Word: mysticism
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...stoned surfer dude in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And one of his four Oscar nominations was for playing a sweet-souled retarded man in I Am Sam. But he won an Oscar this year for mobilizing an implacably vengeful rage as the father of a murdered girl in Mystic River. Before that, he turned his anger into the rancid sullenness of a tormented guitar player in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown and made us sympathize with an unapologetic killer in Tim Robbins' death-row drama, Dead Man Walking. Let's call him a necessary actor. The movies always...
...need to connect to the audience that makes Man a more successful tragedy than Helgeland’s Mystic River script. Scott’s actors play their melodramatic roles with a grace that Sean Penn did not achieve in that film’s overwrought dinner-theater performance. This decision gives what is essentially a well-written straight-to-HBO Rutger Hauer flick a core that Mystic never achieved. Can you imagine what Christopher Walken would have been in Eastwood’s hands? Here, he underplays his role. Let me repeat that: Walken underplays a role. The last...
...kidnapping plot is incoherent. Somehow it involves a shadowy secret agency of corrupt cops and villainous baby’s mamas, but their interaction with the actual kidnapping is never clear. Pita’s mother has hysterics that belong in a Mystic River, not this profoundly reserved effort: she quickly becomes no more than annoying. Why is unfazeable do-gooder journalist Mariana (Rachel Ticotin) so well-connected, and why don’t some of the uber-powerful villains follow through on their threats against her? Why is Scott Free productions fixture Giancarlo Giannini so damn cool as Mariana?...
...autobio" trend in the medium. Never one to stick to trends, after an aborted fictional project that featured dialogue written in gibberish, Brown turned to "Louis Riel," yet another audience-challenging work. "Riel" is Brown's interpretive biography of Louis Riel, a real-life 19th-century French-Indian mystic who defied the Canadian government's annexation of what became Manitoba. Crystallizing many of Brown's themes of religion, anti-authoritarianism and madness, "Riel" has become a critical and commercial hit, selling out of its first printing in two months. This past weekend, the 2004 Eisner Awards have nominated...
...most interesting sections of the exhibition examines the influence on the artists of Savonarola, the apocalyptic preacher of the 1490s who organized the Bonfires of the Vanities, in which many famous Renaissance works of art were destroyed. It features Botticelli's only signed and dated painting, Mystic Nativity, from the National Gallery in London, and commissions Filippino painted for Savonarola's most powerful follower, Francesco Valori. "Botticelli was personally influenced by Savonarola. There is a change in his style that would reflect his religious convictions," Nelson notes. "His work becomes more austere. The figures lose their pearls and gems...