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The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes Zeitgeist Films

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The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes | Culture | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

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Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]

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New York Times (registration req'd) Jeannette Catsoulis, November 17, 2006, also here: The New York Times (Jeannette Catsoulis) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Brian Montgomery and Yunda Eddie Feng

EURYDICE…SHE, SO BELOVED

Great Britain (12 mi) 2007

DVD Outsider Slarek (Excerpt)

A live action musical interpretation Orpheus' quest to rescue his dead lover Eurydice from Hades, bristling with extraordinary monochrome imagery, into which colour quietly bleeds in the later stages. An appreciation of the music is probably required to get the most out of the film, despite its visual splendour, and it's not as instantly recognisable as a Quay Brothers work as the two preceding shorts.

VERTIGO | To See, If Only Once: Eurydice - She, So Beloved… James Rose from Vertigo, Winter 2008

The Black Lodge [James Rose]

Eurydice…She, So Beloved, a film by the Brothers Quay John Coulthart, May 20, 2015

Qubeka, Jahmil X.T.

OF GOOD REPORT B 85

South Africa (109 mi) 2013 Website Trailer

An extremely provocative South African film, where the director was born in South Africa, raised in East London, educated in English, where his first feature film is something of an homage to genre pictures, including film noir, as it is shot in low contrast Black and White and features a lead character, Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano), a teacher by trade who is besieged by hallucinations, yet never utters a word. The film certainly plays on audience expectations, where it’s hard to believe anyone entering the theater could have possibly anticipated what this film delivers, as it’s a bit mind blowing. With only one film under his belt, Qubeka is already the bad boy of South Africa, a bit like the brash style of Tarantino, but Qubeka is much more experimental, where the director does resort to exploitive and often horrific imagery, including the naked body of a minor, which has generated criticism that he’s a child pornographer, yet supposedly the film was made to elevate a public discussion on social issues, specifically gender violence. One might question whether the best way to elucidate the issue is to make a film where an adult brutalizes a young girl, but that is one of the fundamental problems in South Africa, where according to the Human Rights watch in 2001, “for many South African girls, violence and abuse are an inevitable part of the school environment.” This is a nation where educators misuse their authority and sexually abuse young girls. It’s not young boys that are impregnating young girls, it’s those with money (which the kids certainly don’t have), the stereotypical “sugar daddy.” In one South African province alone, KwaZulu-Natal, today there are somewhere between 10 – 15,000 female students that become pregnant each year, astonishing figures, which don’t even take into account the number who may have contracted HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.

Initially scheduled to premiere at the Durban International Film Festival, the largest in South Africa, the film was banned prior to the screening on child pornographer issues, something that took the filmmaker completely by surprise as he wasn’t aware they banned films in South Africa post 1994, where prior to that they banned everything, “including Eddie Murphy movies.” The Durban Festival has a history of protest, and of showing taboo work, where even during the apartheid era when films were routinely banned, the festival found a way to show those films. Within about 10 days, the court overturned the ban, as the actress playing the 16-year old child is actually 23, and allowed the film to be seen on the final day of the festival. Mind you, this film offers no moralizing or lectures of any kind, and isn’t remotely a message film, but is a hugely subversive take on genre films, using a radical musical score from Philip Miller, much of it drawn from his LP Music for the Films of William Kentridge, whose unnerving dissonance keeps the audience disoriented and provides a shattered sensibility, reflecting the psychological breakdown of the lead character, Parker Sithole, who served time as a soldier before reporting for duty in an impoverished rural South African township with no local connections, yet he comes with excellent recommendations, a man “of good report” during a time of teacher shortages, so he’s seen as exactly what they need and is immediately enlisted as a school teacher, where everyone involved with the school has high hopes for this shy and quietly introverted man. So with inverted expectations, it’s a bit shocking to see him instead develop into a deranged psychopath, where the film shows the early origins of a serial killer, where Parker becomes sexually involved with a beautiful underage girl, Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma), something of a sirenesque Lolita who turns out to be one of the students in his class, but rather than end the relationship, he escalates the time they spend together, becoming more and more sexually obsessed, where he does little to hide his prurient interest in her.

Using flashbacks and dream sequences, along with frequent hallucinations, Parker goes berserk when Nolitha leaves him, becoming Othello to her Desdemona, often veering into the horror genre, where the past and present converge and it’s often hard to distinguish between some of his mad ravings that exist only in his head and what actually happens, much like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000). While offering a convincing portrait of a tortured man who can’t help himself, it recalls Peter Lorre in M (1931), a psychopathic pedophile who can’t stop himself from kidnapping and murdering little girls. Parker is a miserably lonely man, likely stripped of all dignity during apartheid, endlessly wallowing away his time as a soldier, where he learns to kill, slowly losing touch with the world as he descends further into the moral abyss, escalating into utter depravity, becoming a nightmarish vision of Hell on earth where he hermetically seals himself away from the world outside, utterly alone with his handiwork. We see what he does, which for some will be graphically excessive, generating gasps in the audience, and we see him get away with it, at least temporarily, where he lives to do it all over again, like a deadly parasite attaching itself to another living form. Opening and closing with the same visual motif, a man stumbling through the desert, where the camera shows nothing above the waist and focuses only on his dirty boots covered in mud and dust, a highly effective device, as the film is about the arrival of a stranger, a non entity, someone with no local roots, who comes bearing excellent recommendations, a man “of good report,” where much like the white-gloved, overly polite boys in Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), no sooner have they brutally murdered one family before they move on to the next. Of interest, this is a South African and Icelandic production, where one wonders where the Icelanders came into the picture. The director, who was present for the screening, suggested he would love to come back to this character in about 20 years and pick it up again. When he made it, he was hoping it would become a cult film. It’s a strange and intensely moody portrayal of a post-apartheid society that fails to recognize the continuing existence of an evil presence lurking within, that lives invisibly among us, where over the end credits the film turns to color with an animated red Devil dancing off to the side, a laughing reminder of more victims yet to come.

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]

Originally banned in South Africa, “Of Good Report” also features a strong silent type, albeit a psychopathic one in teacher Parker Sithole. The film’s opening is from the point of view of a shambling monster picking teeth out of his head, like a horror movie walking onto the set of a Sergio Leone Western. Through seamless flashbacks we stitch together Parker’s murky past as a U.N. soldier and a widely respected educator. A drunken liaison with the stunning Nolitha at a bar proves to be the catalyst for the already disturbed Parker to delve into the very depths of depravity when she is later revealed to be of his new pupils.

Jahmil XT Qubeka’s filmis startling, not only for the controversial subject matter but also for the sheer audacity and competency of his direction. Parker shouts, growls, bleats, cries and howls but never speaks-some feat when he is in virtually every scene, at times his hang dog face elicits sympathy. A risky sexual encounter with Nolitha in a toilet cubicle turns into nerve-shredding suspense when her friends are locked outside. We should be shouting from the rooftops for Parker to get caught, but instead we are deceived into rooting for him to escape, because Qubeka manipulates his audience just like Parker manipulates an entire community. “Of Good Report” then leaves the same savage aftertaste as “Cold Fish” or Richard Stanley’s “Dust Devil” and a character in Parker Sithole as shocking as Travis Bickle or Patrick Bateman.

In Review Online [Calum Reed]

Of Good Report, the striking feature-length debut of South African filmmaker Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, opens with the scene of a battered and bloodied man stumbling across a treacherous African desert. It's a particularly unsettling opening for what is, on paper, a seemingly familiar domestic drama about an affair between a male teacher and his female pupil, but one that immediately implants an underlying sense of gruesome volatility that never quite detaches itself from the film's core.

With its stark black-and-white photography and mournful brass-driven musical accompaniment, Qubeka’s style casts the African continent in an altogether different light, immersing us in the cultural identity of the locale but draining away its natural mystique. The Africa of this film is a wilderness rife with primal sexuality and simmering aggression, its monochrome veneer visually hinting at its later detective-led noir plot elements. The film’s story structure, too, bears elements of a classic noir mystery like Crossfire (1947), melding flashbacks and hallucinations into the central narrative with comfortable ease.

In the dread-inducing way that it is able to shift perceptions of its tortured male character, Of Good Report echoes William Wyler’s The Collector (1965), whose antagonist Freddie Clegg slowly transforms from a harmless mummy’s boy to an erratic potential psycho. The psychological turmoil of the teacher, Parker (Mothusi Mangano), bears some similarities to that of Clegg, but unlike Terence Stamp in Wyler’s film, Magano is too disconcertingly opaque and expressionless when called upon to convincingly relay the introverted man’s disturbed inner life.

Even if the acting isn’t always up to par, though, Qubeka’s direction picks up enough of the slack for the film to make an impact nevertheless; his mirroring of the film’s opening and closing sequences is especially effective at heightening its impact as a cynical tale of past trauma and unforeseen danger. Qubeka’s directorial command provides Of Good Report with a lasting bitterness and visceral power rarely seen in cinema these days.

The film you're not allowed to see Charl Blignaut from City Press, July 28, 2013

Of Good Report, denied a classification by the Film and Publication Board, views SA through a prism that makes for uncomfortable viewing. Charl Blignaut sees what you’re not allowed to

The biggest problem when it comes to the discussion around the banning of Jahmil Qubeka’s Of Good Report is that few people have seen it. I have.

It was available to journalists as an online screener ahead of the Durban International Film Festival.

Unfortunately, I saw it on a computer and not in a cinema. I have no doubt it’ll be even more impressive on a big screen.

And it is impressive. Shot in black and white as a homage to film noir, it’s a very dark comedy told as an African Western by a bona fide auteur. It’s a fresh, confident, quirky and accomplished art-house movie with excellent performances and a genius score. It takes experimental South African film up several notches.

What it doesn’t do is wag a moral finger or try drive its message home. It isn’t a piece of social realism or a “message film” (whatever that is). It’s not the kind of film that pushes a line in “nation building” that government film agencies are so keen to see on our screens (think Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday).

Neither does it push a notion of “social cohesion” because it’s about social disintegration and a country of crumbling morals – where an older man, a man “of good report”, can get away with murder. And our sugar daddies do, every day.

When the film maker approached the National Film and Video Foundation for funding they rejected his application because, they said, it doesn’t “offer a protagonist we can root for”. They advised him to look at Red Dragon or Dexter to up the lead character Parker Sithole’s moral convictions.

But easy comparison or classification evades this film. And this makes the debate around its depiction of underage sex even more complicated.

Because the language of the film is difficult, its classifiers will need to understand film language first. And if you see the film, you will wonder if they do.

The sex scene in question is stylised and absolutely inexplicit. It’s the least of the problems the film raises. Yes, the girl is 16, but so is the age of consent.

The Film and Publication Board (FPB) is governed by an act that says she must be 18 or older. The actress playing her is 23.

Where “the aesthetic element is predominant, the image will not constitute pornography”, stated former chief justice Pius Langa. By this definition – a landmark judgment by the Constitutional Court on the FPB’s definition of pornography – Of Good Report is not pornography.

It’s not an overtly political film either. When it takes a jab at political corruption it does so symbolically – President Jacob Zuma talking on the TV while a poster of him is stuck to a wall next to it. The message is clear, but you have to work to find it.

Most people who end up seeing this film will probably not even realise, by the end, that Sithole doesn’t utter a single line of dialogue in it.

He’s a miserable and comical man, stripped of his dignity by apartheid and hardened by his former life as a soldier. He is a killer who is unable to get in touch with his emotions.

In one scene, we finally see him cry. Except he doesn’t. The tin roof of his room is leaking and water is dripping on to his face. When he meets Nolitha, she offers a small glimmer of joy in his dark life.

Yes, she’s a Lolita. She thinks it’ll be fun to seduce this man in authority, her teacher.

She appears to even enjoy the sex. Perhaps it’s this that really upset the FPB.

Here we have a real and complex character who doesn’t easily fit into the portrayal of South African women as either virgins or whores – as academic Sarah Dawson argues in The Con, an online magazine.

Dawson saw the film when helping make selections for the Durban festival. She proposes our problem with Nolitha is we don’t know how to classify her because we barely recognise her rights in our patriarchal society.

The banning, she writes, “has happened purely because the sexualised young female of Nolitha doesn’t yet have a proper meaning in this society”.

As Of Good Report’s powerful final scene ends, it instantly took its place in my all-time South African top-10 favourite films.

Our poor moral report - City Press Senzo Mchunu from City Press, August 19, 2013

“Of Good Report”? - Africa is a Country Zachary Levenson from Africa Is a Country, August 19, 2013

Reopening the debate about censorship, art and its value ... - Africiné Hans-Christian Mahnke

Of Good Report | tiff.net

Durban Festival Opening Night Screening Canceled as Government ...

Durban Fest Offers Rare Spotlight on African Cinema - The ... Rutendo Nyamuda

Of Good Report: The serial killer movie they tried to ban - CNN.com CNN interviews the director, August 21, 2013

Of Good Report: The Serial Killer Movie they Tried to Ban Eric Ford interviews the director from Houston Style magazine, August 21, 2013

Qubeka Brings Anarchy, Mayhem, Dissent to S.A. Biz | Variety Alex Stedman interviews the director from Variety, July 18, 2013

Quillévéré, Katell

LOVE LIKE POISON (Un Poison Violent) B+ 91

France (92 mi) 2010

When you were here before
Couldn't look you in the eye
You're just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry

You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You're so fucking special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here

I don't care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice
When I'm not around
You're so fucking special
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here

She's running out the door
She's running
She run, run, run, run
Run

Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You're so fucking special
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here
I don't belong here

—“Creep,” by Thom Yorke, Radiohead, 1992

From the opening pan of parishioners singing inside a church, this film shows how French culture remains dominated by the influence of the Catholic Church, yet is also a rapturously beautiful coming-of-age story of a sensitive young 14-year old girl, given a thoroughly intelligent overview as seen through the observant eyes of this female writer/director. After attending a private girl’s boarding school, Anna (Clara Augarde) returns to her small town home to spend the summer, where she is reunited with her over-controlling mother (Lio), her sexually candid but dying grandfather (Michel Galabru), along with Pierre (Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil) a cute young boy who enjoys spending time with her. What immediately grabs our attention is the use of music, where the old English folksong “Greensleeves” sung by Barbara Dane, has a mesmerizing effect, where the piercingly melancholic mood is heart rendering, sung during a downpour of rain that falls over the French countryside. This sets the tone for the use of more songs, each bearing a personal stamp of intimacy, many of them folk songs from an earlier era. This music coincides with a young girl’s self-awakening, the discovery of her own body, and the effect she has on the opposite sex. At the same time, her parents are going through a bitter separation which leaves her traumatized by their seemingly petty bickering. The other main character is the parish priest (Stefano Cassetti), a bearded, wire-rimmed young man who expresses genuine interest in the lives of others. As she prepares for her confirmation, one of the more interesting scenes is Anna expressing her doubts to the priest, who reminds her that this is quite common with people of faith, that Mother Theresa continually doubted her faith throughout her life, so this shouldn’t in any way diminish her thoughts of herself as a primarily good person.

The film is understated and low key throughout, where Augarde as Anna is surprisingly assured in this her first screen role, where her character yearns for a kind of individuality and freedom she doesn’t have, that no one has, as problems seem to fall on the shoulders of everyone, holding everyone back. Even in the tenderest moments between mother and daughter, this will be followed by an all too depressed mother who remains bitter and angry at her father, becoming overly critical and hurtful in her remarks to Anna. The film plays out like a short story, as the attention to meticulous details of small-town life is essential to the overall mood of Anna’s experience, as her life unfolds through a series of vignettes that she shares with various people, where her maturity and kindness feels more highly evolved than others around her, where perhaps only the priest has a pretty good window into her character. At her confirmation, the Bishop brought in to speak chooses excerpts from the Apostle Paul which are a harsh reminder of sins of the flesh, which is the only message he’s conveying to a group of teenagers who pretty much only have thoughts of the flesh on their minds at that age. This example of the Church being so out of touch with their everyday lives contrasts heavily with Anna’s own rhapsodic sexual discoveries, which are a universe of walking contradictions, the sacred and the profane. The real showstopper, however, is the extraordinary use of an all woman’s choir singing the Radiohead song “Creep,” (heard here on YouTube: scala creep radiohead 4:45), which reverberates like a church choir, but with a much more humane message that speaks so earnestly about the transparency of the human soul, where all we ever really want is to feel human.

The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]

The teenage daughter of a divorcing couple begins to feel the first pangs of love just as she is about to undergo her religious confirmation. Sensitive coming-of-age tale as seen through the eyes of people struggling with issues of identity and faith, sensibly performed and directed.

CIFF 2010: LOVE LIKE POISON Ben Sachs from Cine-File

A fourteen-year-old girl returns from Catholic boarding school to spend the summer in her small-town home, where she must confront her parents’ separation, her grandfather’s slow death, and the attentions of a cute boy in the neighborhood. This is familiar material, to be sure, but writer-director Katell Quillévéré displays such feeling for her characters and setting that the film doesn’t feel like a series of clichés. She’s also surprisingly frank in depicting sexual subject matter without letting it overwhelm the story at hand: This isn’t THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS, but it isn’t Catherine Breillat territory, either. Quillévéré is after a holistic portrait of adolescence, and her tone–probing, attentive to small things, and honest in its emotional content–reflects the manner in which many teenagers aspire to see themselves. Also commendable is the film’s treatment of Catholicism, which is serious without turning reverent or critical: Anna may come to doubt her religious teaching, but Quillévéré wants us to know that doubt is perfectly natural, too. In recent movies as diverse as Krzysztof Zanussi’s A WARM HEART and Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s GORDOS, European cinema has provided images of religious and secular values operating in mature co-existence; and LOVE LIKE POISON provides several more. (The character of a self-effacing, soccer-playing priest is especially charming.) This is more of a cultural achievement than a cinematic one, but it’s edifying all the same.

Love Like Poison (Un Poison Violent) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Small communities, Catholicism and burgeoning sexuality - it’s a classic, some might say over-familiar, combination in French debut features. But it’s rarely carried off with such confidence and subtlety as in Love Like Poison, Katel Quillévéré’s superb drama, which has already won the 2010 Jean Vigo Prize for first features.

Given the low-key quality of the narrative, there’s nothing obviously commercial in the film, apart from the presence of two stalwart names with some mainstream cachet - Lio and veteran comic actor Michel Galabru. But the film’s sheer command, and the candid central performance by promising newcomer Clara Augarde, will win the film equal support from critics and audiences on the festival circuit, which should help it to respectable sales in a select art-house bracket.

Fourteen-year-old Anna (Augarde) has returned from boarding school to her village in Brittany, where she lives with her mother Jeanne (Lio) in the house of her elderly, ailing paternal grandfather Jean (Galabru). Anna’s father Paul (Neuvic) is absent - he turns up only late in the film - as he and Jeanne have broken up.

One gap between them, it seems, is Jeanne’s committed Catholicism, which Paul doesn’t share and has only recently become a problem for them. Things are complicated by the increasingly depressed Jeanne’s attraction to easy-going young village priest Père François (Cassetti). Anna, meanwhile, is caught between her own religious convictions - she’s due for her confirmation - and her teenage sexual stirrings, which are awakened by choirboy Pierre (Leboulanger-Gourvil), a precocious squirt who’s in a hurry to get beyond best-friend stage.

Not a great deal happens, but when it does, it means a lot: two funerals, a couple of faintings on Jeanne’s part, and a genuinely tense moment between Jeanne and François in which it looks as if he’s going to have to do some soul-searching and fast.

There are also some delicate, but boldly handled, scenes of exploratory physicality between the two kids, which Augarde and the engaging Leboulanger-Gourvil carry off fearlessly, but with just the edge of nervousness that the material calls for.

Galabru, generally associated with broader material, brings an imposing sense of crumbling physicality - it’s anything but a vain performance, given the actor’s age and girth - and has a good time as a blustering rager against piety. Some unsettling sexually-charged scenes between the old man and Anna are carried off with a shrewdly judged tone that shows how much Quillévéré is on top of her material.

The film is beautifully shot by Tom Harari, who captures faces and the Breton landscape with equal sensitivity, and a very individual soundtrack includes English folk songs, church choirs and a highly unconventional Radiohead cover over the end credits.

Variety (Alissa Simon) review

Small in scale, but beautifully written, extremely well-played and sensually lensed, "Love Like Poison" from first-time French helmer Katell Quillevere centers on a middle-class 14-year-old in the Breton countryside about to celebrate her confirmation in the Catholic church. Winner of the 2010 Jean Vigo prize, this naturalistic coming-of-ager encompasses the cycle of life from adolescence through infirmity, confirming the ongoing demands of the flesh and the way they frequently conflict with religious faith. Kudos, strong reviews and name adult cast will draw auds in French-lingo territories with extended life in ancillary. Quality fest item could find niche distribution offshore.

When Anna (newcomer Clara Augarde) arrives at the remote village home of her ailing grandfather (Michel Galabru) during spring break from her Catholic boarding school, she finds her father (Thierry Neuvic) has finally left her devout mother (Lio). While her mother seeks consolation from local priest Father Francois (Stefano Cassetti), Anna cares for her earthy grandfather and explores her budding sexuality with neighboring teen Pierre (Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil).

After a trio of short films, Quillevere appears an assured director of actors, achieving an impressive credibility in both familial heart-to-hearts and scenes of teens on their own. Although her depiction of the relationship between the mother and the priest occasionally feels a little heavy-handed, she makes entire pic underscore theme of the contradictory impulses between one's imposed education and inherent instincts.

Obviously a personal story, prize-winning script by Quillevere and Mariette Desert opposes Anna's youth and beauty with her mother's jealousy over loss of same and her bon vivant grandfather's last stirrings of physical pleasure. Anna's wrestling with her faith is mirrored by Father Francois's own struggle, while protag's essential innocence and the provincial setting offers a refreshing change from current spate of pics about promiscuous, disaffected urban teens.

As Anna, curvaceous redhead Augarde reps a true find. With her lively intelligence, malleable features and sexy figure, she can look forward to a long career. Meanwhile, octogenarian comic actor Galabru steals every scene he's in, bringing an affecting poignancy to a man who has lived life to the fullest but now faces death. In smaller parts, the rest of the adult cast acquit themselves strongly.

Standing out among solid craft credits, the lush location camerawork of Tom Harari fluidly shifts between handheld and dolly work. The well-chosen music track, including hymns and American folk tunes, anchors pic's mood of melancholy and rapture.

French title refers to a Serge Gainsbourg song, though sales agents may want to find a more resonant, less forbidding English moniker.

Camera (color), Tom Harari; editor, Thomas Marchand; music, Olivier Mellano; music consultant, Frank Beauvais; set designer, Anna Falgueres; costume designer, Mahemiti Deregnaucourt; sound (Dolby Digital), Emmanuel Croset; line producer, Mathieu Verhaeghe; casting, Sarah Teper, Leila Fournier, Francois Guignard. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight), May 14, 2010. Running time: 92 MIN.

IONCINEMA.com review [2/5] Eric Lavallee

Soft Touch Dustin Chang from Floating World

The Hollywood Reporter review Bernard Besserglik

Creep (Radiohead song) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

scala creep radiohead “Creep” Scala & Kolacny Brothers (4:45)

SUZANNE B+ 92

France Belgium (91 mi) 2013 Website

Quillévéré’s earlier film, LOVE LIKE POISON (2010), is a beautiful coming-of-age story, one that reflects a rare insight into the mindset of female youth, often using superb choices of music to expand the depth of character. Along with Xavier Dolan, the Canadian French-speaking wunderkind from Montreal, both are among the best of the new directors in probing the interior worlds of today’s youth, where Dolan uses more experimentation, such as wildly colorful artificiality mixed with heavy doses of realism, continually changing the film speed, literally immersing the audience in music, along with shifting moods and atmosphere. Quillévéré is often harsh, brutally honest, heavy on the stark realism in this French working-class drama, but ultimately generous, reaching for a poetic intimacy with her characters, where both use music and novelesque detail to accentuate complexity, ambitiously covering 25 years here in just 90-minutes, where what’s left unsaid or the spaces in between scenes often express more than words could ever do, which means both directors rely upon powerful performances, giving the audience something they’re not used to. That is certainly the case here, which has one of the more beautifully photographed openings, as it’s a colorful montage of exuberant young kindergarten age girls getting dressed up in red, sequined costumes and feathers in their hair, along with sparkle on their faces, just before they give a dance performance. It’s exactly the sort of thing every young girl experiences and it’s a moment to be showcased publicly in front of eager parents with their cameras, where applause and approval greet them afterwards, where it’s a wondrous expression of the innocence of happiness.

Jump ahead ten years, Suzanne (Sara Forestier) and her younger sister Maria (Adèle Haenel) are flirtatious teenage girls living with their widowed father, (François Damiens), who’s often away for extended durations driving a truck, but we also see times when he picks them up after school in his truck, where the warm enthusiasm shows. They are a close-knit family, where the two girls do everything together, always looking out for one another’s interests, while they also join their Dad on regular visits to their deceased mother’s grave. What quickly develops is Suzanne has a mind of her own, often at odds with everybody else, including her father, where her idea of independence is not having to listen to anybody tell her what to do. When she gets pregnant, letting the school inform her father, as she hates confronting him, their relationship instantly deteriorates. Jump ahead five more years, where Suzanne and Maria are seen frequenting bars hauling around her son Charlie, often asleep on her shoulder, but he’s passed around whenever someone wants to get up and dance. When she meets Julien (Paul Hamy), something of a punk gangster with a flair for gambling, irresponsibility, and leaving out the important details, where he tends to get in trouble, often having to leave town on the spur of the moment. When it’s time to make a quick dash, Suzanne leaves Charlie behind, where she doesn’t see him for another several years, but hears that he’s living with a foster family from her attorney inside a prison cell. Without providing any backdrop of this development, the news is received like an emotional cluster bomb, where she literally drops from the impact.

Forestier’s strength is never overplaying any scene, showing quick bursts of infuriorated emotion followed by an immediate attempt at a getaway, usually protected by her sister, where she doesn’t stick around for the lectures or moralizing. Her dizzying love affair with Julien went from being a deliriously rapturous expression of never wanting to say goodbye to never being mentioned again, but when she receives a necklace from him she literally melts. She’s an emotional whirlwind of changing moods, a wandering soul that follows her heart and her desires at the expense of everything else, where the audience may be as exasperated with her as her father, but the director always presents her in a non-judgmental light, where the film continuously explores her unique qualities that make her what she is. When her father has to sit in court and listen to the unending list of charges being made against her, none of which she denies, it’s an utterly devastating moment, as this is not the vivacious little girl we saw in the opening shot. Co-written by the director and Mariette Désert, this is a stunning exposé of indefatigable strength followed by incredulous naïveté, where she’s instantly elated or sullenly depressed, but never for a second does she express vanity or pretension. The bracing scenes of realism with the intoxicating allure of love have rarely been captured with this degree of melancholic immediacy, eventually leading to pure heartbreak, where Quillévéré creates sympathy for a woman who would otherwise typically be seen as an outcast. The hauntingly atmospheric music composed by Verity Susman from the all-girl English band Electrelane offers an impressionistic palette, where this beautifully observed, pieced-together drama has a way of rendering its full impact at the end, once we get a fuller picture of her life, where music high priestess Nina Simone sings the Leonard Cohen song live at Montreaux in 1976 over the end credits, seen here in Rome 1969 at the Teatro Sistina Nina Simone - Suzanne (Live) - YouTube (6:28).

Cannes 2013: Suzanne – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Catherine Shoard at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2013

This up-tempo drama from a young French woman director is acutely observed and at times almost unbearably moving

There may be only one female director with a film in competition at Cannes this year, but new work from women opened both the Un Certain Regard and Critics' Week sidebars. Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (which kicked off the former) was all swag and slebs; Suzanne could hardly be less concerned with shopping. The second feature from 33-year-old Katell Quillévéré, it's the sort of woozily shot, remorselessly emotional, acutely observed socio-realist soap that both confounds and confirms chick-flick prejudice.

Baldly recalled, it sounds like a telenovela: Suzanne and her elder sister, Maria, live with their widowed father in the Languedoc. We see them first in primary school, then as Suzanne (Sara Forestier) is about to leave secondary and announces she's pregnant. Flash forward five years and Charlie is part of the family (his father is never seen or spoken of) and Suzanne works in the office of the trucking company that employs dad. Then she falls in love, with Nicolas (Paul Hamy) who feels the same, but he's a small-time gangster, and when he must leave, Suzanne must choose between him and her family.

