Word: savannahs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nearly three hours, Eastwood's ponderous adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil creeps along like a slug under the hot Georgia sun. Drag is indeed the most striking feature of this unwieldy film, and I'm not talking about Lady Chablis, the preeminent transvestite of Savannah...
...Williams is only one of many, many characters Berendt has on file. There's also Luther Driggers, an eccentric chemist who carries on his person a vial of poison powerful enough to kill every man, woman and child in Savannah; Joe Odom, a ne'er-do-well lawyer who lives in other people's houses and steals electricity from next door when the power company cuts him off; and, of course, the irrepressible Lady Chablis...
...results are disastrous. Midnight is one of those rare films that cries out for a voice-over, but Eastwood and his writers seem to have consciously avoided that course of action. Instead, they give us John Kelso (Cusack), an idealistic young writer from New York who comes to Savannah to write an essay on a Christmas party and ends up getting involved in Williams' murder trial. By embroiling Kelso in the plot, the refreshing detachment of Berendt's narrative is lost. The story shifts from the town and people of Savannah to the fictional Kelso--his life, his ideals...
...these scenes, the simplicity of the set design--a bare stage, whose back-drop, with its slowly changing colors and tones of light, evokes the horizon of a flat African savannah--suddenly makes its aesthetic value felt. The dancing warriors are the only thing on the stage: the tawniness and black-and-white spots of the animal skins they wear, the flowing white fur of wristlets and anklets flying with their movements, the sharp vertical movement of spears and staves and of the black-and-white geometrical design of the tall shields all convey an energy which is certainly...
...Seven, in which he had an unbilled turn as the gruesome serial killer who cuts off Gwyneth Paltrow's head. "Whether a character does good or bad things doesn't interest me," he insists. "It's whether there are ambiguities." Later this year he will appear as the Savannah, Ga., antiques dealer accused of murder in Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil...