Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dern has his detractors--people who think he perpetually overacts. He might, but that's what makes him so interesting. Most comfortable in "psycho" roles, Dern's bulging eyes and thin, strangled voice convey inner torment and rage better than any film star today. He frequently suggest a cross between Anthony Perkins and Jack Nicholson--a homey, sardonic, seventies Norman Bates--and those quivering depths make his comparatively restrained performances in The Great Gatsby and Smile teeter devastatingly on the brink of an explosion. But in his all-out roles--in Silent Running, Black Sunday, Coming Home-- Dern makes...
Certainly Magic is endless, especially if one has seen Dead of Night, Psycho or any of the other horror movies it ineptly rips off The film tells the story of a psychotic ventriloquist (Anthony Hopkins) whose dummy "orders" him to kill. For two hours the audience must unwillingly suspend disbelief while the other characters take their sweet time in unmasking the villain. There is no pretty scenery or hot sex to relieve the intervening tedium...
...blame for this less-than-thrilling thriller lies with the ponderous pace of Richard Attenborough's direction, the same touch that made his A Bridge Too Far an hour too long. Nor is there much life in William Goldman's script, which uncomfortably straddles the genres of mystery and psycho-drama. The familiar theme of the mad ventriloquist and his not-so-dumb dummy can still invoke shudders, but the filmakers' failure to find a fresh approach makes the whole thing tedious...
...Paul Sorvino). Newman, like Price, wants to make a larger sociological point about the breakdown of oldtime immigrant values in chaotic modern America, but he overstates the case. Bloodbrothers has so much narrative, most of it melodramatic, that every scene becomes a climax, every speech a tragic monologue. Each psycho logical motive is spelled out; no events are left to the audience's imagination. As a result we remain outside the characters and eventually start to question their authenticity. The film's ending- true to formula but false to Price's novel - destroys whatever credibility remains...
King of Marvin Gardens, for the uninitiated (and there are many), is a wonderful and very bizarre film about two brothers--Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern, here originating the psycho role Dern has used for the past six years--who spend a weekend in Atlantic City during the winter. Anyone who has ever been to Atlantic City in the winter knows that it's the most desolate, depressing place on the East Coast (not that it's all that great in summer). Brackman lived there for five years as a child, staying with a grandfather in the hotel business...