It weighs in at just 90 minutes, but Quillévéré crams in 25 years of life, with chiming between the early and late scenes; it takes time to absorb. The rapidity of the jumping between years cuts both ways: the pace is kept tight, but you're often left reeling, not given space for events to settle before their repercussions have already become bread-and-butter to the characters. It's a device that lends the film unusual oomph but after a few too many slaps can feel manipulative.

Yet the brilliance of Quillévéré's direction is in the performances she coaxes from her cast, and the clear-eyed, non-judgmental way she presents them. François Damiens, a Belgian actor previously seen bumbling about in the likes of Heartbreaker and Delicacy, is brilliant as the father: almost unbearably moving in a courthouse scene in which a roll-call of minor charges are levelled at his daughter, whom he hasn't seen for years. As the sister who moves from tearaway to matriarch, Adèle Haenel is terrific, too; but Sara Forestier is just indelible in the lead, brimful of feeling and sympathetic stupidity, now depressed, now quixotic, never obvious or vain.

Mostly, Quillévéré manages to match her lead (there's a brilliant shot from a window of Suzanne and her boyfriend parting), but from time to time the switchback tempo and on-the-button music cues (the Leonard Cohen song is reserved for final credits) highlight Forestier's brilliance by comparison.

Suzanne Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Suzanne | Reviews | Screen

The second feature from Love Like Poison director Katell Quillevere confirms her talent for capturing the precious moments that can define and shape a life. Suzanne offers snapshots of the title character from carefree child to careworn adult. There are rare moments of joy, reckless decisions, heartache and much more in a film that feels like flicking through a family album filled with births, deaths, wrong turns and piercing regrets.

The random nature and episodic structuring of the film presents a problem as it tends to work against a complete emotional investment in what is unfolding. Too many gaps in the narrative are left unexplained or there is such a compression of developments that it risks feeling superficial at best or melodramatic at worst. Quillevere may be guilty of striving to achieve too much in such a conventional running time but there is still enough in the trials and tribulations of Suzanne’s downbeat life to engage the heart and secure further

Festival exposure and a decent theatrical life for the film. Quillevere has a real gift for bringing out the best in her performers. The early scenes of children putting on a show and the giggly fondness between the young Suzanne (Apollobia Luisetti) and her sister Maria (Fanie Zanini) are among the best in the film; fresh, naturalistic and entirely true to life.

They are also among the happiest even as we are made aware of their mother’s death and the widowed father (Francois Damiens) who does his best to care for them. The mood darkens as we quickly jump forward to the day the father is called to school to be informed that Suzanne (Sara Forestier) is pregnant, to a kiss that means everything to Suzanne and her boyfriend Julien (Paul Hamy), to the day she abandons her son and other stops along the way in a life that tips into a downward spiral.

The intensity of Sara Forestier keeps you on the side of what could be construed as a fairly selfish, irresponsible character and there is an equally impressive performance from Adele Haenel as the adult Maria, a woman who remains a loyal and loving sister through everything that happens.

It is only when the narrative moves forward too rapidly that it starts to lose its grip. Years pass, lives change in the blink of an eye and there is no chance to let things breathe or give each moment the weight it really requires. Elements of thriller and melodrama do not always successfully gel and yet they are balanced by the surges of emotion that Quillevere extracts from particularly telling acts and their consequences.

An atmospheric, haunting score by Verity Susman considerably enhances the changing moods of a film that in its finer moments can readily stand comparison with the films of the Dardenne brothers.

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa

In addressing with Suzanne [festival scope], which opened the Critics' Week last night at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, the path followed by a character over a 30-year period, Katell Quillevéré, already noticed on the Croisette in 2010 with her first feature Un poison violent [trailer] (Love like Poison), has set the bar pretty high. A risk accepted and crowned success with a romanesque film, sensitive and moving, borne along by an excellent Sara Forestier in the role of a young woman who tries to take short-cuts and inevitably pays the price.

From this shred of fate over which there wafts a hint of bad luck, the director culls a very clear and affectionate portrait of a family of modest means in the depths of France, that of truck-drivers, working women and waitresses, barbecues in shabby courtyards, children placed in foster families, bars and clubs in which people try to escape, and small-time dealers. This world of solitude where family ties serve as lifelines is conveyed by Katell Quillevéré with a healthy energy, an excellent screenplay (co-written by Mariette Désert) skilfully addressing the time factor, and intelligent staging (without any ostentation), effectively swinging from the intimate to a vaster perception of the outer world.

It all starts with the innocence and laughter of childhood for Suzanne (Sara Forestier) and her sister Maria (Adèle Haenel), lovingly raised by their protective father (François Damiens) in a working-class suburb in the South of France. The absence of their mother, who has passed away, does not seem to weigh on the two little girls who soon become "grunge" and rather forward teenagers. The film is set in the 1990's and the first stroke of fate is about to fall: school-girl Suzanne gets pregnant and gives birth to a boy, Charly, whom she raises alone in the family home. Maria leaves to work in Marseille, though the very strong bond of affection between the two sisters lasts until Suzanne falls madly in love with Julien, a young lout (Paul Hamy) trying to wheel and deal at the race-course. Borne along by passion, Suzanne follows him and disappears, abandoning her young son who is taken care of by the grandfather. A few years later, the young woman finds herself in prison after committing a burglary with a break-in and violence. Julien is on the run, and Suzanne, devasted by loneliness and guilt, discovers that her son has been placed with a foster family. She pays him a visit when she gets out and tries to make her life over after getting back togther with her sister and father. But the smart Julien, who has risen in the ranks of the criminal world, turns up by chance. The couple get back together against a backcloth of drug trafficking with Morocco, which doesn't prevent Suzanne from giving birth to a daughter. Once again far from her family, the young woman pursues her chaotic destiny, but unpleasant surprises are still lurking in her path…

Going one better as compared to her first feature film, Katell Quillevéré (born in 1980, just like Suzanne) has several strings to her bow as a filmmaker. Overcoming with great ease the difficulties inherent to the plot and wide time-span, she succeeds in giving her characters real consistency, even for the most secondary roles (Corinne Masiero, Anne Le Ny), with the overall quality of the acting also worthy of praise. Anchored in social realsim which is perfectly recreated and using music very effectively (composed by Verity Susman from the English band Electrelane), Suzanne deploys a rather irresistible charm in the touching wake of a young woman on a desperate quest for love and freedom.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river... Dustin Chang from Floating World

HEAL THE LIVING (Réparer les vivants)

France Belgium (103 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site [UK]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Andrew Robertson]

The temptation to cliche is great and Heal The Living's subject matter - a cardiac transplant - invites phrases like 'heart-wrenching' and 'haunting' which though accurate are less than this film deserves. It's based on a novel of the same name by Maylis De Kerangal and its events unfold slowly, not quite metronomically, the occasional skipped beat a counter-point to the steady flow of its story. The only antagonists in Heal The Living are time and distance and human frailty, death in triptych.

There are moments of hypnotic beauty, small gestures of comfort documented with an omniscient kindly distance, a dawdling angelic remove. Slowly, steadily, the circumstances of a single life-saving operation are constructed.

Startling and unflinching, this is a film that documents tiny kindnesses amongst the visceral and technical in a way that demonstrates an almost perfect simultaneity of compassion and craft such that it nearly defies description. Strong performances from its cast turn a seemingly slight set of events into something that is gripping.

Katell Quillévéré's direction is assured, equally adept in depictions of twilight surfing expeditions, of tense surgical explorations, in and among alleyways and apartments, theatres musical and operating. She shares writing credits with De Kerangal and veteran writer (and previous collaborator) Gilles Tuarand. Their efforts are partnered with an almost flawless effort in subtitling translation (at least in the version Eye for Film saw at the 2017 Glasgow Film Festival) that ably copes with some relatively abstruse vocabularies. The one oddity (merguez becomes hot dogs) is easily forgiven; the meat of this story is elsewhere.

It's hard to single out any performances, though César nominations suggest someone has tried. Anna Dorval as the transplant's recipient, Dominique Blanc's surgeon, and Emmanuelle Seigner's turn as the mother of the donor are all note-perfect, and Tahar Rahim's performance as the transplant counsellor produces one of the film's most touching moments. Even in small roles - Gabin Verdet's Simon is the all too human source of another's hope, focus of others' grief - the performances are touching.

Alexandre Desplat's score is well-used, but the sound in general is phenomenal. Environmental noises are integrated smoothly, in particular the lead-up to the accident that makes Simon's heart available. Perhaps the most striking sonic note is over the end credits - Five Years from Bowie's Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is song enough, but the semantic weight of a song about time running out from the beginning of the career of a legend now passed is, well, palpable.

At once cerebral and humane, compassionate and clinical, Heal The Living is so staggering in its emotional intensity, even honesty, that it itself rejuvenates, reaffirms - it will make your heart sore, then soar.

Slant Magazine [Derek Smith]

Structured as a loose triptych, Katell Quillévéré's Heal the Living approaches death in prismatic fashion, which allows for its all-encompassing compassion for and understanding of people on every side of a tragedy. Quillévéré deftly slides between three separate dramas surrounding a teenager who's left brain-dead following a car wreck, giving equal attention and respect to the parents, the doctors preparing for the potential use of the young man's still-beating heart, and a woman coming to terms with her impending need for a heart transplant. Heal the Living negotiates matters of the heart in both intangible and material terms, vacillating between the corporeal and spiritual as the emotional consequences of death clash with the cold, dispassionate machinations of a hospital whose concerns lie with healing and not consoling.

The film opens with an ethereal sequence that eloquently sets up Quillévéré's interest in the transition between states of being, from the physical to the metaphysical. The camera exudes a spectral quality as it glides above 17-year-old Simon (Gabin Verdet), leisurely admiring young, healthy bodies in motion as Simon skates to the house of the friend who will drive them to the beach for an early-morning surf. This fluidity of movement continues unabated as three friends ride wave after wave and later make their way back home—and as the driver of the vehicle imagines the road as the ocean surface, it's almost natural how he drifts off to sleep and crashes the car on the side of the road.

Katell Quillévéré's film allows the sorrows of losing a life and the joys of saving it to remain congruent.

Heal the Living's focus then shifts to Simon's parents, Marianne (Emmanuelle Seigner) and Vincent (Kool Shen), who must grapple with the fact that he's brain-dead and is only on temporary life support. Quillévéré keeps a respectful distance from the grieving parents, acknowledging their pain without conveying its depths and as such potentially succumbing to exploitation. In this very same moment of anguish, a young doctor, Thomas (Tahar Rahim), offers his condolences as he struggles to find a way to tactfully ask Marianne and Vincent for consent to use Simon's healthy heart for an emergency transplant. Such dualities are carefully balanced throughout the film as impending death and incomprehensible grief repeatedly run up against the mundanities of medical bureaucracy and its potential for healing.

After receiving approval to use Simon's heart, Thomas informs his supervising doctor and the two share a brief, celebratory high-five. In most films, such a display would seem crass, but Heal the Living allows the sorrows of losing a life and the joys of saving it to remain congruent. The high-five, Simon's unfinished tattoo, and a call to Simon's phone that comes through while his father holds it on the drive home from the hospital all serve to deepen our sense of pathos toward all the characters, grounding them in a reality that's always both individually unique and universally shared. Even the emotional swell of a melodramatic flashback briefly showing Simon's initial flirtatious encounter with his future girlfriend plays as an earned reprieve from the heartache and a tender, melancholy reminiscence of the loss of youth.

As Heal the Living moves into its final section, which depicts a woman, Claire (Anne Dorval), about to receive Simon's heart, Quillévéré refuses to shy away from the material realities of death and the body. The surgical procedure is depicted in great detail, beginning with Simon's heart extracted from his body and put on ice. This final section brings the film full circle, literalizing its themes with a striking resonance and restraint. Matters of life and death are unflinchingly presented not as awe-inspiring or terrifying, but merely natural components of existence. As Quillevere effortlessly weaves these various stories together, a delicate, understated tapestry is revealed, portraying the thin line between life and death and the dichotomy between mind and body as almost imperceptibly fluid rather than rigid and clearly defined.

Writing: Movies [Chris Knipp]

It all comes together

Katell Quillévéré's third feature adapts Maylis de Kerangal’s bestselling French novel (Mend the Living), a humanistic medical thriller about events leading up to a heart transplant. It begins with Simon (Gabin Verdet), the bleach-blond surfer boy whose car accident makes him brain dead and his perfect organs available for replacing others' failing ones, if his devastated parents, Marianne and Vincent (Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen) are willing. Meanwhile there are closeups of the medical professionals involved, young cardiologist Thomas Rémige (Tahar Rahim) and his master Docteur Pierre Révol (Bouli Lanners) and nurse Jeanne (Monia Chokri). Then we observe Claire (Anne Dorval of Xavier Dolan's Mommy), the lady who is to receive Simon's heart, a lesbian classical pianist and mother of two college-age sons (Finnegan Oldfield, Théo Cholbi) whose heart's days are numbered.

Like Tell No One, a French version of an American crime story way better than Hollywood could do it, this is a ridiculously vivid, clear, humanistic and tasteful version of what seems the most conventional US TV medical drama material, and you cannot but admire it, while in the back of your mind still wondering, why did she bother? Quillévéré's leap forward as a director of complex, demanding movie dramas - with more budget and more name cast members - is also a step back out of the raw indie territory she inhabited in her first two movies into a safer, more mainstream, even if demanding, work.

But it's still an ambitious, complex film, and not only does she never slip into the saccharine territory that the material threatens to draw her into, but she provides some lovely touches, while the whole fits together impeccably. In a lovely opening passage Simon leaves his girlfriend Juliette (Galatea Bellugi) in the wee hours, leaping out the window, races a pal, suits up and surfs - water sequence magnificently shot to show both perfect marriage with the waves and threat of death. Then comes the fatal drive, turned into a sea death as sleepiness of all three youths makes the road and horizon fade into soft waves, the crash just a bang, no messiness. This whole Simon passage, a model of its kind, is of a sublime simplicity and physicality, delivering nothing but a sense of youth, health, and impermanence. The only further development of Simon is equally physical: to seduce Juliette at first meeting, he successfully races her rail car with his bike, leaps over his bike in a move I've never seen, climbs up breathless to the platform, and they kiss.

Later, the film gets equally intimate in a lower key in following Claire as she interacts with her concerned sons Maxime (Oldfield) and Sam (Cholbi) and attends a piano concert by her beautiful protégée and former lover Anne Guérande (actress and pianist Alice Taglioni). She also meets with her cardiologist, who will perform the transplant; Drs. Rémige and Rémol will remove Simon's heart. Claire's scenes require a refocusing effort from the audeince after the intensity of the earlier passages, all of them at a high pitch further heightened by Alexandre Desplat's piano-based score. The presence of the well-known French movie composer is a sign of the glossier production, but Thomas Marchand, the editor, whose presence is more essential, was present on the director's first two films. Claire's sequences apparently add to a barely outlined character in the novel, and they're still relatively flat after the vivacity and invention of Simon's sequences and the high pitched emotions of his parents' grieving.

A turning point in the film, and a key to its humanism, comes when Marianne and Vincent, still in great grief, come to accept the goodness of allowing their son to be an organ donor.

The still boyish Rahim, who gently elicits this decision, is a good choice for exuding human kindness, and the film's best moment and best evocation of the magic of the medical miracle this story is about comes when he carries out a ritual farewell to Simon in the operating room following the boy's parent's directives, and it's at this moment that this tasteful and economical film indulges in its one repeat sequence, Juliette's tearful face in the light of dawn and Simon's leap out her window: rhythmical repetition, a joining of the circle, death and life.

Still, for all this beauty, though onne may not miss the oddness of the director's debut Love Like Poison, one does miss a bit the wildness and emotional extremity of her sophomore effort, Suzanne, which also put Adèle Hanel on the map. What Réparer les vivants, heavily publicized in France and widely distributed there, does do, is show that Quillévéré is a directorial talent both recognized and worth continuing to follow. "Un feel good movie" is a French term, which critics have applied, and this does what one of those should: it leaves you feeling good.

Review: In Katell Quillévéré's HEAL THE LIVING ... - ScreenAnarchy Dustin Chang

Film-Forward.com [Kyle Mustain]

'Heal The Living': Venice Review | Reviews | Screen Lisa Nesselson from Screendaily

Cineuropa.org [Fabien Lemercier]

J.B. Spins [Joe Bendel]

Katell Quillévéré's Mesmeric Melodrama "Heal the Living" - Village Voice Nick Schager

Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]

Heal the Living - Curzon Artificial Eye

Daily | Venice + Toronto 2016 | Katell Quillévéré's HEAL THE LIVING ... David Hudson from Fandor

Interview: Katell Quillévéré on HEAL THE LIVING ... - ScreenAnarchy Dustin Chang interview from Screen Anarchy, April 16, 2017

Katell Quillévéré: 'With each film I try to renew myself' Wendy Ide interview from The Guardian, April 16, 2017

'Heal the Living' ('Reparer les vivants'): Venice Review | Hollywood ... Boyd van Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter

'Heal the Living' Review: Katell Quillévéré's Wrenching ... - Variety Guy Lodge

'Heal the Living' is a heartfelt, surprising story that ... - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Rogerebert.com [Sheila O'Malley]

Quine, Richard

THE SOLID GOLD CADILLAC

USA (99 mi) 1956

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Several classic Hollywood notions combine here: that capitalism is tickety-boo as long as businessmen aren't corrupt, that one dumb broad can defeat the wiliest crooks in the business, that a male and a female goody will inevitably fall in love. With the rallying cry of 'Somebody's got to keep an eye on these big businesses', Judy Holliday, in a variation on the part that made her in Born Yesterday, takes on the wicked businessmen and rallies Middle America behind her. It's pernicious, but fun.

The Solid Gold Cadillac - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

The hit Broadway stage version of The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), written by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann, ran over 500 performances beginning in 1953 and starred the famed stage actress Josephine Hull. She was 67 when she took on the role, and she earned raves.

But when the Columbia Pictures film version was released in 1956, moviegoers instead saw 34-year-old Judy Holliday in the part. It turns out that the play as originally written had actually called for a much younger actress, but it was rewritten to suit Hull; screenwriter Abe Burrows simply changed things back to the original conception.

Certainly Holliday was already as famous as Hull, a grande dame of the stage who had also left her mark in Hollywood with memorable performances in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Harvey (1950). Holliday had scored big on Broadway with Born Yesterday and recreated that role to astonishing success in the movie version. In fact, Hull and Holliday both won their only Oscars® in the very same year, with Holliday taking Best Actress for Born Yesterday (1950) and Hull nabbing Best Supporting Actress for Harvey. With Jose Ferrer winning Best Actor for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), another stage adaptation, and All About Eve (1950), perhaps the best movie about theater ever made, winning the rest of the major awards including Best Picture, it was definitely a Broadway-themed Oscar®: night. And just to hammer home the point, the greatest movie about Hollywood ever made, Sunset Blvd. (1950), lost the Best Picture award that same evening.

In The Solid Gold Cadillac, a corporate satire, Holliday's comedic abilities are aptly displayed. She plays a dizzy blonde who owns ten shares of stock in a major company and basically serves the profiteering board members their comeuppance. Paul Douglas co-stars as the former head of the company who joins forces with Holliday; a romantic subplot between the two was added for the movie. The stars' chemistry was a known commodity, as they had already worked together a few years earlier on stage in Born Yesterday. Narrating the movie from off-screen is George Burns, a job held by Fred Allen on Broadway.

Critics loved The Solid Gold Cadillac. The New York Times raved that "[Holliday] is knocking the role completely dead... She's an actress who has the ability to move mountains." Variety noted that the production "achieves a plushy look without the use of color or big-screen assists" (though there is a color sequence at the end). Indeed, that "look" landed an Oscar nomination for Best Black-and-White Art Direction, though the movie won only for Best Black-and-White Costume Design.

Film Appreciation: The Solid Gold Cadillac - Thinking Cinema Dana Lemaster

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review

FilmFanatic.org

Channel 4 Film capsule review

TV Guide review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

The Solid Gold Cadillac - Wikipedia

FULL OF LIFE

USA (91 mi) 1956

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

Breezy comedy, with gargantuan Baccaloni (a popular New York opera singer of the '50s) pissing off Italian-American couple Holliday and Conte by interfering in the birth of their child. Holliday has no special religious convictions but her boozy father-in-law-to-be insists she confirm her faith before the sprog is born. Holliday is vivacity itself; Baccaloni is a roly-poly firecracker; and the script by cult author John Fante (from his own novel) strikes just the right note.

Full of Life - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

In the comedic drama Full of Life (1956), Judy Holliday and Richard Conte play a married couple a few weeks away from having a baby. When their kitchen floor collapses, Conte brings in his Italian-American father, played by Salvatore Baccaloni, to fix it. Baccaloni not only repairs the floor but also builds a large, unnecessary fireplace, all the while attempting to indoctrinate them on Catholicism which he feels they have abandoned.

Driven more by its characters than its plot, Full of Life is probably most notable for being the work of writer John Fante, who adapted his own novel for the screenplay. Fante is best known today for his Depression-era novel Ask the Dust, which was made into a movie by writer-director Robert Towne in 2006 and is one of four Fante novels to center around the fictional character of Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer. While that character does not figure into Full of Life, Conte does play a writer who bears many resemblances to Bandini.

Full of Life was Metropolitan Opera star Salvatore Baccaloni's American film debut. "Amusingly corpulent and mannered," The New York Times said of him. "Judy Holliday, usually outstanding, is decidedly in his shadow as the wife... Conte is excellent as the husband."

Also in the cast is Esther Minciotti, the intrepid Italian-American mother specialist, who played virtually the same mother role in The Undercover Man (1949), House of Strangers (1949), Marty (1955) and The Wrong Man (1956).

Fante's script, with its frank depiction of pregnancy, ran into some trouble with the Production Code Administration. "It plunges into the details of pregnancy with very little discretion and little exercise of good taste," was the verdict. The offending scenes were somewhat toned down but Full of Life remains frank for its time, and for his efforts Fante received a Writers Guild nomination for Best Written American Comedy.

Quinn, Tom

THE NEW YEAR PARADE B 84

USA (87 mi) 2008 Official site

Written, directed, produced, shot, and edited by Tom Quinn, so one would think his imprint is all over this film, and perhaps it is, as it’s a sprawling work of raw, unedited emotions, shot over several years on a shoestring budget, supposedly $7,000, yet offers vital insight into the harsh realities of a particularly unpleasant divorce, leaving the kids to fend for themselves like damaged goods. Set in the working class neighborhood of South Philadelphia, the film uses the Mummers parade as a backdrop, which is a Mardi Gras-like event where rival costume-laden marching bands take to the streets in a battle of the bands competition, which includes guys lugging around those gigantic bass fiddles. What we learn is that generational continuity has been maintained by the tradition of this event, where fathers march with sons, and then their sons, which is what makes this family split so disastrous. Jack and Kat are the affected children, Greg Lyons and Jennifer Lynn Welsh, whose lives are crumbling right out from underneath them and there’s nothing they can do about it. At 16, Kat is in high school where she’s worried about her first boyfriend, yet when she learns that her mother was having an affair with someone else, she can’t seem to trust her mother anymore. The counseling offered is a joke, so she puts up her best front that none of this matters. Her father’s violent outbursts however send her into tears, as it’s obvious her parents can’t live under the same roof anymore, leaving everyone devastated.

Jack, in his mid twenties, works at a local bar and plays sax in his dad’s marching band, the South Philadelphia String Band, who are largely featured in this film, both in endless rehearsals and finally in competition, but he’s growing irritated by his dad’s destructive behavior in splitting up his family, a guy who claims he wants to stay together, but then does all the wrong things to guarantee they stay apart. While we catch glimpses of them in their daily lives, much of this has an amateurish feel, but not necessarily in a bad way, more in the way the film feels sloppily assembled. But this lack of polish accentuates the raw emotions which are surprisingly real, especially in the gutty performance by Jennifer Welsh, whose already messed up teenage life is simply in turmoil, but she pretends she can handle it, and remarkably, for the most part, she does. Her astonishing confidence is underscored by moments when she simply falls apart, as she nearly has to jump into her boyfriend’s lap to get his attention. But somehow, she prevails, and despite the father and son thing going on, she’s really the heart and soul of the film, as she’s so conflicted about her mother’s heartbreaking actions.

The parental behavior on display is tragically self-centered, where Jack tries to assume the role of the more responsible big brother, but he’s conflicted as well and considers jumping ship and playing in another marching band, separating himself from his father, who’s embarrassing him and become too big a burden to bear. Their parents don’t make it easy. What makes it worse is all the talk among the members of the band, as all the family secrets are suddenly an open book. How do kids and young adults handle their business being the subject of jokes and ridicule all over the street? Not easily, as both would rather be just about anyplace else than where they are. Kat goes through a tug of war between her two separated parents, and at her tender age, she’s expected to choose between them? That’s a horrible thing to ask of her when all she really wants is her first kiss, and a guy to appreciate and accept her while her world is coming apart. The performances by the kids especially is very good, while the parental missteps are hauntingly memorable,

as the pain they inflict is unstoppable, a lit fuse waiting to explode. The film doesn’t condescend or offer any real conclusions or moral lessons other than in life one endures. It’s a grim, but realistic portrait of the emotional carnage left behind by parents who stop caring about one another. The director brings a very observational style to his work, and despite its flaws, the quiet moments are perhaps its best, as that’s what draws us into the world of people we grow to understand and occasionally admire.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

Two grown siblings are blindsided by their parents' breakup in this gritty but delicately nuanced indie drama, which plays out against the backdrop of the annual Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. The son (Greg Lyons), a doughy but soulful bartender, is so intent on doing the right thing by everyone that he almost loses himself, while his teenage sister (Jennifer Welsh) resents mom (MaryAnn McDonald) but has qualms about moving in with dad (Andrew Conway). Writer-director Tom Quinn draws heartrending performances from his four nonprofessional leads and grounds this cinema verite feature, his first, by involving the South Philadelphia String Band, working-class stalwarts who exude integrity and venerate family and tradition. 85 min.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Tom Quinn’s genial, four-years-in-the-making “The New Year Parade,” winner of a Slamdance jury prize, is a study of the effects of divorce on the members of one South Philadelphia family across the course of a single year. Set in the world of Mummers, or competitive marching bands, Quinn’s great stroke beyond marshaling the time scheme of the film is getting the motions (and emotion) of hundreds of musicians on screen in such lucid fashion. The seemingly improvised performances have a sweet, ragged edge, and the music swells. Nothing musical on film has touched me the way the first viewing of “Once” did, but “The New Year Parade” is a song in the heart. With Greg Lyons, Jennifer Welsh, Andrew Conway, MaryAnn McDonald, Irene Longshore, Tobias Segal, Paul Blackway, The South Philadelphia String Band. 90m.

eFilmCritic Reviews Jason Whyte

A hit at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, Tom Quinn’s heartbreakingly real human drama is among the best indie dramas this decade. A working class family in urban Philadelphia is going through some pretty tumultuous times; the parents are breaking up, the twenty-eight-and-still-living-at-home son is trying to take that next step in life, and his teenage sister is experimenting with losing her virginity. Spanning the course of a year and utilizing a kind of documentary style filmmaking that feels like we are voyeurs in the lives of these people, Quinn is able to make us feel like this domestic drama is really happening, but it is also thanks to great song selections from Elliot Smith and amazing, real performances from his leads (Jennifer Lynn Welsh as the precocious daughter is a knockout) that makes this film very unique and brutally honest. I also admire the fact that this film was made for nearly no money yet is so rich in scope and drama that it is easy to overlook. It’s kind of awesome to see.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Tom Quinn sets the dissolution of a South Philly family against the backdrop of string-band culture, making for a low-key but satisfying blend of melodrama and observant naturalism. Greg Lyons and Jennifer Welsh play the children of oddly named South Philadelphia String Band leader Mike McMonogul (Andrew Conway) and wife Lisa (MaryAnn McDonald), whose infidelities split their marriage apart. Although his cast is largely composed of nonprofessionals, Quinn draws relaxed performances from most, especially rock-scene veteran Lyons (current Eastern Conference Champions and former Laguardia/Trip 66 drummer), although Conway seems uncomfortable with some of his more dramatic moments. The film's best parts have little to do with its leading roles, or even its story. Quinn spent a year hanging around with real Mummers, and the time he put in shows in the film’s detailed but unforced capturing of a culture often reduced to fat drunks in drag. At times, Quinn literally loses the plot, wandering off to let some banjo-playing veteran reflect on years of Mummery, but the stories, and the faces, are so engaging you don’t mind the diversion.

THE NEW YEAR PARADE Facets Multi Media

Set in the Irish-American, blue collar community of South Philadelphia and bookended by the traditional Mummer's Parade, The New Year Parade charts the destabilizing effect the separation of Mike and Lisa has on their two kids. Jack (Greg Lyons) is 25, a bartender and featured player in the South Philly String Band, led by his dockworker dad. Kat (Jennifer Walsh) is 16, a smart high school student whose steady boyfriend wants more from her. Both appear to be coping, but the hurt and doubt cannot help but come out in different ways. Kat believes that their parents will reconcile and keeps the situation secret, but as months pass and tensions mount, she becomes isolated between family and friends with no one to confide in. Meanwhile, Jack is forced to mediate between his parents and carries the burden of the family finances, while questioning his loyalty as the impending divorce adversely affects his own personal relationship. Just as fidelity is central issue in their divorce, Jack contemplates an almost greater transgression: moving to another club. Written with great tenderness and sensitivity and cast with a combination of professional and first-time actors (including the majority of the actual South Philadelphia String Band), this film authentically captures the heritage of the Irish and Italian neighborhoods where fathers and sons pass on the traditions that define their culture. Writer-director Tom Quinn shot and edited the film with a minimal crew over several years and creates a very moving melodrama without trivializing the emotional turmoil that his characters endure. His actors -- all of them new faces -- respond with open and honest performances that cut right to the heart. Winner of the Grand Jury prize at the Slamdance Festival, The New Year Parade is one of the most assured and poignant independent films of the year.

User comments from imdb Author: J_Trex from Philadelphia

This was a fascinating "reality show" type movie set in Philadelphia from Jan 2004 to Jan 2005. The subject matter of the film is a working class family in South Philly going through a messy divorce, the relationships between the Father, Mother, Daughter, & Son. There is a great deal of tension due to the impending divorce. The Father & the Son belong to the South Philly String Band, which marches in the annual Mummer's Day parade each New Year's Day. The story is thus twofold: the dynamics of the family going through the divorce process and the Mummer's Day parade backstory, which is actually the main story and what gives this movie a special edge, especially if you live around Philadelphia and watch these parades each year.

The casting and screenplay did have the appearance of a "reality show". I'm sure there was a screenplay but it's hard to tell while watching the movie. That's not to say the dialog was anything less than outstanding, it just had a spontaneous character to it. It seemed very genuine working class Philly.

The cinematography was outstanding, with many excellent pictures and scenes of South Philly, Mummer's preparing their costumes & practicing their music & dance routines, the screenplay and backstories were great.

As a Philly native, I really loved this movie, but even if you live in LA or NY or Dallas, this is worth checking out. It's a very good movie and as Indie movies go, quite excellent.

User comments from imdb Author: marque63 from Los Angeles

I had the privilege of seeing this yet to be released film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where the director spoke to the audience after the film was viewed. As of this writing, the film does not yet have a distributor, but hopefully, it will, and this review will entice the readers to go see it. I was not involved in the making of this film at all, but I appreciate the artistic endeavors of the creators to get their work seen.

The story is about a troubled family, where the parents are separated and the grown son and younger daughter are trying their best to deal with the traumas it has caused them. The father and son are members of an all-male band in South Philadelphia, and much of the action surrounds their involvement in helping get the band in shape for the annual New Year's Day Parade. Mother works several jobs to make ends meet, while the daughter is in high school and has a paper route. There are hopes that the parents will get back together, but it seems doubtful due to the breakdown in communications between the adults. In fact, the mother and father have very little on-screen footage together, making it seem that their love for their children is the bind that had kept them together as long as they were and that the communication in their 25 year relationship is sorely lacking.

The daughter has anxieties over the separation, which causes the mother to get a school counselor involved. She also has the responsibility of getting chores done after school while the mother works, in addition to getting her own meals and dealing with the various boys who are interested in her for one reason or another. Considering that all four major players are played by unprofessional actors, they all do an outstanding job. The actress playing the mother reminds me of a younger Joan Allen, while the actor playing the father in certain close-ups reminded me of Barry Williams ("The Brady Bunch"). And the children? They are not cotton candy examples of Hollywood actors trying to play real people; They are real people just doing what they were chosen here to do-play real people, and they all do it darn well. If the actress playing the daughter chooses to make acting a career, she could do well; She has an innocent Christina Ricci like quality to her, and is very pretty, without being glamorized like the typical teen actors we are used to seeing in movies today. There is a scene after the parents have a violent argument where the brother consoles the sister that is very touching. I have not seen anything like this in domestic films of this nature, making it much more than just a typical Lifetime TV Movie.

I could also relate to the scenes involving band preparation for the parades as I spent several summers in marching bands, and at least on the North East coast, these events are very important to communities big and small. The costumes for the Mummers are outrageous and fun, and the editing was brilliant as well.

In this day and age when big brassy spectacles are all that make money in movie theaters, films like this tend to go unnoticed. As an adult near the age of the parents, I could also relate to their inability to express themselves to each other and yet be more open to their children and expect to get their loyalty over the other parents. Several strong messages I got from the film were just because a couple is married for a long time and has children, doesn't mean that they have fully and emotionally matured. Some people never do; In fact, some people I know say that most people never do. This is a sweet film that says hang in there, kiddo, we know life is rough, and we're all having a rough go of it. Married, single, young, older.

While apparently the print I saw is not the finished work, what I saw certainly impressed me as an artist to say what I saw I liked, and this film's festival awards did not go undeserved. Best of luck to the creators as they work on getting this out to the mainstream.

J.J. Murphy

Hammer to Nail [Mike S. Ryan]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]

Indiewire Eric Kohn at Sundance

Director's statement Scott Macauley interview from Filmmaker magazine, November 18, 2008

The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

Variety Peter Debruge

TimeOut Chicago Ben Kenigsberg

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Roger Ebert

Qurbani, Burhan

SHAHADA (Faith) B- 80

Germany (88 mi) 2010

This film starts out promising enough with the introduction of multiple characters expressed with a stylish realism through different chapter headings, but eventually despite the headings, three stories become interwoven into a larger fabric about Muslims living in Berlin, as seen through the guilty conscience of a Muslim police officer who accidentally kills another woman’s unborn fetus, feeling unending streams of remorse, the daughter of an Imam who secretly has a back alley abortion with horrible consequences, and two Muslim coworkers who develop a homosexual relationship which is forbidden under Islam. According to the director, this film was his college graduation thesis, thinking it was perhaps a bit “too edgy” for American audiences, as if no one has ever read Dostoevsky before or seen movies that dealt with these themes, while cris-crossing the narrative wouldn’t happen to resemble CRASH (2004), BABEL (2006), or fellow countryman Fatih Akin’s THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007)? This film actually won the Best New Director Award at the Chicago Film festival, not because he’s talented or innovative, but because his Islamic idealism matches what Americans want to hear from the Muslim world. That being the case, the gritty realism displayed at the beginning was thrown out the window in favor of wishful thinking and ambiguity, as none of these three stories actually has a resolution. This style of interwoven film actually works to build suspense or complexity, but this director does neither, as instead the stories simply deflate into thin air.

While two of the three stories deal with devout religious beliefs, the story of the guilty policeman shooting an illegal Bosnian immigrant who was accidentally caught in the crossfire when he was aiming at a burglar, has no Islamic religious references and simply deals with age old questions of guilt. However the story of Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), a devout African Muslim, does seek religious guidance from the Imam (Vedat Erincin) when he begins to reciprocate his best friend’s gay affections. Using wisdom that all Americans would love to believe, the Imam suggests that the Koran has many passages to describe what’s right and what’s wrong, but only Allah really understands the love in one’s heart, claiming Islam is a religion based on love, suggesting there is no love that Allah would deny. Now of course, there’s no Imam in the world who would utter such a thing or practice such tolerance, or Catholic priests for that matter, and very few Jewish rabbi’s and Protestant ministers, as the director appears to be going for the entire rainbow coalition.

The most intensely urgent of the three stories surrounds Maryam (Maryam Zaree), the daughter of the Imam, a somewhat westernized, independent thinker who conceals her self-inflicted abortion by taking illegal medicines. When the bleeding persists indefinitely, she believes this is a sign from God and against the more liberal teachings of her father, developing strict fundamentalist interpretations as if the Apocalypse was upon us, as it is certainly within her. Her sudden rigidity shocks everyone, from her friends, family, and Muslim community, as if she became deranged overnight. While the last two stories feature characters who attempt to reconcile their behavior with Islamic teachings, of course, they can’t, as their behavior is forbidden, as it is under the Catholic Church as well, under archaic religious interpretation which outlaws abortions and homosexuality. While the filmmaker acknowledges that this liberal thinking Imam does not represent reality, it instead reflects the views of his grandfather, as the filmmaker himself was raised Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish, which required a real balancing act to theorize a kind of love that they all have in common. As it turns out, the chapter headings, which feel unnecessary with names like Sacrifice and Devotion, are named after a step of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. It'a hard not to think this isn't a similarly contrived Muslim version of Paul Haggis's CRASH.

The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]

Three Berliners, children of immigrants, are torn between their beliefs in the Muslim religion and their desire to live their lives the way they want to. Thoughtful mosaic melodrama that has something to say about contemporary Germany and says it very clearly and confidently.

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at Berlin

BERLIN -- Western Islam in several variations is examined in "Faith" ("Shahada") through the intertwined stories of three young German-born Muslims. A film school graduation project that landed in Berlin competition, written and directed by Burhan Qurbani, shows a promising new talent grappling with an over-written script and too many characters, none of whom come across as real people viewers can care about. Another problem is the somber open-ended finale which leaves too much open to interpretation to satisfy most audiences.

Still, the effort to communicate is there and it's a relief to find the subject of religion treated, for once, without making the seemingly obligatory reference to terrorism, such as in Bruno Dumont's "Hadewijch," another recent tale of faith gone bad. Here, caught between their religious upbringing and the liberated lifestyle of the West, the young characters fixate on lines from the Quran to find an easy way out of their moral dilemmas.

In some ways, the film itself takes the easy road out of the problems it poses, coming to facile, feel-good conclusions like, "Everyone decides how to live his faith," and "The Quran is a book of love that guides and consoles us, but can't tell us what to feel." This approach may create maximum consensus with audiences, but does not a deep film make.

"Faith" is structured in chapters with mythic Arabic/English titles like "Beginning of the Journey," "Sacrifice" and "Self-Sacrifice," which portend intriguing things to come, but unfold more banally as a series of dangerous sexual liaisons.

The most significant of the stories belongs to Maryam (Maryam Zaree). The German-born daughter of a tolerant, kindly local Imam, she first appears as a rebellious nightclubber out on the town with her girlfriend. Barely minutes later, she's having a deliberately provoked abortion in the disco toilet. The sight of the fetus so shocks her that she turns into a half-mad bigot who upsets the entire community with her raving desire for God's punishment.

The growing attraction between Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), a young Muslim believer, and Daniel (Sergej Moya), who works in the same packing plant, throws Sammi into a wrenching inner struggle with his homosexual desires, which are forbidden in the Quran.

Ismail (Carlo Ljubek) is a cop racked with guilt over the accidental shooting of a pregnant woman, who lost her unborn child as a result. When he bumps into her again, Leyla (Marija Skaricic) so inflames his imagination that he leaves his wife and son for her. The story is utterly improbable but the two handsome, brooding young actors raise the temperature a few notches.

Blending urban cityscapes with subtle Orientalisms, the visuals have a very distinctive look. Yoshi Heimrath's cinematography is evocative throughout, from the endless warehouse to the humblest dwellings.

Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review

Three Muslims in Berlin struggle to do the right thing in Burhan Qurbani's good-looking feature debut, "Shahada," a German film-school exam project that was a surprise inclusion in this year's Berlinale competition. Tackling hot-button issues that are contentious in many religious communities, including abortion and sexual orientation, Afghanistan-born Qurbani's level-headed approach thankfully avoids preachy melodrama, but it never quite gets under his characters' skin, either. Topical pic should see further fest play and decent B.O. in Germany, with minor Euro niche potential a possibility.

Maryam (Maryam Zaree) is the daughter of a liberal imam, Vedat (Vedat Erincin), a widower. Very much a Westernized girl, Maryam wonders whether the difficult aftermath of her messy illegal abortion is a punishment from God. Too ashamed to talk to her father about it, she drifts into more radical religious thinking.

One of Vedat's students at his Koran school is Senegalese Muslim Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), who works at a market hall with his best friend, Daniel (Sergej Moya), a German. Sammi's developing feelings for his friend, who is gay, are difficult to reunite with his firm religious beliefs.

At Sammi and Daniel's workplace, a thirtysomething cop of Turkish origin, Ismail (Carlo Ljubek), checks the papers of the immigrant workers. Last in line is Bosnian Leyla (Marija Skaricic), who was a victim of an accident that also involved Ismail, who has never been able to forgive himself for it.

Maryam's and Sammi's stories, focusing on the generation of religious youngsters who have to reconcile forming their identities with living between two cultures, are the strongest. Qurbani neatly explores the effort it takes for them to live by the rules of their religion, and also suggests that these rules aren't set in stone because each individual is different. The story of Ismail -- who is older, has his own family and is the least religious of the three protags -- never quite feels part of the mix, despite editor Simon Blasi's nimble cutting between the occasionally overlapping storylines. Pic's division into chapters ("Devotion," "Sacrifice") isn't really necessary.

Though Qurbani, who also co-write the screenplay, shows a deft hand in setting up his scenes, he is not quite as successful in taking them through to their final payoff, and there's no sense at the end of the film that we know any of the characters very well. The director's tendency, as with the films of Ferzan Ozpetek, to circle the protags with his camera while the music swells on the soundtrack to illuminate their inner struggles doesn't always work. Some of the thesps, notably Zaree, are much better at conveying their feelings with words and actions than with simple looks.

"Shahada," which can be roughly translated as "faith," looks very good, especially for a first feature (not only for the director but also for the d.p. and production designer). Handsome widescreen lensing, in a combination of static shots and handheld camera during the tenser moments, is aces, and transfer from HD to 35mm is spotless. Production and costume design firmly place the story in contempo Berlin's Muslim community, with Maryam's changing sense of dress a subtle indicator of what her character is going through.

Camera (color, HD-to-35mm, widescreen), Yoshi Heimrath; editor, Simon Blasi; music, Daniel Sus; production designer, Barbara Falkner; costume designer, Irene Ip; sound (Dolby Digital), Magnus Pflueger; creative producer, Leif Alexis; casting, Karen Wendland. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 16, 2010. Running time: 88 MIN.

Radford, Michael

1984

Great Britain (113 mi) 1984

Time Out

Sensibly realising that science fiction is always a distortion of the time at which it was written rather than a prediction of the future, Radford aligns himself with Anthony Burgess' suggestion that the book only makes sense as 1948, with its food rationing, its housing shortages, bad cigarettes and Churchillian slogans. The look of the film certainly achieves the right rubble-strewn, monochrome period feel with precision and genuinely cinematic scope. Perhaps the greatest hurdle cleared, however, is the problem of incident. Radford's achievement is to have incorporated the impossible preaching and crazed ideas into the fabric with hardly any loose threads. The locations look very like modern Britain; and Burton at last found the one serious role for which he searched all his life.

All Movie Guide [Andrea LeVasseur]

Filmed during the actual dates in 1984 as described in the book, Michael Radford's adaptation is the preeminent film version of George Orwell's infamous novel. The stark gray settings effectively set the mood of a totalitarian state. John Hurt is a beaten-down Winston, whose weathered face shows every result of his tortured existence, especially during the final devastating scenes with the Thought Police. Suzanna Hamilton does what she can as Julia, bringing some human warmth to the otherwise grim and desolate surroundings. In the last performance before his death, Richard Burton conveys Inner Party member O'Brien with a strange fatherly compassion that makes his sadistic role all the more disturbing. In contrast to some other flashy and visually inventive future dystopia movies, 1984 focuses on the plight of humans with an austere landscape, washed-out colors, and severe close-ups signifying the omnipresence of Big Brother. In general, 1984 faithfully follows the book in story, character, and tone, which makes for an authentic if thoroughly depressing and slow-paced movie.

Ted Prigge

George Orwell is probably one of the greatest writers of all time. And his "1984" is probably his best (although I might argue it could be "Animal Farm"). The novel, written around 1948, I think, is a bleak story of a future where there is peace but the expense is a totalitarian state where everyone is miserable and afraid because there are TVs everywhere where "Big Brother" watches so you don't do anything treasonous. It's a frightening idea and pretty much illustrates that "Give Peace a Chance" might be a bad idea.

Michael Radford (director of "Il Postino") directed this film, ironically made in 1984 within the dates the book took place. He paints a futuristic world which doesn't resemble anything else before. There are no flying cars, monorails, or anything. The world is just a ruin with run-down buildings and plain old buses and what-not. In every room, there is a big television where Big Brother, the symbol of the state, is watching and the Thought Police are always the threat of even thinking of a treasonous act.

Our protagonist is Winston Smith (John Hurt), who really looks like he has been beaten down by the state in all senses of the word. He is a state worker who rewrites history the way the government wants it and in his spare time, writes in a journal about his dreams of having rampant sex, which is prohibited. One of his co-workers, Parsons (Gregor Fisher), is the symbol of the ultimate defeat of the state, since he is constantly telling of his love for everything that embodies Big Brother. In one darkly humorous scene, he talks about the processed meat and how it isn't even meat and that's why it's good.

Winston runs into (literally) a woman named Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) who's also a government worker and who passes him a note (Hello? Junior High?) saying she loves him and wants to meet him. They carefully plan their meetings and end up having intense sex in a far off place where no one, not even Big Brother is watching. Their sex is not actually about love, but as a form of rebellion and expression of their way to anti-supress themselves. They try to join the rebellion, headed by an O'Brien (Richard Burton, in his final performance), but that turns out to wind them up in prison and a torture sequence on Winston where he is beaten into admitting that 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4 and stuff like that. It's a horrific scene in all senses of the word.

"1984" the film works because it wonderfully embodies the bleakness that was the book. All of the scenes are drearily set and the film is as depressing and thought-provoking as the book...well, maybe not as thought-provoking. And John Hurt and Richard Burton are fabulous in their respective parts.

I highly reccomend this film for anyone who loved the book, but for anyone else, it's not going to be fun. It's a highly depressing film that is so dark that you might have to watch it in two sittings. But the message is still there and that's what counts. If you want a livelier film (and a better one, in my opinion), try Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." But this one will do if you're looking for a good intellectual film.

DVD Times [Gary Couzens]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

1984 and Brazil Nightmares Old and New, by John Hutton from Jump Cut, April 1987

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Britmovie

Foster on Film - Dystopias

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) January 1, 1984

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

IL POSTINO B+ 92

aka: The Postman

France Italy Belgium (108 mi) 1994

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

—excerpt from La Poesía (Poetry), from Memorial de Isla Negra, by Pablo Neruda, 1964

An immensely popular Italian film that screened in American theaters for nearly two years, long after the video release and its initial cable run, spawning millions of new Pablo Neruda fans across the globe, as the film is a fictionalized account of an incident in Neruda’s life, adapted from the 1985 Chilean novel Burning Patience (Ardiente Paciencia, or El Cartero De Neruda) by Antonio Skármeta, which takes place in the early 1970’s on Isla Negra, the tiny Chilean village where Neruda lived, but is transported to a small Sicilian island in the film shortly after his exile from Chile in the early 1950’s when the Communist Party, embraced by the Marxist poet Neruda, was outlawed in Chile. Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for Best Musical Score, where for several years it was the highest grossing film ever made in a language other than English, the film is one of the few foreign-language films to be nominated for Best Picture, something that hadn’t happened since Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972) and the Costa-Gavras film Z (1969). The film is largely a dream project of the lead actor, 41-year old Massimo Troisi, who was known mostly as a comic actor in Italy, but bought the rights for this movie and even helped write the screenplay, as he identified with the lead character. Postponing heart surgery to make the film, the actor was extremely limited by his physical restrictions on the set, yet provided a poignant and enduring performance for which he will always be remembered, yet died tragically of heart failure one day after the shooting finished. The film’s fascination with the poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) is instantly compelling, as he’s known as the greatest poet in the history of the Spanish language, so when he decides to make this remote little island his home in exile, the residents, nearly all illiterate fishermen and their families, light up with excitement while watching cinema newsreels of the upcoming event, where the railway station in Rome that greets Neruda’s arrival was actually commissioned by Mussolini for the arrival of Hitler, but it wasn’t finished in time. Choosing a charming mountainside villa with an outdoor terrace located between a volcano and the sea, the high cliffside location is probably the only luxurious home on the island, reachable by a winding dirt road that overlooks the Tyrrhenian Sea. While Neruda once lived on the island of Capri in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio, this film was shot on the nearby islands of Salina (rural and beach scenes), part of the Aeolian islands north of Sicily, and also Procida (harbor and village scenes), one of the Flegrean Islands off the coast of Naples, where the sunny, idyllic locations lend themselves to a dreamy, slow-moving, romantic adventure.

Set in a tiny Italian seaside village, it’s the story of a simple man, Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi), who breaks from tradition by being disinterested in being a fisherman, which makes him a bit of an outcast, and also out of a job. So when he sees a sign on the post office (which doubles as a telegraph office) for a mail delivery man who has his own bicycle, it’s like a scene out of de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES (1948). Inquiring within, he meets the rotund telegraph operator (the marvelous Renato Scarpa) who is looking to hire a temporary postman to deliver mail to the island’s lone customer, Pablo Neruda, where he’ll need a bike to climb up the cliffs. The anonymity of the island is part of its charm, as there are no cars, few roads, but there are plenty of fishing boats in the harbor, which, outside of the church, becomes the town’s only thriving activity. So when Mario arrives at Neruda’s door, he’s viewed as just another one of the nameless citizens inhabiting the island, all but ignoring him. While Mario can read, he’s flabbergasted to learn that nearly all Neruda’s mail is coming from females, an observance he amusingly shares with his boss, who never forgets to remind him that Neruda is also a fervent communist, where concerns for social justice are something his boss admittedly shares with the poet, perhaps taking refuge in his political beliefs, as nearly all the residents on the island are poor. To Mario, Neruda is a poet of love, jealous of all the women that flock to him, while to his boss, Neruda is a man of the people, a poet of the mistreated, reminding Mario that he shouldn’t linger and bother such an important man, but should at all times show him the respect he deserves. Of course, Mario is a man who can’t help himself, as he’s a dreamer who’s curious about such an important man in their midst, where he can’t take his eyes off the poet (who looks surprisingly like the man himself), wondering about each and every thing, eventually blurting out his own interest in becoming a poet. Neruda’s advice, upon reflection: “Try to walk along the shore, as far as the bay, and look around you.” Over time, Mario’s incessant questioning leads him to spend more time with Neruda, where his quizzical nature and halting speech seem so pure and innocent, almost childlike, yet the ever patient poet seems to delight in offering paternal wisdom, as it probably breaks up his day with these daily visits, often coming even when there’s no mail to deliver. But there is no more excitable moment than when Mario rushes up the mountainside with earth-shattering news, where you’d think the Pope had died, but like a mandatory trip to the confessional, Mario needs the poet’s advice, as he has fallen madly in love.

The woman in question is Beatrice Russo (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), the lovely barmaid that works in her mother’s restaurant and bar, spending her days all to herself for the most part as the men are away at sea. Mario is literally starstruck upon laying eyes on her, stunned, tongue-tied, unable to speak, where she may as well be an imaginary woman that exists only in his imagination, a beautiful woman loved from afar, where he excitedly asks the poet to write a poem to help him win the girl’s heart. Reminiscent of Cyrano’s poems to the beautiful Roxane in Edmond Rostand’s classic Cyrano de Bergerac, Mario is positively befuddled when the poet refuses, stumbling over himself with unleashed anxiety, “Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it; it belongs to those who need it.” Exasperated, with a sense of utter desperation, the poor man is flummoxed, lashing out sarcastically at the poet, “If you make this much of a fuss about one poem, you’re never going to win that Nobel Prize.” Neruda, of course, takes it all in stride, as he’s romantically living with a mistress that will eventually become his third wife, Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia (Anna Bonaiuto), seen dancing together on the flowered outdoor terrace overlooking the sea. While this may sound like the most far-fetched and sentimentalized story, it’s far from it, where both Troisi and Noiret are brilliant together, like long lost brothers who affectionately shelter each other from the storm, always warmhearted and intimate, having long conversations on the beach, where Mario’s driving needs are constantly spoiled by the seething rage of Beatrice’s mother (Linda Moretti), who is sure that communist poet is leading that boy into her daughter’s pants, pleading with the local priest to do something about it. But sincerity wins out in the end, where the film becomes a brilliant blend of romanticism and social realism, where Neruda’s time on the island is short, able to return to his native land, where time goes by and Mario feels the poet has all but forgotten him, where he has to assume his own responsibilities. But there’s a lovely turn of events when Mario returns to the villa to send items left behind, a nostalgic twist that gets at the heart of love and friendship, where he makes a recording of all the beautiful sounds that are unique to the island, including the heartbeat of his soon-to-be-born son, and sends them along, finding an extremely eloquent way to express a poetic finale, reminding viewers of the universal appeal of poetry and its ability to touch the very heart of humanity. Neruda’s work is deceptively simple in the way it celebrates the beauty of everyday objects and people, loving women, loving life, and his fellow man. The passion that Neruda exudes in his writing made him the object of great affection by women all over the world, where he was married three times, though his final love was Matilde Urrutia, the eventual love of his life, for whom he wrote The Captain’s Verses (Los Versos del Capitán) which were published anonymously in Italy in 1952 and not released under his own name until published in Chile in 1963. Neruda’s home in Chile was also a seaside residence, where he identifies with the ocean because of the internal movements of the waves, becoming something that remains alive in the rhythm of his poems. Surrounding himself with the vocabulary of his poems, “Her eyes were the color of faraway love,” he never accepts reality as it is, but expects us to relate to history in a creative way, to offer a better alternative. Much of his life was spent in exile, yet as a poet he is a national hero in Chile (no one fills that position in America), where his poems give identity to a continent and to a country.

Il Postino, directed by Michael Radford | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

When, in 1952, the exiled Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (Noiret) takes up residence in a house on a quiet little island off the Neapolitan coast, the fan mail he receives is so copious that the postmaster hires Mario (Troisi), the none too bright son of a local fisherman, to deliver the celebrity's mail. At first, Mario is simply star-struck by Neruda, who responds with understandable wariness to the postman's gauche attempts at conversation; soon, however, he's teaching Mario about metaphors, and when the postman falls for Beatrice (Cucinotta), a lovely but rather aloof barmaid, the poet agrees to try to help him win her with words. Inspired by an incident in Neruda's life, the story's engaging blend of easy humour and sunny romance takes hold from the start and never lets go. Much of its seductive charm derives from the excellence of the leads: Noiret does his gruff but malleable turn to perfection, while Troisi (who died soon after filming finished) exudes a simplicity of heart, mind and soul that never seems excessively sentimental. Mercifully, Radford avoids making the small peasant community too glamorously Arcadian. Old-fashioned it may be, but it knocks the spots off pap like Cinema Paradiso.

Il Postino: The Movie | Academy of American Poets - Poets.org

Based on true events, Il Postino portrays the story of a shy postman who develops a transformative friendship with the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. On a tiny island off the Italian coast in 1953, the postman has been given the job of delivering mail to the town’s new resident. He is astonished by the remarkable amount of mail from women that Neruda receives, and forges a relationship with the poet to learn the secret of his unlikely power over women. Through their friendship, Neruda not only helps the shy postman capture the town’s most beautiful woman, he also inspires the postman to see himself and his quiet fishing village a in lyrical way.

Nominated for five Academy awards, the film is a graceful masterpiece with beautiful performances by Philippe Noiret as Neruda and Massimo Troisi as Mario Ruoppolo, the postman. The film was Troisi’s dream project, and despite his failing heart he insisted on seeing it through and ultimately died the day production wrapped.

The film is based on the book Burning Patience by Antonio Skarmeta, which takes place in the early 1970s on Isla Negra, the tiny Chilean village where Neruda lived. The story follows the growth of a young postman whose only job is to deliver mail to Neruda, paralleling the changes in his inner life with the political upheavals in Chile.

