Reviews

I watched all of the original brilliant Belgian series and have tried a few of this British knock off. The original was one of the very best series I've ever seen. Some British series are up there at least in the top ten too - but unfortunately not this one. It's a surprisingly pale imitation, clearly by a completely different and mediocre level of director/s.

Every criticism of the British version found here is correct There's just nothing about it that comes close. Every element is much worse.

Just find the original series and watch that instead. After a few minutes I didn't even realize I was reading subtitles. The overall arc of that one was surprising and brilliant. I assume this one may follow it but there's no way it will work nearly as well. There's just not much of a there here.

I'm a gay man. I have no problem with any actor playing any role. The usual objection is to straight male actors playing gay men, and I get it. But there are certainly examples of straight male actors nailing it, like the guys in Brokeback Mountain or Tom Cullen in Weekend (you may know him as Anthony Gillingham in Downton Abbey) which being about modern guys in an accepting society goes much farther in explicitness and intimacy.

In this case it's straight male actor Eddie Redmayne playing a trans person, and I agree with some other reviewers here who thought it doesn't work at all. I guess he tried, but it came off to me as completely superficial and trivializing the character. It led to me questioning his acting as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything which I thought really worked at the time. Was that portrayal also just an assemblage of physical traits with nothing much going on behind them?

(Seen on PBS 9/2020) This doc does a very good job covering Raul's life and career. However, never a wart is to be seen - he's shown only as a saint of the theater and film. I've known a lot of actors and also guys from backgrounds like his, and there is definitely much more that could have been documented here. The most egregious section is about his involvement in EST and the EST Hunger Project. His actual involvement is not detailed in any way. Even Werner Erhardt (not his real name), the leader of all that, appears in the present day. EST was a very cleverly packaged semi-cult ego project scam run by a super salesman who got rich off of it before it collapsed. The Hunger Project ended up doing not much at all. None of that is even obliquely mentioned. Nothing but the most complimentary stuff is allowed in this film, so it is not really a credible documentary.

Apparently in the mid 1980's American film making could be kind of like in the 1950's. Every moment and the dialog generally feel contrived and sentimental. William's saxophone miming is totally unconvincing. Music choices under scenes are thuddingly obvious. There are a couple of very minor offensively stereotypical gay characters. The Russians shop at Bloomingdales. Why? Maybe it wasn't super expensive then? And William's character gets an apartment (OK, not a spiffy one, and only a bedroom/living room) in Manhattan with a spacious eat-in kitchen. And it's not on the street side! Why didn't he move to Brighton Beach? Anyway it was on the local PBS station and I didn't have to pay rapt attention, so worth it for some 80's NYC.

Somehow the filmmakers got lots of interesting and known but not quite star actors to show up. Everyone does a good job, particularly the actor playing Ira. Abby tends to thin whining. Real New York City locations (I live here).

But nothing is believable ever. Abby would not last one week in her job, which is selling gym memberships. There is no reason for her and Ira to get married after just meeting. He seems pretty normal and she seems rather obviously really high maintenance. It is no Bogart and Bacall kind of deal.

The film is sort of watchable minute to minute if you ignore the fact that none of it is justified in reality in any way, and never manages to cast the sort of spell a movie that isn't necessarily real but manages to establish a reality the viewer can go along with has to do.

I often found it often pretty easy to predict what was going to happen before it actually did.

Pretty much everyone in the film either is a $300 an hour therapist or going to a $300 an hour therapist every week. Ira's therapist parents seem to have never discussed anything with each other.

Maybe if you see it for fee on PBS like I did it might be worth it to see Jon Hamm with longer non-Mad Man hair and clothes looking like a regular shmo in a small part.

Overall, not really an indie. More of a superficial low budget conventional but subnormal movie.

Of course this film wasn't very successful originally. It's a black and white European art film with an American budget. It's got long periods of silence, including toward the end. The black and white cinematography is consistently gorgeous, aided by the dramatic lighting. Steam at night? Are you kidding?

