catalyst-7
Se unió el sept 1999
Distintivos2
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Calificación de catalyst-7
Two days after seeing this film, I can't remember a single tune, but I'm still happy. And still thinking.
This is the kind of movie that provokes both happiness and thought. And happiness and thought are especially welcome in an unhappy country that seems--finally--to be nearly ready to emerge from its Cheneyesque "There's only one way to be OK" mindset. That was also true in the early '60s, the period depicted in this film. I remember that time very well, and am most eager to leave it behind me a second time.
I hope to return with a more thoughtful and thorough review, but for now I will offer one bold prediction: John Travolta will be the surprise winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for his remarkably sweet, funny and straightforward portrayal of Edna!
This is the kind of movie that provokes both happiness and thought. And happiness and thought are especially welcome in an unhappy country that seems--finally--to be nearly ready to emerge from its Cheneyesque "There's only one way to be OK" mindset. That was also true in the early '60s, the period depicted in this film. I remember that time very well, and am most eager to leave it behind me a second time.
I hope to return with a more thoughtful and thorough review, but for now I will offer one bold prediction: John Travolta will be the surprise winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for his remarkably sweet, funny and straightforward portrayal of Edna!
I'm blown away. In a world where the IQ targets of movies have been declining for nearly four decades, where the iconic Coming of Age story has descended from the wit of The Graduate to the banality of Friends, where Whale Rider has seemed the best since Flirting because Hollywood keeps lowering the bar, I have just seen a wonderful film called Summer.
Summer, from Canada, appears to have been shot for such a small budget that it puts to final rest the adage `You get what you pay for.' True, you can plainly see how little was paid in cheap filming medium and a few editing gaps, and the filming locations are appalling in their ordinariness (isn't most of the inhabited world?), but this film is outstanding for two reasons. First, the story: Coming of Age, AKA Who Am I and How Can I Become Who I Really Am?, the all-time Third Best Plot (the Best Plot being Love is Everything, the Second Best being Goodness Will Win). For a first film on a subject that's been done so often, it manages to be funny, touching, really insightful and very much worth watching. And second, the acting is extraordinary.
This movie is about three kids, no four kids, no six, no. it's about all kids, actually. At least the ones who graduate from (whatever) and find themselves facing The Cold, Cruel, Scary World. Charlie (Michael Rubenfeld) has succeeded due to his belief in boldness. Stefanie (Karen Cliché) worries that her chosen profession (acting) is not one where one meets lots of good people. Miller, (Joe Cobden) is lost, so unsure of his path that he just wants to play for a summer or maybe longer.. And, Ella (Amy Sloan), Miller's girlfriend, faces The Cold, Cruel, Scary World by attacking it before it attacks her. They beautifully illustrate ways that young people face their second toughest decision (the first being Who Will I Marry and third being Where Will I Live? both of which get some play in this movie as well).
The time is the Last Summer Before It Starts. They hold court at a swimming pool the size of a small world that is their turf until it is taken over by a `pool Nazi.' (The rendition was so cartoonish that this character didn't belong in this film). They drink to excess (none of them smoke, which I found really refreshing; no tobacco industry product placements here). They make new friends, couple and uncouple, listen to the best recorded music in recent films for young people and face crises in ways that determine their trajectories. This isn't a film that will appeal to those who thrive on car chases, explosions and computer-animated fantastic martial arts feats. The kids aren't crude or inexplicably mindless; everything they do and say reveals their conflicted intelligence and appeal.
Miller is the emotional center of the film, a kid who is facing the choice of working in an antiquarian bookstore or going to another city to do something big and bold in business. Ella, played by an actress so attractive and fresh it's hard to believe that she hasn't been sucked into the Hollywood black hole yet, wants to be a physician and feels the need to start working towards it Right Now, even if that jeopardizes her relationship with Miller. As a result, Miller feels driven into the orbit of a woman who sends red flags up in everyone but him. His apology is one of the most nakedly touching I have ever seen on film. Yet it is topped by another-delivered by someone who was was, to that point, the film's least interesting character-who also makes a bad choice of the heart, and takes the stage and humbles herself before friends and strangers alike in a monologue of almost Shakespearian power even if its subject and delivery are 100% today.
