vito4077

Tarkovsky's death bed film certainly lacks some of the fire and energy of his earlier work, but the story of Alexander's search for faith amidst the worst kind of madness is by no means dull. The cinematography and editing are obviously Bergman influenced, but anyone who says that it bothers them to see Tarkovsky borrow the style of another needs to learn more about Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and perhaps Wajda.

This film serves as a stark example of the real difference between the work of the European authors and Hollywood. While viewing, keep an eye on the editing. Th film opens on a five minute long shot in which it is extremely difficult to even discern which character is speaking. The scenes are made up of as few shots as possible and the shortest shot of the entire film is about 10 seconds. There are less than a dozen close ups in the entire piece, which may be why American audiences with their limited attention spans, would reject the film. The Sacrifice might not sit well with Tarkovsky purists, but it's themes and philosophy, I feel, surpass in depth, any of the master's other works.

It was very late at night when I turned this movie on. I had decided to check it out because TV told me that Kate Hudson was in it. The first scene I saw was one of the first, the baseball game where Jesse is introduced. For a minute I was pondering changing the channel, but then I noticed a very special cameo. The man announcing the base ball game was none other than Ken Kesey. I watched the rest of the movie waiting to see if he would pop up again, but he did not. It turned out that the movie was not that bad, so it worked out alright. It has an excellent message about prejudice and coming of age. Where it falls short is in the writing mostly. The acting has a few short comings as well. The directing is solid, but presents the movie in a straight forward, no frills way. This wold be a good family movie, even though there is a bit of swearing.

Where to begin? It is of course based very closely on thompson's novel, which makes the dialogue and narration excellent. There are cameos by large multitudes of great actors as well. Throw in a bald Johnny Depp, a fat Benicio Del Toro, and a directing Terry Gilliam and you have a recipe for insanity. And Hunter himself spent large amounts of time on the set.

See it already...