The Screengrab : albert finney

Reviews By Request: Tom Jones (1963, Tony Richardson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Due to some difficulty I had in getting my hands on Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, I was unable to post this review last week as promised. Sorry about that. As usual, to vote for the next Reviews By Request selection, see the poll at the end of this review.

In a survey of the Oscar winners for Best Picture, Tony Richardson’s 1963 film Tom Jones is one of the more intriguing titles. Sure, it’s an adaptation of the classic novel by Henry Fielding, but this is hardly the kind of reverent literary epic that usually gets the Academy to take notice. But beyond its bawdy comedy, it’s also a stylistic departure from the usual period pieces, with Richardson employing the techniques of the French New Wave to take the wind out of the wigs-and-horses period setting. On paper, Tom Jones is just the kind of movie that ought to be recognized more often by the Academy- a film that boldly tweaks cinematic convention in an attempt to entertain audiences in a unique way. But the trouble with judging a movie on paper is that sooner or later one must actually see it to get the whole story, and in the case of Tom Jones, the whole story is that it doesn’t live up to its potential.

I knew I was in for a long sit during the opening sequence, in which Richardson establishes the circumstances of Tom’s birth. Rather than portraying it in a more conventional way- say, through narration or montage- Richardson turns it into a silent movie, complete with intertitles. Now, I’m sure most of you would agree that this is an interesting and unexpected twist on the usual style of the genre. However, with the actors’ hyper-exaggerated mannerisms and John Addison’s manic harpsichord score, the scene comes off more cutesy than bold. By the time the opening titles have hit the screen, Richardson has already dug himself into a hole that he never manages to escape.

Richardson drops the silent-movie pastiche after the opening credits, thankfully, but he still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve- jump cuts, cheeky narration, and more. In one of the more glaringly out-of-place bits, there’s a scene in which the adult Tom (Albert Finney) evades a jealous husband in which Richardson speeds up the film like an old slapstick comedy (think the Keystone Kops). There’s also a handful of moments in which Finney breaks the fourth wall, as when he asks the audience for support when a female innkeeper accuses him of trying to weasel his way out of paying his bill. It takes an inspired film to pull off moments like these, and Tom Jones is not that movie.

It’s a shame, because Finney cuts a fine figure as Tom. At its heart, this is the story about a man who’s torn between his good nature and his base impulses, which lead him into trouble. Tom’s loyalty invites others to take advantage of him, and his dashing good looks bring him the kind of female attention he would be wise to avoid. Despite the film’s period trappings, Tom bears more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Seaton, Finney’s breakthrough role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, who was unable to reconcile his desires to have fun with his need to do right by his single-mother girlfriend. With these two films, Finney announced to the world that he was a major actor, and he effortlessly holds his own here opposite an impressive cast, including Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joyce Redman (with whom he shares the film’s most famous scene), and the great Joan Greenwood, who had one of the great voices in cinema.

One key directorial decision that I appreciated was Richardson’s unwillingness to lend the usual glamour to his period setting. Most historical and literary films tend to be showcases for the art directors and costume designers, who spare no expense in re-creating the trappings of period luxury. By contrast, Richardson’s portrayal of country gentility in the early 1700s is hardly luxurious. Meals consist of copious amounts of wine and freshly-killed meat eaten with the hands, and interiors are dusty and dark, lit only by a handful of candles. Practically the only form of entertainment was the hunt, which Richardson portrays as scores of dogs and men on horseback pursuing a stag- hardly very sporting. To accentuate the less charming aspects of this world, Richardson and cinematographer Walter Lassally shoot the film in anemic-looking tones and with a mostly handheld camera. When it comes to epic splendor, Gone With the Wind this isn’t.

Richardson’s de-glamorization of his period setting is such a refreshing change of pace from what one normally expects from a movie of this kind that it seems a shame that he feels the need to goose it with his arsenal of New Wave tricks. Unlike most Oscar-winning films, which seem to have little on their minds besides taking home rafts filled with awards, Tom Jones is rather more ambitious- in the end, too ambitious to be successful. In the end, the film must be labeled a noble failure, and although one can’t help but admire Richardson’s desire to step outside the well-trod path for literary adaptations, that doesn’t mean I look forward to seeing Tom Jones again anytime in the near future.

