Word: weills
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Girl Friends, directed and produced by Claudia Weill '68, is a small movie. It's not that nothing happens, but when it's all over, you wonder if it was worth the trip. What you see on the screen is hardly more engaging than watching your neighbors. A lot of water passes under the bridge, but somehow it never reaches the other side. What does emerge is a very warm and compelling portrait of a young woman, Susan Weinblatt. But however appealing her character is, so little is required of her that we remain uninvolved. She ends up very much...
...WEILL'S APPARENT PURPOSE is to focus on the friendship of the two women, but she shifts to a study of Susan. While it is Mayron's performance which makes Susan such an attractive and humorous character, not all the problems with the character of Ann stem from Skinner's weak performance. Ann hovers in stereotypically suburban settings, seeming not only distant from Susan, but from the camera as well. One finds her cold and unsympathetic, and even the original friendship seems implausible at times...
...lopsided presentation of the two roles of Susan and Ann gives Mayron more of the spotlight, but at the expense of an involving plot. Weill's documentary style uses everyday situations to reveal changes in the attitudes of the characters. Susan, however, holds the screen alone for so much of the film and so dominates it even when Ann appears that the film seems to be a celluloid diary of Susan's life as a young woman in New York. It's true to the city, and offers some well executed cameo roles of gallery owners and Soho artistes...
Girl Friends might have been a more successful project if Weill had been as true to life with her main characters as she is with her Manhattan settings and her bit parts. She loads the dice so heavily in Susan's favor that one wonders not only where the plot escaped to, but how one friend could be such a gem and the other such a turd. With all that's happening to Susan in her career and romantic life, it's not clear why she would feel such an acute sense of loss over friendship with...
...David-Weill has cut Lazard's roster of full partners from 30 to 21. Those remaining, including the best-known of all, Felix Rohatyn, 50, the mastermind of New York City's financial rescue, have agreed to reduce their share of profits to make more money available for recruitment. To move into municipal bond trading, David-Weill hired the top traders at five of the biggest bond houses. Some other heavyweight hires: Frank Zarb, once the Ford Administration's energy czar, and Donald Cook, former chairman of American Electric Power, one of the U.S.'s largest...