Word: pureed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...role that she never quite becomes. This is partially because she was famous before she undertook the role, unlike Barbara Streissand, (Funny Girl), who, in the beginning of her career, was considered synonymous with her part. Also, while Diana Ross changed her singing style, her physical delivery is pure Supremes. She surmounts these problems only in the early scenes where she depicts the young Holliday. In other parts of the movie, the contrast between her and Lady Day is so extreme that it is laughable. The difference between the two women is especially evident in the opening scenes where Ross...
These sorts of hyperbolic vignettes are piled one stop the other without logic or order. Russell has no intrinsic rationale for his boned-up effects. It's pure Hollywood chi-chi. The movie lasted less than a week in Boston. Consider for example a scene of Sophie and Henri husting stones by the seashore. He scales a lower of white rock, and straddling he peak, black cape whipping in the winds, he cuts a lone prophet figure against a clear sea; meanwhile the dances out her care-free spiritual applause on the sand, crying. "It will be a hymn...
...TELESCOPING A LIFE. Russell has descended to pure scandal-mongering. It is simply naive to explain artistic creation solety by sexual trauma, and cheap to elicit sympathy for an artist by the sordid expose of private scandal. Russell twists the facts and fabricates the milliew. The result is an hysterical film, rather than a film about hysteria. Even worse, Russell revels in his gossip--he has a fiesta turning a genuinely moving story into a turgid peephole show...
...four decades than to old Edward G. Robinson bloodlettings on the Warner Brothers back lot. In the traditional Robinson role of the chairman of the thugs is Joseph Wiseman, a usually reliable actor who has mysteriously decided to portray the Sicilian overlord Salvatore Maranzano in an accent that is pure Transylvanian. Maranzano divides the gangs all over the country into families, then stands back and watches the fun, quoting Julius Caesar and letting the profits accrue until he himself is finally eliminated by an enterprising rival. Various beatings, tortures and murders ensue, although The Valachi Papers reserves its worst maulings...
...bill during the Harvard Square Theater's Janus Film Festival. I can't think of a better evening of film. Bergman's work marked that director's broadest progression away from both adolescent psychological drama and baroque imagery, towards a mature acceptance of emotional struggle and transformation, and a pure film style based on character. Dealing with an aging doctor's recognition of his sins during a trip to Stockholm taken with his daughter-in-law, the film develops in vignettes suggested by the scenes which remind the doctor of his youth. It is not as piercing as such later...