Word: flatness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...soon becomes clear that it is not going to be easy. Her sloppy, vicious cab-driving mother (Madeleine Thornton-Sherwood) turns up to excoriate her. A prison guard (Bob Burrus) has quit his job and accompanied Arlene to her Louisville flat, with the lecherous expectation of shacking up with her. He is an odd mixture of paternal solicitude and cruel menace. Her ex-lover and pimp (Leo Burmester) shows up. A smarmy swaggerer in an orange suit, he proposes to take her off to the rich mean streets of New York...
...revolutionary's muscles in aesthetic and theological debate with school friends become strangely wooden when, instead of reading them on the printed page, we are forced to watch actors trying to speak these abstractions with realistic spontaneity. As for Joyce's famous epiphanies, they seem disastrously flat on the screen, at least in this adap tation. It falls to John Gielgud to deliver the most famous of them, a priest's vivid description of the torments of hell. He speaks the words well enough, his precise diction giving them something like the burning power...
...Bogdanovich does not have a particularly keen descriptive eye; he goes for tourist snapshots instead of true grit. Except for Denholm Elliott, who offers a fastidious portrait of a typically down-and-out British colonial, the actors do little to help the proceedings. Gazzara is fairly blameless, given his flat role, but the miscasting of his con-man nemesis is a disaster. Had a strong actor played the villain, who recalls Harry Lime in The Third Man, Saint Jack might have had some tension and dramatic heft. Instead, the director has placed himself in the role and then played...
...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...
Despite a heavy cloud cover and intermittent rain, conditions were almost ideal for racing. The flat water, the well-buoyed course, and the swift current combrined to produce fast times throughout...