Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Come Home; it is the odd couple as crime busters. Turner is a small-town detective, an apt occupation for a man of his temperament. He has placed Hooch, the only witness to his former owner's murder, in protective custody. As the movie's none-too-ambitious mystery plot unfolds, it is Hooch, ferociously loyal to both his former master and his new one, who does most of the protecting. He's obviously never heard of Miranda rights. Not that he is a one-note character: he introduces Turner to romance with the local veterinarian (Mare Winningham...
...least partly a drama of class distinctions. That is why, for example, the cavalier can simply walk in on the wedding of the peasant Masetto and walk off with his bride Zerlina. When Don Giovanni is converted into an East Harlem hoodlum, the character no longer fits the plot, so Sellars blithely begins changing various details of the story...
Just as Sellars' transfer of Don Giovanni to a phantasmagorical Spanish Harlem really tells us very little about Harlem, it also tells us nothing new about Don Giovanni. There have been so many changes in plot and character that Giovanni is no longer Mozart's defiant hero but a quite different and less interesting character of Sellars' creation. In the intensely dramatic finale, for example, he is not dragged unrepentant to hell by the statue of the man he murdered but rather led there, while groveling in his underwear, by a young girl in what looks like a Communion dress...
This tormented sensibility also afflicts Sellars' gloomy version of Cosi. It is full of visual gags (the two heroes pretending to go to war are waved on by crowds carrying signs such as BURN THE SUPREME COURT), but it has very little of Mozart's cynical vivacity. The plot derives from a rather cruel bet: two young men agree to adopt disguises and try to seduce each other's fiancees. Alas, it proves all too easy, but after a reasonable amount of tears and outcries, everyone is reconciled at the end. Not in Sellars' version. Here they finish...
...describe the plot -- in which we learn that Graham can reach sexual climax only while watching videotapes he has made of women's carnal confessions -- is to make sex, lies sound like a smirking stag reel. But this is not an "adult film" in the X-rated sense; it is an adult film, "patient and subtle," in its creator's apt words. It is about men who use women by watching them, and women tired of being the object of satyric attention. What amazes is that at just 26, Soderbergh displays the three qualities associated with mature filmmakers: a unique...