With writer/director Paul Schrader currently in the news for his critically lauded new film, First Reformed, it might be a good time to discuss one of his earlier efforts, one known to about five people outside of The Criterion Collection enthusiasts and a favorite of yours truly since checking it out on VHS back in the late 1980s.
Unless you live under a proverbial rock, you’ll know that journalist/author/dandy Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at the ripe age of 88. I won’t rehash his impact on American arts and letters — there’s been plenty of ink spilled for just that purpose the last week or so, including this obit in the “failing” and now “crooked” The New York Times.
It’s doubtful that many of you will recognize the name Anne V. Coates. Such is the lot of a film editor, unknown to all but a handful of film geeks as he or she toils in the shadows of an editing suite, sweating over hundreds of thousands of feet of film (or nowadays, digital image capture), shaping it one cut at a time into something resembling a tightly paced, coherent narrative.
Believe it or not, if you look past all the zombie nonsense they keep churning out well past its sell-by date, the American basic cable channel AMC has become the gold standard for multi-part adaptations of dense, complicated books.
This first occurred to me in 2016 when the channel aired The Night Manager, an adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 best-seller. Not only did the program boast fine direction,
Well, I had another post in the works but the passing of two favorites, one a director, the other an actor, preempts our regularly scheduled programming.
Miloš Forman
While the great unwashed may not be familiar with the name, you certainly know his work, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first:
I think it’s safe to say that Mickey Rourke is a study in contrasts, an actor not just of two distinct careers, but also two distinct faces, the former something to celebrate, the latter best served as a cautionary tale.
Career/Face #1™ entered the public consciousness with his breakout supporting role as charming arsonist Teddy in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir, Body Heat, a film Rourke followed up with, among others, Diner, Rumblefish, The Pope of
For those of you who lap up, like so many Hot Toddies, those treacly Christmas-themed films running up and down the TV dial this time of year to warm your cold, stressed heart in the toasty embers of the season, I’m going to offer up a one-time warning: this post may not be for you. Because in the CFS’s manly world, one filled with bulging pecs, sweat-stained undershirts
In a recent, hugely popular CFS post (∼30 views, 0 comments…and counting!), you might recall that I recycled the well-worn assertion that prose has a distinct advantage over film in how the medium can “get inside people’s heads, which allows for an interior complexity that movies simply can’t hope to match.”
While the literary chops of, say, a Robert James Waller (“I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” — The Bridges of Madison County) or E. L. James (“Vaguely, I’m aware that I’m still in my sweats, unshowered, yucky, and he’s just gloriously yummy, his pants doing that hanging from the hips thing…Finally, my medulla oblongata recalls its purpose. I breathe…” — Fifty Shades of Grey) are much more formidable, the CFS™ grudgingly accepts the news that Nagasaki-born, British-raised writer Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Such is the immortal nature of images captured on celluloid that even a (self-proclaimed) cineaste occasionally finds himself confusing the dead for the living, an embarrassing scenario that usually plays out thusly: sprawled on the couch, clicker in hand, the CFS stumbles across a film featuring a performance by such-and-such that’s so clever he finds himself activating IMDB’s phone app to see what such-and-such has done lately, only to be reminded that such-and-such now resides in the great proscenium in the sky.