Word: facials
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Billy Wilder once ecstatically claimed that Walter Matthau "could play anything from Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara." For more than a decade Matthau was as unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur...
...same time suitably wide-eved and innocent. David Gullette as the Thief-Taker General scowls meanly and reads his lines with precise meter and intonation. Senelick is good at developing expert character actors; Dribbling Wilf ("a criminal mastermind of the first water"), played by E. Mackenzie, has remarkable facial control and an admirable ability to salivate. The Incredible Porty McFigg (Lawrence F. Uhl) cats glass, strangles rats with his teeth, roars and grunts and pounds in his pornography-painted chest, all with considerable glee...
Wendy Walker's expressive self-portrait, dramatic in its russet, green and purple facial tones, is a forceful and moving expression. David Fitcher's silkscreen of a contorted American flag lying amid a claret and orange landscape ably controls, through an appreciation of the organizing effect of color, both its political and aesthetic context...
...second half of the film undermines all that precedes it. When we first saw the characters, they were apparitions floating up from suburbia. There was a beautiful, almost hallucinatory, effect in those early facial close-ups against a blank background. But once past histories and individual psychologies are filled in, the dreamlike quality vanishes. As the film becomes more "rational" and defined, it becomes less moving...
...real problem is that even after he excites our interest in plot, he refuses to change his subjective style. He does not show events but responses to events. There is, for instance, one scene where the three men are at a dice board. The camera focuses on their facial expressions, and we never actually see what happens with the dice. We are, of course, meant to infer actions from character reactions. And this would be a legitimate technique if Cassavetes were not constantly implying some larger, more important, context, some intricate narrative which lies just beyond sight...