Nathan Wolfson's review of "The Postman"

In 1970, Salvador Allende, after three unsuccessful attempts, finally became president of Chilé. He was, arguably, the first democratically elected Marxist to ever become a head of state. He began to implement the ideas of his Popular Unity platform and quickly became a target of the imperialistic tendencies of international business. The first major international accumulator of capital to grow wary was the American-based ITT corporation. By 1973, through their enlistment of the US Central Intelligence Agency, international capital was able to subject Chile to a violent military coup (in which Allende was killed). Aided by the United States, General Pinochet's bloody military dictatorship pandered to the interests of foreign investors for sixteen years. Allende's murder sent a resounding message around the world: mess with the interests of the rich and "we" will kill you.

The poet of the proletarian (as well as of the lover and beloved), Pablo Neruda, had been nominated for the same, "communist" party ticket but bowed out once Allende (a seasoned politician) expressed an interest in running for the presidency that fourth time. As fate would have it, Neruda died the same year that Allende was killed by American-backed forces. What would have happened had Neruda become president is open to speculation. His political attitudes, the social milieu in which he lived, and his achievements as a poet (Kenneth Rexroth--the father of the beats--once called him "almost certainly the leading poet of his type") are a matter of record.

Michael Radford's Il Postino (The Postman), now playing in Arcata, draws from this real life intermingling of left wing politics and poetry, while taking some liberties with the facts surrounding Neruda's life. These liberties belie a radically different agenda from that embodied in the life and work of Pablo Neruda. Drawing from--and occasionally diverging radically from--Antonio Skarmeta's novel Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience), Radford presents us with a set of scenes drawn largely from Skarmeta's book set within a somewhat altered scenario. Skarmeta's book was set in Chile prior to and during the Allende presidency. Il Postino takes place on a small Italian island, during and after Neruda's fictitiously composed exile there.

The film takes a cynical stance regarding the ability of the inhabitants of a rural fishing village--and, perhaps, of the film's audience--to understand political issues. The stance implies that working towards social equity is not worthwhile.

Prior to Neruda's arrival in the narrative, we are introduced to Mario. Early in the film, he goes to a movie theater. The newsreel Mario sees depicts the arrival of Neruda, recently cast out of Chile, at an Italian railway station amid protests aimed at convincing the Italian government to let Neruda stay. This newsreel forms a microcosm of Il Postino's attitude both towards the working people in the film and towards those who view the film.

The black-and-white images of the newsreel at first appear to mirror the simplistic voice-over accompanying the images of Neruda walking through a train-station full of protesters. The verbal narrative paints a dichotomous picture of Neruda's political consciousness and those of the newsreel's expected viewers. We, the newsreel implies, will view Neruda as an eccentric (perhaps even as a subversive) for his political views. At the same time, his notoriety as a poet (and, even more so, as a celebrity) will be what matters to us most.

Never mind that Neruda speaks eloquently of our plight as exploited individuals. Pay attention to "Neruda, the poet of love"--and to his romantic aura. But just as black-and-white images are really composed of varying shades of gray, the film subverts itself by pandering to an a- political/apathetic/right-wing understanding of the social world while unintentionally demonstrating this bias to us at the level of a sub-text.

This attitude of post-modern indifference to matters of politics and economics is a frightfully pervasive, implicit, rightist theme underlying many interludes in the film. An initial example occurs with the characterization of Mario's boss, Giorgio.

Giorgio runs the local post-and-telegraph office. Neruda is coming to town and will be receiving bags of mail each day that need to be delivered to his semi-remote home. Giorgio needs an individual to make a single, arduous special delivery every day. With un-acknowledged shades of DeSica's Bicycle Thieves (sic) in the air, Mario is granted a job paying "just enough to go to the cinema once a week" in light of the fact that he owns a bike.

The telling exchange between Giorgio and Mario occurs during their first encounter. In introducing the new postman to the standards of his office, Giorgio states plainly that while he is a "communist" he expects to be called "sir". This kind of ironic utterance is echoed through three or four similar scenes throughout the film.

On the surface, the humor is undeniable. Beneath that, however, lies a contempt for attempts to achieve social equity. The implication is that perhaps the most we can hope for from a movement for social justice is a good laugh based on its hypocrisy. But Radford suggests that we can expect more.

The "more" is not the political reality of being exiled embodied in Neruda's plight. This is part of the statement that the film makes. And it is certainly a necessary plot device inasmuch as it explains why Neruda is in Italy. But the "more" we can expect from social activism exposes itself more subtly.

One result of progressive political participation Radford presents is the untimely death of our beloved postman. Towards the end of the film, through a series of flashbacks, we see the recently politicized Mario attend a "communist" rally. When the rally is dispersed by the police, a small riot ensues. In the tumult, Mario is killed.

One is left with the feeling (expressed by Mario's wife), If only he hadn't gotten involved with radical politics! If only he hadn't gone to that rally on that fateful day! And so on. These views are expressed in the presence of Neruda, so she refrains from directly blaming him. But the implication is there, since Neruda inspired many of Mario's beliefs. And Neruda is visibly shaken with a kind of remorse mixed with disillusionment.

Of course, if it wasn't for "that poet" Mario might never have married the woman he fell in love with. This tension is at the root of the dichotomy Radford constructs. On one side of the balance, all these ideas about equality and democracy expressed by Neruda are either ridiculed or portrayed as dangerous. On the other side of the scale, we find Neruda the poet of love. It is this side of his pursuits that are heralded. Whether in the romantic love he and Matilde shared or in his ability to communicate the state of romantic ecstasy in verse (that permits others to find their own paths to such a destination), Neruda's actions are vindicated when unattached to concern about political, social and economic domination.

There are problems with comparing a film to the book from which it was derived. In most instances, I prefer to view the film as an independent creation and attempt to appreciate it on its own terms. But with Il Postino, examining some of the ways in which the film differs from its inspiration, Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience) offers insight into the films implicit argument against social awareness. There are many variations between the two texts. For example, as already mentioned, they are set in two different countries during two different periods of time. I'll describe just two indicative variations between the two works.

First, in the film, Neruda is portrayed as entirely uninterested in continuing contact with the people he has been living with--whose lives he has touched--once he departs from the fishing village. He stirs things within the hearts of the villagers, plays matchmaker for Mario, inspires the name of the new couple's child, informs Mario's political and aesthetic sensibilities--and then fails to write to or publicly speak of his Italian interlude. As one of the most cynical characters in the film comments, when a bird is done eating, it flies away.

In the book, however, Neruda remains much truer to the spirit of camaraderie he expressed about--and imparted to--the people of the small village near where he lived. Even in his absence, he still thinks of Mario. In the film, Mario turns to making a recording of characteristic sounds of the fishing village to send to Neruda (as a way of reminding him what he has left behind and how intensely Mario still feels for him). In the book, Neruda writes to Mario, sends him a Sony tape recorder, and asks Mario to make just such a recording because he is missing the village so much.

The film creates an implicitly two-faced radical intellectual who appears to live by an out-of-sight-out-of-mind principle. Without faulting the film for not faithfully adapting the book to the screen, this particular re-arrangement of the plot serves to further undermine our faith in the character of Neruda and the ideas of communalism he personifies.

Another telling discrepancy between the book and the film involves Mario's death. In the book he doesn't die. He grows old with his family, experiences the transformation of Chilean society under Allende (before the violent halt), and outlives Neruda. His politics and his love of Neruda do not kill him. These parts of his personality set Mario free.

Both of these inversions (who writes whom and who dies) demonstrate the underlying subtext present throughout much of Il Postino. I have little problem with a screenwriter altering a book however much to create a meaningful, independent film. But the manner in which this film reworks the book that inspired it serves to denigrate the potential for even mildly venerating work for social justice.

The message: Speak of metaphors about the sunset. Watch the sea's rippling waves. But pay no attention to the fellow removing the money from your pocket that you have earned. You're better off exploited than working for change.

The problem: Neruda's possible nagging doubts towards the end of his life not withstanding, I find at the core of Il Postino an undermining of the aspirations of all people (such as Neruda) who spend their lives working for justice.

Il Postino - Culture Court Lawrence Russell

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1995 [Erik Beck]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel

ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

Review for Il postino (1994) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

Review for Il postino (1994) - IMDb Pedro Sena

Il Postino / The Postman | Review by Chris Tookey

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Jersey Film Society - review

Il Postino (1994) - Michael Radford - film review - Films de France James Travers

Il Postino Blu-ray (Italy) - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: Il Postino: Collector's Series

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

Film locations for Il Postino (1994) - Movie Locations

The Postman | Variety Derek Elley

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason

Tourists threaten Il Postino beach | Environment | The Guardian John Hooper, May 10, 2007

Washington Post Hal Hinson, also seen here: Hal Hinson

San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]

San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

The Postman (Il Postino) Movie Review (1995) | Roger Ebert

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) also seen here: Movie Review - - FILM REVIEW: THE POSTMAN (IL POSTINO); A ...

FILM; The Required Deceptions Of 'Il Postino' - The New York Times May 28, 2000

Postino: The Postman - Wikipedia

MICHEL PETRUCCIANI

France Germany Italy (102 mi) 2011

Michel Petrucciani: Cannes Review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 2011

Doc about the French jazz pianist is a clear-eyed, non-judgmental portrait of an artist as a permanent young man.

If you only knew jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani through his recorded music, you’d know this was an extraordinary individual. His phrasing, the electricity of his right hand and the cleanness of his improvisations take jazz to the very heights of artistry. But as many jazz aficionados know and Michael Radford’s film Michel Petrucciani will make known to many more, one needs a better word than “extraordinary” to describe this man.

For Petrucciani was born in the south of France with osteogenesis imperfecta — or brittle bone disease — that prevented him from growing beyond three feet and subjected him to a life of pain as bones broke constantly, even as he was playing. None of this caused him ever to stop. He lived life in a rush — “I hate wasting time,” he says early in the film — knowing that with his affliction he would not enjoy a long life.

The film chronicles his overindulgence in food, drugs, wine, women and discarded friends as he raced against time, playing sometimes 10 hours a day and performing over 200 concerts in a year. He died at age 36 in New York in 1999, not so much from his handicap as foolishly going out into a cold New Year’s Eve with his fragile lungs and then catching pneumonia.

Radford has assembled ample footage and interviews with his subject from many friends and other sources along with numerous interviews with colleagues and lovers to pull together a clear-eyed, non-judgmental portrait of an artist as a permanent young man. Even spurned lovers and friends have mostly kindly things to say about a man who so blazed through their lives that they still have a startled, dazed look about them.

Here, clearly, is a charismatic, dazzlingly talented individual that lived every moment to the fullest. His 36 years is more like 72 for anyone else. He even managed to learn fluent, colloquial English in six months.

What the film never says is that music may be what nourished him, that every hour at the piano may have added an hour or more to his life. Another thing the film only barely mentions is that his deformity, if you will, may have added to his genius. To witness in archival footage the rapidity with which the fingers of his right hand hits the piano keys defies all understanding of that part of the human anatomy. How can fingers move so fast? They don’t seem to with a “normal” person’s hand.

The one great fault with this doc, which makes an ideal film for special runs in art-house venues and, of course, on TV and DVD, lies in Radford’s unwillingness to identify his interviewees. In press notes he claims such identification is “irrelevant.” No, it’s not.

Otherwise though, the film has much to stay about overcoming fate, loving life and living with eternal optimism.

Michel Petrucciani Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

It’s always a labour of love to make a jazz film, a jazz documentary even more so - especially when the musician subject is no longer around to promote it. But the labour pays off beautifully in Michel Petrucciani, Michael Radford’s fond and informative portrait of the phenomenal jazz pianist, who died in 1999. Petrucciani’s life is a story of exuberant triumph over challenge, and of the pleasures and prices of living life to the full.

The film takes a four-square but effective documentary approach, stitching together archive footage with interviews, and features enough of Petrucciani’s performances to make this a must for jazz buffs, whether or not they’re fans of the subject himself (major jazz names interviewed include Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano and John Abercrombie). This will be a hard sell theatrically outside jazz-loving France, where it’s released in September, but its DVD prospects should be brisk.

The film represents a confident return to non-fiction for British director Radford, best known for 1984 and Italian-language hit Il Postino but a documentarist through the 1970s. Here, Radford takes an unshowy and intensely sympathetic rather than reverent approach to the life
Petrucciani, who was born in 1962 in Montpelier, France with the condition osteogenesis imperfecta, sometimes known as ‘brittle bone disease’.

As an adult, Petrucciani grew to only three feet, while his fragility meant that he often broke his bones and that his extremely energetic playing style was a constant physical risk. The son of a jazz guitarist father, Petrucciani fell in love with piano after seeing Duke Ellington on TV at the age of four. Rapidly becoming a prodigy, he played his first professional concert with trumpeter Clark Terry at the age of 13 - although some friends are quick to debunk the myth about the gig being an entirely impromptu marvel.

Through a friend, the pianist visited California, where he was befriended by saxophonist and mystic Charles Lloyd. A phenomenal transatlantic career followed, with Petrucciani becoming the first non-French artist signed to legendary label Blue Note. Success also brought the opportunity to indulge himself, and much of the ’80s, we learn, was spent in a wild rush of champagne, cocaine and partying.

Petrucciani, we learn, was irresistible to women and, one former consort claims, was as talented between the sheets as on the keys. In interviews filmed at various stages in his life, Petrucciani is candid about his hedonistic tendency to overdo things - a penchant which, friends suggest, contributed to his early death. This portrait is anything but reverent about the pianist - we learn from his ex-wives and girlfriends that he had a habit of leaving one abruptly to take up with another, and associates reveal, albeit sketchily, that he had a callous side.

But what emerges, not least from footage of the man himself, is that Petrucciani was a hugely charismatic and ebullient character. Most importantly, we get insights into his blindingly rapid and inventive playing; and ample, hugely pleasurable footage of Petrucciani solo, or in tandem with greats such as Lloyd, Konitz and Stéphane Grappelli will make non-converts want to go out and discover the music.

Radok, Alfred

THE DISTANT JOURNEY (Daleká Cesta) A- 94

Czechoslovakia (103 mi) 1949

A modernist Holocaust film made just a few years after the end of WWII using an experimental film style that includes archival film mixed with re-enactments which offers a vivid feel that resembles Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone. The film opens like the Nazi Academy Awards, as one by one, each top ranking official, from Hitler to Goebbels on down, introduced in a huge title boldly displayed onscreen, is seen at the podium offering a rousing speech for the fatherland, like a series of Nazi greatest hits, accompanied by marching troops and bold Nazi symbols. After a blitzkrieg of Nazi images, another realist story begins about a female Jewish doctor in Prague who refuses to leave her country, despite the rising tide of anti-Semitism and violence, claiming this is her country and her language. So her family decides to stay with her instead of emigrating abroad, even after she marries a fellow doctor, a Gentile man for protection, beautifully expressed during a time when anti-Jewish laws were being written, where being Jewish was outlawed, where one of the guests actually commits suicide afterwards, all happening offscreen, which introduces Jewish symbols, using a split screen, where a Jewish menorah is seen in a small square off to the side of the main images of a Nazi military parade, a method used to juxtapose the two events happening simultaneously throughout the film.

Also of interest, the dialogue occasionally completely disappears, turning the story into a silent film, using shadows and other Expressionist images, also barely lit film noir imagery with occasional jolts of energy from a mixture of avant garde jazz music and orchestral passages to enhance the mood. All in all, it was rather difficult to follow the narrative, as the characters resembled one another, and one did need to have a knowledge of history to understand the nuances, such as the use of the Terezin (Terezienstadt) concentration camp in Prague as a show camp, supposedly built to protect the Jews, a mythical idyllic city cleaned up, with children singing in the corner of the frame, giving the Red Cross from the West a view of Jews living in peaceful harmony before the curtain falls after they leave, turning from a transport camp, a waiting station until they could be transported further East into the death camps, into another one of the Nazi crematoriums where nearly 100,000 died, including 15,000 children.

One by one, where all the Jews are marked by the mandatory wearing of a Jewish star, the doctor’s family is shipped off to the camps, while a Jewish band plays music as they are herded like cattle down the city streets, leaving her in a state of bewilderment, not knowing what happened to any of them, while she herself is eventually fired from her job, and all the other Jews are rounded up to live in a cramped ghetto without walls, totalling some 150,000, until eventually she and her Aryan husband are among the last to be transported to the camps. When the scene shifts to the camps, we see them building the crematoriums, with brief documentary images of actual dead bodies lying in an open field. Unfortunately, this film begins to resemble a style of miserablism, with unnecessarily exaggerated displays of sadistic Nazi temperament, always displaying the most openly cruel behavior possible. The filmmaker Radok was himself imprisoned in the last months of the war in the detention camp of Klettendorf near Wrocław, from which he managed to escape, so the material is never anything less than genuine and riveting. The film had a limited release, suppressed by the Soviet state which controlled Czechoslovakia after the war, which may have actually altered the film in its present form, limiting the view of widespread theft of Jewish possessions, and perhaps suppressing the sentiments of the non-Jewish Czechs, such as the father of the groom who failed to attend the wedding, as the film was not really seen until some forty years later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Today, the film contains historical perspective, like Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1945), as it was filmed so near the end of the war and features many of the devices used by Roman Polanski in his early terrifying horror film REPULSION (1965), such as the use of offscreen sound, a mix of the real and unreal, vivid use of music, particularly percussion, and an understanding of Expressionist cinema.

CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the 1940's Charles Coleman, Facets Film Programmer

Confronting the horrors of history head on, Radok and his crew shot this first feature film about the Holocaust just three years after the war ended. The film combines actual footage with reenactments and Expressionist camera setups to create a vivid, immediate look at the concentration camps. With Blanka Waleská, Otomar Krejča. Directed by Alfred Radok, Czechoslovakia, 1949, 35mm, 103 mins.

Czech Modernism in Film: The 1920s to the 1940s JR Jones from the Reader

Czech director Alfred Radok lost his father and grandfather in the Holocaust and spent several months in a detention camp himself, which makes the poetic control of his 1949 drama -- the first to confront the subject -- even more impressive. He carefully charts the growing anti-Semitic persecution in Prague, as a Jewish doctor tries to protect herself by marrying a gentile, then watches her relatives being shipped off to a transport camp in Terezin. Though the movie is filled with striking expressionist images, Radok also weaves in documentary footage of the Third Reich, telescoping the dramatic action into a frame within the frame that echoes the victims' powerlessness.

Village Voice J. Hoberman (excerpt)

"Czech Modernism" includes only two postwar movies—one, Alfred Radok's 1949 The Distant Journey (December 10), is a masterpiece. Among the first movies to represent the Holocaust, Distant Journey focuses on a Jewish doctor who briefly forestalls her deportation to the "model" concentration camp at Terezin by marrying a Czech colleague. (Their wedding dinner is a remarkable blend of gaiety and terror— the proper bourgeois guests marked for death by their mandatory Jewish stars.)

Like Orson Welles, Radok was a man of the theater and his use of film form has a comparable audacity. Distant Journey is filled with outsize shadows and shimmering reflections; it interpolates newsreels and noir angles, using a spare, mournfully jazzy soundtrack to underscore its expressionist touches. Once the action shifts to Terezin (where Radok's father and grandfather died), the fantastic is a function of the movie's verisimilitude.

This horrifying, emptied-out world seems distinctively Czech—or at least Kafkaesque—with its gnarled old people and vast warehouses filled with confiscated Jewish belongings.

Something similar happened to the movie itself—withdrawn after a brief run and locked in the vaults for the better part of two decades. In his history of Czech cinema, novelist Josef Skvorecky links The Distant Journey to the Czech new wave of the 1960s, remembering it to have been "as much a revelation to all of us as were the films of Véra Chytilová, Milos Forman, or Jan Nemec"—all of whom were profoundly influenced by this "tragically premature and anachronistic work of art."

The Reeler Peter Hames

Central Europe Review an extensive review by Jiří Cieslar

New York Times Bosley Crowther

Rafelson, Bob

Bob Rafelson | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Hal Erickson

The nephew of famed playwright Samson Raphaelson, American director Bob Rafelson decided to forego the expensive education planned for him and take up cross-country vagabondage instead. He worked in a rodeo at 15, became an ocean-liner deckhand two years later, and a jazz drummer a year after that. He entered Dartmouth College, after which he worked as a deejay on an Armed Forces radio outlet. As a writer, Rafelson toiled in numerous New York-based TV shows, then travelled westward to try his luck in Hollywood. His breezy, patchwork writing style was perfectly suited to the Beatles-like TV sitcom The Monkees (1966-67), wherein Rafelson worked as writer, director, and coproducer (with Bert Schneider). In concert with then-partner Jack Nicholson, Rafelson penned the script for the surrealistic Monkees feature film Head (1968), which he also directed. The film was suitable impetus to the Columbia Pictures higher ups to bankroll another Rafaelson-Nicholson collaboration. Five Easy Pieces (1971), was an intensely personal and somewhat autobiographical study of a young man (Nicholson) whose alienation with the status quo causes him to chuck the security of his musical career and his wealthy family for a life of drifting. The critics loved Five Easy Pieces, but were less enthusiastic about the 1972 Rafelson/Nicholson concoction, King of Marvin Gardens, in which Nicholson played the establishment figure, while fellow 1970s icon Bruce Dern played the dreamer. Stay Hungry (1976) was a story of bodybuilding juxtaposed with the changes in the New South, boasting an early leading role for Arnold Schwarzenegger — and the first-ever nude scene for costar Sally Field. Critics of Stay Hungry called Rafelson on the carpet for his credit-grabbing attempts to become an "auteur" director, even though these same critics had applauded Rafelson's auterism in his earlier productions. With The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) — again with Nicholson as star — Rafelson lost much of his critical support for having the audacity to turn out a purely commercial product. Actually, Rafalson's improvisational style had gotten slicker as he gained more experience. Bob Rafelson's most recent film was Mountains of the Moon (1990) a lavish but still distinctly Rafelsonesque period piece about a 19th century "anti-establishment" rugged individualist, explorer Sir Richard Burton.

Film Reference profile by Rodney Farnsworth

Bob Rafelson is a neglected director mainly because he lays bare the myths essential to America. He does not sugarcoat the bitter dose of his satire, as do Coppola and Altman. A distaste on the part of mainstream critics has caused attacks upon, but mostly the neglect of, Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens , which is his most representative film. Head is bound by the conventions of the teenage-comedy genre and shows few marks of Rafelson's authorship; Stay Hungry is a minor work that sustains his standard theme of the dropout—this time it is a Southern aristocrat who falls into the underworld, which is ambiguously mixed with the business world above. Something of a popular success, Five Easy Pieces certainly demands attention.

Five Easy Pieces was the first expression of the burned-out liberalism that was to become the hallmark of American films of the 1970s. Rafelson's film expresses the intelligentsia's dissatisfaction with its impotency in light of an overweening socio-economic structure. Either capitulating or dropping out seemed the only choices. The film's protagonist seeks escape, from a successful but unsatisfying career as a concert pianist into the world of the working class—first as an oil-field worker and then, at the end of the film, as a logger. The film centers on his foray into the bourgeois bohemia of his family's home—a sort of ad hoc artist colony under the aegis of his sister. The world we see is both figuratively and literally one of cripples. His sister's lover is in traction. His father is a paralytic. All are emblems of a pseudoclass, without a vital motive force, that the protagonist rejects, but cannot replace. The protagonist's sole contribution to an intellectual discussion among his sister's friends is an obscene comment on the senselessness of their phrase-weaving. In the largest sense, Five Easy Pieces is about the American intellectual's self-hatred, his disorientation in an essentially anti-intellectual society, and his resulting inability to feel comfortable with his capacity to think and to create.

The King of Marvin Gardens cuts through the American dream—the belief that every man can achieve riches by ingenuity. The protagonist becomes drawn into his brother's success dream. Rafelson sets the film in pre-boom Atlantic City—an emblem of economic desolation. The locale's aptness is affirmed by the scene of the protagonist's sister-in-law throwing her make-up into a fire. Her ageing face, without make-up, is seen against the dilapidated facade of boardwalk hotels. Her gesture (and in Rafelson's uncommitted world we daren't ask for more) of defiance is directed against what has been the female share of the American Dream: the male has traditionally taken for himself the power that comes of wealth and left woman the illusion called "glamour." Another symbol is the blowing up of an old hotel; it collapses in a heap like the dream of entrepreneurship the protagonist momentarily shares with his brother.

Rafelson's elliptical style creates tension and interest in the opening moments of thrillers like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Black Widow , and Man Trouble , but this style makes for occasional plot confusion. It is often hard to tell whether the ellipses are accidental or part of aesthetic strategy. In one instance, whatever the intent, an ellipsis poetically seems to suggest a shudder of horror at the human condition and a desire to drop out entirely from it: Rafelson suddenly presents us with the strangely clipped, abrupt walkout of the protagonist at the end of Black Widow. The films focus on what is the main theme of Rafelson's films of the 1980s and 1990s: betrayal from those closest to you, especially from within the family group. Rafelson cannot ever be said to have been caught up in the recent sentimentalism about the traditional family structure. In his filmic vision, he places no trust in the values found there.

Only in the unconventional pairing between the explorer Burton and a liberated aristocrat (exhilaratingly played by Fiona Shaw) in Mountains of the Moon does one find a positive vision of marriage and human trust, achieved only after the hero drops out from the competitive struggle for grants toward explorations and for credit from the findings. Burton experiences betrayal from Spekes, his boon companion during the exploration of the mountains at the source of the Nile River. While the film tries but fails to exonerate Burton of any deep complicity in British imperialism, it does pointedly show how powerful English interests seek in every possible way to harm his career and discount his accomplishments because he is of Irish birth. The socio-historical impact is otherwise weakened by the narrative. Whereas Rafelson's thrillers benefit from elliptical expositions, they play considerable havoc with much of the first half of Mountains of the Moon. Rafelson has failed to gain audience popularity and rare critical approval because he does not soften brutal political deconstruction with dazzling techniques. He devotes his attention not only to the straightforward expression of his themes but to getting brilliant acting out of his casts. He forces them to explore the darker sides of their characters—each a microcosm of society.

Biography for Bob Rafelson - TCM.com Shawn Dwyer biography from Turner Classic Movies

Bob Rafelson: Information from Answers.com biography

Bob Rafelson | American director and producer | Britannica.com biography

Bob Rafelson The Indie King, which includes a biography, from Film Festival

the lecture bureau presents... Bob Rafelson profile

New York State Writers Institute - Bob Rafelson profile

Bob Rafelson - Screenrush biography

Bob Rafelson - Overview - MSN Movies

Bob Rafelson brief bio from NNDB

Bob Rafelson @ Filmbug brief bio

Bob Rafelson from No Good Deed - at Film.com brief bio and filmography

Bob Rafelson Mubi

Bob Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces' is the quintessential film of the so ... Cinephilia and Beyond (Undated)

Film View; THE STORY IS THE SAME BUT HOLLYWOOD HAS CHANGED Janet Maslin from The New York Times, April 26, 1981

Boardwalk Xanadu: Time and Place in The King of Marvin Gardens ... Boardwalk Xanadu: The Time and Place in The King of Marvin Gardens and Atlantic City, by Maria San Filippo from Senses of Cinema, April 10, 2001

Five Easy Pieces - Bright Lights Film Journal Andrew Culbertson, August 1, 2007

Bob Rafelson | Popdose Ken Shane from Popdose, November 19, 2009

Michael Wood reviews 'Five Easy Pieces' · LRB 9 September 2010 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, September 2010

TSPDT - Bob Rafelson They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Bob Rafelson | The New Yorker October 24, 1970 interview

Film Journal Interview Bob Rafelson and His Odd American Places, includes an interview by Peter Tonguette from The Film Journal, October 2004

The Monologist and the Fighter: An Interview with Bob Rafelson ... Franz Müller and Rainer Knepperges interview from Senses of Cinema, April 14, 2009

BFI | Sight & Sound | One for the road: Bob Rafelson and 'Five Easy ... David Thomson chats with the director from Sight and Sound, September 2010

Bob Rafelson · Article · The A.V. Club Noel Murray interview, November 22, 2010

Bob Rafelson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HEAD

USA (86 mi) 1968 Director’s Cut (110 mi)

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review

After NBC canceled their innovative sitcom, the Monkees and their TV brain trust, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, hatched this big-screen psychedelic freak-out (1968), a narrative cul-de-sac of genre parodies, musical numbers, smug antiwar statements, and bilious McLuhan-esque satire. Scripted by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson (who would next collaborate on Five Easy Pieces), it's uneven but mostly a blast, with great tunes like Harry Nilsson's "Daddy's Song," Michael Nesmith's barn burner "Circle Sky," and Gerry Goffin and Carole King's grandiose "Porpoise Song." Rafelson directed; with cameos by Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello, Sonny Liston, Teri Garr, and Victor Mature. 86 min.

