Word: forsyth
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Directed and Written by Bill Forsyth...
...demonstrated in last summer's Gregory 's Girl, Bill Forsyth is a master of the throwaway turnabout. Here, with a tenser situation and a somewhat richer mix of characters, he makes about the kind of advance one would expect from him, modest and self-effacing. Maclntyre (Peter Riegert), the acquisitions man from Knox Oil and Gas, may think of himself as "a telex man," all hard figures and bottom lines, but once in the field he is entirely capable of going all soppy about a wounded rabbit. His boss, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster, expertly doing his clean...
Displacement of conventional expectations is, of course, Forsyth's specialty. If one sometimes wishes Forsyth could more often keep his eye on the comic point, it is also true that he finds his best material out there on the periphery, at the edge of the frame. What is a punk rocker doing in the rural highlands? Why does that motorbiker keep burp-burping through the action without explaining himself? Forsyth isn't telling. He's just laughing to himself, a shy, shrewd film maker worth bending near so you can hear what he has to say amidst...
...there is more to the appeal of Gregory's Girl than wistfulness for the kind of adolescence no one seems to enjoy any more. Writer-Director Bill Forsyth, working inexpensively on his native heath, is not one to confront life headlong and headon. He is a jogger not a sprinter, a man content to chug amiably along observing the world through a series of sidelong glances instead of driving single-mindedly toward a narrow goal...
Ensuring that his hero gets squared off and paired up is not the only thing on Forsyth's mind. He has a genial taste for mild eccentrics and sees to it that plenty of them wander in and out of Gregory's life. There is a friend who is overstuffed with useless facts ("Did you know when you sneeze it comes out of your nose at 160 miles per hour?" he inquires of a girl he's trying to impress), a headmaster who encourages a student's underground traffic in exotic pastry because...