Word: vagabonding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...harder and harder to ignore, as the film is buffeted about by the tired-eyed wonder of the younger and the stilted bluster of the elder. Apart from a consistently hilarious deadpan performance by Mary Kay Place, the story remains dreamy and quirky, but, almost too faithful to its vagabond kiddie heroes, a little grating and puzzling...
Stone plays Charles with some discomfort. Charles is a stock character, a young vagabond whose ignorance makes him vacillate between over-confident threatening statements to pathetic acts of (sincere?) sorrow. I do not know if it is with the acting or the directing, but Charles needs to be slimier. He is a con man who is trying to get money out of John while feigning gay companionship. While Stone utilizes his Pudding past and tries to play up the effeminacy of his gay character, it is not made certain until Charles threatens to leave John if he does not swindle...
...bitter dialogue combined with his penchant to answer a questions with another question, makes the pace of the film move very fast. His psycho-babble seems off-putting at first his lucid, outrageously original ideas surface from all of the verbage. This technique, combined with the Johnny's vagabond lifestyle, allows Leigh to put Johnny in unexpected yet realistic situations. For instance, a security guard wants Johnny to quit loitering in front of the empty building he protects. When the guard opens the door, Johnny embarks on a diatribe about how the security guard is goig...
...pulp. His outward emotions change, almost as visibly as his eye blackens. But by the end, he opts not for love but for wandering. This type of movie could undercut all of the statements of modernity Leigh has spent two hours making. Johnny must continue his solitary, vagabond ways with only his sharp wit and active libibo. Like a modern-day Huck Fin, Johnny sees the skeleton that forms the basis of the human psyche, he also sees the skeletons in everyone's closet. With this knowledge and his determination, we hope he finds the meaning that he wants...
Fellini once played God: he was the vagabond whom a peasant (Anna Magnani) mistakes for Jesus in Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle (1948). For Fellini, however, God was a goddess and woman was the world -- everything in the world that excites and frightens, forbids and enchants. To Marcello in La Dolce Vita, woman is "mother, sister, daughter, lover, angel, home." How small and sad and funny men are in comparison! At one end of the spectrum they are like the midget bluenose in Boccaccio 70 (1962) overwhelmed by Anita Ekberg as a sexual giantess -- it's the attack...