In the end we are left feeling that we have become friends with some remarkable young people, and are the richer for it. What more can you ask from a movie, especially a first feature film shot for so little money, the kind that screens in very non-prime hours on small audience-share TV stations? A movie that isn't available on DVD? But however overlooked, Summer is a gem, clearly a 10, one I dearly wish there were a way to share with my wife and my three twentysomething sons.
Summer, from Canada, appears to have been shot for such a small budget that it puts to final rest the adage `You get what you pay for.' True, you can plainly see how little was paid in cheap filming medium and a few editing gaps, and the filming locations are appalling in their ordinariness (isn't most of the inhabited world?), but this film is outstanding for two reasons. First, the story: Coming of Age, AKA Who Am I and How Can I Become Who I Really Am?, the all-time Third Best Plot (the Best Plot being Love is Everything, the Second Best being Goodness Will Win). For a first film on a subject that's been done so often, it manages to be funny, touching, really insightful and very much worth watching. And second, the acting is extraordinary.
This movie is about three kids, no four kids, no six, no. it's about all kids, actually. At least the ones who graduate from (whatever) and find themselves facing The Cold, Cruel, Scary World. Charlie (Michael Rubenfeld) has succeeded due to his belief in boldness. Stefanie (Karen Cliché) worries that her chosen profession (acting) is not one where one meets lots of good people. Miller, (Joe Cobden) is lost, so unsure of his path that he just wants to play for a summer or maybe longer.. And, Ella (Amy Sloan), Miller's girlfriend, faces The Cold, Cruel, Scary World by attacking it before it attacks her. They beautifully illustrate ways that young people face their second toughest decision (the first being Who Will I Marry and third being Where Will I Live? both of which get some play in this movie as well).
The time is the Last Summer Before It Starts. They hold court at a swimming pool the size of a small world that is their turf until it is taken over by a `pool Nazi.' (The rendition was so cartoonish that this character didn't belong in this film). They drink to excess (none of them smoke, which I found really refreshing; no tobacco industry product placements here). They make new friends, couple and uncouple, listen to the best recorded music in recent films for young people and face crises in ways that determine their trajectories. This isn't a film that will appeal to those who thrive on car chases, explosions and computer-animated fantastic martial arts feats. The kids aren't crude or inexplicably mindless; everything they do and say reveals their conflicted intelligence and appeal.
Miller is the emotional center of the film, a kid who is facing the choice of working in an antiquarian bookstore or going to another city to do something big and bold in business. Ella, played by an actress so attractive and fresh it's hard to believe that she hasn't been sucked into the Hollywood black hole yet, wants to be a physician and feels the need to start working towards it Right Now, even if that jeopardizes her relationship with Miller. As a result, Miller feels driven into the orbit of a woman who sends red flags up in everyone but him. His apology is one of the most nakedly touching I have ever seen on film. Yet it is topped by another-delivered by someone who was was, to that point, the film's least interesting character-who also makes a bad choice of the heart, and takes the stage and humbles herself before friends and strangers alike in a monologue of almost Shakespearian power even if its subject and delivery are 100% today.
In the end we are left feeling that we have become friends with some remarkable young people, and are the richer for it. What more can you ask from a movie, especially a first feature film shot for so little money, the kind that screens in very non-prime hours on small audience-share TV stations? A movie that isn't available on DVD? But however overlooked, Summer is a gem, clearly a 10, one I dearly wish there were a way to share with my wife and my three twentysomething sons.
Who am I, an amateur moviegoer, to say that two pros, Roger Ebert and James Berardinelli, are wrong? But amateur means lover--one who does something for love, not for money. I love really good movies, and I think that these usually on-target reviewers are wrong in calling Road to Perdition a three-star film. Titanic was, maybe a three-star film (or, on rethinking it, two-and-a-half). Road to Perdition is not only a four-star film, it is the best one I've seen since American Beauty, which, not coincidentally, had the same director. Look at it any way you want, from technical details to cinematography to acting to a story that plums the human dilemma, this a remarkable movie.
Road to Perdition is a movie about fathers and sons, a topic of eternal and profound importance, whether we're talking about every male's individual story, why ghettoes have endemic problems or why whole nations go to war. Road to Perdition addresses painful questions such as which counts more in a father's heart, blood or loyalty? Or in a son's heart, a father's decency or his simply being a father? It answers these questions with subtle but powerful truth, beautifully unfolded, as befits three wonderful actors, two Oscar-winners (Tom Hanks and Paul Newman) and one who will be (the boy to watch is Tyler Hoechlin).
