Word: reel
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...screen of abstraction. Professional actors are neither trained nor eager to display themselves so ruthlessly for millions, and porno stars are unlikely to be convincing in a serious film's nonsex scenes. Audiences may have trouble shifting gears when a character they believe in suddenly impersonates a stag-reel stud. Suspension of disbelief breaks down, viewer becomes voyeur...
...business of this intricately designed yet simply stated movie is to turn obsession into irony. This is always a useful enterprise. In life, it is the great antidote to insomnia; in movies, it is the alternative to melodrama and an excess of gunshots in the final reel...
...true that in Iwerks' rubbery stick figures and bare backgrounds there was an elemental anarchy that is still delightful. But one has only to look at Norm Ferguson's roughs for Playful Pluto, in which he caused his pup to be caught in flypaper for an entire reel of helpless hilarity to see what three-dimensional plasticity could do to enhance the range and delicacy of animated humor. When the whole Disney gang got going on something like The Band Concert or Mickey's Service Station, the allegro pace of comedy bits could be staggering. That these...
...splash of delirious lyricism-King William (Ed Harris), naked, birching himself clean in a sylvan lake before mounting his trusty motorsteed-then bogs down in 145 minutes of psychological verismo. The writer-director wants to present rounded, sympathetic characters but never allows them to develop beyond the caricatures in Reel 1. Romero, whose early films displayed the carnographic brio of the E.C. horror comic books of the '50s, has gone classic-or, at least, Classics Comics. Even his talent for visceral editing is restrained: the big tilts are flaccidly cut, and the final battle is confusingly anticlimactic. Romero...
...pausing at the gutter to retch quietly for a moment then loudly rejoining the buoyant inebriated throng, they totter off toward the campus or a cafe where they can calm down with a cup of coffee. The fraternal transport is not at is beatific height. Arm in arm they reel indifferent to traffic or the piercing cold: one lifts his hands to the frigid heavens and races down the street backward, his scarf and topcoat wildly flapping in the wind, crying out in ecstasy. "Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!" The unbroken tension of weeks--of a year and a half...