Word: bogdanovich
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bogdanovich picks good models and adds good ideas to his petty thievery. Bobby Thompson's execution of his wife and mother superbly blends diverse gimmicks (stop motion shots, wide angle distortion) into a well-conceived unity. A close moving shot along the floor after the corpses are removed reveals some loose change which fell out of the mother's house coat as she died--truly a good touch, as is Bobby's compulsive neatness: a bit of calculated direction about which I would be more sanguine were Bogdanovich's own camera style less neat and precise. These are better than...
ANDREW SARRIS correctly analyzed Bogdanovich's inability to mix cinema of contemplation with that of tight Hawksian storytelling. His camera is constantly pulling away from the action to examine the locations or pause on details. Consequently Bogdanovich gives us more visual information than we need to enjoy a crisp narrative, or (take your pick) too much narrative to enjoy a reflective stylistic bent normally associated with Mizoguchi or Rossellini. It is hard to determine what director has influenced Bogdanovich, but the outcome exists largely in terms of meaningless tracking shots which bear down on their subjects. In any case, Targets...
...generally conceded that an audience forced to watch a movie through the eyes of its main character begins to identify with that character, a point which for my money Bogdanovich disproves. Renata Adler wrote a depressing column suggesting that the audience, looking through the sniper's gunsight, wants him to hit his victims--just as the audience wants that car to sink into the swamp in Psycho although its disappearance serves only to protect nasty old Mrs. Bates. Nuts! An audience made complicit in wholesale slaughter by virtue of POV shots resists with all its might, particularly when they have...
...retire, beautifully played by Boris Karloff. We learn early that there is going to be a confrontation of the two at a drive-in, and tend to want to get it over with once the set-up has been established. To some extent, this is suspense generated slickly by Bogdanovich, but mostly it's irritation at having to wade through tentative cross-cutting toward a climax...
...Targets has one hell of a pay-off, and adding it to the film's generally successful calculation, Bogdanovich comes out pretty clean considering this is his first movie. Midway through he begins to set up a contrast between the horror of reality represented by the sniper and the melodrama horror of movie reality represented by Orlock. At the end, Orlock takes Bobby, knocking a gun out of his hand with a cane, asserting a potency he had thought nonexistent. Although ambiguous, the effect is one of total release: we are still in a movie, and in the movies...