Change Your Image
lottnewborne
Reviews
Revengers Tragedy (2002)
absolutely agree with writer of "Atrocious" review
Even worse than Liz and Dick's heavy panting and grunting SHREW, this epic seems determined to obscure any connection to its source material. Twenty years later, timelessly bad,
The Humans (2021)
great play destroyed by its writer/director
Saw the play in both NYC productions and was extremely eager to get a DVD of a film version. The strength of the play is the closeness of the family members, but the movie has no interest in the family as connected, warm (yes) human beings and instead is obsessed with obscuring them into tenement cockroaches. Obsessed with any distraction from involving us with them as people, this isn't THE HUMANS but THE BUILDING.
I kept waiting for the actual play to start ,,, and waiting and waiting. Instead lots of artsy long-shot geometric photography of irrelevancies to the script, whose occasional scraps of dialogue are swallowed in empty-room echoes at a distance or outside the frame apparently defying us to listen and comprehend them, to connect the words to characters uttering them, and thus purposely daring us to engage with the story.
I miss the original theatrical cast and the connectedness they supplied to the expertly developed plotting and character nuances. All of which is lost with these daughters who lack any hint of belonging to this would-be family. By the time the far-away actors finally gathered around a distant dinner table, I didn't want to struggle through the wall echoes to hear them, much less take the trouble to know about them.
Yes, plays are about words and movies are about visuals, but devoting this production to an adamant obliteration of the words, the plot, characters and, therefore, the drama is an ego-trip devastation by a wannabe Antonioni: an NYU film school travesty perpetrated (incredibly!) by the actual THE HUMAN playwright who long ago devised such a brilliant theatrical drama. Magicians use misdirection; this direction more than misses--it messes into less than a meh.
Margin Call (2011)
If Chayefsky wrote THE BIG SHORT for PLAYHOUSE 90
I can't find my first copy of this DVD, so clips on YouTube led me to buy it again. Some responses stay the same: excellent ensemble cast, lamenting that a mature Demi had apparently aged out of major roles (sadder still a decade later), surprise to learn that Spock is lefthanded, etc. But the main take-away is about Kevin Spacey--not in contrast with his Wiseguy blockbuster nor his current Kultur Krotch defamation, but how his performance (and physical appearance) make clear his role was tailormade for Gene Hackman (or, in Chayefsky's draft E. G. Marshall without the dying dog). The low-key sostenuto (spared the razzle-dazzle of WALL STREET, THE BIG SHORT, and other movies about this subject) allows and encourages the main conflict and the actors to develop expansively. Don't miss it!
The Iron Lady (2011)
a mess
Much of Britain would argue that "Disrespectful Throughout" is describing one of the most despised Brit politicians since Cromwell, except its narrative is SO botched that the movie is too badly edited and circuitously incoherent to convey ANY sustained interest for M. S. to latch onto.