Word: rafelsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...corporate-thugs and coming up with the idea for a whole series of pulp thrillers. Maybe there's some meaning lurking in the fact that we were gushing over Sinatra while the French were building the Maginot Line. It doesn't really matter much. If Camus had seen Bob Rafelson's latest version of Postman, it would have inspired him to join the merchant marine...
...part because these scenes are the film's only submissions to spontaneity. This Postman is a true period piece-not 1934, but the early '70s, when American and European directors were investigating functions of the apocalyptic orgasm from behind a modernist screen. Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley...
...Rafelson makes handsome, careful movies (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens) about outcasts fighting a system all too ready to ignore them. At times, his Postman is too handsome, too careful: Rafelson caresses every ladder in Cora's stockings, every crescent of dirt under Frank's fingernails, until they become aspects of art direction. Jack Nicholson's performance as Frank is studied too. The dashing star of a decade ago has dared to inhabit the molting seediness of the character actor. So Cora must choose between two middle-aged galoots: one offers her security...
...wailing siren -Circe in a highway diner. Jessica Lange's Cora is trapped, no less than Nick and Frank, by the grim imperatives of the Depression and her search for the deepest sense of identity through sex. The actress's presence and gestural eloquence provided Rafelson with this point of focus: Cora knows who she is and what men will do to possess her. A fraternity of appraising eyes follows her on the streets, in court, at the diner. One managing, sad-faced, respectably poor-emerges from the crowd to remark that they are from the same town...
...debut in King Kong; few actresses could have gracefully endured the Kong hype to which she was subjected. "I was naive," she says, "and it brought me pain. For a while I lost control over my own life. I didn't work for two years." So when Bob Rafelson walked into a motel room in North Carolina, where Lange was appearing in a threadbare sex comedy, she was ready to show him what moviegoers had missed. Rafelson recalls that he found "an incredibly sensual woman who made no effort to be sensual. I thought that if I could...