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review

Rafelson's first feature, made when Monkee mania had all but died, Head proved too experimental for the diminishing weenybop audience which had lapped up the ingenious TV series. It flopped dismally in the US, and only achieved belated release here. Despite obviously dated aspects like clumsy psychedelic effects and some turgid slapstick sequences, the film is still remarkably vital and entertaining. Rafelson (who helped to create the group), together with Jack Nicholson (co-writer and co-producer), increased the TV show's picaresque tempo while also adding more adult, sardonic touches. The calculated manipulation behind the phenomenon is exposed at the start, when the Monkees metaphorically commit suicide. The typical zany humour is intercut with harsher political footage and satire on established genres of American cinema, exploding many a sacred cow into the bargain.

Head (1968) - Articles - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

It sounds like someone's LSD flashback. Frank Zappa, boxer Sonny Liston, Annette Funicello, female impersonator T.C. Jones, San Francisco's legendary topless dancer Carol Doda and other cult celebrities appear in a movie scripted by Jack Nicholson and directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) that showcases the TV-created pop band The Monkees in the leading roles who in one scene play dandruff in Victor Mature's hair. Entitled Head (1968), this Cuisinart-puree of pop culture infused with anti-establishment posturing and served up in the then-current style of a trippy experimental film could only have happened in the late sixties when Hollywood studios were in a try-anything phase to capture the rapidly receding youth market. Rampant use of recreational drugs among Hollywood's elite and film industry personnel might have had something to do with it too.

Virtually plotless with a free-form structure that owed a lot to the scattershot sketch format of TV's "Laugh-In" (1968-1973), Head was like the anti-A Hard Day's Night (1964) for cynical hipsters. Instead of depicting David, Micky, Michael and Peter as the endearing goofballs worshipped by teenyboppers across America, it deconstructed their image, revealing them to be a synthetic by-product of Hollywood marketing. The irony was that The Monkees were in on the joke and were only too happy to spoof their once popular TV series (1966-1968) and their pre-packaged personalities. Head also marked Bob Rafelson's feature film debut after an apprenticeship of producing and directing episodes of The Monkees TV series. And it was clearly a transitional film for Jack Nicholson who already had penned several screenplays including The Trip (1967) and was on the verge of stardom without knowing it - Easy Rider (1969), released the following year, would catapult the actor to overnight success.

Initially called Untitled, Head was an unconventional project from the beginning. According to author Patrick McGilligan in Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, "Bob, Bert [Schneider, executive producer], and Jack, with the four Monkees in tow, went to Ojai [California] for several days. They smoked "a ton of dope" (as Davy Jones recalls) and tossed ideas into a running tape recorder...The script was set up to have the least continuity imaginable, and only the slenderest plot trigger - the four Monkees leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge in an effort to escape the mental prison of a black box, which was "Head," meaning pothead, but also meaning all the rules and straitlaced conventions inside one's head that inhibit enjoyment of life. With their tapes and notes, Nicholson and Rafelson went away to the desert for inspiration. According to at least one account, they scribbled a treatment while tripping on acid."

By the time filming began on Head, The Monkees were less than happy with their circumstances. Not only were they feuding with Columbia over their contracts and salaries but they felt betrayed by Rafelson and Nicholson after they were informed that none of them would receive a writing credit on the film. "We were disappointed and angry," Micky Dolenz said. "Mike was furious. He took all the tapes and locked them in the trunk of his car!" As a result, Micky, Davy and Mike (without Peter's involvement) refused to show up on the first day of shooting which infuriated Rafelson and Nicholson. After a day of negotiations, filming resumed with all four band members but relations between the Monkees and their director were decidedly strained after that...and Mike, Davy, Micky and Peter never received a writer's credit for their contributions.

When Head was completed, Rafelson and Nicholson launched a guerilla advertising campaign in New York City, plastering stickers for the film everywhere on taxicabs, signs, police helmets, you name it. At one point they were even arrested for being public nuisances but their efforts were in vain. The critics were unimpressed and the film held little appeal for anyone who wasn't a fan of the Monkees' TV show. Dolenz stated later, "Because the film was rated R, most of our fans couldn't even get into the theatre to see it in the first place and those who did just didn't have any idea of what we were up to." Nicholson, however, maintains even today that Head is one of his proudest accomplishments and still calls it "the best rock-'n-roll movie ever made." Despite its commercial failure, Rafelson was equally pleased with it, comparing it often to Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

The remarkable thing about Head is how well it holds up today despite being mired in the counterculture of the sixties. Some of the satirical jabs and anti-war rhetoric are as timely as ever, particularly the scene where Micky attacks a defective coke machine in the middle of an Arabian desert set. Or the scene where a deranged football player (Green Bay Packers' middle linebacker Ray Nitschke) repeatedly tackles Peter in a foxhole while chanting, "We're number one, we're number one!" Rafelson and Nicholson also have fun spoofing different movie genres and in one Western burlesque Teri Garr gets to deliver the immortal line "Suck it, before the venom reaches my heart!" after being bitten by a rattlesnake. The film's uneasy mixture of comedic throwaway bits with actual newsreel footage of Viet Nam and other flash points of the sixties gives it a subversive edge though some critics found it pretentious. "There was this one very disturbing sequence," Dolenz recalled, "in which Bob used that famous piece of news footage of Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulling out a snub-nosed .38 and shooting Vietcong Captain Bay Lop in the head....At one point in the movie it is shown thirty-two times simultaneously in split screen."

In the end, The Monkees may have had the last laugh since they were finally able to play their own music in Head after being dubbed by studio musicians in their television show (The band members, with the exception of Michael Nesmith, weren't real musicians when they were first hired for the TV series but learned how to play by the time Head went into production). And Head includes some of their best songs such as Nesmith's all-out-rocker "Circle Sky" (recorded before a live audience in Utah), Tork's two "Summer of Love" ditties, "Can You Dig It" and "Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again," "As We Go Along," a Carole King-Toni Stern composition featuring the guitar work of Ry Cooder and Neil Young, plus "Daddy's Song" by Harry Nilsson and the psychedelic opening number, "Porpoise Song," written by Jerry Coffin and Carole King.

Years after being ridiculed as an infantile imitation of The Beatles, packaged for fickle teenagers, The Monkees are finally getting a little overdue respect for Head whose cult continues to grow whenever it is shown. And Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson have nothing to be ashamed of either.

Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Head (1968) - The Criterion Collection

3B Theater

User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]

TV Guide

Channel 4 Film

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (Renata Adler, Vincent Canby) review

FIVE EASY PIECES A 96

USA (98 mi) 1970

You don’t sit down and say, “I’m feeling alienated today, I think I’ll make a movie about alienation.” —Bob Rafelson (director)

Shot while Nixon was secretly bombing Cambodia in the winter of 1969 – 70 and released in September 1970, the same year as the Kent State shootings, 100,00 people marched on Washington D.C. protesting the war, and the Beatles released Let It Be. A 60’s counterculture film, Counterculture of the 1960s, one that reflects the mood of rebellion and alienation during the Vietnam war era, one of the first to be viewed by mainstream audiences portraying the dissatisfaction of an anti-hero while also using a new indie style in American cinema, where the minimalist approach in telling a story is a different way of expressing itself, a complete turn away from the action and Hollywood glamorization which shoots for overkill, like PATTON (1970) which won the Best Picture and George C. Scott the Best Actor (which he refused to accept) at the Academy Awards that year. Perhaps the industry wasn’t ready yet to recognize and herald in a new era in filmmaking driven by naturalistic performances, but the film, screenplay, and two acting performances were nominated for Academy Awards and certainly left its mark with pitch perfect direction and a moody self reflection that continues to challenge the collective consciousness of the nation. It remains a classic example of dropping out of society, as seen today in the films of Kelly Reichardt like OLD JOY (2006) and WENDY AND LUCY (2008), where disenchantment with the system overall may not lead to any specific new answers, but it does send one in search of new directions. Shot by the brilliant Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács, a lover of naturalist landscapes and fresh off his work in EASY RIDER (1969), his use of differing location shots exquisitely depicts the central character’s state of mind, as it moves from the oil fields of Bakersfield, California to the scenic Pacific coast highway to the upper class exclusivity of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound, Washington.

Displaying an array of skills we only see early in his career, Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his career in Bobby Eroica Dupree, a brooding outsider layered in an understated and downbeat realism that borders on miserablism and discontent, a gifted classical piano student who left his upper class background and traded it in for a life on the road, working the hot and back breaking work as a rigger on the oil rigs, living in a trailer, spending his time drinking beer in cheap bars and motels and bowling alleys while living with his girl Rayette, Tammy Wynette stand-in Karen Black in one of her more superb roles as a pretty but dim-witted waitress with a mouth that won’t quit, where at one point he tells her “If you wouldn't open your mouth, everything would be just fine.” She smothers him with her undying love, while he prefers to keep a safe distance, making no commitments which he obtains through male cruelty and infidelity, regularly spending nights away from Rayette and sleeping with whatever comes around, which includes Sally Struthers in one memorable scene. When his co-worker on the rigs, Elton (Billy Green Bush) lets it slip that Rayette is pregnant, Bobby flips out in a full tantrum, pissed that his life is suddenly in full view for others to pass judgment upon, especially since he went to such trouble to disappear to the ends of the earth where no one would find him.

Around this same time he visits his sister making a classical recording in Los Angeles and learns that their father has had several strokes and can no longer speak, where she urges him to visit, perhaps for the last time. Initially walking out the door without her, Bobby repents in anger and disgust when he realizes he must ask Rayette to come along, which turns into the comic sequences of the film, acerbically written by Carole Eastman under the name Adrien Joyce at the time (the entire film is really a connection of extremely well written sequences), as they pick up two lesbian hitchhikers, one of whom (Helena Kallianiotes) constantly chatters away about how the world is filthy and fucked up and a waste of time to live in, like a Travis Bickel monologue from Taxi Driver (1976), endlessly griping and complaining for the duration of the trip, a marathon of annoyance that is a marvel of comic invention Crap and more crap and more crap - YouTube (1:23). During this segment they stop at a local diner where Nicholson does his infamous chicken sandwich request to a befuddled waitress (Lorna Thayer), hold the chicken, all in an attempt to get a side order of toast which was not on the menu Five Easy Pieces Diner Scene - YouTube (1:53). When his sarcasm gets them kicked out, his iconic reputation for being a wise ass was solidified.

By the time they get to Puget Sound, Bobby parks his girl in some cheap motel while he goes to visit his family, calling in every few days to report nothing’s happening, while in reality, he gets the hots for Susan Ansbach, a young pianist who is studying music and also engaged to his brother Carl. In little time the audience gets a sense of what Bobby was running away from, as this little den of secluded artists is really a picture of family dysfunction, superbly exposed by the roving eye of the camera which catches every meticulous detail. When Rayette shows up unannounced after a week or so with the subtlety of a Mack truck, it turns out to be a hilarious contrast in social class, each more contemptible than the other, where it’s difficult to tell which one he’s ashamed of the most, his family or Rayette. In the end, of course, nothing compares to the loathing he feels for himself. Nicholson does have a brilliant monologue alone with his father Jack Nicholson: Five Easy Pieces ("Life You Don't ... - YouTube (3:15), where he attempts to make some sense out of his messed up life, where he continually fouls things up so bad that he has to run away from his own stupid mistakes, a haunting scene that actually includes tears, perhaps the only Jack Nicholson scene on record to do so. When he makes his escape, it comes in the most unexpected fashion, a moody, existential moment where he takes stock of his life, all shot in a masterful style of picturesque quiet and understatement Five Easy Pieces (8/8) Movie CLIP - I'm Fine (1970 ... YouTube (2:12).

Time Out review (link lost)

Rafelson's second film - in which Jack Nicholson, seemingly a redneck oil-rigger, turns out to be a fugitive from a musical career inherited from a family of classical musicians - is a considered examination of the middle-class patrician American way of family life. Centreing on Nicholson's drifter, the film unswervingly brings him into confrontations with his past as he equally unswervingly attempts to evade everything, preferring to make gestures rather than act consistently. The result is less a story and more a collection of incidents and character studies, all of which inform each other and extend our understanding of Nicholson's mode of survival: flight.

Time Out Tom Huddleston

Hollywood’s early-’70s identity crisis produced a multitude of masterpieces, but few are fit to stand alongside Bob Rafelson’s autumnal 1970 tragedy ‘Five Easy Pieces’. In his most restrained and arguably finest role, Jack Nicholson plays Robert Eroica DuPea, a cultural refugee from a well-to-do musical dynasty hiding out in a California trailer park and trying unsuccessfully to drink and screw away his deep-seated sense of shame and self disgust.

It’s a film of stark, superbly judged and beautifully sustained contrasts, the soundtrack hopping confidently from Tammy Wynette to Chopin as Bobby and his waitress girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) travel from the lusty, sun-baked south to the cerebral, rainswept north to pay final respects to Bobby’s dying father. Refusing to submit either to gross sentimentality or pompous pontificating, Rafelson and co-writer Adrien Joyce play their themes like piano keys, touching lightly but effectively on ideas of masculinity and mortality, class and creativity, family and frustration.

It’s not a particularly subtle film – some of the supporting characters, notably Black’s dogged but witless Rayette, are written and played a little broadly – but it is a magnificently insightful and engaging one, flipping effortlessly from icy realism to heated melodrama while always maintaining a darkly comic, at times quietly satirical undercurrent. All of which is reflected in Nicholson’s phenomenal central performance, for Bobby is himself a kind of actor, playing at being ugly, mean and self-sufficient in a doomed effort to disguise his absolute emotional emptiness, feeling himself exposed layer by layer as the film approaches its devastating climax.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs

The films of the so-called American New Wave were united by an effort to translate European arthouse aesthetics to a U.S. idiom. They fluctuated wildly in their success, but FIVE EASY PIECES is one of the era's few enduring masterpieces. Much of its success derives from its central antihero, Bobby Eroica Dupree, an invention worthy of epic literature but realized in wholly cinematic terms. Carol Eastman (working under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) wrote the character specifically for Jack Nicholson, an actor whose moodiness and darting intelligence have never been better deployed. Dupree's alienation is always a wonder to behold, as the character constantly switches allegiance between his performing-arts background (which comes through in moments of off-handed arrogance) and the perceived authenticity of the working class (which he attempts to emulate by living in a trailer and affecting macho self-confidence). Everything he does is a failed attempt to divert his angst: Working on an oil rig, picking up every blue-collar girl that comes his way, even (in the movie's creepy final shot) trying to rid himself completely of his identity: Nothing can satisfy this soul determined to live in exile. Working with the great naturalist cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, Rafelson says as much about the film's locations as he does the lead character, plumbing the zeitgeist in such disparate locations as the oil rigs of central California and an upper-class manor off the coast of Washington state. This beautiful but haunted island is the setting of FIVE EASY PIECES' final act, where Nicholson's prodigal son returns to visit the dying father he loathes. The place is populated exclusively, it would seem, by neurotic musical prodigies: It's the closest equivalent in U.S. movies to the penitential "resorts" that Ingmar Bergman's late-period characters are always flocking to; and this may be, overall, the most profound U.S. film to take inspiration from Bergman's cinema. While taking a page from Bergman's drama of painful self-examination, FIVE EASY PIECES--collaborative filmmaking at its finest--extends such scrutiny to an entire generation. Note: Facets will be screening a new print of the film in celebration of its 40th anniversary. It purportedly restores all of the film's grainy, sun-bolstered majesty. (1970, 97 min, 35mm)

Last Week - CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs

FIVE EASY PIECES is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the New American Cinema, displaying a complexity worthy of epic literature in wholly cinematic terms. Carol Eastman (working under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) wrote the character of Bobby Eroica Dupree specifically for Jack Nicholson, and it's one of the greatest gifts a writer has ever given to a screen actor. Drawing on the actor's moodiness and darting intelligence, Eastman created an unforgettable antihero, a contemptuous jackass who's also a wounded, pitiable soul. When we first meet Dupree, he's a surly blue-collar type working on an oilrig; we quickly learn, however, that this life is only an epic charade, an attempt to convince the world he isn't really a blue-blood piano prodigy. Yet the charade is a failure, as Dupree lashes out at his friends and cheats constantly on the sweet-hearted girl naive enough to love him (Karen Black, in the movie's other immortal performance). Few U.S. films have depicted so precisely the love-hate relationship between a certain type of intellectual and the working class. The opening passages of FIVE EASY PIECES are careful not to condemn Dupree's arrogance; it's clear that he sincerely respects the authenticity of blue-collar America, even if he can never emulate it himself. (Beneath Dupree's pouting is an unspoken feeling of betrayal by American culture for being far more stratified than it presents itself to be—a sentiment at once immature, jaundiced, and highly relatable.) He displays a similar ambivalence in the movie's final act (to which the film drifts, novelistically, after a brief stint as a road movie), when this prodigal son visits the dying father he hasn't seen in years. The family manor sits on a small island off the coast of Washington state: Rich in natural beauty and appearing chilly even in summer, it's the closest equivalent in U.S. movies to the desolate islands that Ingmar Bergman's characters are always retreating to. Indeed, this may be the most successful response to Bergman's cinema that American movies produced, climaxing in a scene of confession that taps into an almost universal pain. (Nicholson purportedly wrote this scene himself, which may explain why the feeling of self-examination cuts so deep; there's nothing else like it in his career.) There are other noticeable influences of European art cinema in Bob Rafelson's direction, namely Michelangelo Antonioni's portraits of modern alienation; but one of the reasons that FIVE EASY PIECES is so extraordinary is that it manages to speak through its influences instead of simply imitate them. Working with the great naturalist cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (who also shot EASY RIDER and most of Peter Bogdanovich's best films), Rafelson gives each location a vivid sense of place, devoting as much attention to forgotten decor as he does to psychology. (1970, 97 min, 35mm)

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 1, 1970

The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels twenty years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.

At the outset, we meet only the man -- played by Jack Nicholson with the same miraculous offhandedness that brought "Easy Rider" to life. He's an irresponsible roustabout, making his way through the oil fields, sleeping with a waitress (Karen Black) whose every daydreaming moment is filled with admiration for Miss Tammy Wynette. The man's name is Robert Eroica Dupea. He was named after Beethoven's Third Symphony and he spends his evenings bowling and his nights wearily agreeing that, yes, his girl sings "Stand By Your Man" just like Tammy.

In these first marvelous scenes, director Bob Rafelson calls our attention to the grimy life textures and the shabby hopes of these decent middle Americans. They live in a landscape of motels, highways, TV dinners, dust, and jealousy, and so do we all, but they seem to have nothing else. Dupea's friends are arrested at the mental and emotional level of about age seventeen; he isn't, but thinks or hopes he is.

Dupea discovers his girl is pregnant (his friend Elton breaks the news out in the field, suggesting maybe it would be good to marry her and settle down). He walks out on her in a rage, has a meaningless little affair with a slut from the bowling alley, and then discovers more or less by accident that his father is dying. His father, we discover, is a musical genius who moved his family to an island and tried to raise them as Socrates might have. Dupea feels himself to be the only failure.

The movie bares its heart in the scenes on the island, where Dupea makes an awkward effort to communicate with his dying father. The island is peopled with eccentrics, mostly Dupea's own family, but including a few strays. Among their number is a beautiful young girl who's come to the island to study piano with Dupea's supercilious brother. Dupea seduces this girl, who apparently suggests the early life he has abandoned. He does it by playing the piano; but when she says she's moved, he says he isn't -- that he played better as a child and that the piece was easy anyway.

This is possibly the moment when his nerve fails and he condemns himself, consciously, to a life of self-defined failure. The movie ends, after several more scenes, on a note of ambiguity; he is either freeing himself from the waitress or, on the other hand, he is setting off on a journey even deeper into anonymity. It's impossible to say, and it doesn't matter much. What matters is the character during the time covered by the film: a time when Dupea tentatively reapproaches his past and then rejects it, not out of pride, but out of fear.

The movie is joyously alive to the road life of its hero. We follow him through bars and bowling alleys, motels and mobile homes, and we find him rebelling against lower-middle-class values even as he embraces them. In one magical scene, he leaps from his car in a traffic jam and starts playing the piano on the truck in front of him; the scene sounds forced, described this way, but Rafelson and Nicholson never force anything, and never have to. Robert Eroica Dupea is one of the most unforgettable characters in American movies.

One Big Real Place: BBS From Head to Hearts Criterion essay by J. Hoberman, November 28, 2010

Five Easy Pieces: The Solitude Criterion essay by Kent Jones, November 25, 2010

Five Easy Pieces Criterion essay by Michael Dare, February 11, 1990, also seen here: Liner notes from the original Criterion Laserdisc

Five Easy Pieces (1970) - The Criterion Collection

Michael Wood reviews 'Five Easy Pieces' · LRB 9 September 2010 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, September 2010

Five Easy Pieces - Bright Lights Film Journal Andrew Culbertson, August 1, 2007

Bob Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces' is the quintessential film of the so ... Cinephilia and Beyond (Undated)

Five Easy Pieces - Turner Classic Movies Jay Carr

Five Easy Pieces - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Thomas L. Erskine

Slacker Film Guide

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] also seen here: AMC Filmsite [Tim Dirks]

Thoughts on "Five Easy Pieces" Ken D. Kraiker

Reflections on "Five Easy Pieces" Stuart Fernie and David Dieni

Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts] Jack Nicholson for Best Actor (winner, George C. Scott, Patton)

One for the road: Bob Rafelson and ‘Five Easy Pieces’ David Thomson chats with the director from Sight and Sound, September 2010

indieWIRE Peter Bogdanovich

theartsdesk.com [Nick Hasted]

Cinespect [John Bleasdale] also reviewing KING OF MARVIN GARDENS

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Five Easy Pieces: Masterpieces of the ...

Five Easy Pieces: Criterion Collection | Happy to Hang Around Drew Morton from Pajiba

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Edward Copeland on Film (Iain Stott)

epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O. Murray]

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DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, Criterion Blu-Ray

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DVD Verdict - America Lost and Found: The BBS Story Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]

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CriterionForum.org: Five Easy Pieces Blu-ray Review

Erik Lundegaard

rec.arts.movies.reviews Walter Frith

Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]

British Film Institute Geoff Andrew

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SBCCFilmReviews [Byron Potau]

The DVD Journal JJB

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eFilmCritic.com M.P. Bartley

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Townsend]

Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]

Brilliant Observations on 2120 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Goatdog's Movies Michael W. Phillips, Jr.

Montreal Film Journal [Kevin N. Laforest]

rec.arts.movies.reviews Brandon Stahl

FIVE EASY PIECES Facets Multi Media

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Five Easy Pieces Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films

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Channel 4 Film

TV Guide

Variety

Time Out Joshua Rothkopf

Film review: Five Easy Pieces | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, also seen here: The Guardian

Five Easy Pieces was oddly conservative for a 1970s Jack Nicholson film John Patterson from The Guardian, August 6, 2010

Jack Nicholson David Thomson from The Guardian, August 5, 2010

The Observer Philip French

The Daily Telegraph

Independent.co.uk [Geoffrey Macnab]

Los Angeles Times Glenn Kenny interviews the director, April 21, 2010

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] March 16, 2003

Movie Review - - Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces' Bows The New York Times, September 12, 1970, also seen here: New York Times (registration req'd)

FILM; Nicholson On Age, Acting And 'Being Jack' Dana Kennedy from The New York Times, September 22, 2002

Laszlo Kovacs, Cinematographer, Dies at 74 Douglas Martin from The New York Times, July 26, 2007

DVDBeaver.com [Gary Tooze]

Time magazine interview with screenwriter Carol Eastman March 20, 1972

Five Easy Pieces - by Carole Eastman The screenplay

Five Easy Pieces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS

USA (103 mi) 1972

Time Out review Tom Milne

An irresistible movie, not least for its haunting vision of Atlantic City as Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome of genteelly decaying palaces, run-down funfairs, and empty boardwalks presided over by white elephants abandoned to their brooding fate. It's like some unimaginable country of the mind, and so in a sense it is as two brothers embark on a sort of game (Atlantic City provided the original place names for the Monopoly board) in which they exchange their lives, their loves and their dreams. One has retreated, like Prospero, from the pain outside into the island of his mind; the other pursues an endless mirage of get-rich-quick schemes which will let him escape to an island paradise. Their fusion is a stunningly complex evocation of childish complicity and Pinterish obsessions, inevitably leading to tragedy as the obsessions founder on reality. One of the most underrated films of the decade.

User comments from imdb Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia.

Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson's creative relationship began because of The Monkees. Rafelson directing and Nicholson writing their weird and wonderful psychedelic cult classic 'Head'. After that the two teamed up for one of the early Seventies best loved movies 'Five Easy Pieces'. A couple of years later they did it again with 'The King Of Marvin Gardens', though inexplicably it doesn't have the reputation or the high profile of their previous collaboration. I really fail to see why. File it under "great lost 1970s movies" alongside 'Scarecrow', 'Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia', 'Tracks', 'Fingers' (and add your own personal favourite to the list). Marvin Gardens features a really strong and controlled performance from Nicholson in the lead role, an introverted DJ with a show in which he spins "true" tales. But even better than Nicholson is Bruce Dern, a wonderful actor who never became a superstar like Nicholson, Pacino or De Niro, despite a long career of consistently good character roles in movies by Hitchcock, Roger Corman, Walter Hill, Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Elia Kazan, Sydney Pollack and many others. Dern is absolutely wonderful as Nicholson's brother, a dreamer and Mob hanger on. He comes back into his brother's life with a nutty get rich quick scheme which ends up going horribly wrong. This is one of the very best performances by Dern I've ever seen, and his scenes with Nicholson make this essential viewing for any 1970s buff. Added to that are excellent performances from Ellen Burstyn ('The Exorcist', 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore') and newcomer Julia Anne Robinson (her only movie role - too bad!) as the women in Dern's life, and nice bits from legendary musician/actor Scatman Crothers ('Black Belt Jones' and appearances in no less than four 1970s Nicholson movies) and the underrated John P. Ryan ('Runaway Train', 'It's Alive', 'Class Of 1999'). 'The King Of Marvin Gardens' is a slow and thoughtful movie, but once you get into the rhythm of it, an extremely rewarding one. One of Nicholson's best, and Dern is just dynamite. Highly recommended.

Bob Rafelson: The King of Marvin Gardens | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm, December 29, 1999

It took some time to decide whether to put Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces or his later King of Marvin Gardens on to my 100 best list. Both films, made in the early 70s, starred Jack Nicholson and expressed the particularly American angst of the period.

In Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson plays a man - whose middle name is Eroica, after Beethoven, and who once studied to be a concert pianist - who rejects middle-class aspirations in favour of a messy life as an oilfield rigger. In King of Marvin Gardens, he is an introspective all-night talk jock whose brief hope of getting away resides in his brother's moonshine plan to win a gambling concession in Hawaii. Both films are funny, poetic and touchingly observant of the kind of American society you don't often see on film. But they are deeply melancholy at the same time, as if there's no rational reason for their characters to behave as they do, only cracked emotional ones.

Rafelson had great success with Five Easy Pieces, which pitched Nicholson into stardom every bit as much as Easy Rider. But the more tragic and acutely personal Marvin Gardens is perhaps ultimately the more reverberating film, pitching into real tragedy with a ludicrous murder at its end. In any case, Rafelson, hard as he continued to try, in particular with Stay Hungry and The Postman Always Rings Twice, never managed the same amazing grace again.

What made Marvin Gardens so good was the dovetailed playing of Nicholson as the talk radio man and Bruce Dern as his conman brother - hopeless cases who can't manage their lives or the equally well-drawn women who come into contact with them. Dern lives with an ageing blonde, played by Ellen Burstyn, and her pretty step-daughter (Julia Anne Robinson) and the film achieves a sexual contest between them. Rafelson's portrait of a wintry Atlantic City as a down-at-heel holiday and gambling resort seems to point up the characters' disillusion. Only Louis Malle, in Atlantic City, pitched a tale into such accurately crestfallen waters.