No, the Nazis aren't clichés but believable. Jeanne Moreau is of course right there. Never a beauty really, and close to 40 here, but always perfect. Burt Lancaster never tries a Frenchy accent, although everyone else speaks English with a bit of German or French accent. At least he doesn't sound as old time New York City as his real accent probably was. It doesn't matter. He's great.

The situation is that the war is about over and everyone knows it even if some of the Germans don't want to admit it. So the French heroism is even more heroic or maybe foolhardy than before, and the Germans are even more crazed than they might have been earlier. A perfect situation for existentialist drama.

There are a few obvious melodramatic stating the obvious speeches, but given the period not many at all. The story is mostly made up, but the Nazi art theft and destruction is real. Nothing looks like a set. Everything seems real, if better lit than reality. The cinematography/lighting is as stunningly good as anywhere. Highly recommended.

This was of course done forty years ago, and expectations were a bit different, but Anthony Harvey also directed Hepburn in the Lion in Winter a few years before and that turned out pretty well other than a some British overly stage actorish speeches.

Tom's opening address to the audience is cut, although his concluding one was not.

In closeups the kids all look like they are a good forty. The actors were all their early thirties actually. The actors in all Broadway productions including the current one were around the same age, but Quinto for one who is Tom right now, even in closeups on Charlie Rose, looks more like mid twenties which makes more sense. If Laura is really 32, she has been nursing a wild crush on Jim for 15 years. And like I said, she looks 40ish. The situation in the play just makes no sense in any stretch of the imagination with 35 or 40 year old children, unless everyone is indeed certifiable Miss Havershams. Besides, although not set up that way without the opening monologue, it's all a dream world memory, not people's current (or future) age.

Sam Waterston and Michael Moriarty do pretty decent jobs as Tom and Jim otherwise. There is no hint however in Waterston (stand in for Tennessee) about how he's maybe spinning tales about what he's actually up to a lot of nights. You don't get the idea that he's maybe gay or at least making stuff up on the fly.

In the script: Amanda is worried that Laura is going to be a spinster? She's already a spinster. And has been for some years. Speaking of Laura, she's a totally sheltered emotionally crippled homebody who wears full professionally applied makeup at all times, including eyeliner, mascara, eye shadow, and blush. And Joanna Miles doesn't show much of the emotional fragility and vulnerability that is necessary for Laura, except once in a while doing something odd the director told her to do. Or as a lot of people have pointed out, even ever seem to limp.

The big problem, as others have said in various ways, is Hepburn. Also a decade or two too old. She was in Lion as well, but it worked anyway. Early in the play she is going on about Laura being ready for tonight's gentleman callers. Has this been going on every night for fifteen or twenty years with zero callers? Yikes. Even a year or two after high school, and she is living in a real fantasy world. Which she is.

Amanda is necessarily kind of delusional, even while she is at the same time nuts and bolts very much working in the real world. Hepburn just does not live in or create a fantasy world. New Englandish quavery cracked speed talking does not represent that aspect of Amanda, no matter how fast she talks. The Southern way is of course to speak slowly and musically and establish that aura of perhaps imaginary refined gentility. She is totally committed to her character as always, but it's just all wrong. Amanda is just not something she can do, or maybe could do at that point, or was not directed to do. She did play the Madwoman of Chaillot a few years before, and I think that character was brilliantly delusional.

The NY and Brooklyn public libraries only have this one and not any other versions on DVD, although I just saw the Boston/Broadway one on stage. They don't have the 1987 one with Joanne Woodward and it's only on VHS besides. PBS ought to pull a BBC and do modern TV productions of it, and all Tennesse Williams plays while they are at it. OK, I guess they never do anything like that. They should. And other great American plays also, instead of leaving it to the Beeb to do all the all British all the time dramas.

I left the theater in a sort of observational trance, and vowed to get to the Metropolitan Museum ASAP and back to Vienna as soon as I can.

