Word: derning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this as a setback. But movies were too ingrained in Nicholson's blood to be discarded after a few dozen failures; he turned to personal experience to improve his literary output. He wrote about drugs. The Trip (1967), directed by Corman and starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern, detailed, in an obscure way, an L.S.D. experience. Not coincidentally, wife Sandra had experienced a bad trip; understandably, she implored Jack not to work on such a screenplay; not surprisingly, he doggedly persevered, and she packed up and left with daughter Jennifer before The Trip was completed...
Coming Home was the first non-documentary film to approach the war with any pretensions to seriousness and the results were pretty sad. With Bruce Dern as a fired-up army officer, Jane no-that's-not-me-in-the-love-scene-but-that-was-me-in-Barbarella Fonda as his wife and Jon Voight as a crippled vet, everyone is too damn earnest. The depth of the emotional struggles in the movie makes Ordinary People look like a model of complexity. And when Dern bares his buns for that catharsis/baptism, you want to vomit. Any ninth-grader could have...
...obsession with isolated, emotionally-distant characters, and he shows them with remarkable clarity. One wonders, though, if he's really exploring them. The King of Marvin Gardens might have been his best movie, but it was hell to sit through even though Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern were clearly doing something extraordinary. He's a maker of strange hybrids, this Rafelson, and with The Postman Always Rings Twice he has made another of his mutant masterpieces...
...accused of squandering valuable resources. Christopher Plummer, as an activist diplomat, gets to display little more than his profile; and James Woods, who could become the most engaging villain since the young Cliff Robertson, has again been cast in a part that must have been written for Bruce Dern. The sympathetic viewer will want to rescue Hurt and Weaver, not from the bad guys, but from the mechanism of this eyewitless plot. The canny movie producer will want to recast them as the Tracy and Hepburn...
...entertains various fantasies of telling off not just the client but the whole damn world. That's about it. Di rector Trent has no sense of style; Writer Kleinschmitt pencils in obscenities for his characters to spout instead of lines that the actors might savor delivering. Neither Dern nor Ann-Margret is ever able to get into character. They try gamely, but they remain sociological abstractions pasted into a tasteless, materialistic milieu that has been overexplored by novelists and moviemakers...