Rafelson, David Thomson has said, is "a raconteur of vivid, touching events, himself looking on from the dark". And in both films what we see are people we can't dislike, and who seem very real, struggling to make sense of lives which have ceased to be capable of the kind of redemption they hesitantly seek.

It's possible that, after this extraordinary beginning, Rafelson's kind of highly personal cinema became more and more difficult to make. More likely, however, times moved on without him. It happens to the best of directors as well as the worst.

BFI | Sight & Sound | One for the road: Bob Rafelson and 'Five Easy ... David Thomson chats with the director from Sight and Sound, September 2010

Cinespect [John Bleasdale] also reviewing FIVE EASY PIECES

FilmFanatic.org

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Pam Grady

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

DVD Verdict (David Rogers) dvd review

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Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Variety.com [Variety Staff]

The King of Marvin Gardens – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review

STAY HUNGRY

USA (102 mi) 1976

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

After the sombre melancholy of Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, Rafelson pursued his interest in social dropouts and marginal life-styles with this offbeat comedy drama. Bridges oozes carefree charm as a young Alabama heir caught up in a property speculation involving a gym, but instead investing his interest in Arnie and his muscle-building pals. His relationship with gutsy working gal Field helps fill out the picture, although the preponderance of loose narrative threads tends to leave one with an impression of individual scenes rather than any sense of coherent plot. The scene in which Bridges slips though a hole in the social hedge to join a bunch of fiddle players in a country hoedown epitomises the gentle, quirky feel of the film. Based on a Charles Gaines novel about the rootlessness of the so-called 'New South', it has its slack spells, but Rafelson's sure feel for the inexpressible subtleties of emotional relationships is evident throughout.

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Dick Connors from Bloomington, IN

This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. There's something about movies made during this time period - the late 70s, and maybe the very early 80s - that is very distinctive, though I can't really say exactly what it is. It might have something to do with the coloring and lighting and the way it looks visually - there's less "artistic" style, and the aesthetics are more candid looking. It might also be because there seems to be more nudity in those older movies than the ones that are made now. One of the movies this reminded me of is "Caddyshack." Another is "Used Cars" with Kurt Russell. "Stay Hungry" has a really loose story that has very little cohesion. It's almost more of a series of vignettes and oddball scenes (and I do mean oddball - I don't know where they came up with some of the random weirdness in this film) very loosely revolving around a central story of an idle heir (Bridges) whose life intersects with Field and Schwarzenegger's characters.

It's not the plot that makes this movie good, it's the series of strange scenes that make it up. It's almost like someone took a bunch of comedy sketches from the old Saturday Night Live and strung them all together. But the end result is a delightfully bizarre film, the kind of movie that could never be made today because it's just too unstructured and offbeat. This film was written by Charles Gaines, who also created "Pumping Iron." Gaines is a bodybuilding aficionado which would explain the common thread of bodybuilding in both of these films and the presence of Schwarzenegger.

There's little doubt from looking at the case housing this DVD which member of the cast went on to pump up the box office returns in a slew of action movies. It's Arnold front and center, oiled up and with a bad haircut, and a sticker on the packaging reminds us that Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe for his performance—Best Newcomer of 1977. But this isn't a movie for fans of his Pumping Iron years or of his best shoot-'em-ups (The Terminator would surely top that list). Instead, this is a moody coming-of-age picture from Bob Rafelson, at the height of his years as an angry young man—his work in the last couple of decades has been decidedly uneven, but this movie is very much of a piece with the director's early work. Stay Hungry was preceded by Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, and this film may be the most overlooked of the three. It's certainly a mercurial and unusual picture, but it's from arguably the last great period of American filmmaking, and features three performances that changed the courses of actors' careers.

Jeff Bridges plays Craig Blake, orphaned heir of Birmingham, Alabama; he's got oodles of eccentric aunts and uncles and cousins, and lives the lonely bachelor's life in the epic family manse, a man with money but nothing else in his life. He's involved with some real estate developers, who dream big dreams of the New South, and want Birmingham to be at the heart of it—to that end, they want to build a skyscraper, and the only thing standing between them and stories of glass and steel is a seedy little gym. Blake is deputized to negotiate a buyout with the gym's owner; capitalism isn't what motivates him, however, and he gets caught up in the world of the people he's supposed to help get rid of.

Blake gets sidetracked not just by the scene, but especially by Mary Tate (Sally Field), the perky young thing behind the front desk, and the sometime girlfriend of Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger), in training for the upcoming Mr. Universe competition. Bridges is terrific in the lead role, fulfilling the promise he demonstrated in The Last Picture Show; that was an ensemble piece, and here he's asked to carry the picture, and he does so admirably. This is Field's first screen work of any significance, and this performance goes a long way toward eradicating the image of her as either Gidget or Sister Patrice; this seems like a necessary transitional performance for her, making possible her work in movies like Norma Rae and Places in the Heart. And even with superstardom, the Governor of California was never much of an actor; but here, for the first time, he's human, and lacks the annoying self-consciousness and smugness that characterizes so much of his later work.

As Joe Santo, Arnold is Blake's ambassador to the backwoods of Alabama; Joe can play the fiddle and swill moonshine with the best of them. (Arnold doesn't fake the fiddle playing very well, though.) And Blake returns the favor by taking Joe and Mary Tate to a party of the nouvelle riche, where they are hopelessly condescended to and mocked, as if they were a Hee-Haw roadshow. The weak link of the piece is probably Thor, the gym owner who starts stupid and ends violent; he's necessary as a plot element, but he's not very convincing, and R. G. Armstrong gives a cartoony performance. The cast is peppered with notable supporting players, though, including Fannie Flagg in high dudgeon, Ed Begley Jr. begging to get his clock cleaned by Bridges, and Scatman Crothers as a long-suffering Blake family servant. It's worth sticking with this movie, if only for the mad spectacle at the end of bodybuilders flooding the streets of Birmingham like so many greased-up Pamplona bulls.

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

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Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

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BLACK WIDOW

USA (102 mi) 1987

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

From its opening shot - Theresa Russell's split reflection in a make-up mirror - both the theme and the over-schematic symbolism of Rafelson's thriller are immediately apparent. For Russell plays a homicidal psychopath whose killings of various wealthy husbands are investigated by a Justice Department workaholic (Winger), who slowly but surely becomes a kind of mirror-image of her Protean prey. The story and treatment are familiar from '40s noir thrillers, but it's clear that Rafelson is attempting something more than mere homage. Disappointingly, the femme fatale - apparently in love with her husbands even as she plans their demise - is presented as somehow more female, fulfilled and complete than the career woman, who in turn eventually discovers both dress sense and the joy of sex with her opposite's next victim-to-be. There are things to enjoy - committed performances, Conrad Hall's elegant camerawork, a script that becomes pleasurably tortuous towards the end - but the film finally offers far less than meets the eye.

PopcornQ review Cherry Smyth

Reading mainstream films subversively, lesbians have often constructed heroines who do not officially belong to them. The persistence of the dyke invention of lesbian heroines urged me to reconstruct a mainstream Hollywood movie, a psychological thriller, in which the best thrills happen only if you impose a lesbian reading. At the time of its release, Black Widow met with mixed (let's say heterosexual) press reviews, keen dyke response privately, and severe dismissal from some dykes in public. For several reasons, I believe Black Widow is ripe for another spin. While I do not wish to argue that Black Widow is ultimately a progressive text, it does reveal ambivalences in the patriarchal order and the heterosexist gaze and opens spaces for a transgressive lesbian sexual subject.

Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct may be distinctly antifeminist, but was cited popularly as a lesbian heroine.

Black Widow lends itself to a similar kind of ironic reinvention. Here we have a rich, young, beautiful woman, the eponymous Catherine (Theresa Russell) who picks up and poisons her husbands with the skill of a brain surgeon. She is discovered and sought after by a rather dowdy and workaholic federal agent, Alex (Debra Winger), who needs a bit of hands-on excitement. It's a classic chase movie, with the familiar, and so compelling, ugly duckling motif thrown in. What is less familiar is that not only are there two female protagonists, but that Alex develops an obsession with Catherine far beyond the call of duty.

The psychological motivation is thin. When Alex tells her boss that "no one knows why anybody does anything," the gate opens and the psychiatrist has bolted, leaving the field of supposition totally accessible for a dyke interpretation of motivation. Alex's reply, which deflects her boss's concern that she is obsessed with Catherine, acts as a comic cypher for all the times dykes have no answers for the "why." "Why do you always have to have your hair so short? Why don't you ever wear a dress? Why do you have to be so public about it? Why do you enjoy licking pussy?" Alex may be obsessed, but she's not going to see a doctor. She has become a hunter.

Theresa Russell as Catherine is young, stiff, bereaved, and stylish, conjuring up the image of Catherine Deneuve, not only in Belle de Jour, but also in the later and much more dyke-embedded The Hunger. As a widow, however, Catherine is not upset enough, which the spectator may read as a betrayal or as an opening for a story of female revenge, of a husband killed because he deserved it, murdered because he tried to thwart his much younger wife. Catherine is already constituted as a "bad girl," therefore, ripe for transgressive lesbian identification.

To Catherine men are disposable. She swots up enough specialized knowledge to catch her professional mate, exposing hetero-desire as being as superficial and simple to mimic as a game show. Alex, by contrast, is contructed as operating in an adolescent presexual state of distraction. Her reluctance to socialise with her male colleagues (except when playing cards) reinforces the trope of Alex as a lesbian who doesn't know it. Yet. Black Widow is a slow time-bomb of a movie whose formula is charmingly predictable and whose lesbian subtext is so unimaginable to itself that its frissons have endless repercussions. As soon as lesbianism is suggested it is quickly denied.

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

SORRY, BUT ONE of the many dark delights of the detective thriller "Black Widow" is seeing "Blue Velvet" villain Dennis Hopper get his -- wooed, webbed and then poisoned by his loving wife, a seductive serial killer.

Theresa Russell and Debra Winger costar as the wicked widow and the Justice Department drudge who picks up Russell's paper trail while researching a mafioso's murder. The mobster, a New York publisher and then a Texas toy tycoon (Hopper) all die of the same rare disease -- and two of them are survived by their newlywed wives. Or is it wife? Winger's boss pooh-poohs her suspicions, forcing the fledgling agent to pursue the case on her own.

Winger, that homespun heartthrob with a cat's purr and a doe's eyes, makes merry work of this widow's chase. Her character is sexually repressed workaholic Alex, whose obsession with murderess Catherine -- a killer who probably reads Cosmo -- finally releases her pent-up womanliness. Winger gets a 10 on the charismometer and gives the film its warmth and innocence. Russell, a wry sensation as Marilyn Monroe in "Insignificance," plays this femme fatale for keeps.

After careful study, chameleon-like Catherine makes herself into the perfect wife for the billionaire bachelor of the moment. Her fourth fiance', for instance, confides a ridiculous wish to build a hotel under the Kilauea volcano. "God," she gushes, "in the right place, it would be fantastic." Whether it's an airhead he wants -- or an egghead, or a ditzy Dallas belle -- he gets what he deserves.

The relationship between the women, as unpredictable as lava flow, is left deliberately ambiguous. Unnerving and mysterious undercurrents keep us guessing as to the possible outcomes of this glossy game of cat-and-kitten.

Ron Bass wrote the solid and entertaining screenplay that never falters till its end, which suffices -- even surprises -- but fails to live up to Catherine's devious promise. Director Bob Rafelson (creator of the Monkees, director of "Five Easy Pieces" and the man who launched Arnold Schwarzenegger the actor) creates a coherent, soundly paced and smart production.

Rafelson draws memorable cameos from a quirky supporting cast that includes B-movie queen Mary Woronov as a dictatorial scuba diver, Diane Ladd as the sister of the Texas toymaker and Nicol Williamson as the Seattle philanthropist who dies happy (if a little prematurely) as Catherine's third hubby. James Hong is especially hardboiled as an island P.I. named Shin. "You been looking for someone for four weeks?" he sneers at Alex. "Once I looked for somebody for 18 years."

Despite the department's skepticism and the lack of cooperation from local dicks, Alex prevails in this liberating vehicle for gal gumshoes -- a leap from those doddering old dears from England to a female with the quiet intensity of a Real Detective.

User comments from imdb Author: ShootingShark from Dundee, Scotland

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico

Film Freak Central review [Travis Hoover]

Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict: Black Widow Rob Lineberger

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Scott C

Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review

Rahmanian, Hamid

DAY BREAK C 74

Iran (84 mi) 2005

An atypical Iranian film with plenty of European stylistic touches, which detracts from the eventual power and authenticity of the subject matter. Iranian films are known for their raw, simplistic storytelling that get to the heart of the issue without resorting to cinematic gimmickry. This film attempts to accentuate the Iranian judicial system, which is revealed in a dramatic ten minute sequence, which is then re-hashed from every different perspective again and again for the rest of the film, much of it left to the viewer’s imagination.

One prisoner is facing the death penalty, ironically less than 9 months from the date of his crime, which is a far cry from the decade-long jurisprudence that takes place here in America. A man kills his boss, a crime which is undisputed, but the reasons are never provided, so we see the process of a prisoner woken up in the morning, examined by a physician so that he is in good health, as he cannot be executed unless he is, and then he faces his accuser in the presence of a judge who offers the victim’s family the right to forgive the prisoner or take retribution themselves against the prisoner. We witness a rope placed around the neck, the prisoner placed on a small stand, and the victim’s family has the right to pull the stand away or negotiate another settlement directly with the prisoner.

Our prisoner witnesses this process with another prisoner, as they are both condemned for execution on the same morning. The other prisoner is forgiven, but he must donate his family’s house as payment for his crime. Our prisoner’s proceedings are delayed, as the family has not shown up for the last three scheduled executions, leaving him and his family in a state of purgatory limbo, as the exact same process will have to be re-scheduled again until the victim’s family arrives. To further dramatize his agony, we witness several suicide attempts while in prison, or a prisoner fight that breaks out where he steps into the middle in order to be blamed, attacking a guard that intervenes, guaranteeing solitary confinement. What we are seeing is a condemned man punishing himself even further. Each time he is given a reprieve, the other prisoners celebrate by singing and dancing, looking like something out of a poorly rehearsed Youssef Chahine film, which specialize in exotic musical numbers.

What we witness is the same sequence of events, the prisoner rising in the morning by guards walking him to the physical examination, intercut with flashbacks and dream sequences, all of which allow for different possibilities, all of which are playing out in his head. It becomes impossible to know what is real and what is imagined, but eventually it becomes like a Twilight Zone episode where Dennis Weaver dreams that he is condemned to die, and the court proceedings replay in his head over and over again like the myth of Sisyphus, his own internalized psychological hell from which he can never break. He can not, even awake, separate himself from the sequence, knowing it will re-occur again and again, that he is condemned to participate in this sequence forever. The power of the film is the negotiation sequence with the family, the judge, and the condemned prisoner, as that is a revelation to most of the world’s eyes. The rest of the film, shot in a dark, colorless, shoddy-looking video, we’ve all seen before, put to a better use, as it’s simply a swirling variation of the same theme.

Raie, Motjaba

BIRTH OF A BUTTERFLY A 97

Iran (110 mi) 1997

One of the best examples of the beauty and magic of Iranian films, where the heart is always connected to primeval forces, the dawn of man, the miracle of life, mortality and faith, filmed in the remote mountain areas of northern Iran and Azerbaijan, this film has spectacular landscapes, extraordinary camera composition, and a truly unique use of color, cinematography by Mohammad Davoodi, art direction by Malak Jahan Khazzai.

I. The Birth

The film opens with a spectacular montage of unusual, abstract rock formations rising out of the desert, revealing homes carved into these rocks. There is an eerie chorus, akin to Kubrick’s 2001 monolith music, birds can be heard, the wind, the color blue predominates against the natural dirt and earth, blue doors, fences, skirts, dresses, and suits. A mother can be heard wailing in childbirth. Her two children, a boy and a girl, are alone, guarded by a serious looking stepfather who locks the boy in the house, later released by a kinder uncle who brings them both to the refuge of his green grape vineyards. After a visit by the stepfather, the boy hears the uncle crying in the vineyards, so he runs away into a mountain of clay, where his father was buried in an accident. He sees his stepfather, also in tears, following him into town where the color blue has turned to black. All villagers are weeping over the death of his mother. Voices, like ancient souls in anguish, wail over the tears.

II. The Path

A young boy, Mandanay, walks with a limp and lives with his sick grandmother. His family plans to visit a holy shrine the next morning. Mandanay sleeps under the stars. His father transports people in a tractor-driven cart and leaves early in the morning without him, so he walks alone, led by a few mischievous boys who throw him into a pool of water at the base of a waterfall before running away. Mandanay discovers a multitude of chrysalises that will turn into butterflies, some fly away as water glows from the green moss on the rocks, where drops, like silver, illuminate the landscape and water flows out of trees. An old man offers him a dry change of clothes, wrapping him in a green cloth while listening to the boy’s plans to make a vow, not for himself, but for his ailing grandmother. The old man is impressed, telling him as he gathers water, “Your leg may be limp, but not your heart.”

They both walk towards town. Mandanay offers to carry the water, which is heavy, and is being brought to “pilgrims” along with an iron rod for a friend in town who needs it. The old man thanks him for his generosity and lays down on the road under the green cloth to take a nap, while Mandanay walks on alone. He sees the town in a vision under a special light under a cloud, where an ancient chorus of voices is heard as birds soar in the sky. But then he sees the tractor broken down carrying his grandmother, who is moaning that this is a sign of death, that she’ll never make it to the shrine. But Mandanay hands his father the rod, which is all he needs to fix the tractor, and they drink the water he has brought, his father tells his son, “We are pilgrims.” The music changes to serene, symphonic music as they continue to head for the shrine. A distant shot reveals the tractor small against the giant desert landscape. But it gets dark and they must stop in a village before they reach the shrine. Mandanay decides to go on alone in the dark. The music at the shrine turns into a mixture of East and West, where a man is playing an instrument inside the shrine. Mandanay asks for the holy man. They gesture he is asleep. Mandanay sees the green cloth. The ancient voices soar as the old man raises his head and smiles at him.

III. The Butterfly

A young man walks down a road past an old man who is playing Eastern music in front of his home, which is surrounded by flowers, past a little boy who is chasing butterflies in a lush green field, a color so luminously green that it is intoxicating, particularly after the first two episodes which took place in an arid desert. He walks into a forest past a river surrounded by moss and trees, across a bridge, where he enters a village. He is the new teacher is a small village that has not yet built a school, so he sleeps on the floor of the mosque and teaches the Koran to a circle of young boys. One brings a jar of butterflies to class each day and they can be seen flying around the room when he is asked to read the scriptures. The teacher feels at home, warmly greeted by the villagers, and expresses his inner peace. “Nature, rain, the songs of birds are voices which give me cause to rejoice...I’ve become like a butterfly.” He is warned by the town’s headman, “The nightingale sings ‘I’m in love,’ but the butterfly flies towards a flame and dies without complaining.”

The teacher tells the headman that the river may flood, that the village needs to build fortifications along the banks. The teacher sees one man in tears complaining his cow has been lost, instructing him to stop weeping and start looking for it, then another man in tears complaining his son went to the city to work for 3 months, but it’s been 9 months and he hasn’t heard a thing, comforting the man with gentle words, “Don’t worry, he will return home soon, God willing.” Next thing you know, the cow was found, the son returned, the villagers were beginning to think of the teacher as a Messiah. When the river floods, they all gather outside his door, asking him to pray for a miracle to make the flood subside. He tells them, “What you want is a Saint’s job, I am an ordinary man,” refusing to pray for their miracle.

The next day, only two boys show up for class, one, the boy with the butterflies, was late as the flood washed out the bridge. The teacher asks him to read the scriptures, instructing him to fly across the river the next day “like your butterflies.” No one in town would speak to the teacher. Wherever he goes or sits, they move away, and if he is seen talking to one of the children, the parents grab the child away from him. So the teacher goes to see the headman, but he also turns away, agreeing to visit him the next morning. The teacher pleads with him, “I am not a prophet, I can’t make a flood recede.” The headman responds, “The people need your prayers. The worst that could happen would be for your prayers to go unanswered. If everyone felt every prayer had to be answered, no one would pray except for the prophets. You wouldn’t pray because you feared people would lose their faith in you.”

The next day, the boy with the butterflies comes after the teacher and says he must come quick, that only he, the teacher, can help. So they run out the door, the teacher following the boy, until the teacher collapses, exhausted. When he looks up to where the bridge has washed away, the boy is walking on the water across to the other shore. The teacher enters the water, is waist deep in the water and is in tears. The boy turns and stares at him, as a butterfly lands on the teacher’s scarf.

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

Three stories encapsulate different aspects of traditional moral instruction. The first sees a stern father banishing his young son from the household to spare him the sight of his dying mother; the second follows the good deeds of a devout disabled boy left at home when his family visit a religious shrine; the third shows the dilemma in which a teacher finds himself when local villagers are eager to believe he possesses spiritual powers. The didactic lessons will be more obvious to Iranian audiences than to Western eyes. That said, the rugged landscapes are striking and there is a captivating reverence in the way the director films a bowl of apples, for instance, or a rippling pool.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Mojtaba Raei's episodic, three-part 1997 feature is a good example of the vital Iranian cinema our cultural gatekeepers rarely allow us to see, without the packaging and automatic charm of Gabbeh or The White Balloon but with plenty of artistic credentials of its own, a film so deeply involved in its own brand of Islamic thought that the absence of easy access to outsiders is part of its special fascination. (This is also true of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's very bad early feature Fleeing From Evil to God, though in contrast Raei is clearly in command of the material.) Filmed in remote mountain areas of northern Iran and Azerbaijan, Birth of a Butterfly can be recommended for its landscapes, compositions, and employment of color. From the first episode, which begins with a montage of abstract rock formations leading to dwellings carved into a hillside, Raei's choice of settings and sense of how to film them is often astonishing—though I didn't always understand what was going on thematically or emotionally, I was held throughout by the enchantment of the natural surroundings. Ironically, the last and most comprehensible episode culminates in kitschy calendar art and a heavenly choir evoking 50s Hollywood religiosity, but prior to that I was reminded more of Alexander Dovzhenko or Sergei Paradjanov. As for the stories, one finds men weeping a lot and isn't always sure why, but the world they're passing through is infused with beauty and magic.

Mojtaba Raei's mystical meditation, ''Birth of a Butterfly,'' was filmed in the mountains of northwestern Iran, where the people's elemental relationship with nature is colored by an intense spiritual faith. Consisting of three parables in which that faith is tested, the movie suggests that Christianity and Western culture have no monopoly on turning out religious kitsch. Although ''Birth of a Butterfly'' is comparatively restrained and tasteful as these things go, it imitates the Hollywood technique of using gushy music to underscore moments of revelation.

The protagonist of one parable is a shining-eyed teacher who leaves civilization behind to trek through the wilderness and instruct the children in a remote mountain village. Exuding a charismatic radiance, he becomes an informal adviser to the community. When one man who has lost a cow wonders where he can find it, the teacher suggests he look in a certain field. Another man is waiting for his son who disappeared a year ago to return. The teacher counsels patience and says the son will soon come back.

When both insights prove true, word spreads through the village that the teacher is a prophet. And when a flood threatens the community, the villagers plead with him to intercede with God. Even after the teacher insists he has no special powers, they refuse to believe him and stalk off angrily.

The miraculous upshot of the parable could just as well be Christian as Islamic (in the entire movie there's no mention of Allah), and can be summed up in one sentence: And the faith of a child shall lead them.

The other parables are not as clear-cut. In one, a man whose wife is critically ill blames his innocent stepchildren. In another, a young boy on a pilgrimage to a sacred spring whose waters are supposed to cure all ills engages in a dialogue with an old man he meets along the way.

''Birth of a Butterfly,'' which will be shown on tomorrow at 5:45 P.M. and Monday at 9 P.M. at the Museum of Modern Art as part of New Directors/New Films, is best appreciated as a kind of visual poem in which human beings are seen as intelligent wildlife clinging to the rocks of a harshly beautiful natural landscape. The faith the movie explores seems to spring naturally from an environment where human life is so entirely at the mercy of the elements that catastrophic events are assumed to have spiritual and moral dimensions.

Raimi, Sam

Sam Raimi - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Steven Schneider from Film Reference

Director, writer, producer, and occasional actor Samuel Raimi was born the third of five children, and was raised in a large home in Franklin, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. His father, Leonard Raimi, a furniture and appliance store owner, staged and shot elaborate home movies, and Sam quickly became "fascinated by the fact that you could capture reality, however staged, with an 8mm camera, replay it, edit it, and make things happen in a different order than they did in real life."

When he was just eleven years old, the younger Raimi made his first film. At age thirteen, he bought his first 8mm camera, using money he had earned from raking leaves. The movies he made at this time ranged from slapstick comedies that resembled and were inspired by his beloved Three Stooges, to a huge "Civil War extravanganza using props and costumes with fifty extras." Sam and his older brother Ivan (with whom he would later co-write Darkman and Army of Darkness ) were constantly experimenting with different camera techniques in order to get the strangest angles possible—a preoccupation evident in his films to this day. At the age of fifteen, Sam and his friend Bruce Campbell (who would go on to attain cult status as Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy) began attending classes taught by industrial filmmaker Vern Nobles. Nobles hired Sam as a production assistant, and after directing his own amateur films (as well as some commercials in the local Detroit area), Raimi enrolled at Michigan State University. There he met future business partner and aspiring producer Robert Tapert. Sam, Ivan, Tapert, and Campbell formed Renaissance Pictures, and after a few early efforts by Raimi ( It's Murder! , Within the Woods , and Clockwork ), they struck gold with The Evil Dead in 1982.

Stephen King called The Evil Dead , "the most ferociously original horror movie I have ever seen," and this unexpected compliment brought the picture instant credibility. Made on a budget of approximately $50,000, Raimi's backers were at first annoyed because the film appeared to be a comedy, when they thought they would be getting a horror movie. But it is precisely the director's trademark combination of gore and slapstick (otherwise known as "splatstick"), along with his innovative camerawork—particularly his use of demon point-of-view shots—which made the film a hit. The Evil Dead , an expanded version of Raimi's earlier short, Within the Woods (also starring Campbell), tells the story of five students who travel to a creepy cabin in the woods for a weekend break and are cut off from the outside world when a bridge collapses beneath them. In the basement of the cabin, the students find the Book of the Dead (bound in human skin) and a tape recorder. The tape's narrator warns of the evil dead, malevolent demons he has unwisely summoned. Sure enough, the evil dead show up, and all hell breaks loose. One of the female student goes outside and is raped by possessed vines, a scene which incurred the wrath of moralists in Britain, and led to the film being prosecuted under existing "video nasty" legislation. Although The Evil Dead 's super low budget is unintentionally revealed at times, the film's kinetic camerawork, over-the-top gore, and sheer intensity insured its status as a cult fave.

In 1985, Raimi teamed up with friends Joel and Ethan Coen (who hit the big time a year before with Blood Simple ) on the flawed but inspired Crimewave. In this movie, a pair of cartoon-like exterminator/hitmen kill the owner of a burglar-alarm company, and proceed to stalk the partner who hired them, his wife, and a nerd framed for the murder, who tells the story in flashback from the electric chair. Two years later, Raimi would direct the next installment of The Evil Dead on a substantially higher budget than his previous efforts. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn retells the entire story of the first film in about ten minutes, and develops the franchise's underlying mythos, thereby paving the way for the third and most whacked out installment, Army of Darkness , in 1993. One crucial difference between Evil Dead II and its predecessor is that the latter is a more overtly comic film. The gore is still there, in spades, but as one critic puts it, "the flying eyeballs and lopped-off appendages serve as the functional equivalents of custard pies and buckets of whitewash rather than anything psychologically retrograde."

Raimi made his major-studio debut with Darkman in 1990, which he co-wrote as well as directed. Although he tried to secure the eponymous lead role for his friend Campbell, the producers opted instead for established star Liam Neeson. The film—a moderate success at best—concerns a scientist who is horribly burned by a fire in his lab lit by criminals. Using the synthetic skin he had invented, he seeks revenge under different identities. After Army of Darkness , Raimi teamed up with the Coen brothers once again, this time on The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which he co-wrote. In 1993–94, Raimi also co-produced a pair of Jean Claude Van Damme action spectaculars, Hard Target (directed by Hong Kong legend John Woo), and Time Cop. In addition, he found great success as executive producer of the hit schlock television shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. Raimi returned as director on the revisionist Western, The Quick and the Dead (1995), starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, and a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio. But his critical breakthrough came three years later, in 1998, with A Simple Plan , in which Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton play brothers who find a bag full of money in the woods, with disastrous consequences. As well as being Raimi's first heavyweight, serious film, it was also his first shot at directing an adaptation of a bestselling novel (written by Scott M. Smith). A Simple Plan wound up garnering two Oscar nominations, for Best Supporting Actor (Thornton), and for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. Raimi's next feature, the tepid Kevin Costner baseball vehicle For Love of the Game (1999), led some fans to believe he was selling out. But that view should change with his upcoming film, Spider-Man scheduled to appear in 2001.

