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bart

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 2:07 pm

Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 2381 Location: Lincoln NE

I liked American Gangster (SPOILERS AHEAD),

though some of the fine ensemble were kind of neglected so far as developing character, mostly providing a frame for outrageous outfits and a place of almost caricature in the plot -- in a 90 minute film this wouldn't be such a viable complaint, but this thing lasted nearly 3 hours.

Much as I liked many scenes, including the adrenalizing bust at the end of the hunt, the tete-a-tete between Frank and Richie, the street scenes artfully shot to capture the dirtiness and meanness of NY in the 70s, and lines like "Love me like a cop, Frank, not like a lawyer!", the whole thing seemed somewhat cliched and unoriginal. It's fair to say that, since it's based roughly on actual events, there are going to be events that are prosaic, people who live out the stereotype, and life that is full of walking cliches.

Somehow, though, I find it hard to find much memorable in the notion that gangsters can be guys with their own kind of integrity, who love their mamas, who go to church regular, and feel they are doing the right thing for their social group. This is a concept that gangster movies have been offering us for at least half a century and I sort of feel like I've gotten it.
At one point in the film, I heard a man in front of me mutter to his partner, after the scene where Lucas and one of his brothers (Cuba G, I think) heatedly argue about selling quality product and so on, "Look, they've turned into Italians."

Well, sure, Lucas had learned a lot both from his mentor Bumpy and from the mafiosos and the point seems to be that, yeah, the line of work you're in shapes who you are a certain way -- or you go bust.

The scene where they tear apart the Army transport plane to find the big dope shipment was somewhat reminiscent of the famous scene where they tear apart an automobile in...The French Connection? The suspense there is somewhat muted for most audience members over a certain age who will remember the famous news story about the H secreted in soldier coffins.
But suspense is not paramount, given the basic structure of the story...the fact that we know it's based on actual events is a signal in advance that Richie's hunt will not fizzle out.

The film does leave you with good water-cooler questions to chat about -- what would YOU do with a million in unmarked bills, especially if you were a poorly-paid cop struggling to make ends meet and pulling long shifts? Are cops who keep confiscated drug money a cut above cops who are just on the pad? I think it was G. B. Shaw who said that there's no such thing as tainted money, that money has no intrinsic moral aura, it's just money.

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Nancy

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 8:31 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4607 Location: Norman, OK

Syd wrote:

Quote:

mo_flixx

AMERICAN GANGSTER reminds me of Al Pacino's SCARFACE for some reason. I would like to know more about the "true story" it's based on. Russell Crowe is miscast (has a hard time with the New Yawk accent), but otherwise OK. Kind of weird that Crowe's character seems to go from detective to lawyer by the end of the film. What did he do...go to night school??

Quite probably yes, and pre-legal education before becoming a detective. They show him with a table covered with books in one scene.

He's clearly shown taking law courses at night school at the beginning of the film, and later shown taking the bar exam. Right after the task force was formed, he gets a letter saying that he has passed his bar exam. So it's not such a surprise that he has become a lawyer by the end of the film.

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Befade

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 9:08 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ

Quote:

LIONS FOR LAMBS - an 88 min. film that seems like 800. 3 stories - 2 of which are didactic and talky.

It was a tract against the war and the direction Bush has taken us. And it could have been on paper........(as in not on screen). It was more a message movie than a drama movie.

As far as the lazy boy was concerned.......Redford was probably impying that we (the American people) are the lazy boy......and what are we going to decide? Those are my thoughts for today.

For a great review of Lust/Caution go to Rotten Tomatoes and check out what Kenneth Turan says.

mo_flixx

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:30 am

Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 12533

Befade wrote:

Quote:

LIONS FOR LAMBS - an 88 min. film that seems like 800. 3 stories - 2 of which are didactic and talky.

I thought LIONS FOR LAMBS actually could have some potential on the stage. I think it could have been done quite effectively...and much better than a movie.

I got your point about the complacent student, but...

SPOILER

...what was all that business about fudging his grade, etc.? It appeared that Redford was trying to engage the student in some kind of Socratic dialogue but frankly its point missed me. Making a bargain regarding the kid's grade seems precisely just what the professor WOULDN'T do if he wanted to get the student involved. It was the most contrived of the 3 stories.

Did you actually _see_ the movie?

These were some of the most boring 88 minutes I've ever spent at the movies. Since Redford was actually trying to make a point about the war (and IMO he's preaching to the choir anyway), he might have had a better shot with an Op-Ed piece.

tirebiter

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 8:53 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4011 Location: not far away

For those who loved the book, No Country For Old Men will please you. The Coens stick with it about 90% and even use a lot of Sheriff Ed Tom's monologues verbatim. Some of the action at the end of the book is clarified by the film, and some developments are jettisoned in the interest of economy. There are still so many skeins at play that it's a challenge to put it all back together in a coffeehouse (or ice cream parlor, in our case) after the credits. "Why was that guy killed again? Who di he work for?" Another fine Coens film, very spare and without many of their patented camera tricks (which I like, but which would have intruded here).

