Word: forman
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...Taking Off is an equally minor film and a greater failure. Like Claire's Knee for Rohmer, this is Milos Forman's fourth film, and a comedown from his previous work...
...surface problem is a familiar one: Czech expatriate Forman is not familiar with the American milieu. His Greenwich Villagers look and sound like Jones Beach burliness, his suburban middle-class home is unrelievedly, unfunnily tacky; not sterile, but completely manufactured, though he films it gently, with soft lighting...
...seen in the film is capable of following an action or thought to its end. Granted-Forman is dealing with limited people. But he doesn't show us why he chose them. Odets and Miller at their best also dealt with "the ordinary," but at those points of confrontation which showed their transcendent qualities or possibilities for change. If Forman fells the social limits his characters run up against are those of the human condition, there is no reason for him to have delineated such a steadfastly minor group of people as those he presents here-unless, as John Simon...
Reviewers were wont to acclaim Forman's earlier filmed anecdotes for exposing the drabness of life in an industrial socialist state. His method: to depict characters whose development is short-circuited by necessary compromise to the social structure. That Forman would make the same kind of film in the United State indicates that his vision is more suited to the acceptance of a restrictive state than criticizing...
Those byproducts, however, are minor results of Forman's call to arms -as was the trickle of money to B.E.D.C. More significant is the growing response to the clear need of the poor, the rejected and the dispossessed...