Sam Raimi > Overview - AllMovie biography from Hal Erickson

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BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: A Simple Plan (1998) Philip Kemp, June 1999

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BFI | Sight & Sound | For Love of the Game (1999) Andy Richards, July 2000

JewishJournal.com Spider-Mensch, Michael Auschenker, April 25, 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Spider-Man (2002) Kim Newman, July 2002

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Film Monthly Interview (2007) Sam Raimi Talks Spider-Man 3... And Beyond, by Paul Fischer from Film Monthly, April 22, 2007

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EVIL DEAD

USA (82 mi) 1982

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

Raimi's first feature, a sensationally bad-taste effort which narrates the rapid decline into demonic mental and physical possession of a clean-cut, all-American holiday party holed up in a mountain Tennessee retreat. The woods come alive, devils possess the living, and Tom Sullivan's amazing make-up effects climax with a final fiery exorcism which makes George Romero look like Playschool. Short on characterisation and plot but strong on atmospheric horror and visual churns, this movie blends comic fantasy (EC Tales) with recent genre gems like Carrie and Texas Chain Saw Massacre to impressive effect.

Countless imitators later, The Evil Dead remains a dizzying bloodbath in which gore proves both nasty and amusing. Setting the template for thousands of subsequent followers, Sam Raimi’s debut film charts the saga of two guys and three girls as they embark on a vacation in a remote forest cabin where, in a creepy dungeon decorated with a torn The Hills Have Eyes poster, they discover the Book of the Dead and an accompanying audio recording. Once played, said tape lets loose the surrounding area’s demons, who proceed to possess the hapless twenty-somethings save for Ash (Bruce Campbell), a sweet, somewhat timid guy who begins the evening giving his main squeeze a necklace and ends it by chopping her head off with a rusty shovel (severing the inflicted’s limbs being the only method of stopping them). Raimi’s rollercoaster cinematography seems no less gimmicky now than it did in 1981, creating a freewheeling vibe that contributes to the goofy comedy that underlies the film’s over-the-top gross-out scenarios, which primarily involve Campbell – in an iconic turn both sweet and terrified – having his face splattered with crimson goo. No serious subtext to be found here, just vigorous love and respect for the simultaneous horror and humor inherent to the genre, here epitomized by an infamous sexual assault carried out by animated tree branches, the chilling sight of girlfriends morphed into milky white-eyed ghouls who taunt victims with nursery rhymes, and endless POV shots that place one directly in the line of Raimi’s projectile-fluid fire.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Stumbling upon a Book of the Dead that zombifies folks might have in the previous decade pointed toward unearthing the characters' own political unrest; here, it's a green-light for unspooling rivers of gore, oozy but giddily unthreatening. Armed with zero budget and tons of film-school antsyness, Sam Raimi and pals hit the woods for the quintessential shoestring horror hit, mining the ol' chestnut about spelunking youngsters stranded in a log cabin fending off demonic forces till dawn arrives. Bruce Campbell, Dudley Do-Right jaw continually moist with splattered viscera, plays Ash, the kind-of leader, in the sequels upgraded into chainsaw-toting Curly and surly knight, but mostly the pantsy here. The opening session is all ominously scuttling cameras, breaking through windows and darting past trees when not hiding behind a swinging pendulum; once the demons are loose, it's full-on slaughterhouse slapstick. Ellen Sandweiss gets raped by malevolent weeds before picking up where Linda Blair left off in The Exorcist, Betsy Baker morphs into a gurgling, white-eyed bobble-head doll while Hal Delrich hacks possessed girlfriend Sarah York with an ax until blood literally douses the lenses. Limbs are rudely separated from their owners, goo squirts from orifices, and the zombies melt until their creamed-corn guts spill all over Ash's hilariously disbelieving mug. For all the bug-eyed panache, the gremlins-at-the-wheel pyrotechnics get wearying, all the more so for trading the radicalized tropes of '70s horror films for jokey film-class flailing. Still, what sets Raimi apart from the condescending emptiness of his buddies the Coens (Joel, incidentally, is credited as assistant editor here) is his lack of snarky distancing -- power outlets start bleeding, but Raimi is always alongside his characters, preferably as a disembodied track zooming into a screaming mouth.

Evil Dead Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Twenty years after its original theatrical release, Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead still feels like the punchiest horror flick this side of a Dario Argento gialli. Made on a shoe-string budget, The Evil Dead is difficult to assess for what initially seems like nothing more than B-movie schlock. Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his friends take a weekend trip to the woods only to stumble across the mysterious Book of the Dead. Spells are unleashed, friends go zombie and Ash is forced to test the limits of his squeamishness. Raimi's script is riotously deadpan, his compositions undeniably breathtaking and inventive. The director relentlessly fashions the film's first half as a creepy-crawly sweat chamber with evil seemingly taking the form of an omniscient, roaming camera. Raimi takes so much joy in poking fun at his five protagonists you might wonder why Kevin Williamson even bothered Screaming. Artist Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is literally raped just outside the film's infamous cabin, busy twigs and branches suggesting horny woods at play. Despite the signs (the difficult-to-start vehicle, the fallen bridge), no one else believes the woods are alive. Ash and his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker) share an intimate, peek-a-boo moment through which Ash gives Linda a necklace. When he is later forced to kill her, Raimi takes great joy in referencing this coquettish exchange of affection. Ash is horrordom's most memorable wuss, victim to both a hissing group of crazed friends and to Raimi's lightweight yet burdensome mise-en-scène. Now infamous for its over-the-top gore and cheesy effects sequences, The Evil Dead is most impressive for Raimi's unnerving wide angle work and his uncanny, almost unreal ability to suggest the presence of intangible evil via distant headlights, bleeding light sockets and, in the film's most awesome set piece, a simple game of cards. Raimi actively teases his protagonist for not being a man. Ash may return for the sequel, but The Evil Dead's finale suggests that he was never really up to the challenge.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Evil Dead Trilogy

DVD Times Anthony Nield, Evil Dead Trilogy

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eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder

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Digital Retribution dvd review Collector’s Edition

The Digital Bits dvd review [Limited Edition] Todd Doogan

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2.5/4] Limited Edition

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review Limited Edition

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review [Limited Edition]

Cinescape dvd review Anthony C. Ferrante, Limited Edition

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Limited Edition

UpcomingDiscs.com (Jeremy Frost) dvd review [4/5] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition] Colin Jacobson

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Doc, Limited Edition

The Evil Dead: Limited Edition Blu-ray vs. Ultimate Edition DVD Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique

DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Ultimate Edition] 3-disc

Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Ryan Daley, Ultimate Edition 3-disc

Twitch (Todd Brown) review Tim Janson, Ultimate Edition 3-disc

DVD Town (Tyler Shainline) dvd review Ultimate Edition 3-disc

DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [8/10] Ultimate Edition 3-disc

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review Ultimate Edition 3-disc

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review Ultimate Edition 3-disc

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Ultimate Edition] Michael P. Dougherty II

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg] Blu-Ray

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [4/5]

Bill's Movie Emporium[Bill Thompson]

And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]

Cinema de Merde

Dark Horizons (Garth Franklin) review

It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie review [-2.5/5]

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [2/5]

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [8/10]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review

Frankie Paiva review

Mondo Digital EVIL DEAD and ARMY OF DARKNESS

Deadites Online - The Fan's Official Source For Evil Dead

Sam Raimi Bruce Campbell Evil Dead Blu-ray Commentary Clip - UGO.com Matt Patches from UGO, August 17, 2010, including YouTube (1:42)

Evil Dead Continues Cross Country Tour Bryan from Famous Monsters, March 2, 2010, also seen here: Famous Monsters » Sam Raimi

EVIL DEAD by Sam Raimi Screenplay Online

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] comic

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition] Dalton Ross

Variety review

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review

EVIL DEAD II

USA (84 mi) 1987

Not so much a sequel, more a self-parodic reprise, like some black comic nightmare in the damaged brain of sole survivor Ash (Campbell). This time though, tired of cowering in the corner, Ash gets tooled up with a shotgun and a chainsaw, and lets the monsters suck on some abuse. Meanwhile, four other victims - none of whom has ever seen a horror movie - arrive at the shack and start settling in, unaware that they'll be dead by dawn. The dialogue has been pared to the bone, the on-screen gore toned down, and the maniacal laughter cranked up to full volume. Using the same breathless pacing, rushing camera movements and nerve-jangling sound effects as before, Raimi drags us screaming into his cinematic funhouse. Delirious, demented and diabolically funny.

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

Where the original Evil Dead was a juggling act of film-school antics and genuinely evocative creepiness, Sam Raimi's sequel/remake is full-on gore slapstick, more Tex Avery than Dario Argento. All of the first film is wittily telescoped into the opening five minutes, recapping how Ash's (the inimitable Bruce Campbell) weekend getaway in the woods got interrupted by evil forces unleashed by the Book of the Dead, right down to the ominous final tracking shot straight into a screaming mouth. Daybreak gives the hapless hero some much-needed time-out, but, since the film is shaped as a wide-eyed comedy of bravura kineticism, it doesn't take long for the frenetic splatter gags to kick off again. Indeed, for the most part, Evil Dead 2 places Ash as straight man to Raimi's delirious camerawork, with no prankish stone left unturned—winking setups, rotating sets, disorientating lens tricks, forced perspectives, and blood geysers erupting from shotgun blasts. Raimi delights in using sinister movement to suggest unseen menace: In one showstopper, the demonically skittering camera chases Ash from room to room inside the cabin, crashing through door after door, then losing him along the way and retreating back into the woods. A new batch of victims (including Denise Bixler, Dan Hicks, Kassie DePaiva, and Richard Domeier) eventually turn up, donning monstrous make-up and blank eye-caps, though Raimi, despite the picture's pricier budget, remains dedicated to the original's brand of guerilla ingenuity and retro-chintz. The hero's decapitated beloved rises from her grave to provide a little stop-animation ballet, trees crush houses like beer cans, and a skull-faced demon's neck stretches to the sound of shrieking chimpanzees—fond Ray Harryhausen shout-outs all, but my favorite is Ash facing a chortling deer-head trophy. (A literalization of the title of Pupi Avati's underrated chiller The House With Laughing Windows, maybe?) Yet Raimi's resourceful restlessness ultimately pushes the movie beyond gooey genre pastiche and into uniquely absurd farce. Ash may lose limbs as he chainsaws his way through the installment, but Evil Dead 2 holds together as the giddiest treatment of viscera this side of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.

Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987) - Articles - TCM.com Richard Harlan Smith

With Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987), writer-director Sam Raimi pulled off a typically impossible feat – he made a sequel to a cult movie milestone ("the ultimate experience in grueling terror") that was widely considered to be better than the original. Initially, Raimi had wanted to press on from the exposure afforded him by The Evil Dead (1981) to a sequel that would catapult its benighted protagonist Ash (Bruce Campbell) into the Middle Ages. When moneyman Dino De Laurentiis came aboard (at the behest of Stephen King, then making his own directorial debut with the De Laurentiis-produced Maximum Overdrive[1986]), the power behind the newly minted De Laurentiis Entertainment Group demanded a scenario more in line with that of Raimi's original cult hit. With a budget ten times that of The Evil Dead, Raimi's follow-up has a more aesthetically pleasing look and a host of special effects that pays homage to a score of horror and suspense classics: the canted angles of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the anthropomorphic trees of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the fruit cellar of Psycho (1960), stop motion animation reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen, the boarded-up windows of Night of the Living Dead (1968), the "blood flood" from The Shining (1980), the rays of light streaming in through a sundered wall from Raising Arizona (1985) and it's anyone's guess whether Ash's perambulating hand was a nod to The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), The Crawling Hand (1963) or Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965).

With Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi took the opportunity to experiment with time cuts, which advance the action one significant piece at a time in the manner of comic book panels. This technique is most pronounced in the now celebrated setpiece in which Ash amputates his stump with the help of nominal heroine Annie Knowby (Sarah Berry), whose father has unwisely unleashed ancient evil upon the world. In addition to the forward momentum gained by telescoping these events, this editing tack brackets the dumb fun (which so often metastasize into full blown surreal slapstick) with an authorial intelligence that was not lost on moviegoers whose enthusiasm turned Evil Dead II into an instant cult classic rated slightly higher than Raimi's gnarly original. Raimi had grown up on the punishing physical comedy of The Three Stooges and the hyperkinetic cartoons of Tex Avery, which bent the physical world to the demands of animated high comedy. In Evil Dead II, Raimi and crew freshen the shopworn formula of inanimate objects coming to an horrific semblance of life (a gimmick driven into the ground with the trifecta successes of The Exorcist [1973], The Omen and Carrie [both 1976]) by making these items (a rocking chair, a gooseneck lamp, a stuffed deer head) not just so much telekinetic flotsam and jetsam but characters in their own right, who taunt Ash in witchy high octaves, pushing him to hysterical, transcendental laughter even while promising he'll be "dead by dawn."

In a 1988 interview with British journalist Jonathan Ross, Sam Raimi projected for himself an inevitable loss of creativity that would come with the assignment of bigger budgeted studio projects. Indeed, as Raimi became the A-list director-for-hire of such popular successes as A Simple Plan (1998), For Love of the Game (1999) and the Billy Bob Thornton-scripted The Gift (2000), the stately, tasteful manner of his craft seemed a betrayal of his salad days as a DIY splatterpunk using Milk Duds to thicken his bathtub ichor. If Raimi had been suspected by his early fan base of having sold out prior to the New Millennium, his helming of Columbia's mega budget Spider-Man franchise from 2002 on was likely the final coffin nail for the faithful. Yet while these summer blockbusters (the final budget of Spider-Man 3 is calculated to have hit $350 million) seem, at least superficially, to be anathema to the hands-on Raimi aesthetic, there is an obvious and reassuring kinship shared by Ash of The Evil Dead canon and Spider-Man's Peter Parker. We meet both characters on the cusp of adulthood and witness their maturation being interrupted by occult forces, supernatural events that change them physically, complicate their love lives and compel both to rise above their fears and physical limitations to become unlikely and initially unwilling heroes. Although Raimi rarely works in full-on horror these days, Ghost House Pictures, the production company he founded with Evil Dead producer Robert G. Tapert, remains a strong brand in the genre with such box office hits as Boogeyman (2005) and The Grudge (2004) and 30 Days of Night (2007).

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Evil Dead Trilogy

DVD Times Anthony Nield, Evil Dead Trilogy

Jerry Saravia review Evil Dead Trilogy

Classic Horror review Chrissy Derbyshire

Kamera.co.uk review Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell

Juicy Cerebellum (Alex Sandell) review Halloween party pick

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

Mike Bracken review [5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long

Cinescape dvd review [Collector's Edition] Steve Biodrowski

The Digital Bits dvd review [Regular and Limited Editions] Florian Kummert

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review [Limited Edition]

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD Clinic (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [5/5] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

MovieFreak.com (Greg Malmborg) dvd review [8/10] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVDActive (Dustin McNeill) dvd review [8/10] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Divimax Edition] Dante A. Ciampaglia

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [8/10] Blu-Ray

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [8/10]

Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review

The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review

Digital Retribution dvd review

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [5/5]

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [2/5]

Horror Express review Finn Clark

Serdar Yegulalp retrospective [3.5/4]

Lars Lindahl review

Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [4/5]

Variety review

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review

Washington Post (Richard Harrington) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

DARKMAN

USA (96 mi) 1990

Edward Copeland on Film (Damian)

Dr Westlake (Neeson) is on the verge of perfecting a synthetic skin which conceals disfigurements; the problem is, the skin dissolves in sunlight after 99 minutes. When his laboratory is ransacked and blown up by gangster Durant (Drake), Westlake is left for dead, face down in a vat of caustic chemicals. But he survives (sans visage) as Darkman, an avenging angel who uses temporary masks to impersonate and destroy his enemies, while simultaneously attempting to win back his estranged love (McDormand). Drawing self-consciously on the 'misunderstood monster' tradition of Universal's golden age, Raimi's major studio debut abounds with conflicting ambitions, juggling pathos, horror and incongruous slapstick as it attempts to meld (with variable success) an archaic narrative structure with a kinetic, modern visual style. Neeson's performance encapsulates these contradictions, mixing camp histrionics with moments of touching precision. But the breathtaking action sequences find Raimi in his element: wild, woolly and occasionally wondrous, Darkman has the chaotic charm of untrammelled, undisciplined talent.

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5] also seen here: Sam Raimi, Darkman: Old School Reviews (links lost)

I must thank Roger Ebert for recommending Darkman when it was first released in 1990, when most critics generally panned it. His praise for Sam Raimi's low budget film intrigued me enough to check it out before it vanished from the theaters, and a number of scenes have remained in the long time pleasurable memory zone. Recently re-watching Darkman on DVD, I find the film continues to hold up as entertaining melodrama and offers hope for the Spider-Man series.

After two misfires with mainstream releases For Love of the Game and The Gift, it's refreshing to see Raimi taking on the essentially cartoon characters of Darkman and creating a believable universe in a visually rich environment with touches of pathos. Although most Raimi cultists loyally stand by his Evil Dead trilogy in hopes that he'll transform Spiderman into a worthy film, the best indicator of Raimi's ability to work with cartoon material lies with his vastly underrated Darkman.

Liam Neeson (destined to star in Schindler's List three years later) carries the film as Darkman, an identity scientist Peyton Westlake takes on after being horribly burned and left for dead. Westlake has been working on synthetic skin, developed from digitally transforming photographs, but unfortunately the skin breaks up at the 99th minute.

Similar to Hitchcock's protagonists, Westlake is a victim of random circumstance. His girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand, six years before she strikes gold in Fargo), discovers compromising papers from her boss that prove extensive corruption and leaves them in Westlake's lab. Mobster Robert Durant (Larry Drake) and his henchmen show up for the papers, blow away Westlake's lab assistant, thrash and trash Westlake and lab, and leave him for dead as the lab explodes in a beautifully filmed fiery inferno.

Alive, but deformed with burns covering 40% of his body, Westlake anonymously is treated in the hospital by removing nerve endings to make his life tolerable. Ironically, rendering him in this manner subjects his mind to high stages of rage and episodes of extreme strength, similar to the Incredible Hulk without changing green, but now he becomes a creature of the shadows—Darkman.

He sets off to win back his girlfriend, but cannot do so in his deformed condition. Using scientific intelligence, Darkman reconstructs his lab, collects photographs of his adversaries, and creates duplicate masks to extract revenge on Durant and his crew of mobsters in plots reminiscent of Mission Impossible that set the bad guys against each other.

This provides some great humor and also establishes another Hitchcockian theme—the idea that evil dwells within us all. Raimi beats us over the head with that theme often, but as a cartoon this is perfectly acceptable—this isn't exactly in the same territory as Notorious, but I can imagine the Master of Suspense enjoying Raimi's work here. The depiction of good and evil within the protagonist demonstrates that Raimi understands how to bring a measure of depth to characters that would be left paper-thin in more traditional treatments. One memorable sequence with the evil Durant's cigar cutter evokes physical reactions in the audience without even showing the blood, and a subsequent parallel scene with an enraged Westlake crunching a carnival worker's fingers further establishes his theme associating our protagonist with his dark side.

Credit the main actors for translating Raimi's screenplay into the flesh. McDormand delivers the goods believably as the loyal girlfriend, conflicted when Westlake apparently dies. Her part could be expanded more, but the film allows Neeson to demonstrate his acting skills to a much fuller degree. His over the top scenes of rage show excellent comic timing, but he shows a great deal of range. The quieter moments with his pained looks add far more sympathy for his character than we'd expect in such a screenplay.

Darkman contains many pleasures that film aficionados will appreciate. Incorporating Chicago locations in the mix and combining warm sunlit open spaces with darker closed in sets, cinematographer Bill Pope (The Matrix) captures great explosive scenes, surreal dream sequences with lots of reds and yellows, and really gloomy scenes in darkened alleyways with the despondent Darkman character.

Overall, this film shows off Sam Raimi's vision and gives the clearest preview of what we can expect of his Spider-Man. Should the large budget movie fail, we can still bring out this far less seen DVD as definitive proof that Raimi remains one of the better directors working in the business. Of course his Evil Dead fans have believed this for years.

Dorkosphere [Alex Miller]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]

Mark R. Leeper review [-1 out of -4..+4]

Classic Horror review Jenn Dlugos

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

DVD Verdict - Darkman Trilogy [Dylan Charles]

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg] Darkman Trilogy

DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [2/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [2/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

UpcomingDiscs.com (Ryan Erb) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Nicholas Sheffo

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) dvd review [2/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

High-Def Digest [El Bicho] Blu-Ray

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

Draven99's Musings [Chris Beaumont]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]

Cinephile Magazine [Richard X] Richard Saad

Georgia Straight (Steve Newton) review

eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [5/5]

Blood Brothers [Matt Reifschneider]

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] capsule review

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

Variety review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Joe Brown) review

Siskel & Ebert (audio)

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

DVDBeaver dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Yunda Eddie Feng

ARMY OF DARKNESS

USA (81 mi) 1993 Director’s Cut (96 mi)

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

A calculated tilt at the cross-over mainstream audience, this second sequel eschews the hardcore horror of The Evil Dead and the splatter comedy of Evil Dead II, in favour of a swashbuckling comedy. Catapulted back in time, chainsaw-wielding hero Ash (Campbell) joins forces with the inhabitants of a besieged castle - and damsel in distress Sheila (Davidtz) - in their battle against an army of skeleton Deadites. With its stop-motion effects and knockabout humour, this plays more like a Ray Harryhausen version of El Cid than a horror movie, with plenty of slapstick but very little gore.

With the reluctant hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) having been unwillingly sent from his haunted cabin in the woods back to medieval times, the opportunities for camp indulgence in Army of Darkness have been considerably expanded upon from those in the first two Evil Dead films. Looser than the overdrawn original film but not as tight or relentlessly original as the second, this capper to Raimi’s schlock horror trilogy is wicked fun in delightfully bad taste, the visual gags coming fast and cheap as Ash disposes of any possessed creatures that unwisely crosses his path with prowess and brio to spare. Here, the zombies take a backseat to a skeletal army that wages war against the local castle residents, led by a chainsaw and shotgun wielding Ash (“You see this? This is my boom stick”). The feel is fittingly haphazard, moving from one outrageous visual gag set piece to the next without a moment more of screen time dedicated to the necessitated plot than is absolutely necessary. Perhaps no moment of the film is funnier (at least to knowing film geeks, a la Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still) than when Ash, commanded to retrieve a sacred book that can return him to his own time, tries to cover up his failure to remember the magic words needed to do so with perfectly timed ineptitude. With loving references to the legends of King Arthur, Gulliver’s Travels and The Three Stooges abound, Army of Darkness succeeds thanks to its indulgences into the utterly ridiculous.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kian Bergstrom

Also known as BRUCE CAMPBELL VERSUS ARMY OF DARKNESS, this is the third and, so far, final film in Raimi's saga following the moron Ash (Campbell) as he strives to save the world from the legions of the damned. Dripping with glee, ARMY OF DARKNESS revels in its gore-splattered Deadite lunacy, featuring a plot that's little more than a series of contrivances for visual puns, hackneyed romantic clichés, and action set-pieces of virtuosic, if incoherent, energy. Every poke in the eye, every zombie glare, every threat upon one's edible soul is an opportunity for Raimi's teenage sense of humor to show itself, making this perhaps the most 3 Stooges-inflected action-horror film ever made. Certainly it's the lightest film Raimi's ever made, an effervescent dollop of self-mockery capping off a stage in his career of wild-eyed experiment and go-for-broke invention. This is filmmaking at it's happiest, glorying in the bald capacities of cinema to shrink, duplicate, and transform its actors, to mold and mistreat space, to weirdly stutter and truncate time. Merely getting to move the camera is enough pretext for Raimi to set up an elaborate genre reference or visual gag, and the intricate stupidity of Ash, thrust back in time to Medieval England to fight the zombies he unleashed from the Necronomicon in the previous two (modern day) films is an elaborate counterpoint to his surprisingly badass versatility with a chainsaw and broomstick. In this lead role, Bruce Campbell, long-time muse to Raimi, demonstrates a self-effacing, deeply sensuous performance style that's long been under-recognized. One of the great physicalists of screen acting, Campbell's anti-naturalistic tics, too-careful gestures, and winking, self-aware line readings form a kind of over-saturated scaffold upon which the campy drapery of the narrative hangs. A scene-chewer in the best possible sense, Campbell steals every scene, dominates every shot, never missing an opportunity to deflate the film's artifices or turn his fellow actors' work against them. In the face of his mugging, defamiliarizing body, everyone else plays permanent catch-up. This is the last great Raimi film to date, and a milestone in Campbell's career. "Hail to the King, baby."

Classic Horror review Chrissy Derbyshire

Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a great horror film. Not an auspicious start to any review. Let’s take it one step further. Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a horror film at all. It’s a madcap comedy, avec zombies – but don’t expect Shaun of the Dead either. This third and (thus far) final film in the Evil Dead series is an amalgam of Three Stooges and Monty Python style comedy antics and groovy Harryhausen-esque special effects, all squeezed into an Evil Dead plot so thin it looks ready to rupture at any moment.

The long-suffering Ash (Bruce Campbell) was, if we remember, transported back in time at the end of Evil Dead II. For those of you who don’t remember, never fear: an inexplicably re-shot flashback sequence will explain all. Suddenly, Ash finds himself responsible for saving the Medieval world from the deadites. This, in true Ash parlance, really pisses him off. Campbell is in fine form here, turning a wispy plot and weak script into a whole that merits its unquestionable cult status. He has more lines in this film (the film being generally a lot more ‘talky’ than the previous two) and, despite having little to work with, really develops the antiheroic, arrogant yet lovable character of Ash.

One aspect of Army of Darkness that might truly be called classic is the playful creativity of the special effects. In one particularly memorable sequence, Ash smashes a mirror, and from the shards spring dozens of reflected mini-Ashes who proceed to attack their original in a most ungrateful manner. Eventually they force Ash to swallow one of their number, causing him to grow an evil twin from his shoulder. One gets the impression that Raimi poured all his comic tastes into the character of ‘Evil Ash’, who is far more silly than he is scary, especially in the hilarious fight scene between Ash and his evil clone.

Then again, the whole concept here is more silly than it is scary. The deadites, for instance, seem far more inclined to swing a farcical punch than to swallow anyone’s soul. Resurrected skeletons scream and get blown up – and if you listen carefully you can hear one utter a whispered threat to rip off certain tender parts of Ash’s anatomy.

Embeth Davitz is another predominately comic foil as Sheila, Ash’s love of the moment, whose function (like most women in Evil Dead films) appears to be to scream a lot and become possessed. Unlike Evil Ash (also played by Campbell), she is, unfortunately, not very funny at all. Raimi is a miracle-worker in many ways, but Davitz would be better moulded by a carpenter than by a director. Still, her performance and those of some of the other non-actors in this film cannot take away from Bruce Campbell’s no-holds-barred performance. He’s a great physical actor, he works brilliantly with Raimi, and this combination of actor and director will always be classic.

Watch this film with expectations of comedy, and you won’t be disappointed. It’s good fun, even if it ain’t art. However, I would urge you not to expect horror, or you certainly will be disappointed. Finally, if you’re deciding between editions of Army of Darkness, choose a copy that includes the alternative ending. Look out for this cracker of a sequence. It includes the best line in the film and, in my (never humble) opinion, one of the best closing lines in film history.