Having recently seen Eastern Promises, I vote that Cronenberg be made an honorary Coen.

Now there's rumor that Cormac MacCarthy's newer book The Road is to be filmed. A mistake, in my view.[/i]

billyweeds

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 9:06 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

This has been one of the most amazing years in film that I can remember. The last two months alone have brought us an embarrassment of riches, with no less than four great or near-great films--Michael Clayton, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Eastern Promises, No Country for Old Men--and yet another if you like American Gangster as much as some seem to (I didn't, but that's JMO, as we say).

bart

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:00 am

Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 2381 Location: Lincoln NE

deleted

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bart

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:41 am

Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 2381 Location: Lincoln NE

So NCfOM, which is in some respects belonging to the western genre, opens earlier in South Africa than in Nebraska. Hmm.

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marantzo

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:51 am

Guest

Bart, clam isn't in South Africa anymore. Bush plans to invade so he recalled Mr. Ward to DC.

yambu

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 11:58 am

Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area

tirebiter wrote:

....Now there's rumor that Cormac MacCarthy's newer book The Road is to be filmed. A mistake, in my view.

Not in mine. As straightforward as the book is, there is nothing in it that a good movie can't bring out. And with Roger Deakins working that forbidden landscape, it could be a stunner.

bart

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:29 pm

Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 2381 Location: Lincoln NE

Somehow, the bleak post-apocalypse of The Road that lives in my head, after reading it, doesn't seem like film would do it justice, even if it were completely faithful to the original and didn't sci-fi jazz it up for BO purposes. In any case, I found the story so grim that I'm not sure I'd want to see it on film -- I mean, once was enough.

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Befade

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 1:56 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ

The Road was not a book I savored. There were too many "I know, sons."

Mo.......I saw the movie. Op-Ed piece would have been good. I just think the professor was challenging the student to make a moral decision. It was a little hokey....in that you were supposed to think this was an extraordinarily promising student. I once had a high school teacher make the same offer to me regarding my son. I wasn't impressed.

Redford remains a person I admire.

mo_flixx

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 2:54 pm

Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 12533

Befade wrote:

T
Mo.......I saw the movie. Op-Ed piece would have been good. I just think the professor was challenging the student to make a moral decision. It was a little hokey....in that you were supposed to think this was an extraordinarily promising student. I once had a high school teacher make the same offer to me regarding my son. I wasn't impressed.

Redford remains a person I admire.

I have nothing against Redford (yes, I do admire him), but the movie was a stinker. And without giving out a SPOILER, I'm not sure what the "choice" really was...as you say this student was not a bit like the 2 in Afghanistan and would have _never_ IMO changed one iota despite all of Redford's efforts. He was a selfish shallow little manipulator. And I gather that spending an HOUR with this student was supposed to be a VERY big deal...according to the whiny student who put an abrupt end to the hour's dialogue.

Here's another movie for folks to watch. Highly recommended for art lovers and history buffs: THE RAPE OF EUROPA. This documentary is chock full of interesting facts about the Nazis' seizure of priceless art before and during WWII, Hitler's and Goering's (sp?) taste in Aryan art, their vast collections, "Degenerate Art," the Allies' efforts to protect Europe's masterpieces, heritage cities and monuments during WWII, and the postwar efforts (?) to return art to Jewish owners.

It is based on a book of the same title (which I purchased today).

If you miss this in a theater, I gather it may be on public television at some point.
-------------------------------

Hey, Gary - my new computer is telling me I'm misspelling DIALOGUE!!

jeremy

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 3:14 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

So is Atonement the new The English Patient? Certainly the similarities abound: both films are adaptations of critically acclaimed novels set in and around the Second World War; each film features a pair of star-crossed lovers; they were made by relatively inexperienced English directors; and both films examine, if not embrace, a certain type reserved Englishness, where love dare not speak its name, an unnecessary, hamstrung, selflessness that can infuriate those not inured to it – “For Chrissakes just kiss the girl!”

For some The English Payment has become shorthand for the worthy period drama that is easy on the eye and, courtesy of its cutglass acting or literary credentials, flatters those who are of mind into believing that the film they are watching is as big as the canvas on which it is painted. Personally, I think this is a little harsh on The English Patient, which is not without some merit, and that perhaps this critique would be more accurately directed at such star-studded, but leaden epics as Ghandi or A Passage To India;films that seemed to espouse dullness as a virtue and played well to a risk averse Academy with a cultural inferiority complex. But leaving aside whether or not The English Patient has been unfairly impugned, the implied question is whether Atonement is just the latest in a long line of well-appointed, but ultimately disappointing, big screen Oscar bait.

