slangist Reviews

The Toy (1976)

what he'll do to save his job...

[10/10 · 18 February 2007]

pierre richard is one of the great physical comedians of this or any other era. richard's body language, facial expressions, and line deliveries are as much a part of his characters as are the twitches of groucho's moustache or the twirls of chaplin's cane. yep, he's one of the immortals in my book.

bewilderment, pain, false certainty, bluffed courage, sadness and secret joy flit across his face as fast as the plot requires. he can telegraph a mood by how he sits down in a chair -- or stands up.

in this one he plays a journalist who, working for a rupert-murdoch figure, will do anything to keep his job, including being the non-sexual-but-still-dominated "toy" of his employer's foul son.

this film is as far superior to the later American version as the sun is to a lit match...

The Ladykillers (1955)

encomium extraordinaire

[10/10 · 12 April 2004]

if they make them any funnier than this, i'm already dead. alec guinness' deadpan, middle-class greed lends him a dignified desperation that is shared by peter sellers' squeamish thug-wannabe. as the situations ratchet up in confusion guinness has no trouble in remaining calm in the face of chaos; it's just that you see his belief in his ability to cope being gradually eroded so that, by the end, he keeps going only on sheer inertia. the house it was filmed in was apparently a london landmark about to be torn down at the time of filming in 1954. glad they preserved it on film in all its improbable siting; these ladykillers are so unique they deserved a unique setting.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

swash not quite buckled

[17 January 2004]

a movie is a book with more than half of it left out. peter weir's "master and commander: far side of the world" includes incidents from two of the twenty jack aubrey/stephen maturin novels of patrick o'brian, but it feels like a parallel structure, not an adaptation.

no line of meaningful dialog has been taken from o'brian's original keenly comic and sharply dramatic writing; but in the weir adaptation the dialog is serviceable if not distinctive. yes, o'brian did tell the "weevil" joke but it is so far below the standard of his own wit that it serves only to illuminate aubrey's character as a simple seaman.

russell crowe's aubrey has the requisite charisma, bluffness, courage, and joy in both sailing and in battle; his wisdom in handling men; his assiduity in teaching the midshipmen; and his delight in music. what is missing is his simplicity of spirit and his iron separation from his men and officers other than his friend maturin (so that the "jonah" subplot never comes to his attention). we do get some sense of his naval duty and his absoluteness of command, but not in the subtly varied way presented in the novels.

the saddest hint of the "classic comic book" level of sociology in the movie is the utter failure to deal with the aubrey/maturin friendship in any meaningful way. this no doubt proceeds from the decision to make maturin a mere foil, rather than aubrey's co-equal. they forgot to make a buddy movie when the opportunity demanded it.

the shocking violence of both the warfare and the medicine of the 19th century is well-captured; the actual sailing scenes are magnificent; the model work is more than adequate; and the fact that there is very little plot other than "a man o'war makes a voyage" is forgiveable.

the attempt at giving maturin equal stature to aubrey by having his galapagos islands scientific explorations shown in detail is, however, unsuccessful. no hollywood movie is ever going to give science the same emotional weight as warfare.

Office Space (1999)

wonderful caricature of cube-land...

[8/10 · 8 September 2003]

a bit slow in spots but then so's cube-land... jennifer aniston as "the conscientious girlfriend" does alright, a few moments of actual human spontaneity, i was mildly impressed... she's necessary to the plot in this one but by no means "the star"... it's a caper movie, except these three buddy programmers turn out not to know the first rule of testing: "always test your software in the identical environment to what it's going to run in, even if that means shutting down production to do so..." directed by michael judge, one of the geniuses behind "south park"... sloppy in plot, dead on in satire, worth a look...

Children of Paradise (1945)

love vs infatuation times five

[8 September 2003]

it takes a real poet to write dialog this incisive, not that i speak french, but the new subtitles are very clear (visually) and concise (linguistically)... the poet was jacques prevert, the director marcel carne, and if you want to know how powerful real moviemaking can be, you have to see this picture... as in all true tragedy, the various pairs of lovers comment by their actions on each other's destinies... baptiste/garance are the main pair we care most about, but all the others contribute to and contrast with their true, genuine, doomed affair... the shadows of the main pair are baptiste/nathalie, and garance/frederick, descending to the sick depths of garance/edouard, lacenaire/avril, and jericho/himself. it's like a deck of cards with all possible combinations revealed. based on a true story, set against the theatre milieu of the 1840s, this has the world's best crowd scenes, partially because carne employed every actor in france who needed saving from the nazis, including hiding jews on the set (it was made during WWII). the use of mime advances the plot and is not simply an excuse for baptiste to show off his real-life talents (jean-louis barrault conducts a school of mime in france to this day.) the stunningly vibrant arletty plays garance, a whore with a heart, as if such a thing had never happened before... and until she did it her way, it hadn't...

Macbeth (1971)

single best shaxpr film

[10/10 · 18 April 2001]

polanski got these unknowns to say shakespeare's lines not only as if they had just thought of them and were making them up as they went along, but as if they weren't poetry of fixed length, but were instead pure emotion of uncertain strength and duration... it ain't fair that the best shakespeare film ever done should be by a polish-american, but there it is...