Word: joan
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...inspects the set, a marvelous concoction by Joan Ferenchak, draped with a Brechtian-type banner reading "Figaro," and helps to roll out a rug. "These are two remarkable plays," Havergal says of Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, "and the playwright was a wild, extraordinary man, a pamphleteer and a music teacher. But very soon after he wrote them, one was taken over by Rossini and the other by Mozart, and the operas effectively put a smokescreen over the originals. Cutting and combining the two plays gives the whole show a fascinating irony. The first play...
...classic," and he seems to have communicated only that to his actors. As Marlowe, Robert Mitchum seems merely weary. Sarah Miles and Candy Clark, as the rich, spoiled and sexy sisters who inspire so much greed in others, as well as James Stewart, Oliver Reed, Richard Boone, John Mills, Joan Collins and Edward Fox, as assorted villains, victims and cops, all seem to be doing turns in a variety show rather than acting in an intelligently integrated drama. The result is a movie that lurches unsteadily from scene to scene. The Big Sleep is just an other snooze...
...make up in electricity what they lacked in technique, but when they cooked they cooked with gas, and Rob Stoner's bass lines and the spark of Scarlet Rivera's soaring violin often made you forget how muddy the drums were, and if they didn't Dylan and Joan Baez generally opened the second act with "Blowin' in the Wind," and if that didn't satisfy you had no right to sit there and should have given your ticket to someone who would have appreciated...
...this film; corpulent Ronnie Hawkins does. Dylan plays Renaldo, a somewhat logical cross between the Jack of Hearts and the lone rider of "Romance in Durango"--"Hot chile peppers in the blistering sun/Dust in my face..." Sara Loundes Dylan plays Clara, while Ronnie Blakelee plays Mrs. Dylan, and Joan Baez is the Woman in White. Basically, this is the movie--it appears nothing was planned, nothing "directed," and the cinema verite we are left with is a pastiche of extraordinarily fine concert film and meaningless vignettes, none very illuminating, some extremely offensive...
...women--I never felt I would be able to feel sorry for anyone who would title their autobiography Reflections in a Crystal Teardrop, but Joan Baez manages to come out from under the weight of Dylan's cynicism with her dignity intact. There is one long scene--perhaps we could call it "Diamonds and Rust Comes to the Silver Screen"--in which Baez and Sara stage a tug of war over the bemused Renaldo. Sara is shown as a made-up 35-year-old housewife, a sort of pushy Zelda Sayre; it is hard to believe that Dylan could have...