Word: dostoyevskian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fishburne). They are typical American kids who inexplicably travel together for days without ever engaging in intimate conversation. When they go mad in the film's second half, their transformations seem arbitrarily decreed by Coppola rather than dramatically justified. We feel nothing. Still, the crew members are almost Dostoyevskian in complexity compared with the deranged Kurtz. When we finally meet the renegade at his camp of Montagnard disciples, Apocalypse Now collapses into a terminal anticlimax. An overweight, bald Brando weaves in and out of the shadows of his temple headquarters, doing little more than spouting quotations from Conrad...
...Gambler, a particularly pretentious 1974 James Caan vehicle about a dedicated schoolteacher with a fatal weakness for making dangerous bets. Toback's new film is about a dedicated concert pianist (Harvey Keitel) who runs dangerous missions for his Mafia father. Both movies are cut from the same synthetic Dostoyevskian cloth, but Fingers actually manages to be more obnoxious than its predecessor. Perhaps the reason is that Toback wouldn't stop at writing the new film; he had to go on and direct it as well...
...that they deal not only with individuals at the bottom end of the spectrum, they also deal with a lot of white collar crime and political corruption. I am happy to be involved with that. I find it progressive. And I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates...
Lunatics with apocalyptic visions can be wearisome. Thanks to Percy's inventiveness and rapid pacing, Lancelot is not. In fact, he often sounds like a man playing out a symphony of Dostoyevskian experiences on a kazoo: "Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings?" He tosses off witty remarks about the vacuities of Hollywood and about the strange things that occur when the film crew sets up in his town: "What was nutty...
...Story of the Andes Survivors, Read inherited his Dostoyevskian themes as a gift. A remote plane crash, the compel ling temptation to cannibalism, all this extremity allowed him to make the most of his favorite question: How can a man manage to survive without being damned? Beside this bestselling documentary. Read's novels so far have seemed all too contrived. But there is courage along with foolhardiness here, seriousness as well as pretension. Over extended though he is, Read writes for the most part with grace and economy...