Word: closeups
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...which 12-year-old Dakota Fanning plays a victim of sexual abuse who finds comfort in Elvis Presley music. Protested by religious groups and child advocates, the movie's much-debated rape scene turned out to be disturbing but not at all graphic. The camera fixes on a closeup of Fanning's face while the actions of a predatory neighbor boy are mostly implied. Despite protests, it appears the young star of Charlotte's Web and War of the Worlds was not harmed in the making of this movie. She also skied for the first time while in Park City...
...disturbing but not graphic scene that inspired the controversy, the camera fixes on a closeup of Fanning's terrified face while a neighbor boy unzips his pants. Despite the lack of nudity, and cutaways to falling rain, it's clear the boy rapes Fanning's character, Lewellen. More uncomfortable to watch than that short scene, in which the trauma is implied, are the lingering shots throughout the film in which Lewellen gyrates to Elvis music in her underwear while older men and boys watch hungrily...