intuitive7
Joined Jan 2000
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Reviews8
intuitive7's rating
Jim Sheridan's films are always powerful. Shakespearian in their intensity of character conflict, they bristle with grit, are masterfully acted, and propel themselves the way John Ford's best films do. I consider him, even with his limited output, one of the great A list directors. No, his camera work isn't stunning crane and rail ballet, it's old school - but GREAT old school - Zinneman, Ford. And if you're a filmgoer who likes to care deeply about characters, Sheridan makes your kind of film.
Acting doesn't get better or more truthful than Daniel Day Lewis and Emily Watson working together. They're absolutely believable - inspiring actually - as a couple struggling through forbidden love after 14 years apart. The dialogue they work with is A plus and written by Sheridan; thus it's probably tuned collaboratively during rehearsal. Very organic. Great (!) work by Gerard McSorley, Brian Cox (L.I.E.) and David Stott as Ike.
Yep, Northern Ireland as Sheridan portrays it can be dreary, as commented here. But it's also full of humanity, drunkeness, hope, cruelty, love, loyalty, oppression, and a desperate longing for change - all the stuff of true drama. The action commences at the moment Ireland is on the cusp of real but fragile peace. Boxing and the IRA? A one two punch.
I love this film and I'd watch it again with any friend who wanted to see an excellently written and played picture. If you want your blood to boil from some fine performers playing strongly written characters, check this out. Not quite "Elizabeth", but powerful. Good enough dramatically (albeit not quite visually) to sit on the same shelf with Raging Bull.
Acting doesn't get better or more truthful than Daniel Day Lewis and Emily Watson working together. They're absolutely believable - inspiring actually - as a couple struggling through forbidden love after 14 years apart. The dialogue they work with is A plus and written by Sheridan; thus it's probably tuned collaboratively during rehearsal. Very organic. Great (!) work by Gerard McSorley, Brian Cox (L.I.E.) and David Stott as Ike.
Yep, Northern Ireland as Sheridan portrays it can be dreary, as commented here. But it's also full of humanity, drunkeness, hope, cruelty, love, loyalty, oppression, and a desperate longing for change - all the stuff of true drama. The action commences at the moment Ireland is on the cusp of real but fragile peace. Boxing and the IRA? A one two punch.
I love this film and I'd watch it again with any friend who wanted to see an excellently written and played picture. If you want your blood to boil from some fine performers playing strongly written characters, check this out. Not quite "Elizabeth", but powerful. Good enough dramatically (albeit not quite visually) to sit on the same shelf with Raging Bull.
A film of Shakespearean proportions and ambitions. Unfortunately Shakespeare didn't write or direct it. And it shows.
That said, Daniel Day Lewis is ASTOUNDING as Bill Cutting and worth enduring all GONY's weaknesses for. I have rarely seen such an outrageous character played with such truth, and that includes any of DeNiro's work with Scorsese. DeNiro's Jake LaMotta is a great performance, but LaMotta's not an outrageous character, so it's easier to locate and act LaMotta's truth. Travis Bickle... still not as outrageous. Cutting is a character of Falstaffian size and Day Lewis tackles him full on for three hours with boundless Cagney-like energy. DDL is THE actor to beat on March 23rd.
My cineaste friends all wonder what this film would have been without Day Lewis, and we conclude not much. A few sparks from DiCaprio and Diaz, but nothing special. Fabulous production design, good editing by Thelma S. as usual, but about as much structure as Bringing Out the Dead, which is to say, hardly any. (Where's Paul Schrader when you need him?) Scale, sets, character count and budget do not an epic make. Scorsese is simply not an epic director and probably never will be. Scorsese is without peer when he directs what he knows. No one else could create a Good Fellas. But Age of Innocence should have been a warning; stay away from history. House of Mirth is much better Wharton. Marty is simply not a David Lean, he's not a Spielberg, not even a Polanski (my vote for Best Director this Academy season). Maybe Harvey and Bob W. knew this and it's why they blanched when the GONY budget kept balloooooning.
This is a hugely distorted history by a man with one theme on his mind - the workings of force, intimidation and mob dynamics on a struggling underclass - and that theme is an important nail to hammer over and over. Scorsese knows it New York style better than anyone - for OUR era, culled from his own childhood. But apply the Scorsese touch a century and a half earlier and you wind up with melodrama, and that's what this inauthentic "epic" is. Except for Day Lewis, I'd rather watch "Who's That Knocking" again than this. Or Michael Mann's Insider, which has compelling story with its grit, and no need for axe and cleaver mayhem (see Braveheart for that).
If you're an acting fan, you'll be drawn into GONY again and again if you run across it on cable - thanks to Day Lewis. If you're a Soprano's fan, you can thank Martin Scorsese, because without him, there would be no Tony Soprano. But all that notwithstanding, buy or rent Marty's best work - Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Good Fellas, Cape Fear, etc - not this shapeless shantytown opera.
That said, Daniel Day Lewis is ASTOUNDING as Bill Cutting and worth enduring all GONY's weaknesses for. I have rarely seen such an outrageous character played with such truth, and that includes any of DeNiro's work with Scorsese. DeNiro's Jake LaMotta is a great performance, but LaMotta's not an outrageous character, so it's easier to locate and act LaMotta's truth. Travis Bickle... still not as outrageous. Cutting is a character of Falstaffian size and Day Lewis tackles him full on for three hours with boundless Cagney-like energy. DDL is THE actor to beat on March 23rd.
