Reviews

One distinguishing feature of this series is its ease with which it shifts from morally complex middle-weight drama to near-farce. Following an episode in which Brenda's manipulations amount to a betrayal of her lover, this one shouts "comedy" from the first appearance of guest-actor Jennifer Coolidge, whose ingenious work playing birdbrains has put her into the category of C. Walken comic eccentricity. The whole cast seems attuned to this alteration of styles: they go both-ways with smiling grace. Arvin Brown, who directed this episode, ran New Haven's Long Wharf Theater for many years-- Eugene O'Neill, Gorky, Fugard-- and I hope he enjoyed staging this romp.

At the time of its release, early in Hurt's period of greatest exposure, and directly following the directing/writing team's BREAKING AWAY, this film was regarded as a disappointment and is not much mentioned now. But the cast-list all by itself is a triumph-- I can't think of a mainstream film that showcases so many wonderful actors. As the family Hurt almost marries into, James Woods and two terrific stage actors, Pamela Reed and Kenneth McMillan, each with a showpiece scene (watch Reed's warmth on realizing she won't have to go through with a marriage she doesn't want). McMillan, the greatest modern American Falstaff prior to Kevin Kline, deserves a cult beyond his DUNE maleficence. As aristos with guns, Christopher Plummer and brilliant Irene Worth are less distinctively scripted but bring class to class-hatred roles. And in the margins, the two best actors ever to share the front-seat of a police car, Morgan Freeman and Steven Hill. Acting teachers should run this film as class text.

A long film that grows stronger in its last hour. After some initial disappointment at what seemed a conventional city/rural conflict in police-work, I was surprised by the power of what emerges by the end-- enough so that I looked through the extended cast-interviews included on the domestic DVD. Someone who likes the film will be interested in the interview with the actor playing the second suspect: the film is apparently developed from a successful Seoul stageplay, in which he played all three suspects. Fragments of videotaped stage-performance shows him with very different affect-- and you realize the obsessive, haunted conclusion of the film indicates its open-case presence in South Korea's collective awareness.

A pretty dreadful French thriller in which a gifted scenarist may be learning how to direct. The 126 minutes' length hints of a genre-piece that can't stop itself: the director wrote twice as many fainting scenes, dream sequences, and face-offs between heroine-villain as any film could sustain, and then left in every damned one of them. Its only suspense lies in the gradually revealed nastiness of the director himself-- "He's not going to do THAT to his actors.... My God, he really IS." The casting and the peculiar violations of genre logic show vestiges of a much better movie than BAMBI. In a day full of interesting French films shown at Boston's MFA, this ringer, of course, turned out to be the only one secured for American distribution. You are seeing the Director's Cut on screen-- a case in which a Studio version of this frayed and rough-cut would be superior.

I've just watched the last 15 minutes of SIMON MAGUS for about the fourth time-- Sundance shows it all the time, and maybe that channel's programer intends to give it the exposure it should have had, years ago. One imagines Director Hopkins is a spell-binder-- to have coaxed the exceptional cast onto an under-financed backwoods Welsh location, and then gotten them on the same wavelength despite trepidations about looking silly in shtetl-garb and forelocks. Ordinarily I am deeply aversive to holy-fool fictions-- yet this one made me privy to an ethnic communal memory; the end-credits express thanks to Isaac Bashevis Singer, and one imagines him loving it (a 1972 documentary on him had the same mixture of tomfoolery and elegy). A tone-deaf earlier commentator decried the sound-track-- will bet you'll sit all the way through the scroll of names, listening to the last variations on a score that, like everything else about this film, is a lovingly precise devotional.

In 1966-67, ABC ran a Wednesday night series of "specials"-- one hour shows bearing no resemblance to one another. Two episodes became famous-- the lovely Perry/Capote CHRISTMAS MEMORY and Sam Peckinpah's career-saving NOON WINE. The debut show, with Alan Arkin playing a magic-realist NYC cabby, was remarkable as well (script by Murray Schisgal). Even though IMDb records no other data on "Dare I Weep...", I am reasonably sure it was a mid-winter installment-- a deeply melancholy drama based on an early Le Carre story or script, in which Mason was manipulated into sneaking a man he hated (was it his father?) out of a Communist country. I remember little else except a morose surprise-ending, but was struck, years later, on seeing Carol Reed's MAN BETWEEN with Mason that the pieces had strong similarities.

Mason was an extraordinary actor, and those recognizing belatedly his stature deserve a look at this little 50-minute film. Does anyone know if it has survived?

A splendid negative myth that will endure. Am struck by at least one detail other comments written below have missed-- Lilya is probably 14 (2 years older than her pre-pubertal best friend). Moodysson is a great film-maker who doesn't seem to care if you notice: his work is accessible, empathetic, objective as good journalism but large-spirited in the way that Spielberg and Dickens are/were. This is the kind of film in which a child kneeling at a door to eavesdrop reminds one of the complexity neo-realism has, all but foresaken by most contemporary cinema (YI YI had that kind of casual impact, and the best Iranian films). A 15 second image of kids squatting in an abandoned factory, reading transcripts of Soviet party congresses in utter mystification, achieves an off-handed elegy for a near-century of Russian history.