Now that Oscar season is over, we can get back to some more diverse and, uh, interesting choices for Reviews By Request. As promised, we’ll kick off things with a poll devoted to reader requests. So, which of these will it be? A seventies SF thriller from the director of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three? A documentary about two children who were switched at birth? An infamous horror film about evil children? A thriller starring Alain Delon? Or will it be the long-shelved seventies exploitation title that was immortalized by Patton Oswalt? It’s your call, folks:

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As usual, the comments section is open, particularly for those who would like to suggest future titles for consideration. See you in two weeks!

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

Like many new arrivals to New York City, Joe Morton’s character in John Sayles’ indie comedy is hoping for a fresh start in the strange, scary but not entirely hostile metropolis. The big difference, of course, is that Morton’s innocent mute is a three-toed extraterrestrial, an escaped slave from "another planet" being pursued by two vaguely feline (and white) Men In Black (who, ironically, are far more concerned with the number of toes on their quarry’s feet than the color of his skin). Sayles’ gentle parable of multicultural integration features a magic trick (in the scene above) that hinges on a still-timely sociological sight gag about urban race relations. Yet it’s interesting to ponder what the eponymous Brother would think if he made a return visit to our planet today: with the Disney-fication of Times Square and the ongoing gentrification of Harlem (not to mention the upcoming Obama inauguration), even the human characters from Sayles’ early ‘80s world might feel a bit disoriented in the strange land of 2008 Manhattan.

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Malcolm Lowry's novel of self-destruction is a force of nature. John Huston's film of the novel is, sadly, not. Sure, it contains moments of beauty and tragedy, but when things go wrong, they go wrong with a dogged determinism. Albert Finney plays the drunken Geoffrey Firmin, ex-consul of the British Empire in Mexico, with a grace rarely afforded cinematic alcoholics. The other actors are, sadly, not up to his standards (Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has the same problem, as leading man Brad Dourif's talents far outshine all other actors onscreen, save Harry Dean Stanton.) As Firmin stumbles further out of the relative safety of his regular haunts, Mexico becomes less like an exotic extension of his home and more like a seedy extension of the jungle, where Firmin's haughty imperialism will lead to a swift downfall.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s most notorious creation, Borat Sagdiyev, isn’t really a stranger at all. He’s more of an infiltrator. And his America isn’t a strange land, either; in fact, it’s one the British comedian smugly believes he knows like the back of his hand. Whether you loved or hated Borat is largely dependent on how much tolerance you have for Baron Cohen’s assumption that he can easily get to the ugly creamed filling under the sweet exterior of America just by biting it in the right spot; there are those who find his style of humor hysterical and telling, and others who find it manipulative and condescending. But no one can doubt, after seeing it in action, how skillfully he wields it, not to inform, but to eviscerate. Borat is a butcher, not a surgeon, and we’re his meat. His Kazakhstan is funny because he correctly assumes that it’s distant enough from our daily lives that we’ll laugh at his fantastic portrayal of it; and his America is funny because he correctly assumes that we’re so far inside of it that we won’t even realize how he’s making it look until it’s far too late. The archetype of the man trapped in a world not of his own making usually derives its humor from the fact that he’s a holy fool, innocently reflecting our reality in his ignorance; Borat shows how dangerous it can be when the holy fool is really an unholy genius who knows exactly how to take advantage of the fact that people are likely to do anything if they think they’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t know any better.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

