Word: franked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Frank's desperation will remind some people of Taxi Driver--and, indeed, the movies share the same director, the same screenwriter (Paul Schrader) and the same ambiance (New York's night streets, teeming with hookers and junkies, quickened with the threat of sudden, pointless death). There is also, of course, the same sort of harsh yet slightly fantastical realism and the same sort of antisocial protagonist, who thinks his life might be justified if he could just leave these hellish streets behind. The fact that Frank's vantage point is, like Travis Bickle's, a moving vehicle (in Frank...
...there's a key difference between the two characters. Travis was, at the least, a sociopath; Frank, no less than the people he tries to help, is a victim. The movie is powered by his yearning not just for usefulness but also for transcendence. He hungers for peace, meaningful contact and someplace he can rest and heal from the nightly horrors he sees...
...best hope for that is Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), daughter of a heart-attack victim Frank has brought into the hospital, where the man lingers between life and death and where Mary hangs out, awaiting his fate. In her repressed way, she's as strung out as the medic, and perhaps not good news for him. But she's the only hopeful news in sight, and their tentative flirtation keeps getting interrupted--by cardiac arrests in nightclubs, by the allegedly virgin birth of twins, by the running violence of an often half-naked street person (well played by the singer...
Even when nothing is doing, something is doing, for Frank's driver partners are all loony in different ways. John Goodman's false reasonableness, Ving Rhames' born-again religiosity, Tom Sizemore's addiction to violence--nothing about any of them can help Frank. The film is full of casual dark humor, but what's best about it is its resistance to the conventional three-act movie structure. Its string of incident is relentless, virtually undifferentiated, like life, and contains no promise of uplifting resolution. Bringing Out the Dead is like its title--blunt, truthful, uncompromising. It is hard...
...here, an annex there, accidental courtyards created in between as the building grew to accommodate 1,300-plus kids and their growing appetites. Just two years ago, if you plugged in a computer, it might have blown out a circuit. The school has been rewired since then. Chief custodian Frank Schaffer is already inspecting the premises, moving back the picnic tables that the skateboarders clear out every weekend. He knows every inch of the place, from the mile of utility tunnels in the basement to the old attic that was once used as a rifle range. "This building...