Reviews

Surprisingly spry given that this film is a premise to film antiquity. I always knew who Jimmy Durante was as a late boomer, but I had never seen him in his prime until this movie. I'm glad I did. He doesn't pretend to be an actor and delivers his lines with a uniform delivery. He's not a very funny man, but a weird oddity as an entertainer, the likes of whom would never ever be taken seriously in today's world of commodified entertainers. What's another point of interest in this film is the appearance of a William Cagney,brother of James....I assume the older of the two. Cagney's first scene when he shows up to his fight pie-eyed is a rather realistic and understated portrayal of drunkenness. There is plenty of drinking in this movie and many people get drunk. What's also an unexpectedly nice touch to this film is that the RELATIONSHIPS ARE BELIEVABLE. Filial conflict peppers this film in that the protagonist has to wrestle with his divided loyalty as cornered by his mother and father. Sometimes the film veers off into unbelievable ridicularity that could never respect the viewer; like when Durante wobbles drunkenly down the street, smashes a showcase window, then enters the display and starts his riinka-dinnk routine on the display's piano The least acquired appreciation for the film is its presence of Runyan-esquire toughs. These actors are CHARACTERS, not celebrities acting in obvious vehicles. Worth a look.

What I like most about Night of the Following day is its sublime way in introduces France. The entire film is low-key, which is not quite seen nowadays in cinema. Plus there was Marlon Brando. Brando looks great in this film. His style of dress looks like he's modeling for some design that counts on black colors to the exclusion of all others. In one scene he's wearing an olive trench coat at an airport. Somehow I could not believe that this swank and bronzed and blonde-haired movie star could abet in the same crime as his associates. The only worth-while scenes are the ones Brando's in. Only because you don't know where they're going to end. Richard Boone, Rita Moreno, and the actor who plays her brother are all thinly written characters. Rita Moreno's character snorts heroin, her brother is an ineffectual non-entity who doesn't care whether he's killed as a result of committing this crime, and Richard Boone's character has sadistic tendencies. That's all the audience knows about these three characters. We even know less about Brando's character. But Brando can transcend the material in this shallow film because of his eerie star-quality. Night of the Following Day is indeed an ambitious film. Adapting a novel is ambitious in itself. A plot revolving around a volatile foursome kidnapping an heiress and hiding her out in a house somewhere in France sounds great on paper. But the audience must be engaged and somewhat let in on something. This film keeps the audience at a cool distance.

When young Oliver Twist makes his journey through England's countryside to London, I thought to myself what a lovely trip young Oliver is taking. How lush the scenery and how rich the sky. Nowhere in this film was I able to glean what hunger and exhaustion felt like, as I am whenever I view David Lean's definitive adaptation. Oliver Twist is about the use of an orphan as a pawn to profit both the criminal underground and the petty office of Bumble. The film ignores this element as it leaves out the appearance of Monks and his dealings with Bumble. I have no argument with this. What it does leave out, which makes it fare for children, is any suggestion of moral ambiguity. The State is portrayed as a collective nonentity. The main thrust to Bumble's animus is the using of Twist to strengthen his political standing. The main thrust to Fagin's character is that he sees in Twist the opportunity of developing a pick-pocking talent which would lessen his dependence on Sykes. The only way a film maker can convey these shadowy motivations is through the use of camera, all the more if he doesn't want a spelled-out scenario. But Polanski does not use the camera as a means to tell the story of a secret society wherein money takes the place of humanity. If you were to take some stills from certain frames within the film, they could fill a children's book adaptation of this classic. Another disturbing element that Polanski has failed to explore is the hallucinatory suffering that can grip human beings when they are ill. Both David Lean did this with his treatment of Oliver as did an even earlier version of its treatment of Sykes. It appears that either Polanski or his scenarist Ronald Harwood don't understand the lurid power struggle that defines so many of the relationships in the novel. Why would they completely overlook the relationship between Bumble and his wife. That relationship in itself would lend a hand of dark comedy to the film, which is in terrible short-order. Nor do we have any sense of Sykes dependence on Nancy, a dependence that rewards Sykes with any sense of tenderness he can muster. Regarding Kingsley's Fagin, he is the weakest of all celluloid representations. As far as I know, there were no blonde-haired Jews in Victorian England. Fagin was a redhead who could only feign sympathy and kindness when it suited his needs. This was apparent in both the characterizations of Guiness and Irving Pitchel. But of course if you Disneyfy Dickens, any hint of evil and greed bubbling under the facile gestures of convenient kindness has no place. This film has one true function: for parents to take their children to it, and then take them home and show them on DVD/VHS two antique versions in the hope of unsettling them to the plight of human suffering and the evil that greed can reap on a civilization that calls itself developed. And if the children like the earlier black and white versions, then perhaps they will read the novel and taste Dickens undiluted.

Mr. Leigh would intend for his audience to come away from his film and have mixed feelings about its titular heroine. Of course Mr. Leigh is hardly the first writer to embrace Ambivalence. Henry James loved to use it in the most complicated of family relations. This Mr. Leigh has done as well. When the film begins, Mr. Leigh paints a subtle picture of a contented family. They are not terribly affectionate and Vera's daughter is one of the most gloriously pathetic and confused women I've seen in film for quite a while. This in itself is a masterful achievement. Any follower of Mr. Leighs career no doubt expected his characters his trademark wink of respectful honor. We knew that his characters would possess dignity. Mr. Leigh's treatment of Vera's family in the first segment of the film is clean and well-paced and ultimately on-target. But he purposely hangs Vera in a cloud of mystery. She's kind. She's attending to a sick mother. She invites a lonely boy to her home for dinner. Having these attributes, as noble as they are, does not make Vera Drake all that special because many women beside herself possess these very same qualities. How we reconcile this ordinarily loving woman to the "monster" that the State has made her, this is the question Mr. Leigh has asked. That is what makes this film a wonderful exercise in Ambivalence. Coudn't Vera, if she wanted to help people, have worked in the church as a volunteer? Why did she "help" people in a certain kind of "trouble."? Why she never told her husband is painfully obvious. No pat conclusions is the main question. WHO IS VERA DRAKE?

