Word: mckellan
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...Henceforward (1985) Ayckbourn's futuristic blend of A Clockwork Orange and Amadeus: In a blighted future, with gang wars raging outside, a reclusive composer buys a female robot to keep him company, while he struggles to compose his masterpiece. The thrilling 1989 London production (originally starring Iam McKellan) would be hard to duplicate - but someone should...
Will Saving Private Ryan split Best Picture votes with The Thin Red Line, leaving the race open for Shakespeare in Love or Life is Beautiful? Will the Academy give Tom Hanks another undeserved Oscar because they refuse to credit Ian McKellan for his portrayal of a gay film director? (the Academy refuses to acknowledge gay actors in gay roles--only straight actors who feign gayness get nominated. Witness the fact they passed over Rupert Everett in My Best Friend's Wedding for Greg Kinnear in As Good As It Gets...
...hovers somewhere between tolerable and entertaining. Scenes in the style of Stephen King, normally complex and intriguing, are here sickening. The ethics of making Dussander (a former SS officer) the interesting character and his strident accusers the bland and vapid ones are, of course, also questionable. This said, Ian McKellan may be given credit for giving the masterful performance one expects of him. Todd Renfro's acting (as the boy who discovers Dussander) is generally bland and flat, more appropriate to a sitcom, or an after-school special, than the thriller that is being attempted here. John T. Maier...
This said, Mr. McKellan may be given credit for giving the masterful performance one expects of him. McKellan takes a character whom the audience almost instinctively rejects and makes him immensely intriguing, even appealing. Of course, Dussander also becomes appealing to his counterpart, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a high school student who begins the movie diligently researching the Holocaust. Todd in fact is the one who discovers that old Mr. Dussander is a former S.S. guard, the discovery that sets the movie off on its course of alternating revelation and deceit. Renfro's acting is generally bland and flat, more...
...friend. The horror scenes, too, are filmed in a style that seems little more than a lackluster imitation of "The X-Files." Those same scenes are given their undeniable force not by the perfunctory work of the technicians but by the imaginative prowess of the man who, along with McKellan, is the only artist behind this project. The film is based on the novella of the same name by Stephen King, whose fiction, which can feel somewhat pulpy on the page, seems to come into its own via the overpoweringly visceral medium of the big screen...