It’s no surprise that Terrence Malick’s name would show up on a list of great movies about culture clashes. Since the beginning of his career, he’s specialized in showing us the beauty and violence that grow out of peoples’ encounters with the strange, whether that strangeness is expressed as the dreary middle of the U.S., the uncontrollable vastness of the new west, or the tempting primitivism of the South Pacific in wartime. What’s shocking about The New World is that he manages to pull the same trick twice in one movie – and both times with spectacular results. Filming in modern-day Virginia, his conjuration of the lands that greeted John Smith’s men is so perfect, so unspoiled, so bountiful that it’s almost terrifying. His men were promised heaven, and to see it in this life fills them with an almost religious dread. But this quickly fades: if heaven is on earth, what need have they for law? The settlement soon devolves into a stunted, filthy savagery that stands in marked contrast to the gorgeous plenty of the New World. It’s all done with some of the most breathtaking camera work ever seen, but then the movie takes an astonishing shift – one that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would have shattered the tone of the film. We see England through Pocahontas’ eyes as no less strange and unreal a place than was America in John Smith’s eyes, a place of man without nature, of infinite variations of gray and wet, and it has no less devastating an effect on her life.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Made at pretty much the exact last moment that Robin Williams was capable of doing anything likable, Paul Mazursky’s charming Moscow on the Hudson now seems like a relic of an ancient age, but it should be remembered that it came out at a time when the only cinematic method of interacting with the Soviet Union was with hails of gunfire and exploding rocket-bombs. Mazursky’s story of a simple and kind Russian musician who decides to defect during a state visit to New York had its bittersweet moments, as Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff discovered that life in America is not all smiles and sunshine even for those who have the rare opportunity to have sex with Maria Conchita Alonso. But it also managed to convey the belief, greatly underrepresented in theaters at the time, that Russians were actual human beings who might not deserve to be shot in the face; and it also suggested the possibility – which, as it happened, turned out to be disturbingly correct – that the best way to get the Commies on our good side was just to let them take a gander at a well-cut pair of blue jeans and a fully stocked shelf at the supermarket. Many of Moscow on the Hudson’s land-of-plenty/land-of-want scenes are cliché by this point, but at the time, they seemed fresh and earnest enough to work.

WOODY ALLEN IN GENERAL: PARTICULARLY SLEEPER (1973), BANANAS (1971) & ZELIG (1983)

I used to think of Woody Allen as an explorer of the well-known. He endlessly treads around his own expensively analyzed psyche to tell new truths about self-absorbed Manhattan professionals. Strange then, to realize that much of his early work deals with outsiders who are unable to cope with their surroundings, then suddenly find themselves in even more alien circumstances. In Sleeper he is cryogenically frozen, then thawed in a strangely familiar future where pot-smoking has been replaced by fondling an orb and sex by the Orgasmatron machine. In Bananas he's a hapless doofus who has no particular luck with the ladies. That is, not until he finds himself at the center of guerilla action in a small Central American country in a permanent state of coups and revolutions: an innocent abroad if there ever was one. Then there's Broadway Danny Rose, where Allen stars as a man who lives his entire life somewhat out of his element. (His buddies at the Carnegie Deli suggest a Danny Rose sandwich would be a bagel with Marinara sauce). In Annie Hall he is Alvy Singer, who is perpetually on guard against his familiar New York surroundings turning strange on him. Whenever he ventures outside of New York his suspicion that he is an alien in his own country are confirmed. He cannot function in L.A. and when he visits Annie's family in Wisconsin, he finds himself transformed to a Hassidic Jew. Finally, of course, there is Zelig, the story of the eternal chameleon, never at home, and always adaptable.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Muppet Christmas Carol"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Alert readers may recall that, while I'm posting the reviews of the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon movies in dribs and drabs over the days leading up to Christmas, I actually watched them all in sequence over the space of two days in a bleary haze of rum-soaked egg nog and seasonal affective disorder. I had a highly formalized plan for which movie to watch in which particular order, but I drunkenly knocked over my stack of DVDs after the fifth movie, and then I just watched them in the order in which they fell on the living room floor. I was hoping that it would be late in the day by the time I had to get around to watching some variation of A Christmas Carol -- I find the irascible-old-bastard Scrooge largely preferable to the lover-of-all-humanity Scrooge -- but here's where it turned up, so you're going to have to read about it.

My own misanthropy aside, it's not surprising that Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas has become one of the most beloved holiday stories of all time. It's got a little bit of something for everyone: a sincere, adorable crippled boy, for treacle fans; a handful of truly memorable characters; abundant humor, some of it rather more mordant than one might expect; a creepy ghost story; and, best of all, a central plot that appeals to lovers of Christmas everywhere: a cranky old jerk who hates Christmas has, after a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, a legendary change of heart and embraces the holiday in full, becoming the very embodiment of the spirit of giving and showering those poor souls he previously spurned with largesse.

