Word: newsreel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like the recent television docudrama based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Evita presents itself as newsreel-supported fact, leading to an occasional gap in credibility. While it seems reasonable to expect audiences to understand that some of Evita is fiction, for instance, the revolutionary narrator is superfluously identified as Che Guevara. As the program notes. "Che and Evita never met... when she was at the pinnacle of Argentine politics. Che was a student in medical school." Characters never even refer to Che by name. "I don't know why they didn't just call him Juan, or Roberto," Baker...
Four Friends is a retrospective lock right. It's an ass-backwards cavalcade of newsreel-type images lacking sound and fury, interspersed with gratuitous about ethnic groups, a kitchen sink toward detail, and a felling of amity that never gels...
...newsreel of our President as he was presented with a live Thanksgiving turkey. One couldn't be sure whether he would eat it or appoint it to his Cabinet...
...historical fatalism of Citizen Kane. Resisting the megalomania that attends the making of blockbusters, Beatty plays it not safe but careful, stocking the movie with ingratiating motifs: Christmas trees, old songs, dogs, hats, chandeliers, white lilies, waiting taxis and one adorably solemn child. Dispensing with period photos or newsreel clips in which the historical John Reed might compete with Beatty's Jack, the film instead takes testimony from 32 "witnesses"-old friends and colleagues like Henry Miller, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Rebecca West, who offer a Kane-like kaleidoscope of memories. The rest of Reds is a nonstop...
Milos Forman seems to have understood this. The film's first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first...