I'll admit I'm kind of like the characters in the film. If you are a 13 year old boy whose favorite movie is The Transformers this might not be for you. Then again, you might learn something. There isn't much plot and there isn't much conflict but it isn't about plot or conflict. It's about art and life and to me it wasn't irritatingly slow at all and I wouldn't have cut a second. The pace and observational tone of the film are necessary to what it's about.

The two nonactor main character actors do a wonderful job. They aren't called on to do a lot off complex stuff, and maybe they wouldn't cut it as Martha and George, but they are perfect here.

The film has a lot to say about art and life, without being in any way didactic. The only part that I had the least impatience with was the scene with the somewhat annoying curator lecturing a group, although it did serve its purpose of making some points about the art while revealing a bit about the observers of art as well. There is also one scene that stands out in its sudden deviation from the flat observational realism of the rest of the film into a bit of symbolic surrealism but it's not without meaning either.

Most of the film is about quiet introspective moments. One scene that isn't is of Johann and Anne joining in with patrons at the bar drinking and dancing to ethnic music on Immigrant Night. (Really, I think that's what they called it). Later, thinking about Breugel's Peasant Wedding...

A couple of the reviews in NYC said something about iffy or inexperienced acting from the younger brother played by Fady Elsayed, so I was paying particular attention to his acting. Of course in film, as big brother and experienced actor James Floyd is quoted on IMDb, the director and editor can make or break an actor's performance. So maybe Fady sucked 95% of the time, who knows, but what is in the film was just fine by me.

As someone else pointed out here, the younger brother's turnaround at the end of film isn't really explained. But there had to be some passage of time since what had happened to him previously, and I guess we're probably supposed to figure he did a lot of reevaluating and growing up as a result of what he went through. Why there weren't some clues about his thinking and what if anything else influenced him would be a good question for the director and screenwriter and editor though. I suspect there was a scene or two filmed that they decided didn't work or was too obvious or something.

Another commenter here with some real life exposure to this sort of culture thought the low life stuff is a lot worse in real life. Well, it is a fictional film. I've been around the block myself and the drug dealer crack house and its denizens seemed close enough to me.

Enjoyable as a period piece, but more like the period it was set in - a title card says 1953 - than 1980, when it was made. With some really uneven or just plain consistently bad or mediocre performances, plus some baffling directorial choices and a clichéd script. Kim Novak doesn't just show up in a car from 6 years later, but the most recognizably 1959 car possible, a white Cadillac convertible with the top down making the famous garish fins look even bigger. The only thing campier than the Cadillac is Kim Novak's performance. Her portrayal of a preening bitchy Hollywood star isn't remotely believable. Liz Taylor's version is less bad, being not very believable (but not was wildly ridiculous as Novak) when the character is in public and at least sometimes not bad when the character is in private. Angela Lansbury is sort of passable, but plays the character in as broad and clichéd a way as the nearly identical lady detective (except of course a Maine rather than British accent) she later did on TV. British actor Edward Fox is fine of course. The real surprise is Tony Curtis. He's the only American actor in the film who is natural and relaxed and motivated. He plays the producer as a somewhat comic character, as obviously they were all directed to do, but he's the only one who really seems otherwise like a real guy, Bronx accent included.

And as others have mentioned....whose idea was it for Miss Marple to light up? Not even a line justifying it, like maybe "Nothing like sucking on a fag after a hard day sleuthing and deducing, I always say." Followed by blowing a couple of nice smoke rings.

But its an interesting film. Probably the script writer(s) is way better than the truly terrible director. First, it's Agatha Christie and even better, a Miss Marple mystery. Second, there's this whole meta thing going on on several levels. It opens with (spoiler alert, sort of) a black and white 50's style British mystery film which we find out is being shown to the village by the vicar when the film breaks. Then the color "real" stuff starts. But it's about a film being shot in the same illage - an American film featuring American actors but about British historical monarchy subjects. The American stars of the film portrayed by Liz Taylor and Kim Novak are supposed to be sort of has-been American film stars, who of course are more known for star quality than acting chops, kind of like the actual actors cast in the roles. The very British inspector is such a fan of the films starring the character portrayed by Liz Taylor he has seen them multiple times and thinks she is a great actress. The local girl, grown up, is star struck and had an encounter back in the 40's with the character portrayed by Liz Taylor which was the greatest thing that ever happened to her in her whole life and her story of the encounter is pivotal to the plot.

