Word: closeup
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...graduated summa cum laude. They kept smiling through Cantet's long, fond acceptance speech, then were joined by other cinema dignitaries - including Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper and Faye Dunaway - who were there as presenters. Suddenly, les enfants de Cannes were movie stars, reveling in their group closeup...
...awake from a bad dream. There's an intelligent insolence about Richards, suggesting a pre-teen Tilda Swinton. The girl has the burden of carrying the first half of the movie virtually alone, and does so effortlessly - as if she knows she was born to be appreciated in gigantic closeup - but unself-consciously, without the preening assertiveness of so many child actors. Thanks to Richards, Lyra is the complex character she should be: both earthy and magical...
...Mankiewicz and the urban sophisticates he wrote about, words were swords in the duel of wits. He thought of himself as a screen playwright, and Hollywood as Broadway West: films were theater in closeup. (Academy voters apparently agreed with Mankiewicz: they named him best director as well as best writer for Three Wives and Eve.) No question, he loved the sound of his own authorial voice; it had an overripe eloquence that could beguile any viewer-listener. And when he turned plays into films - producing Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story or directing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - he could fall...
...Unlike some of this movie's skeptics, I don't mind Rogen. He has sweet eyes, a voice too deep and rich for his age and, in his one nude scene (Heigl doesn't get one, as Mr. Skin will tell you, except for a gynecological closeup late in the film) a cute tush. But by Hollywood beauty standards, he's so on the lower side of ordinary, he almost doesn't belong in movies. That's one good thing about Apatow: he subverts the medium's inherent aesthetic fascism - survival of the cutest - and puts funny people center-screen...
...look is too often neutralized, made listless, by all the talk. There are many long dialogues, shot in Cyclopsian closeup. Trying to give the orations more heft, the actors shout them, often pausing after each sentence fragment - as Leonidas does in this iambic-pentameter invocation to his troops: "Eat hearty. For tonight. We dine, In hell...