Word: scene
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This brings to mind a scene from the movie Soul Man, which illustrates this point brillantly. Two white kids, captains of pick-up basketball teams, argue over who gets to pick a Black who has just strolled into...
...silly, TV-movie treatment extends to just about everything in the movie. The movie never deals intelligently with the guilt and political doubts of the Popes. Lumet trots out a bad guy revolutionary from their past to show that the Popes are nice guys, but aside from that brief scene, it doesn't really matter why they are underground except that it provides the movie with its premise...
Occasionally the movie is so inconsistent that it's hard to believe Lumet watched his own film. Arthur spends the entire film castigating his whole family about the need for secrecy, yet in one scene he gets drunk, comes home, and shrieks out a confession to the neighborhood at the top of his lungs. It is one of the first moments where the movie goes definitively from implausible to just plain stupid...
...movie exploits the issue of family separation relentlessly. At heart, Running on Empty is a tearjerker. A particular heart-wrencher is the scene where Annie confronts her father after years of separation. Lahti, who is invariably better than the movies she is in, turns in a solid, believable performance. But the scene is disturbing, not only because it is emotionally manipulative, but also because it suggests that the Popes have forgotten that their sacrifice was a protest against bourgeois ideals. Annie goes back to her father, whom she once described as an "imperialist pig" for help in sending...
Phoenix is intense; he never smiles. He's uncompromisingly, darkly sincere. In fact, everyone in the movie looks just a little depressed, as if someone had told them that it is improper to smile a lot in a movie that treats Serious Subjects. The movie's best scene takes place when it loosens up during a birthday party for Annie. The family and Lorna start singing James Taylor's "Fire and Rain...