Trivia:

An alternate ending (shown in Europe and available on the official "bootleg" DVD amongst others) has Ash waking up a century too late in a post-apocalyptic world.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Evil Dead Trilogy

DVD Times Anthony Nield, Evil Dead Trilogy

RevolutionSF (Kenn McCracken) recommendation Evil Dead: An Appreciation, Evil Dead Trilogy

Jerry Saravia review Evil Dead Trilogy

Army of Darkness – Review & Retrospective Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique Online

not coming to a theater near you (Chiranjit Goswami) review lengthy

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]

a wasted life Bryin Abraham

Jay's Movie Blog Jason

John Beachem review [4.5/5]

filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger) review [4.5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib

CultureCartel.com (Travis Lowell) review [5/5]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review David Milchik

MovieFreak.com (John Teves) dvd review [4/4] [Boomstick Edition]

DVD Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd review [Screwhead Edition]

DoBlu.com Blu-ray Screwhead Edition [Matt Paprocki] also here: Blogcritics - DVD review [Matt Paprocki]

DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review [Director's Cut] [Limited Edition]

DVDActive (Warwick Gaetjens) dvd review [9/10] [Director's Cut]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Director's Cut] Colin Jacobson

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Limited Edition]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Frank's Reel Reviews (Loron Hays) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [8/10] Blu-Ray

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [5/10] Blu-Ray

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Mark R. Leeper review [low +1 out of -4..+4]

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

Mos Eisley review

Lars Lindahl review

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]

Exploitation Retrospect review Dan Taylor

Mike Bracken review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder

Georgia Straight (Steve Newton) review

Bloody-Disgusting review [3.5/5] The Thinker

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [3/5]

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [8/10]

Mondo Digital also reviewing EVIL DEAD

Talking Pictures (UK) review Sweets for the Sweet, by Ed Cooper, also reviewing CANDYMAN, BRAIN DEAD, and HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH

Variety (Peter Besas) review

Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Owen Gleiberman

BBC Films review Nick Hilditch

Washington Post (Richard Harrington) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2/5]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Mark Wilson

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

USA Japan (107 mi) 1995

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

This engagingly hyperbolic homage to the style and revenge fantasies of the spaghetti Western centres on a deadly tournament - organised by Hackman, boss of a township called Redemption - to find the fastest gun in the West. Enter a motley crew, among them Sharon Stone's Eastwood-like interloper, who has a secret agenda of her own... A deadpan black comedy, Sam Raimi's fast-paced movie looks and sounds like a Leone oater but more so. The violence is heightened by an intelligent, often hilarious use of special effects. Stone, who co-produced, is surprisingly effective in the lead, and Hackman's Herod is wonderfully, unrepentantly villainous. Terrific fun.

Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review

Sam Raimi, best known for the Evil Dead series, directs this surrealistically action-packed Western (based entirely on a gunfight contest) as if he'd taken the title to heart and slowing down would kill him. Every sequence spills over with visual punchlines, obnoxiously funny zoom-in shots and ferocious one-liners. It's almost too much movie for itself, and protagonist Sharon Stone can't anchor the picture the way it needs; her Clint Eastwood-style sullenness lacks substance. But the gallery of supporting actors, which includes Lance Henriksen, Leonard DiCaprio, Gene Hackman (doing a twisted take on his evil sheriff role from Unforgiven), fill the movie with so much wanton charisma that Stone's performance as the "straight man" actually starts working after a while. It's a weird picture where A-movie and B-movie qualities are blended at such a high velocity that you start to lose track of which is which.

VideoVista review Donald Morefield

A lone rider arrives in the western town of Redemption, seeking vengeance for her murdered father - a marshal who challenged the criminals that killed him. Back in the mid-1990s, following her attainment of stardom in Basic Instinct, in between action roles in Total Recall (opposite Schwarzenegger), and The Specialist (with Stallone), a 'wild west' picture with Sharon Stone was quite an enticing prospect. Here, she plays 'the Lady', later identified as Ellen, a novice gunfighter joining a duelling contest organised by town despot Herod (Gene Hackman, performing a cheekily extravagant variation of his Oscar-winning 'Little Bill' Daggett supporting character in Eastwood's Unforgiven).

For a slick western thriller that also counts Clint Eastwood's seminal High Plains Drifter (1973) among its varied influences, perhaps this particularly astute casting of Hackman as the chief villain, might be viewed as one borrowing too many from Eastwoods' oeuvre... But director Sam Raimi, and screenwriter Simon Moore, have crafted such an obviously affectionate homage to both stylised 'spaghetti' westerns, and traditional Hollywood horse operas, and then blessed the film with simmering undercurrents of both femininity and feminism (Stone's Ellen is a notable amalgam heroine - seemingly inspired by Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, and Jane Fonda's Cat Ballou), that even such blatantly developed influences, aesthetic and narrative, do not, in any significant way, detract from this film's board appeal to mainstream cinema tastes.

Other principal castings for The Quick And The Dead - of Russell Crowe, whose stardom was clearly ascendant back then; and the 20-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, just ahead of his leading role in Baz Luhrmann's modernist Shakespeare, Romeo + Juliet (1996), plus extremely talented supporting actors such as Keith David, Lance Henriksen, Tobin Bell, with superb veteran, Pat Hingle - provided further evidence of the filmmakers' savvy in assembling team players capable of roundly expressing peculiar individualities for their often ironically-mannered iconic western roles. In fact, every key role in the unfolding drama of sudden death is perfectly balanced for easy recognition by genre fans of several wild-west archetypes; from the undertaker Doc Wallace (Roberts Blossom), and victimised saloon-girl Katie (Olivia Burnette), to grungy outlaw, 'Scars' (Mark Boone Jr), and local sleaze, Dred (Kevin Conway), a rapist and paedophile.

It's not immediately clear, in the timetable of clock-strike scheduled gunfights, who is most likely to end up shooting the hateful villains, or the boastful gunslingers (a Sioux Indian, named Spotted Horse, claims invulnerability to bullets; Henriksen's charismatic trick-shot artist, 'Ace' Hanlon, is fatally exposed as an unskilled fraud by Herod's expertise), but there are few genuine surprises here. It's to be expected that Herod will manipulate proceedings to such an extent that he ends up shooting his immodest son 'the Kid' (a rather unsympathetic DiCaprio), and that the villain is wily enough to pit reluctant hero Cort (Crowe, underplaying almost to the point of invisibility), against vulnerably-anxious heroine Ellen, necessitating their rule-breaking ruse to counteract and prevent a wicked twist of fate that Herod plans for them.

Raimi employs numerous camera tricks or displays of prosthetics to enhance, with consummate wit and savage humour, the wounding and killing scenes. This cannot be praised as a modern classic of the western genre, but neither is it a complete flop (as its US box-office receipts had suggested). It's unlikely to be found on any critic's top 10 listing of cult movies, either. The Quick And The Dead is merely a competent production, a lively mix of clichés and talent, which is quite satisfactory by anyone's standards.

not coming to a theater near you (Adam Balz) review

Edward Copeland on Film (J.D.)

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

Raging Bull Movie Reviews review Vanes Naldi, Dan McGowan, and Mike Lorefice

Steven Krut review

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

Movie-Vault.com (Carl Langley) review [4/10] also seen here: Movie-Gurus.com [Carl Langley]

Rob Furr review

Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review

filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [4/5] also seen here: James Brundage retrospective

The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan

DVDTalk [Jamie S. Rich]

Digital Retribution dvd review Julian

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review Superbit Edition

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [3/5] [Superbit Edition]

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Superbit Edition]

Moda Magazine dvd review Brian Orndorf, Superbit Edition

DVD Town - Blu-ray [James Plath]

DVD Verdict (Eric Profancik) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Colin Jacobson

Georgia Straight (Ron Yamauchi) review

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [4/5]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]

Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [C+]

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman

BBC Films review Matt Ford

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Scott Rosenberg) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]

A SIMPLE PLAN

USA France Germany Great Britain Japan (121 mi) 1998

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

In fiction at least, no plan is ever simple, especially if crime's involved. So when the chance discovery of a wrecked light aircraft on a snowy Minnesota nature reserve places $4m in easy reach of farmer Hank (Paxton), his dim brother Jacob (Thornton), and the latter's ethically challenged buddy Lou (Briscoe), they should surely have known not even to think about keeping it. Still, they're only human, and soon they're arguing over how to hang on to the cash, without arousing the suspicion of friends and families, and desperately trying to conceal the crimes that follow, as if by destiny, hard on their initial lapse from honesty. Raimi takes the old story about dishonour among thieves and renders it fresh through the calm, cool, steady assurance of the telling. The aura of familiarity extends even to the snowscapes, but the sturdy characterisation and taut plotting, which charts the progress towards deadly infighting with all the rigour of a philosophical syllogism, make for an impressively lean thriller.

Memphis Flyer (Hadley Hury) review

Potential viewers of A Simple Plan should not be deterred by those trailers and stills of Billy Bob Thornton, in a major supporting role, wearing glasses duct-taped together over his nose and an old knit cap that plasters greasy hanks of hair down around his face. These promotionals, exacerbated by a goofy grin filled with seriously yellowed teeth, suggest that the writer and star of One False Move and Sling Blade may have finally strayed too far over the line into caricature. As it turns out, in A Simple Plan Thornton brings very quietly and subtly to life one of the most interesting tragicomic characters in recent American film. The performance is one of the chief surprises and satisfactions among many in this arresting morality play, adapted for the screen by Scott B. Smith from his best-selling novel, directed by Sam Raimi, with cinematography by Alar Kivilo, design by Patrizia von Brandenstein, music by Danny Elfman, and an acting ensemble that includes Bill Paxton, Brent Briscoe, and Bridget Fonda.

A Simple Plan is a deceptively simple film in which we are reminded – as we too infrequently are by many current films – that drama is not only not afraid of simplicity but recognizes the mastery of it as an essential step toward artistry in the form. Focused tightly on relatively few characters, its storyline correspondingly taut, A Simple Plan sustains the conviction of its good script and actors, its intelligent direction, and strong visual elements; its exploration of good and evil goes deep rather than wide. It is precisely the creative team’s determination not to cover their commercial demographics by throwing in extraneous characters, plot lines, and cinematic kitchen sinks that makes this project refreshing and, despite a few flaws, has earned it several nods in the early awards competitions. The film is involving, disturbing, and highly entertaining.

Set during the long winter in a small town isolated among the forested hills and rolling farmlands of eastern Minnesota, the film’s tone of irony is established immediately. The snowy fields are clean and white, the hills etched softly in the pale sunlight, the stands of trees rise with the timeless authoritarian grace of nature. It is the human figures that cast the only ambiguous shadows in this pristine landscape, and the movie wastes no time in letting us know that, as in any good tragedy, it’s often the good, moral, and happy man – played here by Paxton in his best role and performance to date – who casts the longest shadow.

In part because of the corkscrew-like circumscription of Scott’s screenplay and in part because of Kivilo’s evocatively stark cinematography, A Simple Plan has the odd sensibility of a dark Jacobean drama laced with the mordant humor and ironic fatedness of some medieval Norse saga. There are some important surprises in the story, but much more significantly this is a tale of inevitabilities. Playwright Arthur Miller has said of his Death of a Salesman that the audience response he wanted to incite “was not ‘What happens next and why?’ so much as ‘Oh, God, of course.’” The “why” of A Simple Plan comes early: Hank (Paxton), his brother Jacob (Thornton), and Jacob’s buddy Lou (Briscoe) discover a small plane that had apparently crashed in the woods some time ago; its pilot is long dead and stashed onboard is $4.3 million. “It’s the American Dream in a goddamned gym bag!” crows Lou. “You work for the American Dream,” protests Hank. But he doesn’t protest long. Though we know where this is headed, the “what happens nexts” of this tale of corruption keep the suspense hissing along like a long-fused bomb. But it is specifically the “Oh, God, of course” toward which A Simple Plan ineluctably moves – fueled by the unadorned humanity of Paxton’s and Thornton’s performances – that separates this film from the pack of postmodern noir drivel and gives it staying power.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: A Simple Plan (1998) Philip Kemp, June 1999

Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan may resemble other recent small-town crime films, but its emotional power and subtlety put it in a class of its own

Early on in A Simple Plan, a man cautiously enters the fuselage of a crashed plane. The pilot is sitting in his seat, his head shaking as if in pain or incredulity. Thinking he's still alive, the newcomer speaks to him and starts forward. His movement causes the fuselage to tip, lurching him forward into the pilot - the crows that have been feeding on the dead man's face erupt in a tumult of angry squawks and stabbing beaks.

It's easy to guess how the Sam Raimi we know and love, splatter-happy director of The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Darkman and The Quick and the Dead, would have built on that scene. Easy to imagine the in-your-face shocks, the crow-haunted nightmares, the vengeful zombie with a half-eaten visage chewing its way up the cast list. The humour would have been gleefully ghoulish, the characters and violence pure cartoon, the genre conventions teased and twanged and mercilessly mocked. But A Simple Plan is the work of a very different Sam Raimi, a film-maker who here austerely rejects hyped-up camera tricks and jokey shock effects and creates living, complex characters whose fates we care about. The result is easily his finest film to date.

The subtlety and the pervasive sense of unease are matched from the start by Danny Elfman's insidious score (hailed by Paul Tonks in Gramophone magazine as "the most daringly original score from Hollywood in years"). Like Raimi, Elfman has come a long way from his cartoonish beginnings (a frequent Tim Burton collaborator, he scored the first two Batman films and A Nightmare Before Christmas). Here, he sets up the chill, edgy mood with an off-key duet between detuned piano and banjo, like a distorted reflection of small-town rural values; they're joined by an eerie ensemble of flutes, alto through bass. By the time the three men (Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Brent Briscoe) stand beside the wrecked plane, debating what to do with the stash of loot fallen literally from the sky, there's little doubt where we're headed. Things are already going badly wrong, and they're going to get worse.

The corrosive effect of an ill-gotten windfall on ordinary lives is no new theme, of course (Shallow Grave, to look no further), and the use of bleak, near-monochrome Minnesota snowscapes - in fact shot in Wisconsin, since the Minnesota winter turned disobligingly mild - inevitably recalls the Coen brothers' Fargo. But Raimi's film never feels derivative, thanks not least to the strongly individualised performances he's drawn from his lead actors. Paxton proves once again that he's one of the most underrated (and understated) actors in Hollywood, his Hank a "nice, sweet, normal guy" horrified to find himself sucked down to disaster by one brief capitulation to his own worse instincts. As his brother Jacob, Thornton gives a masterfully gauged portrait of a man whose emotional insights - which are as acute as anybody's - are constantly wrong-footed by his mental limitations. His performance is all the more moving for never lapsing into the sentimentality that tinged his similar role in Sling Blade. Only Bridget Fonda, as Hank's wife Sarah, doesn't quite come together as a character - not the actress' fault but the script's since it requires her to switch a little too abruptly from moral revulsion to all-out avidity.

But A Simple Plan shares with Fargo something more than a use of rural winter backdrops: its stern, absolute morality, as starkly black and white as crows against a snowfield. An alternative title, in fact, might have been that of the film which gave Paxton his previous best role: One False Move. Hank's single moment of weakness, allowing himself to be persuaded by the less-grounded Jacob and their third accomplice Lou (Briscoe) instead of holding out for integrity, leads with horrifying inexorability into the abyss, making their destruction complete. Utterly different in tone as Raimi's earlier films may have been, they held in common with this latest work a sense of the fearful flimsiness of everyday normality. Just one rent in the fabric of things and darkness is let loose.

But while the plot moves with inevitable momentum to its dénouement, it's far from predictable. Central to the film's dramatic impact is the way its moral centre shifts, quite unexpectedly, from Hank to Jacob. To begin with Hank clearly occupies the moral high ground: he's honest Mr Normal, the guy we identify with, while Jacob's eager venality aligns him with the shiftless Lou. When Lou describes the cash as, "the American Dream in a goddam gymbag", Hank retorts (a touch pompously), "You work for the American Dream, you don't steal it." But as Hank embarks on his slow slide into perdition, it's Jacob, a seemingly gormless figure with his protruding teeth and cheap taped-up glasses, who takes on the role of conscience. By the time he asks, "Hank, d'you ever feel evil? I do", he is confronting the questions his brother is desperately trying to evade.

The key point of transition is the scene when Hank, blackmailed by Lou to hand over some of the cash, comes to persuade his brother to help him gain counter-leverage by framing Lou. As the scene progresses it emerges that for all his slowness of brain, Jacob's scruples are finer than Hank's. Where Hank sees Lou as a contemptible lowlife against whom any tactics are justified, Jacob sees a friend he is being asked to betray. His distress as Hank piles on the pressure is pitiable, and he gives in only when offered the one bribe he can't resist: that Hank will help him regain their father's farm.

Before Raimi took it on, A Simple Plan was to have been directed by John Boorman. (A scheduling conflict with The General obliged him to withdraw.) It may well have been this transfer of moral stature that attracted Boorman to the project; one can imagine the film as a snowbound counterpart to Boorman's Deliverance, another study of everyday guys destroyed by a headlong train of events, and of an individual's self-image (Jon Voight then, Paxton now) fractured and degraded under pressure. But Raimi makes the film his own, carrying over from his previous work the sense of encroaching paranoia as formerly solid ground starts to give way beneath the feet and the avenues of escape are blocked off one by one.

Scott B. Smith, scripting from his own novel, charts his characters' descent into hell with remorseless control and impeccable narrative logic. At each step it's made clear how, at that panic-stricken moment and with no benefit of hindsight, these people could hardly have done other than they did. With each turn of the screw the options narrow down, until Hank, broken and weeping, a gun in his hand, finds himself forced into committing the final, lethal act of destruction. His grief is the more lacerating since by doing so he shatters the only thing to emerge from the grim events, a new-found closeness to his formerly estranged brother.

A Simple Plan is bookended by Hank's voice-over. At the outset he reflects how, despite the dullness of his daily round, a man like him should feel blessed in having "a wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbours who respect him." At the end, looking back on the betrayals and deaths, the ambitions raised and crushed, the ruin of that modest measure of contentment, he muses sombrely: "There are days when I manage not to think of anything at all. But those days are few and far between." There's more unbearable anguish in those few spare words than in all the gore and mayhem of Raimi's previous output.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B+]

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [B+]

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) review

“A Simple Plan” avoids the shallow grave - Salon.com Charles Taylor, December 11, 1998

The Goblin’s dilemma in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Spider-Man Boyd White and Tim Kreider from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

Scott Renshaw review [8/10]

Louis Proyect review

Images (David Ng) review

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C]

Film Freak Central review Bill Chambers

n:zone (Daniel Kelly) review

Matt Prigge review [3.5/4]

Jon Popick review [4/4]

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Jerry Saravia review

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Michael S. Goldberger

Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne) capsule review

Edwin Jahiel review

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]

James Bowman review

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [3/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]

DVD Verdict (Sean Fitzgibbons) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Mandel) dvd review

Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review

Richard A. Zwelling review [4/4]

Harvey S. Karten review

Walter Frith review [3.5/5]

Mark R. Leeper review [+2 out of -4..+4]

Scott Mendelson review [A]

Movie-Vault.com (Dan Smith) review [10/10]

Needcoffee.com review

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]

George Chabot's Review

The Tech (MIT) (Vladimir Zelevinsky) review

Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [B-]

Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]

Mondo Digital also reviewing THE GIFT

Variety (Glenn Lovell) review

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman

The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

Los Angeles Times (Jack Mathews) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

SPIDER MAN

USA (121 mi) 2002

DVD Talk (Loren Halek) review [4/5]

With the stir and crash of Elfman's opening theme, the vertiginous weave of the credit crawl and the hardbitten noir voice-over ('Who am I? Are you sure you want to know?'), this accomplished blockbuster announces itself as a stylish piece of pop myth-spinning. Director and writer afford the old Marvel comic strip the reverence film-makers used to reserve for the Scriptures - which is not to suggest that they miss the fun of it. Every inch the nerd's nerd, Maguire is adroitly cast as Peter Parker, a brainy orphan with a suppressed wild streak and a lot of growing up to do. When the worm turns (courtesy of a GM spider bite), his elation is palpable, a testosterone rush which sends him sky-high. The first thing is to score some greenbacks to impress the red-head next door (Dunst). Meanwhile. Dafoe's arms inventor, Norman Osborn, is the fly in the ointment, trying on his own altered ego - the Green Goblin - to test-Spider-boy's moral mettle. Despite the movie's solid storytelling virtues, it must be admitted that the action spectacular scenes are a somewhat disappointing, and that Dunst is little more than an old-style scream queen.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Everyone wants to be a superhero, even Stan "The Man" Lee. On the April 29th episode of The Simpsons, Lee was convinced he could turn himself into the Incredible Hulk if he pulled a Homer Simpson fit of rage. Poor Lee. Screwed by Matt Groening just when he got the chance to see himself all green and greased up for his fanboys. As played by the perpetually angst-ridden Tobey MaGuire, Spider-Man is less cocky webslinger than rebel-without-a-cause. No, Spidey ain't no wuss. As envisioned by director Sam Raimi, Lee's hyphenated superhero is an existential geek tortured by his superpowers. When a super arachnid bites Peter Parker on a class trip to a hi-tech gene splicing facility, he's kick-driven past that final leg of his adolescent cycle and wakes up with the stud body it takes everyone else half a lifetime to sculpt. Amid the muscle mass, Peter is still a quintessential dork. "Don't be ashamed of who you are," says Uncle Ben not long before irony shoots the wise man in the heart. Spider-Man is a superhero caper cleverly disguised as a coming-of-age saga. With great power comes great responsibility so Peter must negotiate more than silk-clogged pores when the Green Goblin (a carefully campy Willem Dafoe) goes bump in the night. Raimi's millenium Spider-Man is both sensitive and realistically self-serving, rescuing women from rapists but never forgetting that he's got bills to pay. Spidey also does his own PR work, saving a toddler from a fire after the city calls for his arrest. He may be too late to save New York City from Osama Bin Laden (see the film's awesome WTC wink) but Spider-Man is still needed, even if Raimi's New Yorkers treat their superheroes like yesterday's fad. Spider-Man is cheesy and drags at two hours, but Raimi does right by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original creation via an old-fashioned comic-book aesthetic worn on Kirsten Dunst's bright red hair, the Daily Bugle newsroom pyrotechnics and Aunt May's prayers to God. In the end, Spider-Man delivers New York from evil, stares at the face of a selfishly earned moral view and, during the film's bittersweet finale, learns that it sucks being a teenage superhero in love.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-] also seen here: Radio Silence

Handing Sam Raimi $130 million and the lucrative Spider-Man franchise was anything but a sure bet. Yes, it was a smart move given Raimi's undeniable talent and inherent affection for the material, but the guy hasn't exactly been a box-office dynamo. Moreover, I haven't had much use for anything he's directed since his early masterpiece The Evil Dead, save for his tense A Simple Plan. There are fans who argue that Darkman is a terrific comic-book movie, but I'm not among them, and he was unable to draw any flavor out of genre gimmes like The Quick and the Dead and The Gift.

What a relief, though, that he stood at the helm of this film, investing it with the proper degree of respect for Spider-Man's origin story, a great contemporary mythology. In order to sell this stuff, you have to play it incredibly straight. The result is a wonderful blast of nostalgia; the fancy digital effects that allow Raimi to fashion the kind of web-slinging sequences that seemed impossible to put on film just a decade ago turn out to be essential to setting the film's giddy mood, but simultaneously trivial. In comparison to the disarmingly retro characters, the life lessons delivered with a conviction that's gone missing from the movies, and the breathlessly melodramatic romance at the story's core, they're window dressing and filler.

In case you're completely unfamiliar with this stuff: Spider-Man is Peter Parker, a geeky honor-student-with-few-friends type who's bitten by an unusual spider and subsequently develops superhuman strength, the ability to climb walls, and a cool "spider sense" that warns him of impending danger. The Marvel Comics version was always sort of a Superman knock-off-Parker even works as a newspaper photographer, echoing Clark Kent's career as a reporter-with the key difference that Parker wasn't just mild-mannered, like Kent, but was actually an ordinary schlep. And, boy, did creator Stan Lee beat him up. Being a Marvel superhero was never a piece of cake, and the early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man were full of loss and mourning.

Tobey Maguire, with a poker face punctuated by sad yet dreamy eyes, plays the character to near-perfection just by showing up. Kirsten Dunst plays Mary Jane, for whom Peter carries a torch, with a dash of pathos adding a smidge of depth to her reliable girlishness. And the equally dependable Willem Dafoe plays Norman Osborne with the supernatural aplomb that he brought to such characters as Max Schreck and Jesus. It's in the scenes where Dafoe has manic, staring-into-the-mirror conversations with his villainous persona, the Green Goblin, that Raimi takes his Spider-Man closest to the edge-and gets a massive payoff for taking the risk.

Screenwriter David Koepp has made some changes to the comic-book continuity in a bid to streamline affairs-notably combining two female characters into one and giving Spider-Man organic web shooters instead of the science-project contraptions Peter assembled in the comics-but has wisely maintained the cornpone stylings of the original, including the gentle presence of the elderly Aunt May and Uncle Ben as Spider-Man's foster parents and the "With great power comes great responsibility" tagline that defined Stan Lee's ambitions for the character. Indeed, the film carries that lesson to unexpectedly heartbreaking lengths. Like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man is grandly, emotionally affecting in a way that it had started to seem that Hollywood blockbusters never would be again.

So why isn't this, like, A-plus material? For one thing, while the action scenes are admittedly virtuousic-especially for comic-book fans who have long imagined how this sort of material might be translated intact to film-they're also utterly phony. That Spider-Man gets so much mileage out of its human characters makes it that much more jarring when Tobey Maguire turns abruptly into a cartoon. More significantly, for all its virtues, Spider-Man as a film is missing a strong personality of its own. Raimi seems to have directed mainly by getting the hell out of the way. Sure, some of the touches-like the shots of Peter teaching bully Flash Thompson a well-deserved lesson by kicking, repeatedly, directly into the camera lens-have the startling energy of vintage Raimi, but his generally vivid, in your-face style seems finally to have been mostly subsumed by the rigors of studio filmmaking.

When the resulting film is this good, I can't complain too much-it just feels as though it's been wiped clean of directorial fingerprints on the way into the camera (and the digital-effects workstations), and I prefer movies that feel a little more handcrafted. Those cavils aside, Spider-Man is almost as exciting a kick-off for a summer movie season as we could hope for. (And George Lucas will have a lot to live up to when Attack of the Clones opens on May 16.)

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Spider-Man (2002) Kim Newman, July 2002

The Goblin’s dilemma in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Spider-Man Boyd White and Tim Kreider from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Spider Man Trilogy

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [The High Definition Trilogy] Spider Man Trilogy

DVD Verdict - The High Definition Trilogy (HD DVD) [Dennis Prince] Spider Man Trilogy

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review Spider Man Trilogy

World Socialist Web Site review Alex Lefebvre

National Review (Robert A. Georgr) essay ["New Yorker, American"] May 7, 2002

Spider-Man as Everyman - Salon.com Charles Taylor

Spider-Man swings along with brio David Edelstein from Slate

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [B+]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib

AboutFilm.com (Dominic Varle) review [B]

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) dvd review [Deluxe Edition]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]

Nitrate Online (Elias Savada) review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]

Dark Horizons (Garth Franklin) review

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]

Juicy Cerebellum (Alex Sandell) review

Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review

Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review

Jerry Saravia review [3.5/4]

Mark R. Leeper review [low +2 out of -4..+4]

Jon Popick review [9/10]

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

DVD Talk (Geoffrey Kleinman) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [4/5] [Superbit Edition]

DVD Verdict (Michael Stailey) dvd review [Superbit Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Superbit Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Journal Damon Houx, 2-discs

The Digital Bits dvd review [Widescreen Special Edition] Todd Doogan, 2-discs

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Deluxe Edition] 2-discs

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review 2-discs

DVDActive (Richard Logan Powell) dvd review [10/10] [Widescreen Special Edition] 2-discs

UpcomingDiscs.com (Jeremy Frost) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]

RevolutionSF (Kenn McCracken) review

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

PopMatters (Todd R. Ramlow) review

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review

Film Monthly (Michael S. Julianelle) review

Accessible movie reviews (Joe Clark) review

Movie-Vault.com ("Le Apprenti") review [8/10]

CultureCartel.com (Chris Madsen) review [4.5/5]

CultureCartel.com (Brandon Curtis) review [4.5/5]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [4/5]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

CineScene.com (Nathaniel Rogers) review

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review

Needcoffee.com review Widge

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]

hybridmagazine.com review Zack Schenkkan

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Jen Johnston

Newsweek (David Ansen) review He's Got The World On A String, May 6, 2002

Newsweek (David Ansen) review Movies: Spy Vs. Spy, June 10, 2002

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

3 Black Chicks Review Flicks

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Bright Lights Film Journal review Alan Vanneman (capsule review)

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] comic