Though I think considerable expense was spared, Atonement remains a good looking film, and I’m not just talking about its cinegenic stars, Ikea Knightley and James McAvoy. It opens in an upper-middle class, Home Counties, country house in the summer of 1935 and the cinematography is as lush as the tended grounds, but also as light and crisp as the white cotton dresses on show. The pre-war period still resonates in the English psyche, not, as perhaps it should, as a time of inequity and social strife, but as one of Wodehousian innocence. A gentle England, or so the national myth goes, of tea on the lawn, church fetes and chipper ‘fanks guv’nor’ cockneys; a place blissfully, or perhaps wilfully, unaware of the darkening clouds gathering over the continent, an England hopelessly unready for war.

However, Ian McEwen’s Atonement is a thoroughly modern, indeed post-modern novel, and though the film has the look of a 1930s drawing room drama, what unfolds is more Lawrence than Coward. We are treated to a sublime treatise on love across class boundaries and bear witness to how summarily such bonds can be severed when the social shutters come crashing down. In the aftermath of one childish misstep, two lives are ruined, several are blighted and one is spent trying to atone for the wrong done.

The first forty minutes of the first act of Atonement are every bit as deliberate and slow as any in The English Patient, but rarely seem it. The actors portraying the lovers unfold beautifully into their parts. We care more about McAvoy’s lost, gardener’s son than we ever could about Ralph Fiennes’ European aristocrat, and Knightley’s brittle acting style is well suited to playing a young woman whose thin carapace of outward sophistication can barely mask her fragility and longing. The clack-clack rhythm of the unreliable narrator’s typewriter warns that their relationship will be at the centre of a tragedy, so rather than relief we experience tension as the socially removed couple move towards realising their long dormant, passion. England has rarely seemed so sultry, if it wasn’t for the accents you’d think you were in an adaptation of a play by Tennessee Williams (I’m going for the Third Eye record for most literary references in one review). When the storm finally breaks, the director ushers us inside, there are no histrionics or melodrama. We, like thirteen year old Briony, the catalyst, for all that has unfurled, watch from afar. The scene has been set.

Quote:

Yes. Unable to push her tongue against the word, Briony could only nod, and felt as she did so a sulky thrill of self-annihilating compliance spreading across her skin and ballooning outward from it, darkening the room in throbs. She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone, facedown on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.

There were times during the opening section of the film when I felt that a more experienced filmmaker could have wrung more from the material, but, in fairness to Jo Wright, it was probably better to err on the side of restraint. It would have been too easy to broken the brittle tension, to render the scenes overwrought.

As a result of the explosive end to act one, the protagonists are cast out into a world experiencing analogous turmoil. A world of where the male protagonists are forced to shoulder arms and the women provide shoulders to cry on. Unfortunately, freed from the limiting confines of an English country house, Joe Wright struggles to keep his film under tight reign. The much vaunted tracking shot of the beaches of Dunkirk seems contrived, and a scene featuring the bodies of murdered French school girls , which may worked in the context of the book, felt like an unnecessary and clumsy way to let us know that war is hell. I think these and the parallel scenes in a London hospital suffered from being too compressed. Maybe it was not possible to do justice to the scope of the book in a film lasting less than two hours or it could be that the film needed a more ruthless or skilled director, an Alfonso Cuaron perhaps, able to suggest more than allotted time would otherwise have allowed him to show.

That said, and again in fairness to Joe Wright, there are a couple of scenes that seemed false or underwritten at the time of watching, but in the light of the films stunning coda, we see them again in sharp relief, tableau carving cleaned of the dust of obfuscation.

So returning to the opening question, Atonement, despite a lack of focus during the middle third, is a very good film, which, in contrast to The English Patient, actually felt like it would have benefited from being longer. Both novels explore love, class conflcit and war, but in the film of The English Patient, the key theme of identity gets lost somewhere in the panoramic sands of the Sahara desert. The film version of Atonement remains true to the book in its examination of shame, guilt, forgiveness and, yes, atonement. As a result, it views as the much more purposeful and meaningful of the two films. Will it win seven Oscars? No.

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I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it.

marantzo

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 3:23 pm

Guest

There is a painting depicting THE RAPE OF EUROPA and with that title, I believe. By David maybe? Or maybe by one of the Classicist rather than a Neo-Classicists.

Can you picture Hitler in place of the Taliban trying to free and cart off those magnificent huge Buddhist sculptures instead of blowing them up?

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