Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film's Dutch makers do occasionally bring to it a certain intensity, arising from still lively feelings about the wartime behavior of their fellow countrymen. Better yet, the movie is based on an autobiographical novel by Erik Hazelhoff, a Resistance hero now living in Hawaii. Hazelhoff escaped occupied Holland to join the Free Dutch forces operating out of England. He returned on an ill-fated mission to rescue some political leaders and later became an R.A.F. bomber pilot. As played by Rutger Hauer, he is an engagingly unmilitary figure, peering nearsightedly through rimless glasses at a once comfortable world...
...minds about their story. On the one hand, they are tediously documentary about every odd manifestation of the unseen world at work, and the accretion of these minor incidents is so dully presented that we begin to long for a good scare. On the other hand, when the film makers try to assuage our restlessness, they swing too far in the other direction. James Brolin, as the father on the verge of being devilishly possessed, does so much eye rolling that in the movie's sober context, he appears ludicrous. The absurdity is heightened by Rod Steiger...
...result is not chills, but an uncontrollable desire to break into laughter, so lacking is the film in properly gothic suspense. Margot Kidder is chipper and pleasant as the puzzled wife resisting her worst suspicions about the demons in her dream house, but she cannot overcome the film's ineptitude and lethargy. The movie's creators should either have stuck to the facts, ma'am, or they should have invented something to scare the pants off us. As it is, they have managed merely to bore them...
What if Little Nell doesn't die? What if nothing much happens to her? Nell had better be unusually charming, that's what. The feeling here is that Peppermint Soda, a film about an uneventful year in the life of two young Parisian sisters, wavers back and forth across an awkward boundary: sometimes it is just barely charming enough, and sometimes it almost charms, but not quite...
...artistic risk taken by French Director Diane Kurys in this her first film is large. She wants to break free of the artificiality of plot, the storyteller's hokum in which the revelation of character is only incidental to the tedious march of exposition, complication, resolution. Director Jean-Charles Tacchella's likable Cousin. Cousine managed this difficult trick; it simply showed two ordinary but agreeable people falling in love and taking delight in each other, utterly without benefit of story. Kurys tries for the same artful simplicity. She introduces an appealing girl of 13 named Anne...