Dickens write A Christmas Carol for the same reason he wrote a lot of his most famous work: for a paycheck. But it ended up having a much more vast impact on our entire culture than its author possibly imagined. One of the most widely-read stories of the English canon, its familiar story and infinitely flexible formal structure have led it to become one of the most widely-adapted stories as well. The number of stage plays, movies and very-special-episode television series based on the story are probably uncountable; as long as there is economic injustice, as long as there are lazy scriptwriters in love with the flashback gimmick; as long as there are cranky old jerks who, justfiably or not, aren't as into the holidays as the rest of us, there will continue to be new movie and TV versions of A Christmas Carol.

Just to mix things up a bit, I chose as my preferred adaptation this time around the 1992 felt-puppet version of Dickens' classic. Made just after Muppet maven Jim Henson died, it didn't do that well on its initial release, but gained something of a cult following on home video. There's plenty of inside jokes and a clever framing device of the story being narrated by Dickens himself (played by the Great Gonzo) and a comic foil in the form of Rizzo the Rat; the story is surprisingly faithful to the original; the casting of balcony naysayers Statler and Waldorf as Jacob Marley and -- ho, ho -- his brother Robert is inspired and leads to the movie's best musical number; and best of all, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge proves that, just as he can turn in a great performance in a bad movie, he can be intensely human and affecting while acting opposite a stuffed bag of felt.

You'd be forgiven, naturally, if you chose a different movie version of A Christmas Carol as your favorite; there's enough good ones to make a 12 days of Christmas marathon of nothing but this particular story. The 'canonical' version is probably the 1951 British adaptation Scrooge, carried on the strength of an unforgettable lead performance by the wonderful Alastair Sim, but there's also the 1970 Albert Finney version, a 1935 adptation starring Leo G. Carroll, the George C. Scott-as-Scrooge TV movie from 1984, a 1999 television adaptation with slices of thick British ham from Patrick Stewart, Joel Grey and Richard E. Grant, Henry Winkler's An American Christmas Carol, Bill Murray's post-ironic 1988 adaptation Scrooged, and animated versions starring Mr. Magoo, the Flintstones, and a bunch of talking dogs that all have their fans.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An enjoyable 9 Muppet ladies dancing. This isn't the best Muppet movie, but it isn't the worst, and its relentless charm is hard to resist. Henson's son Brian and Steve Whitmore do a solid if uninspired job of carrying on the Muppet tradition, and there's the usual blend of kid-friendly shenanigans and clever jokes and references for the grown-ups. Caine's performance as Scrooge, though, is what really steals the show.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Star Wars Holiday Special

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

Julia Roberts’ breakthrough film, Pretty Woman (about the magical romantic possibilities of being a whore) was a monster hit, if not exactly a high water mark in the history of feminism (be sure to look for it on our upcoming Girl Dis-Empowering Top Ten). Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, was the flipside of the equation: a realistically desperate woman who succeeds in spite of, rather than because of her prominent cleavage...and in this quasi-true story, the prize at the end of the fairy tale isn’t a rich millionaire, but a million dollars the single-mother-turned-investigative-paralegal earns for herself (as a bonus from Albert Finney's lawyer/mentor Ed Masry) through brains and tenacity during the course a battle royale with an evil...uh, utility company. And talk about empowering: Roberts went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, she and director Steven Soderbergh got to hang out with George Clooney and screenwriter Susannah Grant went on to write and direct...Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner and Kevin Smith. Which must have been nice for her.

ALIENS (1986)

There were kick-ass female action heroes before Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, of course. Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien comes to mind, for instance, as does Linda Hamilton in the original Terminator, Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on and so forth, all the way back to real life ass-kickers like Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But the Ripley of James Cameron’s Aliens really redefined the female action star for the modern age. For one thing, she’s the star of the movie, and she’s tough all the way through, taking command of a doomed rescue mission to an alien infested colony when the indecisive (male) space marine commander in charge of the mission literally falls down on the job, then later rescuing her man-sel in distress potential love interest, Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks. But Weaver’s heroine isn’t just a muscled, monosyllabic Rambo with tits: she’s a deeply human character who draws superhuman strength not from extra testosterone or the bite of a radioactive spider, but from the sweet maternal bond she forms with an orphaned girl in the midst of all the gunplay and explosions of the masculine world...at least, that is, until David Fincher went and fucked everything up in Alien 3...but I’ll save that rant until our Top Ten list of great movies with incredibly aggravating unnecessary sequels.

MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Mean Girls began with a book by Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes, about high school social hierarchies and how they shape the lives of those who pass before them. It is a serious journalistic-sociological study, which apparently came as a bit of a surprise to Tina Fey after she agreed to take on the job of adapting it into a movie. Fey, who appears in the movie as the math teacher Ms. Norbury, came up with a story about Cady (Lindsay Lohan), who moves to Chicago and enters her first American public school at 16 after being home-schooled in Africa by parents who emphasize the value of learning, and so has to endure the culture shock of discovering that "education" in the States is all about bureaucratic rules on one side and social anxiety and status on the other. Out of a mixture of anthropological fascination and a half-conscious but real desire to fit in, Cady "infiltrates" the top clique of pretty girls -- a process that involves her pretending to be dumber than she is in order to snare a boy she likes -- and begins to maneuver her way to the lead position by outbitching them in ways that suggest a Machiavellian Heather. The movie's official mouthpiece is Fey's Ms. Norbury, who ultimately gets Cady to embrace her better side by forcibly inducting her into the school's "Mathletes" team. She also has a strange but deeply felt scene where she hustles all the girls together in the gym and lectures them about why they behave the way they do and why it's not good, though the whole point of Cady's character would seem to be that it's possible to know all that and still find the seductive pull of the status sirens impossible to resist. A mere four years since its release, the most poignant thing about Mean Girls now may be that it serves as a reminder of a more innocent time when it was possible to cast Lindsay Lohan as a sensitive brainiac who, after a brief slumming phase, manages to get herself under control.

WAITING TO EXHALE (1995)

This episodic drama about the rocky-but-hopeful romantic lives of four black women in Phoenix (get it, Greek mythology buffs?) shocked the shit out of the industry by becoming one of the major sleeper hits of the '90s. It also surprised movie critics, who tended to notice that it kind of sucks. It's also arguable whether it merits inclusion in any discussion of movies with positive female role models: all of the members of its central quartet come across as a little brain-damaged, and not just because of how eager they are to define themselves as failures or successes depending on whether they've managed to land a man. (The director, Forest Whitaker, managed to wangle some money from HBO after the premiere of Sex and the City, claiming that the network had ripped him off, and it's true that the movie shares most of what's objectionable about the TV show.) But the public embrace of the movie, and the way it cowed professional opinion makers, marks some kind of landmark moment in empowering the audience, especially if you define empowerment as doing the hucksters' jobs for them. Viewers who loved the movie, especially black women, hit back at criticism of it so hard that newspapers and magazines actually started publishing editorials and what amounted to counter-reviews denouncing the people who had been so insensitive to the entertainment needs of those who wanted overplayed, demented soap operas geared to their own demographic group. The movie helped get a number of movies starring black women greenlit, but its real lasting influence can best be seen in the critical reaction to a movie like Dreamgirls, which inspired many mumbly, mealy-mouthed reviews by writers who clearly thought that it stank but also thought that it was going to be another phenomenon and were afraid of being seen as coming down too hard on the wrong side of it. For an example of what this looks like in practice, compare the Dreamgirls review that Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote when the movie was released , and her review of Hairspray, where she led off by revealing what she really thought of Dreamgirls -- six months later, when she thought no one was looking. Waiting to exhale can take many forms.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

It’s one thing to talk about how women are empowered by watching the adventures of a fictional female space marine, lady cop, or teenage devil-slayer. But it’s quite another to consider the triumph over sexism and oppression represented in the animated big-screen adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful, powerful graphic novel, Persepolis. Satrapi was born in Iran, not too long before the Islamic revolution against the corrupt and brutal Shah by the fundamentalist Ayatollahs. Her father was a respected civil engineer and her mother was an international journalist – living symbols of the new, modernized Iran that hoped to take its place among the elite nations. This aspiration was crushed with the Islamic revolution and the subsequent war with Iran, both of which Satrapi lived through as she and the women of her family (liberated all, three generations back) struggled to adjust to a new reality where they could be imprisoned for letting too much of their faces show in public. She managed to escape to Europe, but it was never home to her, and she eventually returned, hoping to balance her need to be in the country that was her true home with her need to be respected and taken seriously as a woman. Satrapi has always made it a point to illustrate the fact that there is more to Iran than the caricature of out-of-control religious fundamentalists, and in the scene where Satrapi, as a college art student, stands up to a panel of men who insist that her education take a back seat to their sexist dogma, it gives a stirring picture of a country that bristles at its every restriction.