My cineaste friends all wonder what this film would have been without Day Lewis, and we conclude not much. A few sparks from DiCaprio and Diaz, but nothing special. Fabulous production design, good editing by Thelma S. as usual, but about as much structure as Bringing Out the Dead, which is to say, hardly any. (Where's Paul Schrader when you need him?) Scale, sets, character count and budget do not an epic make. Scorsese is simply not an epic director and probably never will be. Scorsese is without peer when he directs what he knows. No one else could create a Good Fellas. But Age of Innocence should have been a warning; stay away from history. House of Mirth is much better Wharton. Marty is simply not a David Lean, he's not a Spielberg, not even a Polanski (my vote for Best Director this Academy season). Maybe Harvey and Bob W. knew this and it's why they blanched when the GONY budget kept balloooooning.
This is a hugely distorted history by a man with one theme on his mind - the workings of force, intimidation and mob dynamics on a struggling underclass - and that theme is an important nail to hammer over and over. Scorsese knows it New York style better than anyone - for OUR era, culled from his own childhood. But apply the Scorsese touch a century and a half earlier and you wind up with melodrama, and that's what this inauthentic "epic" is. Except for Day Lewis, I'd rather watch "Who's That Knocking" again than this. Or Michael Mann's Insider, which has compelling story with its grit, and no need for axe and cleaver mayhem (see Braveheart for that).
If you're an acting fan, you'll be drawn into GONY again and again if you run across it on cable - thanks to Day Lewis. If you're a Soprano's fan, you can thank Martin Scorsese, because without him, there would be no Tony Soprano. But all that notwithstanding, buy or rent Marty's best work - Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Good Fellas, Cape Fear, etc - not this shapeless shantytown opera.
About Schmidt is Forrest Gump through the lens of Sartre or Camus. Warren Schmidt has a handicap, but it's the same handicap most of the people standing on line at seven p.m. at your local Wendy's have. The real star (or anti-star) of About Schmidt is the mediocre architectural landscape of America. Every room or box Warren Schmidt enters in this movie is as devoid of caring and vitality as he is: the retirement banquet room, Warren's house, the tire store, the hired wedding reception room. Schmidt's director and production designer take care to place us in the same life-draining, cheap structures we inhabit and deal with everyday. No prettifying. This is the drab landscape of Fargo revisited, but without the irony. The steady doses of violence in Fargo allowed you an escape route. But there's nothing ironical about a wasted life and a 66 year old widower spinning his wheels in the same rut, now partnerless and foundering. The combination of Jack, this story and these settings is effective and compelling. The result would be, I think, inevitable. The tone and attitude is not consistently managed, even by Nicholsen, whose worn-out, mannered schtick pops up occasionally. Yet the final effect is impossible to fend off: mundane American hell with droll comedic diversion. We experience a downfall as poignant as the smell of bacon cooking in Denny's at eight a.m.
Like Forrest Gump, the film depends on extensive voice over narration, V.O'd by Nicholsen as letters to Schmidt's newly adopted six year old Tanzanian foster child. Through these ridiculous sharings of sextagenarian angst with an African boy, we register Schmidt's internal grievances - thoughts we would never know about otherwise without his commentary. The slow dragging score drains vitality from each transition, as if cinematic momentum would be antithetical to the point of the tale. Back and forth we rock from a single minor chord to a second one, getting nowhere. The mood, the landscape, the buildings, the people say it all: Schmidt's on the road, but he might as well be sitting home in his lay-z-boy. The cushy bucket seat of a 35 foot Winnebago makes a good substitute.
Casting Jack Nicholson may have been the only way this story could have come to the screen. I've racked my brain to think of one other actor who could have pulled Schmidt off. Tony Hopkins? Not with the same comedic finesse. Gene Hackman reprising his role in Coppola's The Conversation or doing his Tennenbaum hamming? Don't think so. Only Jack has the mix. He does some hilarious bits in this, but overall the mood is somber, glum, inert. Can this be how that other famous Warren from Nebransas - Mr. Buffet - lives?
I was confused, amused, depressed and wierdly disoriented by About Schmidt as I left the theater. I commented that it wasn't a film I'd go see again. Thinking about it a day later, I'd hold to that IF it meant returning to the theater and paying. BUT - were I to run across About Schmidt on cable, I doubt I could tear myself away from it any more than I could from a crack up at the Indy 500. And I think that chance encounter might happen more than once, maybe for years. After all, this is the America I know and mark time in myself. A recommended film going experience.
Like Forrest Gump, the film depends on extensive voice over narration, V.O'd by Nicholsen as letters to Schmidt's newly adopted six year old Tanzanian foster child. Through these ridiculous sharings of sextagenarian angst with an African boy, we register Schmidt's internal grievances - thoughts we would never know about otherwise without his commentary. The slow dragging score drains vitality from each transition, as if cinematic momentum would be antithetical to the point of the tale. Back and forth we rock from a single minor chord to a second one, getting nowhere. The mood, the landscape, the buildings, the people say it all: Schmidt's on the road, but he might as well be sitting home in his lay-z-boy. The cushy bucket seat of a 35 foot Winnebago makes a good substitute.
Casting Jack Nicholson may have been the only way this story could have come to the screen. I've racked my brain to think of one other actor who could have pulled Schmidt off. Tony Hopkins? Not with the same comedic finesse. Gene Hackman reprising his role in Coppola's The Conversation or doing his Tennenbaum hamming? Don't think so. Only Jack has the mix. He does some hilarious bits in this, but overall the mood is somber, glum, inert. Can this be how that other famous Warren from Nebransas - Mr. Buffet - lives?
I was confused, amused, depressed and wierdly disoriented by About Schmidt as I left the theater. I commented that it wasn't a film I'd go see again. Thinking about it a day later, I'd hold to that IF it meant returning to the theater and paying. BUT - were I to run across About Schmidt on cable, I doubt I could tear myself away from it any more than I could from a crack up at the Indy 500. And I think that chance encounter might happen more than once, maybe for years. After all, this is the America I know and mark time in myself. A recommended film going experience.