Word: scene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...suspense and the brilliant writing of Purple America is sustained almost through the entire book; the last scene seems a bit maudlin, a bit too pat an ending to the complex situation Moody describes so movingly throughout the book. Everything else in the book, however, is as near perfection as you're likely to find in fiction these days...
Woody Allen is not someone generally considered predictable, but this scene in Barbara Kopple's rollicking documentary Wild Man Blues reveals a supreme irony. While missing the Academy Awards to go woodwind-shopping might seem eccentric to us, that decision seems supremely predictable to Allen himself. He'll always pick his music over his stardom--it's just that no one in America cares (or even knows) that he plays...
Consider the sequence in which Kopple and Hurwitz leave the camera directly on Woody during a flailing, ten-minute performance when his lips have failed and his clarinet reed won't vibrate properly. Though the same scene played just as gruelingly and effectively in 1995's dramatic film Georgia, the sequence brilliantly captures the audience's experience of watching a doomed performance, as well as Allen's own furious determination to literally breathe the life back into his music...
...From Here to Eternity (1953) Sinatra's comeback film is a great, great weeper. Frank, as third banana to Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, turns in his best performance for $8,000 -- and netted the Oscar. Beyond the seaweed scene, this is also Clift at his tragic best. See it again...
...Manchurian Candidate (1962) John Frankenheimer directs Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury in this classic and savvy political chiller. Not Sinatra's best role, but his best movie. Worth it for the garden-party scene alone...