Click here for Part One!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Grumbling About Mumbling: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Other Mushmouths

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ever since Frank Sinatra christened Marlon Brando "Mumbles" on the set of Guys and Dolls, inarticulate and incomprehensible speech has been a mainstay of American cinema, particularly among Method actors. David Jenkins of The Guardian has had enough, and it's Philip Seymour Hoffman who has pushed him to the breaking point.

Jenkins' snippy piece begins: "So there they are, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney, emoting like nobody's business after they've buried the woman who was, respectively, their mother and their wife, in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. There's a silence, and then Hoffman speaks — whereupon Finney slaps him. It's clearly a crucial moment, this explosion of violence, but I've yet to talk to anyone who could hear what Hoffman actually said."

Jenkins goes on to bemoan the mushmouthed stylings of the cast of Charlie Wilson's War (including Hoffman again), Miami Vice (with non-American Colin Farrell cited as a prime offender) and even There Will Be Blood. (He lets the Coens off the hook, noting critic Anne Billson's explanation for the clarity of speech in No Country for Old Men: "The Coen brothers are famously proud of their dialogue, so they make sure you can hear it."

The piece traces screen mumbling back to Brando, of course, but also pins some of the blame on Robert Altman for his trademark overlapping dialogue. It's a little hard to believe that nearly forty years after MASH critics and filmmakers could still be uptight about Altman's brilliant cacophonies, but Sexy Beast producer Hercules Bellville agrees. "I've got no problems with 1940s films; then only Peter Lorre had a strange accent. Now there are all sorts of odd accents and dialects, and the colloquial is often rapid and slurred. But technically, there's no reason for it."

These guys are way too uptight; after all, it's not as if American audiences have never had trouble deciphering British speech, and you don't hear us complaining. To quote Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects, "Gbaughg thfllwoogha schwfjflhaw."

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent

Take Five: The Classics

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Read the classics, sir," advises Jason Miller's Lieutenant Reno in The Ninth Configuration. "It improves the entire respiratory system." Sure, but who has time for that? When it comes to the great works of western literature, it's all well and good for academics to slog through the thousands of pages of their Penguin Classics editions, but we're busy people. We have screenings of Saw V: Saw Harder to get to. We need our classics simple, direct, stripped of poetry and obscurity, and preferably less than two hours long and starring someone who can sport a decent six-pack. Robert Zemeckis' all-star adaptation of Beowulf, opening wide this weekend, is much more our speed; if we have to sit through a bunch of crazy Old English dialogue, even brought up to speed by comics legend Neil Gaiman, it better be accompanied by some naked Angelina Jolie. Here's a handful of other cinema-clarified classics.

FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

America's middle school students have one thing to look forward to in the long slog through English classes: Frankenstein. It's part of the holy triumvirate of bona fide classics (along with Dracula and Beowulf) that spice up the prose with a good solid monster. Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his "Adam" have become such iconic figures in our culture that it's hard to imagine a time when he was perceived as anything other than Boris Karloff's shambling, neck-bolded patchwork man; and James Whale's confident direction here, remarkably sophisticated for a film that was made over seventy-five years ago, is still electric today.

TOM JONES (1963)

As school-assigned, instructive Classics of Western Literature go, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is a relative favorite, containing as it does lots of screwing and fart jokes. Tony Richardson's big blow-out adaptation, like the novel a compelling combination of arch and earthy, tries to bring the same tastes-good-and-good-for-you sensibility to the big screen and largely succeeds, despite having been made in the early 1960s when a few of the book's raunchier moments had to be implied rather than depicted. Aided by some gorgeous photography, the film boasts a terrific cast led by young and studly Albert Finney and Susannah York, who's never looked better.

