Word: camerawork
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...recommended only for people, with Roman Polanski-esque leanings. As you probably read in People or the National Enquirer or something, Pretty Baby features the astonishingly ripe 12-year-old starlet, Brooke Shields, as a child growing up in a New Orleans whorehouse around 1917. Director Louis Malle's camerawork is beautiful, as it has been in many of his earlier films, but the story and acting in this fiasco are purely insipid. Particularly bad is Keith Carradine as the voyeur-dissipant who takes little Brooke away from all the evil and loses her later. Carradine's particular brand...
...pace. And in a sleeper called The Thief of Paris, the visual opulence and use of decorative objects created just the sort of decadent bourgeois dreamworld that Malle's meant to attack. But in this film the visual effects, like baby, are just pretty. All Malle's often exquisite camerawork is good for are fleeting moments of aesthetic satisfaction...
...lingers over the deaths of our favorite characters (although this is annoying), but because the storyline is so slack. Screenwriter John Farris has plotted the film with routine situations that are unworthy of the marvelous ingredients, and although DePalma has structured several dazzling sequences, loaded with bursts of subjective camerawork and rhythmically perfect editing, there are too many dead spots for the suspense to build properly...
...will dive out of its seats? If you're going to hit an audience over the head, fine--John Frankenheimer can do it with wit and style; in a film like Black Sunday the camera never stops moving and leaves the audience breathless with excitement. But in Coma the camerawork is smooth and dull, and Jerry Goldsmith's quasi-Bartok music underscores only the gravity of the proceedings...
Flashing back through the last ten years, we see Suzanne suffering in the barren French countryside, chopping wood, feeding geese, brushing her hair back with a dirty hand and a sigh. The camerawork here resembles a series of still photographs, romanticizing the harshness of country life, portraying Suzanne's parents as priggish, old-fashioned country people. The severity of the surroundings is so exaggerated that instead of echoing Suzanne's misery it just makes her look silly and implausible. Would a hip woman from Paris really resort to practicing her typing with the cows in the barn to avoid disturbing...