Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...executives who get the sack: Use your new free time doing something you have been wanting to do. Hoveida, fired as Iran's longtime United Nations ambassador by the revolutionary regime, is devoting his time to writing and art. The deposed diplomat, who in the past penned essays, film criticisms and six novels, has turned to nonfiction: the events that led to the downfall of the Shah and the execution of Hoveida's older brother, former Premier Amir Abbas Hoveida. Meanwhile, a Manhattan gallery is showing 37 examples of his Persian calligraphy, which consists of colorful, paper...
Last Embrace is a film in which a stylish director and a superb cast (even the small parts are played by well-known and expert players, including Sam Levene, Charles Napier and Academy Award Winner Christopher Walken) do their best to triumph over a script that lacks witty writing and genuinely suspenseful substance. The result is a pleasant movie to watch, if your idea of a good time is an unelevated pulse, but one that leaves no lasting impression...
Much running about ensues, as two forces stumble over themselves in their desire to dispatch Scheider. Like so many younger film makers today, Demme is generous in his implied homages to Hitchcock. His camera buzzes around like a mosquito looking for some place to draw blood. Maddeningly, the script offers a number of scenes that suggest an air of gathering menace, but it never quite manages to stitch them together into a tense line of force. Nor does it offer substitutes that can compensate for that defect-an off-the-wall characterization here, an unexpected plot twist there, a memorable...
...loony side too. Add in those neat acting cameos and Last Embrace is not a total loss. It is just that the movie is not all that it might have been or promised to be. The title implies a certain passionate intensity of approach, but all the film really manages is a diffident hug, a peck on the cheek...
...film explores the duality of Doinel's nature; on one hand, he defends his solitude with a stubborn, irrational fervor: no, he will not leave his shirts or razor at his girlfriend Sabine's flat, even though doing so would put an end to his continual lateness at work. Yet he tracks down, seduces, and falls in love with this same woman, all from finding a photograph of her, ripped up on the floor of a telephone booth. He forgets that he and his wife Christine (Claude Jade) are to be divorced that morning. Yet as he and his wife...