Word: knowed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHAT we remember of the fantasies of our childhood is what Walt Disney wanted us to remember. What millions of us know of Alice is what the fat guy in the gray suits and the slicked-back hair told us: "You can learn a lot of things from the flowers/Especially in the month of May." And Bambi and Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney always managed to squeeze out all the incongruities, anything that he could not understand. Then, distilled, it would be fed into the machine that made Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and their...
...legend of Lylah Clare was met by complete critical indifference and/or scorn and generally written off as a disaster. Well, film critics don't know anything about anything, as everyone knows, and Robert Aldrich has (perhaps inadvertently) put together a sensational picture. Lest potential Aldrich cultists get their hopes up unduly, his recent Killing of Sister George turned out truly mediocre, the same restless cutting that compels in Lylah Clare working against him in Sister George. Aldrich is a heavy-handed man, and Lylah Clare deals in heavy-handed mysticism, heavy-handed acting stylization, heavy-handed melodrama, heavy-handed tragedy...
...power of Preminger's decision to control personally the behavior of his characters and the structure of his film, disregarding saner methods of storytelling. The abrupt insertion of musical numbers, for example, or the prison escape sequence may strike you as unbelievable or wretchedly excessive, but you know notwithstanding that a DIRECTOR is in control and is exercising his prerogatives. The cross-cutting (as in Hurry Sundown) makes no concessions to audience logic and proceeds solely on Preminger's sure and personal instincts. And at the end, when Preminger actually Stops the film and his voice on the soundtrack TELLS...
...entirely of croped details of frame elements, showing nothing as an independent whole). More simply, Preminger films the wide-angle claustrophobia of a Hippie bus to contradict their professed freedom, just as the immaculately confident space of the California courthouse is violated by the encroaching teen-agers. If we know how to read the content of Preminger's images, Skidoo is often scary, often moving (an LSD sequence is surprisingly effective, given Preminger's initially labored treatment of psychedelic special effects). Fortunately it's a comedy; the director comes out for sex, Hippies, drugs, all that's good. This youthful...
...paint on white walls, the multi-shaded greens of the train and apartment-house assassination sequences make the real world a complex support of Francis Jeanson's assertion that the students are drasticalliy oversimplifying. But the ending replaces conclusive directorial statement with irony, and signifies that Godard didn't know what kind of statement he wanted to make. I saw La Chinoise in Paris when it opened, and report regrettably that the color of the American prints (I've seen three) doesn't come remotely close to the sharp clear tones of the original...