Word: fleshly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...EITHER the plot or the acting provide the continuity that the cinematography lacks. The peek-a-boo piece in Playboy led us to believe that Violet's mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon) would be a reluctant and ambitious hooker who dreamed of getting out. But Sarandon the ruthlessness to flesh out that theme. She simply ups and weds one of her johns in the middle of the movie--leaving Violet being and leaving us wondering why she did it, and where we missed something. Less self-explanatory still is David Carradine's portrayal of the photographer-suitor, Bellocq. When he first...
Malle tries to make the movie's flavor pass for substance by rilling the film with portentous zoom shots, but the ruse does not succeed. The cast does not do much to flesh out the material either. Be sides having no resemblance to the real Bellocq, Carradine rarely gets a handle on the mysterious photographer-hero. With his sepulchral demeanor, he looks less like an obsessed artist than a constipated undertaker. Sarandon, sputtering like a road-show Tennessee Williams heroine, never creates a credible character. Nor does Singer Frances Faye, playing an ancient madam who does an obligatory...
...Catholicism for Greene is a prop. It's almost a gimmick, the straight man in a series of humorless, introspective routines. Want to introduce the possibility of belief into your characters' lives? Done--make them fallen or apostate Catholics. After that you don't even have to bother to flesh out the reasons for their guilt and self-contempt. The very fact that The Church is looking over their shoulder should be seen as reason enough...
Given the limitations of the screenplay, the cast flesh out the characters as much as humanly possible. Harry Dean Stanton, M. Emmet Walsh and Gary Busey all create idiosyncratic lowlifes out of drab dialogue. Theresa Russell (The Last Tycoon), playing Max's all too obligatory love interest, is powerfully sexy. As for Hoffman, he works hard and well to create a man who lives in a state of constant punishment. It's an admirable job, but one sadly wasted in a film that punishes the audience almost as much as it does the people onscreen...
Such paintings are grounded in a Gothic past. In general, expressionism preferred the art of the Nordic Middle Ages, with their unrelenting insistence on the "four last things"-death, judgment, heaven and hell-to any Mediterranean tradition. Egon Schiele's knobbly waifs, all etiolated limbs and pinched flesh, are the lineal descendants of the fallen Eves in Gothic art. The expressionist body is a scrag of mutton with big extremities, very unlike the prosperous Renaissance nudes that, however mutated, survived in Picasso and Matisse. Expressionism was an art of confession, directed against the impermeable crust of a deeply formalized...