Besides profound, timeless story and brilliant acting, it is a perfect period piece; the factories, homes, roads, signs, clothes, accoutrements are perfect period pieces. They could have been full of anachronisms and I would still have been deeply moved by the story, but the people who did these things got it right, down to the sweat stains on Hanks' collar and the protagonist's bicycle. So did the director and cinematographer; the film has a mood that derives from the darkness and heavy rain outside (reminiscent of Kurasawa's unrelenting rains)and the dark interiors that were once our home and workplace environments.
I found yet another thing fascinating. Gangsters, from the 20s onward, whether Italian, Jewish, Irish or Russian, are always depicted as crude and inarticulate. In this film, the Irish mafiosi and Frank Nitti are depicted as far more sophisticated and intelligent than those we see in the canonical fims and television series such as the Godfather, the Sopranos, Ghost Dog, the TV Untouchables, etc. Were they Tony Sopranos or more like the criminals who ran Enron, Arthur Anderson and WorldCom? I don't know, but now I'd like to.
Every movie has to have some errors of continuity, and found a few concerning the season. The story occurs in late-winter, but at times in-between, the trees are leafed out in late-Spring or even summer glory. Similarly, the fields are winter-sere in some scenes but the corn is growing to near summer height in others and plants are flowering. Clearly the scenes that made the final cut were not filmed in order, or in the six weeks that the story covered.
I don't want to tell the story here; an appropriate rendering (without revealing too much) appears in Steven Holden's NY Times review, which is much more more insightful than Ebert's or Berardinelli's. But I will venture a guess: Road to Perdition will be a strong contender at Oscar time if the Academy has any integrity left in it.
The brilliant science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap." That is certainly true of movies. But Road to Perdition is a movie that deeply touches the heart and mind. If you don't see any other film this year, see this one. Then, after you've thougth about it, see it again.
Road to Perdition is a movie about fathers and sons, a topic of eternal and profound importance, whether we're talking about every male's individual story, why ghettoes have endemic problems or why whole nations go to war. Road to Perdition addresses painful questions such as which counts more in a father's heart, blood or loyalty? Or in a son's heart, a father's decency or his simply being a father? It answers these questions with subtle but powerful truth, beautifully unfolded, as befits three wonderful actors, two Oscar-winners (Tom Hanks and Paul Newman) and one who will be (the boy to watch is Tyler Hoechlin).
Besides profound, timeless story and brilliant acting, it is a perfect period piece; the factories, homes, roads, signs, clothes, accoutrements are perfect period pieces. They could have been full of anachronisms and I would still have been deeply moved by the story, but the people who did these things got it right, down to the sweat stains on Hanks' collar and the protagonist's bicycle. So did the director and cinematographer; the film has a mood that derives from the darkness and heavy rain outside (reminiscent of Kurasawa's unrelenting rains)and the dark interiors that were once our home and workplace environments.
I found yet another thing fascinating. Gangsters, from the 20s onward, whether Italian, Jewish, Irish or Russian, are always depicted as crude and inarticulate. In this film, the Irish mafiosi and Frank Nitti are depicted as far more sophisticated and intelligent than those we see in the canonical fims and television series such as the Godfather, the Sopranos, Ghost Dog, the TV Untouchables, etc. Were they Tony Sopranos or more like the criminals who ran Enron, Arthur Anderson and WorldCom? I don't know, but now I'd like to.
Every movie has to have some errors of continuity, and found a few concerning the season. The story occurs in late-winter, but at times in-between, the trees are leafed out in late-Spring or even summer glory. Similarly, the fields are winter-sere in some scenes but the corn is growing to near summer height in others and plants are flowering. Clearly the scenes that made the final cut were not filmed in order, or in the six weeks that the story covered.
I don't want to tell the story here; an appropriate rendering (without revealing too much) appears in Steven Holden's NY Times review, which is much more more insightful than Ebert's or Berardinelli's. But I will venture a guess: Road to Perdition will be a strong contender at Oscar time if the Academy has any integrity left in it.
The brilliant science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap." That is certainly true of movies. But Road to Perdition is a movie that deeply touches the heart and mind. If you don't see any other film this year, see this one. Then, after you've thougth about it, see it again.