MADAME BOVARY (1991)

Though a number of adaptations of Gustave Flaubert's essential novel have been attempted over the years, perhaps the definitive version comes from the talented and prolific Claude Chabrol. In many ways, he's the perfect director to take on the project: quintessentially French, like Flaubert, but also like Flaubert, just alienated enough from his society and times to view them with a properly jaundiced eye. Given his history of making compelling films about unsatisfied women who come to a bloody end because of their frustration and lack of options, Chabrol was almost born to make Madame Bovary, and he couldn't have made a better choice to play Emma than his Violette Noziere star, the phenomenal Isabelle Huppert.

RICHARD III (1995)

When discussing the classics and their transition to film, there's no avoiding ol' Will Shakespeare. But if you're trying to get the kids on your side, forget glitzy romance and postmodernist flash; forsake the pomposities of a Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and go straight for Richard Loncraine's inventive, delightful Richard III. Nothing animates a Shakespeare play like a good villain, and Ian McKellen — who wrote the adaptation — plays the twisted, perverse, gleefully murderous Richard to the hilt. The setting is likewise outstanding, and the conceit of setting the story in an alternate England of the 1930s, overcome by fascist nationalism, works like a charm, particularly in a dynamite opening sequence.

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY (2005)

If someone tells you often enough that a great novel is unfilmable, you might just start to believe it. For the first hundred years or so of the motion picture industry, no one would tough Laurence Sterne's brilliant, hilarious, rambling Tristram Shandy — a work of postmodernist genius written at least a hundred years before there was even modernism — with a ten-foot lens. It took the arrival of Michael Winterbottom, a man who has made a career out of not listening to people when they tell him what kind of movie he should make next, for anything remotely resembling a big-screen adaptation to be made, and even then, it was more of an impression than it was a reproduction.

— Leonard Pierce

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Rails & Ties, Hideout in the Sun, Brian De Palma

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: "It's hard to dislike Philip Seymour Hoffman or Albert Finney. But in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, it's hard to like anyone, including those two snuggle-bears."

Rails & Ties: "Rails & Ties' long-shot coincidences could be compelling if they didn't feel so purposeful."

Hideout in the Sun: "If Hideout fails as pornography, it now excels as history, a snapshot of a time that may have been less overtly sleazy than our own, but was every bit as dirty-minded."

Q&A: Brian De Palma: "The media has basically been co-opted and made rich. If you're supposed to be a watchdog for corruption, and you're a part of it all. . . "

Whitefield at NYFF: Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Let it not be said that I don’t respect Sidney Lumet. I read his book Making Movies and found it both practical and enlightening. I loved Dog Day Afternoon (who doesn’t?) and Running on Empty. But let’s face facts. Lumet is eighty-three. He made 12 Angry Men in 1957 — fifty years ago! When you receive a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, you can probably read that as Hollywood’s polite way of saying, "It’s a wrap." Apparently Mr. Lumet is hard of hearing.

Though not nearly as bad as his last film, Find Me Guilty, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead turns out to be twice as frustrating, as it squanders an outstanding cast and a knockout script. Lumet chose to go the Tarantino/Babel route and skew the story’s narrative timeline, but by doing so he takes all the suspense out of what could have been huge dramatic windfalls by giving you three major (and I mean major) plot twists within the first fifteen minutes. As if that wasn’t crime enough, each time sequence change is signaled by the two frames locking into one another as opposing triangles in a square that click and spin into the next scene. This and the poor film quality make Before The Devil Knows You're Dead look like a made-for-tv movie circa 1991.

A dream cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and a remarkably sexy Marisa Tomei do an admirable job of trying to prop this dog up on four legs, but in the end it’s just too much to ask. The film’s story spirals from tragic family drama of epic proportions into the realm of the absurd, with plot points that are increasingly unbelievable and distracting. The person I feel the worst for is first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson, who probably thought her dream had come true when she heard Lumet would bring her script to life, only to find herself the victim of an outdated director. I can only imagine the kind of film someone like Rian Johnson (Brick) or Christopher Nolan would have made given the exact same elements. — Bryan Whitefield