Word: riverrun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jane is never merely a symbol or a stereotype. Whether responding shyly to the kindness of a Union soldier, umpiring a baseball game or teasing her earnest young interviewer, she emerges as a human being full of surprising quirks and depths. John Korty, a director whose feature films (Funnyman, riverrun) have lacked emotional fire, here employs his unobtrusive and objective camera to excellent effect. Violence is seen as a constant element rather than a shocking intrusion on a black's existence. As such, its impact is all the more terrible. Finally, Cicely Tyson, whose muted fury was the driving...
...just didn't come through. A few days later, we realized what a dumb piece of filmmaking riverrun was. In late November, there wouldn't have been that delay...
...riverrun tells of a young couple fresh from Berkeley, living together somewhere in the California countryside. Opting out of conventional social strata and consumerism, they settle on a farm and attempt to live in a Walden -esque fashion. Their tranquility is upset when Sarah's father, a merchant seaman, makes a prolonged visit, waiting for the birth of his grandson. The father is a grizzled old Yankee, and ideas predictably clash with those of his equally non-conformist but distastefully aesthetic daughter and her would-be husband (the couple never marry). In a climax as overwrought as the fruitiest...
...mass of critical faculties, it seems, has been blunted by affection for previous Korty films. On the basis of riverrun, it has been said that Korty is a director in search of a screenplay. It seems more likely that he is a technician in search of a creative imagination. His visuals in riverrun are on no higher a level of achievement than the plot-in a narrative film, how could they be? Korty's editing and camerawork go in either for slap-happy pastoral or flash-backing exposition. There are only a few instances when writer-director-photographer Korty shows...
Some cock-eyed wonder, either at the Orson Welles Theater or Columbia Studio's booking agency, has double-billed riverrun and Dr. Strangelove. Viewing the two young lovers juxtaposed with Kubrick's maniac militarists gives the lie to the former's life-style. Even to rather lethargic men of good heart disaffected by the chaos last spring, all Korty's emphasis on such personal virtues as civility and vegetarianism seemed dilettantish, ultimately self-gratifying; the moral foundation of the kids in riverrun is perhaps not far removed from that of their parents. Perhaps riverrun is even a reactionary film...