The movie is not “A Family Woman.” So much of it is his perspective and his journey. But one of the important things about playing a part like this, that it’s so important for my character to love him. She is there to show the audience that he is loved and loveable even when that might otherwise be hard to believe. It’s hard sometimes not to judge her for loving him but I had to as the actor kind of come to a point where I had to understand why she does. It’s funny because when I initially read the script I didn’t think of them as being super successful necessarily, but I did think she is attracted to his sort of kind of cockiness or that nature of that person. When he says, “What’s not to love?” she really loved that.
Digital Trends has a list of movies that received a “rotten” rating on the critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes but deserve another look.
While I don’t agree with every choice (“Europtrip” is pretty bad) and some are uneven (“Troy”), I strongly endorse the inclusion of two great movies, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with Ben Stiller and “Defiance,” with Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. And if “A Knight’s Tale” is on cable, I usually find myself watching it.
Language has been steadily deteriorating in movies since the introduction of the MPAA ratings system replaced the Hayes Code in 1968. It used to be no f-words in a PG-13, then one was okay, and now two, as long as they do not refer to sex. As I have said before, you’d need a degree in semiotics to parse that one. And movies like the “Austin Powers” series get away with using a sound-alike, “frickin.” Studios have been known to add one or two strong words just to avoid the PG rating because they think tweens and teenagers won’t see PG films.
Now a Harris poll suggests that movies may start moving away from four-letter words.
Using “Jesus Christ” to swear is the biggest offense, with 33 percent of the general public saying they’d be less likely to see a movie if they knew beforehand of that particular piece of dialogue. “Goddam” was second at 32 percent and “f***” was third with 31 percent.
Some of the awards seasons biggest films have no strong language. If they are successful at the box office, we may see this become a trend.
Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” turns 50 this week. Rogerebert.com critics pay tribute, fitting as the film was one of Roger Ebert’s favorites and his review of the film helped to make his reputation as a critic of seriousness, insight, and influence. He wisely and accurately wrote at the time that the film was “a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance” and predicted “years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.” Later, with some perspective, he included it as one of his “Great Films” and wrote, “It was a film in which all of the unlikely pieces were assembled at the right time. And more than anything else, it was a masterpiece of tone, in which the actors and filmmakers were all in sync as they moved the material back and forth between comedy and tragedy.”
“Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate,” she wrote. “The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.” And with that, she’s off and running, not only drawing us in with the breathless urgency of her praise, but vibing on what would become one of her signature preoccupations: the wild notion that this commoner’s entertainment could also be considered art, even when functioning outside the rigid confines of the “art film.”
She tackles this idea sideways, in considering and refuting the key argument of the film’s detractors (chief among them, Crowther at the Times): its violence. “To ask why people react so angrily to the best movies and have so little negative reaction to poor ones is to imply that they are so unused to the experience of art in movies that they fight it,” she surmises, and expands upon that notion thus:
Though we may dismiss the attacks with “What good movie doesn’t give some offense?,” the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it—perhaps a law should be passed against it.
These were fairly radical notions at the time (for an American critic, anyway), that a popular art form like film should not only be provocative, but was better for it – and at the very least, it was a radical idea for the tony pages of the New Yorker. But the film’s volatile relationship with its audience, how it turns our expectations and reactions (to violence, to sexuality, and especially to humor) back on its viewers, make for both the essay’s most compelling ideas, and its most astonishing writing.
How can you not be attracted to home movies? Just about every home movie is unique and exists in a single copy. And while many of them picture similar events (birthdays, holidays, trips to the lake, honeymooning at Niagara Falls), each has its own look and emotional feel. I’ve started to think that maybe the essential story of the 20th century is really the composite story made from identical events shown slightly differently.
They’re also structurally unique. Most documentary films these days are built as narratives — stories with a beginning, middle and end; stories with some kind of conflict and resolution; stories with “compelling” characters. But home movies bypass this artificial layer. Home movies are stories all by themselves. There are many small dramas we might imagine about the people, places and activities we see. But in themselves they’re little narratives about the unfolding dynamic between the person shooting and the person shot; about performing for the camera and watching people perform; about family mysteries we may never solve.
Then there’s the element of unpredictability. What will the next shot be? What will these people do? Where will the camera shoot next? You can find anything from close-ups of ears of new sweet corn to covert shots of President Roosevelt walking down a ramp from his private railroad car, shot from behind a baggage cart so that the Secret Service wouldn’t notice and take the film.
And just as there is unexpected beauty in daily life, there is real beauty in films made by ordinary, nonprofessional shooters. It can be intentional or accidental, but I am constantly struck by the wonderful images I find that would be extremely difficult to shoot on purpose. Strange juxtapositions, unpredictable camera angles, mistakes that make perfection look boring.
