectly via their moves and only able to *infer* what the other is like. That was achieved superbly in the original. But in the remake in fact they're brought into face-to-face confrontation way too soon, so they can grimace at each other, bloody the place up, and go through some fairly standard chase scenes.
Item: photography, and "scenery".
The remake does have some nice images, particularly in snowy Finland in the opening section. But the Washington, D.C Metro cannot really compete with the streets of Paris for interesting perspectives and bystander faces.