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Reviews
The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968)
The Editing
I only saw this once and it was okay. The real interesting thing about this is the story around its editing, which is told in Ralph Rosenblum's book WHEN THE SHOOTING STOPS... He and Norman Lear had to dig up tons of old stock footage to insert into the cut in order to make it palatable.
1999 Madeleine (1999)
great loneliness movie
Contrary to the other opinion, this was probably the best movie I saw at the IFF that year. I've seen a few American movies over the years dealing with the struggles of single people looking for love, but this was a fresh European view. It was like looking at a live-action version of the Carpenters' "Goodbye to Love". The color composition is really quite good, the director filling the screen with muted and stark fluorescent lighting, as the protagonist lives half her life in empty metro stations and phone booths. Her dates are viewed through alienating extreme closeups, denoting the hopeless conversations with men who are looking for "someone else".
Far from Heaven (2002)
a bit too much
I had mixed feelings about FAR FROM HEAVEN. I liked the fact that the husband, while being this target of social discrimination, was also a bit of a creep, not very likeable by the end. Quaid's performance of this guy was top-notch, hopefully picking up a career that sort of sagged in the 90's. He really knew how to give him a shaking, chain-smoking demeanor and sour face. The "homosexual underlife" was nicely touched upon, but perhaps could have been explored a bit more.
Essentially, I had a problem with Julianna Moore's whole dual dilemma. Gee, what are the odds that the same week I find out my husband's a homosexual I also fall for a black man? Even for movie standards, I found that this lacked credibility. After awhile, the scenes seemed to be a set up for victim-making.
The movie did, though, point our rightly that so-called progressive New England can be just as Jim Crow as Mississippi. Most of those states are 99% white bread, after all.
Haynes direction was a disappointment to me. Many have said that the idea was to make it look like a 60's social movie. But, I think he could have still done so using the style he developed with SAFE. Maybe the movie would have developed a whole different level of feeling if he did it that way.
Overall, it was good filmmaking that could have better if it zeroed in on the gay issue.
The Henderson Monster (1980)
An Odd One
Even though the title suggests different, this really isn't a horror or science fiction movie, more like a social policy debate movie. It starts off about a research scientist who accidently flushes some bad microbes down a sink. It's not like in OUTBREAK, where a terrible disease takes the city hostage, just people talking and screaming at one another about the possibility of an outbreak. Stephen Collins turns in a wacky performance as a scientist's husband who likes to jump around and accuse people of playing God. I kinda liked its low-key thoughtfulness, but nothing really goes on.