Word: films
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Damon, who like Blanchett and Paltrow was cast in the film before achieving Oscar-night eminence, knows how to emit charm--of the aw-shucks variety in The Rainmaker or streetwise in Good Will Hunting. Here, though, he is a plodder. Pasty white among the bronze gods of Mongibello, striding stiffly, with nerdy glasses adorning his pinched face, Damon could more easily be mistaken for the creepy losers Hoffman usually plays (in Boogie Nights or Happiness) than for a patrician hunk like Dickie. The deglamorizing of Ripley pays off beautifully in his final meeting with Freddie, who sees through...
...abort you by guzzling turpentine, you may grow up with a sour view of humanity. Mary Patricia Plangman Highsmith--born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921--had murder on her mind from the first of her 23 novels, the 1950 Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock made a film of it a year later, though he dared include only one of the book's two murders. Soon after, the woman whom screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) calls "our best expatriate since Henry James" left for Europe, where she was welcomed as an important novelist, not just a thriller writer. From...
...movie, unable to pack in the book's entire accumulation of incident, is necessarily anecdotal. Frank's mother (Watson) has been slightly sanctified, and Dad (Carlyle) given the lilt of Irish laughter to go with his wastrel ways. But the film has the vitality of remembered truth. Is Frank hungry? He licks a newspaper for the residual grease of the chips it held. Is he sopping? He steps in more puddles than Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain. (Ten years the family rented the same flooded ground floor, and no one thought to lay a plank from the doorway...
...quick, deft lines. Perhaps, in the long view, we are all idiots. But we don't need a 60-year perspective to see Robbins' attitude revealed in all its meanness of spirit. If he hated these people so, why did he waste his time and ours putting them on film...
...doubt his qualifications to do a job beyond his expertise. Morris takes this quietly agitated fellow (he consumes about 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes a day) at face value, letting Leuchter explain how tinkering with science led to his rise and fall. It's the fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution...