I have not read David Baldacci’s first novel, upon which William Goldman based his script, but while watching Clint Eastwood’s spare, moody, often mesmerizing Absolute Power I wondered whether the reference made in the title is as ambiguous with the book as it is with the film. The expression comes from the Victorian historian Lord […]
Monthly Archives: January 2011
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16 http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19
Robert Redford is deft and appealing, although largely inscrutable, as Jeremiah Johnson, a former soldier in, possibly a deserter from, the Mexican-American War, who now aims to lose himself in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, living an isolated, peaceable existence, but who finds he cannot leave behind the savagery of his recent past. Based […]
Philip Yordan won an Oscar for the idea of turning his earlier King Lear-ish script for House of Strangers (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) into a western; but perhaps the more interesting prize that Broken Lance garnered came from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose members voted it “Best Film Promoting International Understanding”—a category the organization […]
Sixty-something television star/anchor Viola Fields has just been sacked. While interviewing bubble-brained pop-youth personified, a Britney Spears-facsimile, Viola strikes a blow against ageism by imagining herself leaping onto this guest and throttling her—perhaps the funniest moment in Monster-in-Law, an amiable satirical farce which Robert Luketic directed from a script by Anya Kochoff. A control-freak, Viola […]
Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s premier misogynist beginning with his first feature, Play Misty for Me (1971), has an unwholesome field day with Million Dollar Baby, a film so nasty about or towards its female characters that, here, Eastwood doesn’t need to have a Sondra Locke-lookalike’s getting her face slashed in order to make his point, as […]
Except that their politics are mightily opposed, one could mistake Oliver Stone’s Wall Street for something by Frank Capra; much of the sensibility, the emotional atmosphere, of the film is Capraesque. This and Salvador (1986) are Stone’s best, most heartfelt films, and Wall Street is the finer of the two. Yes, even with its mildly […]
