Reviews

Scarlett is the center of the movie and she gets a lot of help from three main sources. The director gives her freedom, the writer gives her great lines and the male co-star gives her someone to work with. Everyone centers around her and she has delivered a performance that can compare to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday or Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series. She is classic. Her lines are pure comedy from the writer. She makes them her own. After the show I walked away with the need to search her other movies to see if this is the same person I had remembered from the earlier films. She is. She has what it takes to be the next big one. I am a fan of Woody from way back. He is a generous and gracious director and writer. He knows his movies. The film is shot with great economy and subtle references to the classics. His choice of music told me from the first few moments in the beginning credits that he was going to give something worthwhile. Scarlett's outstanding performance was a genuine plus. I loved them all.

Corpse Bride works for me on so many levels but outstanding is the integration of music and words. The musical that blended the words and music to such a level that one could hardly imagine the film without the composer's contribution. This should be advertised as Danny's production as was the practice of Rogers and Hammerstein, or Irving Berlin or Cole Porter. We have a new art form here: the animated opera. Music is alive and well in the world of the dead. The music in the titles presents themes which continue into the film. An important part of the love story is the interest of the main characters and their methods of expression of emotion via piano music. The characters exist in an aura of sound. Imagine a Russian epic without the Lara Theme or Rick's place without Sam's piano. This film has achieved an identity that says this is music and this is what the movies has to say. All awards to those involved!

Nicholas Cage was just right from the beginning until far past the end. I kept thinking about the movie and what I saw and it had just trapped me from the very beginning. The film was shot with such economy and all the little things do add up. Nothing was wasted. The people in the cast need to all be admired and praised. The writing and directing was so subtle. Make something so casual that you forget that you are dealing with thousands of little things which all add up at the end and after. I want to see it again. I enjoyed the experience.

Here in Marin County the film is being shown at the Raphael Theater and people are coming out of the movie and telling everyone to go see this movie. It sparks some sense of participation in the artistic process. The artist in the documentary comes across as an ordinary man who finds the means of expression in the ordinary events of life. He sometimes seems to be a child playing in the vacant lot, the beach or on the rocky edge of a stream. The audience, I include myself and the people around me at the showing, reacts to the events with held breath, oohs and ahhs and laughs of young glee at the moments of presentation of his events in nature. See it. It is a film filled with moments of small treasures.

In the comments I have read I have not come across the reaction that I had to the movie (film). In Hollywood Ending he is openly discussing his views of movie making and the effect of the studio package on the work of film makers. He contrasts the way he makes a film in New York with the way that the studio would have a director work. In the film within the film he lists the various steps that the studio intrudes and shapes their product and how the work is diminished. The common attitude is that it is the greed or taste of the powerful executives. He says that it is the whole process that he is against. In preproduction through to the release and the previews, the director and film making is distorted by traditional methods. A few examples are the studio production team, the selection of material and the ego driven costs of budget. I found the movies succeeded in the various levels that I have always expected from Woody Allen and this direct criticism of the filming method was an added bonus.