Word: branagh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Allen has cast Kenneth Branagh as Lee Simon, as uncannily familiar whimpering and shaking fellow in his mid-life crisis. Lee is a travel writer who has seen little beyond New England due to his fear of flying. He has just left Robin (Judy Davis), his wife of 16 years, to pursue other things, such as Bryant Park catwalks, movie stars and young struggling actresses...
...Simon (Kenneth Branagh) is a man in a rumpled corduroy jacket with his nose pressed eagerly against the double-glazed windows of fame. A failed novelist, he writes celebrity profiles for magazines and subsists emotionally on such crusts--a bit of gossip, a moment of false intimacy--as the famous discard as they pass...
Woody Allen's Celebrity tracks the former's possibly predictable fall and the latter's entirely unexpected rise within the tensely striving world of Manhattan's media and cultural demimonde. Since Branagh's performance (rather daringly) imitates Allen's anxiously stammering screen persona, and Davis is doing something she has done--expertly--for the writer-director before, playing a jilted, tilted woman, it may sound as if this is yet another of Allen's comically discordant chamber pieces about the impossibility of permanent connection between postmodern urbanites who think too much about themselves and feel too little for each other...
...well as leaders like George Bush and Fidel Castro. Equally important, the series lets us hear from the mid-level officials (the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, for example) who have the grittiest knowledge of how policy was actually carried out. There is narration, tautly delivered by Kenneth Branagh, but the story is told primarily through film footage of events and the recollections of participants. The filmmakers have combined these materials so that each hourlong program is coherent and well-paced, and the entire series has a dramatic drive...
...millimeter means big screen. Very big screen. It's a wave of nostalgia for those who lived through the '50s and '60s; a new experience for those accustomed to the economy-size compartments of mall movie theaters. And what films! They've already played "Lawrence of Arabia" and Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet." Still to come are "My Fair Lady" and "The Last Emperor...