It's the director who screwed all this very promising stuff up. The fake black and white film at the opening seems really fake. A real period British film would feature non-method but in its own way very intelligent acting, which this does not. Liz Taylor and Kim Novak, as I mentioned above, are not very believable (Liz) or absurdly unbelievable (Kim) as stars out in public. Kim Novak is also quite unbelievably bad when shown being shot in scenes for the film they are shooting. Oh,also any film using a built set for some scenes would have been shot on a British or American sound stage anyway, not at a nonexistent sound stage in the village.

Like in some earlier American films, reality is sacrificed for some idea of reality. A good director would have not violated reality for hackneyed ideas of what the script is about. Here's how to direct famous American actors portraying famous American actors: get them to act as well as they can in any scenario, not portray the meaning of the scene or how they think the character should act. Being there and listening and allowing and being vulnerable and are the only things that ever work, in something semi-satirical or whatever.

This film is a worth watching period piece from the early 60's, which is essentially the 50's. You just can't expect the level of realism we expect today in this sort of filmmaking. Not in acting, direction lighting, sets, etc. One interesting thing not commented on elsewhere is the cars. Tuesday Weld is driving a 1963 Plymouth Fury convertible. You might notice that when there is action going on inside the car, which is not running at the time after an accident, the steering wheel is seen to move loosely back and forth about two inches. This is normal for a Chrysler product of the time when the engine isn't running. When the engine is running the steering is actually more precise than in other cars of the period.

But the real weird thing is the convertible driven by Steve McQueen. The interior reveals it to be a 1955 Ford. But it is entirely missing the chrome trim on the sides that it should have, as all convertibles were Fairlane models. Even the cheap Mainline models had some sort of chrome trim on the sides. The headlight trims are also not from a 1955 Ford but a 1956, or maybe a lesser 1955 model. In some shots you can see that the exterior door panels are rippley. I assume that the production got a period Ford from someone and didn't notice these discrepancies. Why anyone would remove the chrome trim from a 1955 Ford convertible is a mystery.

This is perhaps the worst indie ever made. Fortunately, I didn't pay to see it. It's on my local NYC PBS station right now. I would email them about their lack of critical judgment if their website was actually working. It's blank. Maybe they are justifiably embarrassed.

Two very unattractive young but balding guys are roommates in an actual industrial loft building that has been expensively turned into lofts with designer kitchen appliances. The space above them has a young woman with a 20 thousand dollar grand piano she pretends to play and a $300 KitchenAid mixer. Maybe they all have trust funds.

A new woman roommate quirkily moves in with all her stuff in a quirky red wagon. She is a pretend singer songwriter and pretend pianist. And she quirkily writes fiction or something in the park where she met one of the unattractive guys, whose friend brings him ice cream with a plastic spoon inexplicably stuck to a pen, which the quirky red wagon girl happens to say she needs, even though she is already writing with another pen. The ice cream guy with a horrible beard also brought a quirky bicycle built for two. The roommate gives away his pen/spoon, even though there is no way for him to eat his ice cream cup except letting it melt and drinking it or something. They inexplicably ride across the grass while with the ice cream cups in their hands instead of eating it first. Maybe they had to wait for it to melt. (This is only the first couple of scenes, so I'm not giving much away.)

The dialog is terrible. Everything is contrived, or just doesn't really make sense, or both. The acting is mediocre. There's lots of singer songwriter music.

Digital filmmaking made this possible. No one would spend the money to film this when you had to buy actual film, unless the filmmaker had a trust fund too.