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| billyweeds |
 Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:44 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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I don't think Toby (no ?) Jones should be castigated for his performance as Capote. It was very different from Hoffman's and in some ways superior. (And b4 you press "send" note that I say "some.") It was funnier, for one thing, and not afraid to go somewhat caricatured. (Hoffman was so careful to avoid the homophobic that he sometimes became dullish.) The one scene in Infamous that sticks with me the most and that I consider better than anything in Capote is Christmas Day at the Dewey's, where Capote realizes that he can score points with the locals by dropping famous names--Jennifer Jones, Humphrey Bogart, etc. It was hilarious, and Jones (Toby, not Jennifer) played it with great elan.
I also loved Sandra Bullock's Harper Lee, even more than Catherine Keener's. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:55 am |
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I imagine that these two pictures focussed on the In Cold Blood part of Capote's career because it was such a turning point in his life. Making him a huge figure while kicking off his journey into a strange and disturbing descent into self-destruction.
A full biography is certainly a great story for a film. Now there is a film that should justify a 3 hour length. |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 1:08 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 7149
Location: NYC; US&A
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| Yeah, well, I found Sandra streeee-e-e-e-e-tching it. She actually bored me. Caricature is the right word to use for Jones, Toby, not Jennifer. Making Perry the way they did, some glossy pinup boy from Honcho? Whatevs. Yeah, I saw the intended humor, and supposedly the real Tru had it in spades, but give me Hoffman, Keener and Collins, Jr. anyday. Basically, Infamous sucked, and if you like your bio-pics done as broadly as a Hanna Barberra cartoon, then rent the dreck. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 4:15 pm |
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| I thought Capote was an excellent movie, so I guess you are cautioning me to not expect much of Infamous, Wade. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 6:11 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| I had Capote as the best movie of 2005, which makes me wary of Infamous. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 6:29 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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marantzo wrote: I imagine that these two pictures focussed on the In Cold Blood part of Capote's career because it was such a turning point in his life. Making him a huge figure while kicking off his journey into a strange and disturbing descent into self-destruction.
A full biography is certainly a great story for a film. Now there is a film that should justify a 3 hour length.
There really isn't another dramatic story in his life, other than the scandal involving Answered Prayers, which would probably bore most audiences. The choice of this moment (In Cold Blood) to concentrate on makes perfect sense. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 7:01 pm |
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Syd wrote: I had Capote as the best movie of 2005, which makes me wary of Infamous.
So did I. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 7:51 pm |
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Quote: The choice of this moment (In Cold Blood) to concentrate on makes perfect sense.
Joe, that's pretty well what I said. And as to his life being rather uneventful or what ever you think it was before In Cold Blood came out, you are mistaken. He was famous before that and had a reputation as an eccentric character with many celebrity friends and was not shy about giving his opinion. I don't know many details about the time, but from what I do know he had quite an interesting life growing up in the South. He was unique among the writers of his time from the very beginning. There is an advantage to being there and not having to trust what you've read about it. I was not an avid reader, but I knew about Capote from way back. I've only read some of his short stories by the way. It was before In Cold Blood that Mailer referred to Capote as a ballsy little guy. Ballsy little guys make for interesting stories. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:03 pm |
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Location: Houston
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Well, I never said it was with In Cold Blood that he found fame. Simply that none of the rest of his life is anything that would make an interesting movie. His feud with Vidal? That he was the darling, and then the parriah, of New York society? It would likely be dull to watch.
He was kinda-sorta controversial (though in perfectly fitting the general stereotype of a gay man, he was probably as comforting to the prejudiced as anything else). The photo that appeared on the back of his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was startling enough in its decadence, for the time, and for an American author, that it was widely believed to be the real reason for the book's sales. But can a compelling dramatic narrative be made from this sort of anectdote? I doubt it. |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:30 pm |
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Location: NYC; US&A
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Syd wrote: I had Capote as the best movie of 2005, which makes me wary of Infamous.
sydhe, it might be kinda gratifying seeing it. I don't think it'll change your mind, but. . . . |
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It truly disappoints me when people do something for you via no prompt of your own and then use it as some kind of weapon against you at a later time and place. It is what it is. |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 12:12 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 8251
Location: Salt Lake City
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marantzo wrote: Syd wrote: I had Capote as the best movie of 2005, which makes me wary of Infamous.
So did I.
Count me as another. I wouldn't mind seeing Infamous, but I really don't want to spoil the good time I enjoyed from Capote |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 12:46 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| I've yet to meet anyone in real life (as opposed to virtual reality) who did not end up preferring Infamous to Capote. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 8:14 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
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Location: Lithgow, Australia
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I’ve watched two excellent Gary Cooper movies in the past few days, with Cooper in top form in both.
Man of the West (1958), an Anthony Mann western; like Mann’s best work, a formally rigorous, tough-minded film sensitive to the nuances of violence. Very much a forerunner to the ‘70s revisionist Westerns, and better than most of them. Boasts one of Lee J Cobb’s titanic ham performances and a surprisingly good one from Julie London.
Souls at Sea (1937), directed by Henry Hathaway, isn’t as good, but in many ways more rare and interesting. It is, firstly, just about the only pre-Civil Rights era Hollywood film I’ve seen that portrays the Middle Passage slave trade; early in the film a slave ship captain, seen viciously whipping his cargo, falls into the hold and gets himself beaten to death. Except that it’s not really about that. Cooper plays a seaman who, at the start of the film, is on trial for playing god with the lives of survivors of a shipwreck; he’s written off as a shady character involved in slavery.
Except that, as the film reveals, he’s an obsessed man engaged in a private vendetta against the slave trade, signing up in the crews of slave ships and sabotaging them. He’s eventually used in a secret mission by the post-Wilberforce British government to infiltrate a Savannah slave-trading outfit. On the way there, he falls in love with sister of a British officer who’s complicit in the trade. Cooper’s own motivations are intriguingly hazy; there’s only the slightest hint that he’s acting through guilt over his wife going mad when she saw the treatment of slaves. George Raft plays his fellow sailor, an unrepentant roughneck and slaver, who stumbles toward redeeming himself in a romance with a serving girl who’s run off from the British class system (just to be even-handed in the period politics).
Where all this is going is inventing many clichés of the Titanic-type story, when the ships catches fire – a brilliant sequence - and Cooper’s the only one level-headed enough to get the rescue situation under hand; he’s eventually forced to shoot rioting idiots when they threaten to swamp the lifeboat. Superlatively produced, an excellent dramatic slow-burn, and only 90 minutes long!
Also been watching Ninotchka. Garbo sublime - the best performance I've ever seen from her; Melvyn Douglas a hoot; Ernst Lubitsch's direction a bit stagy. |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 8:56 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Salt Lake City
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Joe Vitus wrote: I've yet to meet anyone in real life (as opposed to virtual reality) who did not end up preferring Infamous to Capote.
Sounds like that needs to go on my list of ones to watch. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| Nancy |
| Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 9:48 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4607
Location: Norman, OK
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| Souls at Sea sounds interesting. I'll have to look for it. Thanks, Rod. |
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