Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film focuses exclusively on this triangle, somewhat at the expense of the supporting figures. Kate's aunt Maude, Susan, Milly's chaperone and caretaker, and Lord Mark, Merton's rival, such pivotal and richly complex characters in the original novel, are here reduced to merely functional roles. Fortunately, the three principal players have more than enough presence to command one's entire attention, and Softley's cinematic style--heavy on facial close-up shots, the only method by which he attempts to reproduce James's constant psychological probing of his characters--plays off every shade of expression in their looks...
Hence the deliberate bumping of the story to 1910 (the novel was first published in 1902), to accentuate the closeness to present-day society of this transitory period of modernization, down to the street lights, elevators, subways and evening gowns. Hence also, perhaps, the film's overt eroticism, which constitutes the boldest and most potentially controversial reworking of the text. In James, the eroticism is so finely distilled that it breaks through to the surface only fleetingly, and then restricted almost entirely to the violence of suggestion and language rather than action. Softley's contemporized approach works because...
...know L.A. Confidential has ended when it is both daytime and not raining. In a fine version of the somewhat beefy Ellroy crime novel ostensibly about a strange murder, director Curtis Hanson portrays the cool, brutal world of Hollywood glam and corrupt police in 50s Los Angeles with all its gradations of ethics. Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe turn in fine performances that give us two different approaches to policing, thinking first and hitting later, or vice versa. A reptilian James Cromwell and slick Kevin Spacey round out a fine cast and a finer tale...
Much of Felix's charm comes from its wonderfully self-conscious adherence to the classic conventions of mystery novels. A few key red herrings are made painfully obvious, as are several crucial clues. A large, distinctive signet ring is referred to in detail three or four times; only a very slow-witted reader could fail to mark its significance. In the car after interviewing Mirry about Gavin's death, one policeman turns to his partner and asks significantly, in time-honored detective novel tradition, "I wonder how she knew [the murder weapon] was a spanner," since the precise murder weapon...
...innocent child who indirectly causes all this fuss, emerges as the center of both rationality and emotion in the novel. Existence with his flighty mother Mirry is less than satisfactory; when post-murder complications force her to leave Ian to fend for himself for a while, Ian, instead of lamenting her absence, looks forward to "a really good tidy-up" of their filthy apartment. He alone remains calm through all the turbulence of chaotic events, yet it is his plangent, intermittent requests for paternal affection that add a touching although never cloying emotional dimension to the book...