Word: viewer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Then again, no one would confuse personal-injury lawyer Jim ("the Hammer") Shapiro with the Pillsbury Doughboy. He is experimenting with several versions of his one-second spot, at $35 each, in upstate New York. In one ad he yells "Hurt!" while the word comes hurtling at the viewer in large orange letters, above his phone number. Even at a second, the ad is as subtle as a car wreck--and, Shapiro hopes, just as likely to bring him new clients...
Kieslowski and his gifted screenwriting colleague, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, knew that drama begins with the human face; it is a sponge for the viewer's emotional complicity. So the camera takes closeup mug shots of faces in love or anxiety. Or it crouches furtively, behind a tree, in a closet like a fretful nephew or an avid voyeur. It watches ordinary people (including some of the most beautiful actresses in Europe) tangling with moral demons, holding on to what they were taught to believe or--this being real life in Poland just after martial law--what they have learned to settle...
...same impact on a viewer, for this film is Kieslowski's confession of the awful power in watching people--which is exactly what movies are. Now audiences have the precious opportunity to watch a great filmmaker watching...
...face is gaunt--ravaged but handsome, like a weathered statue--and the skull is nearly visible through the skin. The body is hunched; it needs a cane for support. Getting a first glimpse of Marcello Mastroianni here, the viewer is not surprised that this was the last film he completed before his death in late 1996. Was he only 72? He looks a decade older, frailer. A closeup could be like an autopsy, were it not for the actor's perennial ease and grace before the camera...
...lifelikeness. Its effect is to wrench your sense of scale out of kilter: far away, with no real humans near it, it seems close to you; then you realize how big it is, and it takes on the threatening and remote aspect of Big Momma, as though you, the viewer, were no longer an adult but a child...