Word: rich
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Once Jacob lands in Denmark After the Wedding - a rich, intricate and very gripping movie from Susanne Bier - takes off. His benefactor, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), is Jacob's opposite in every way. He's a large, bumptious man, open in his emotions - genial and generous in his family life - but devious and manipulative in his business dealings. He invites Jacob to attend the wedding of his adopted daughter, knowing full well that (a) he has married the great love of Jacob's life and (b) that the daughter is actually Jacob's child - a fact that becomes agonizingly clear...
...angry self-made man - and a brutality that is openly manifested in a drunken restaurant brawl that is not quite as surprising as we at first think. We've always suspected that there is more rage in him than he dares to let on. He would not have gotten rich so fast without it. And all along, we have sensed that his support for Jacob's orphanage is contingent on bending him to the rich man's implacable will, which includes a reunion between his wife and her embittered former lover. This guy is the all-time master manipulator...
...think that's why After the Wedding works so well. There was a time, particularly in American movies, when the lives of the rich and the damaged were a common subject - almost a genre in itself, with the likes of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford facing the consequences of their pasts or the errant behavior of their soul-crushing relatives and trying to find true love and a reliable trust fund. The clothes, hair styles and decor of these films were alone worth the price of a ticket. And that says nothing about the attendant hysteria of their plots. These...
...again in the role of the overbearing underdog, the big galoot who's somehow likable. But it's Heder, the geek from Napoleon Dynamite, who's the more appealing presence, and his character who has the cleverer backstory. We learn that as a child Jimmy was adopted by a rich man (William Fichter) bent on breeding champion skaters. "When I was nine," Jimmy says, "my dad insisted I be circumcised to minimize wind resistance." In his early maturity he has soft curls and a winsome grace; Chazz sneers that he looks "like a 15-year-old girl...
Beard Papa's is the Dunkin' Donuts of Japan, only it has replaced fried dough with cream puffs on steroids. It opened its first U.S. store in 2003 and has been invading mall spots. Inside each store, Japanese women in uniforms push down on metal levers to plop rich, creamy custard mixed with whipped cream into oversize profiterole shells. Like so much of Japanese culture, Beard Papa's has taken our creation and refracted it through the mythological wholesomeness of America in the 1950s--which is just what you want fast-food dessert to taste like...