any woman married to peter Falk's character would for sure go mad, because he's a completely muscle-headed coward who is so stupid as to believe that if he claps his hands in Mabel's face, she'll snap out of it. MABEL is not crazy, the people around her are. maybe she is feeling her mortality and as a reaction, regresses to a childhood innocence and wonder. she is in her own movie a la swan lake. she wants to sing and dance and enjoy her life, break free of the restraints that society imposes on good "motherhood." what's crazy about that? what's so crazy about wanting to dance with one of peter falk's coworkers. why does peter falk bring home his entire crew for breakfast with no warning to MABEL? NOT only is he stupid, he's also a hypocrite as he refers to a black man as a monkey. this man is looney!

Watching the first ten minutes of F & T F, I can honestly say that I experienced the only true religious experience I've ever felt in the matrix of a movie theatre. I had an out-of-body experience, so completely was a swept into the world of Julian Temple's interpretation of what The Sex Pistols were, how they came to be, when they came to be, and the madness of Great Britain that allowed them to come to be. It was probably the only time cheek irony ever really worked, that is, playing majestically classical music during the opening credits. And then that marvelous segue from the lower-income housing courtyard to Johnny's blistering presence. As ferociously brilliant a film as the band itself. But the film is more than just about the band; it's also about the fear of the establishment when its status quo is threatened, the media, and British society. The hypocrisy of the British government is ever evident when we see a public official denouncing the band as a disgusting bunch sub-human runts that are "the antithesis to human-kind" and then later see this and play a benefit concert and host an x-mas party for the children of striking firefighters. THAT WAS THE POINT OF THE PISTOLS in some respects. Their anger was grounded in the mistreatment of working people. Maybe it was a publicity booster, but I've seldom seen any American bands get their ands dirty and link up with Labor issues. The film is also about Language. It seems that using racial epithets are accepted in some British circles, but airing some traditional four letter words on public television, is still taboo. Anti-drug? Certainly. Johhny Rotten comes right out and extols the evils of Heroin and we see what it can do to a human being in Sid and his ultimate demise. SEE THIS MOVIE!

First of all, how could a film that has brought so much enjoyment to so many people be called "the worst film ever made"? I have seen major Hollywood products with major Hollywood stars and some of these films are impossible to sit through even once. "Dick Tracy" comes to mind, as does "Caligula." The very first time I saw "Plan 9" in a NYC revival house, just hearing Tor Johnson's struggle with English pronunciation and watching him wriggle out of the ground was worth the price of admission! It was probably the hardest I'd laughed in a movie theatre in many years. I don't know what kind of movie the actor who plays Eros thinks he's in, but he seems to be having a lot of fun. We all know that the comedy of the film was unintentional, then why do we laugh? We laugh because Mr. Wood does everything conceivable to mask his non-budget to give the illusion of a grand sci-fi-horror epic. And he does it with such unabashed gracelessness with so little concern for time continuity or any other kind of logic, that we laugh at just how absurd the medium of film can become, if used in incompetent hands. Ed Wood gives new meaning to the word "schlock." The cinematic legacy he has left to enjoy should be called "pop-schlock." If the point of the film is to ultimately entertain, this is one of the best films of all time, not the worst.

Excuse me, but this film should be an insult to anyone over the age of ten. Are we to believe that, first of all, Jack Lemmon can convinceably play a Jewish character. That terrible lapse in casting notwithstanding, since when does Morrie Schwartz have a patent on dying with dignity and optimism? Who made Morrie the sage of the century when confronted with the grim reaper? People with a lot less education and success have died with equal an equal amount of dignity and have no regrets for the life they have lived. But of course the film-makers don't understand this about their audience. They believe that everyone who views this film is so afraid of death that they need a lesson on how to bow out gracefully. The real Morrie Schwartz was no doubt a good man, but he ultimately became the darling of the media who didn't mind being exploited. The story should have left there. This is not a film but packaged syrup that's good for pouring over stale waffles.

This film is memorable and is always a compelling piece of film-making. It offers a realistic view as the urban environment as the ultimate alien environment to a person who is incapable of connecting to other people. At the beginning of the film, we have sympathy for Travis. His thwarted efforts at trying to have a conversation with the woman who works behind the candy-counter in the porn theatre is pathetic. When Travis takes Betsy for coffee, we see him doing his best at getting the relationship off to a good start. We see a man who doesn't know the "games" that people often play in interpersonal encounters, and we are hoping that he gets a second chance with Betsy. But when he does, that's when our sympathies dissolve for Travis, and we realize how out-of-touch he is, how utterly socially inept he is. For the obvious reason that he takes this beautiful and educated woman to a sex film. How unaware and tasteless can a man be? Why should we feel sorry for Travis when his subsequent efforts to try to et back together with Betsy go rebuffed? From then on, we don't have a film about loneliness as the film claims to be, but a film about descent into madness. Travis becomes a comic-book character, who is acting in his own movie, albeit as either a cowboy or an Indian. Travis becomes an Action-Hero suffused with anomie. He becomes a socio-pathetic warrior in search of an enemy. His intentions with Iris are noble, but the means of execution are criminal. He becomes more violent and misanthropic than any of the sleazy characters he disdains.