Word: flashbacking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...camera and to hear Mark's quavering voice: "This is the first of July, and Tommy's just died." The succeeding scenes are equally brutal -- a medical official taking down the vital statistics, the corpse being wrapped in a body bag. The film ends, heartbreakingly, with a flashback to Tom and Mark dancing in front of the camera in that spirited documentary of 15 years earlier...
...other big issue is political reform. The puff piece on him in this month's Rolling Stone makes a big point of his work with labor groups and his success at mobilizing local activity while he was managing Clinton's campaign. In what seemed like a bad Jerry Brown flashback, Wilhelm predicted the increased use of "800" numbers and celebrity telethons. He even compared the possibility of such an event to "Jerry's Kids." You can just picture Barbara Streisand urging us all to give to "Clinton's Committees...
Such was the moral of the Dutch Vanishing: curiosity killed the cat. It's a provocative premise, but it wants some legerdemain and a third act. Enter screenwriter Todd Graff (Used People). He takes the original's perplexing flashback structure, flattens it out and fattens it up, mostly by creating a new character, a waitress (Nancy Travis) who falls in love with Jeff. Graff changes the theme: now knowledge is just a cue for righteous revenge. The Dutch movie had no gun; in a Hollywood thriller there must be a gun, and it will go off. The original's ending...
...film's audience. For director Gyllenhaal has worked some striking variations on standard flashback technique, visual bestartlements that fling us, edgy and disconcerted, from 1974 Pittsburgh, where the film's framing action takes place, to England in the wartime '40s. There, in the Fens, the ; East Anglian coastal marshlands that provide the film's title, the young Tom and Mary (Grant Warnock and Lena Headey) fall in love...
...lust? Anyway, what happens to them is careless and heedless. The actors bring a terrifying, clarifying force to their representation of an unsentimental sexual education, more powerful than any the movies have lately given us. There is something of Adam and Eve in their innocence. Except that as flashbacks within the flashback unfold, we realize that this Adam is already tainted by something like original sin, visited on him by his family's history (and symbolized by the hulking, tragic presence of his mentally deficient older brother), and that this Eve's temptation is, if anything, more clearly prefigured than...