Charleen

Original post date: 15 May 1987
Rating: ✭✭✰✰

This film and Backyard are a couple of documentaries by Ross McElwee, the guy who did Sherman’s March, which played for a long time in Seattle. These are mainly about people that McElwee knows in his hometown in the South. Somehow he seems to make them as involving as if they were fiction. Which is high praise for reality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Trouble with Dick

Original post date: 22 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   The kind of delightful surprise you usually only find at film festivals. A quirky independent U.S. comedy with a style all its own. Features Susan Dey ( Partridge Family , L.A. Law ). Dick is a freelance (read unemployed) science fiction writer who is bombarded with rejection from publishers and from Susan Dey but constantly attacked by his California airhead landlady and her sexpot teenage daughter. I can’t remember a movie where every line and every scene seem so carefully planned to work independently and yet build on everything that has gone before. The scenes portraying the action in Dick’s novel about an escapee from a prison planet chain gang are hilarious.
Read more

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Original post date: 26 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ So here’s another one of those quickie movies that someone just threw together during a weekend or two. Ha! If you know anything about this film, then you are aware it is the poster child for filmmaking production hell. As documented no fewer than 16 years ago in the film Lost in La Mancha, this movie would wind up taking Terry Gilliam nearly three decades to complete. Think about that. This flick was conceived more or less around the same time as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2000 the great Jean Rochefort was to be Quixote and Johnny Depp the filmmaker he takes to be his Sancho Panza. In 2010 it was to be Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor. In 2015, it was John Hurt and Jack O’Connell. In the end it is Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver. (The film is dedicated to the memories of Rochefort and Hurt.) And how fitting that it is Pryce, who had the lead role in Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. For a film that deals with multiple levels of meta
Read more

Sweet Smell of Success

Original post date: 14 April 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” This 1957 poison pen letter to the world of journalistic arrogance and backstabbing scriveners was based on stories by Ernest Lehman, drawn from his experiences as a gofer for Walter Winchell and other gossip columnists. Lehman wanted to direct, but the producers instead brought in a more experienced helmer, Scottish Ealing veteran Alexander Mackendrick. Lehman withdrew because of a stomach illness, and Clifford Odets was brought in for rewrites of Lehman’s screenplay. The result is a darkly cynical portrait of a society in which powerful egos must be stroked, principles are for losers, and working gals could sure use a #MeToo movement. Tony Curtis plays sleazy publicist Sidney Falco with just enough of a hint of conscience—mainly reflected through concerned looks from his secretary, Sally (Jeff Donnell)—to hope he’ll eventually do the right thing—or at least not do t
Read more