Word: schrader
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...folks dying in the snow (Fargo, The Sweet Hereafter, A Simple Plan). And they revere Nick Nolte, who has a lock on the role of the tough man--out of sorts, time and control--in a world with no use for his strengths. No surprise, then, that Affliction, Paul Schrader's film from a Russell Banks novel about family violence in New Hampshire, has placed strongly in the year-end critics' polls, and that Nolte won some Christmas laurels as best actor...
Unless he has adapted to the new era, as has the one who calls himself Juvenal in writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's Touch. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts...
Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead. Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But Touch was never meant to be Get Shorty. It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective...
MOVIES . . . TOUCH: Writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's 'Touch' is the story of Juvenal, a Christ figure who has adapted to the modern era. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts...
MOVIES . . . TOUCH: Writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's 'Touch' is the story of Juvenal, a Christ figure who has adapted to the modern era. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts...