Reviews

The initial presentation of the protagonist for me laid no basis at all for his later accomplishments. The view of Newfoundland is very unpleasant - I hate to think it's that bleak. though I have no personal knowledge of the place.

It's hard for me to believe that a newspaper like the one portrayed could possibly afford all that staff and support an absentee owner too. The sea part of the film contained not one but two highly improbable survivals from disastrous situations. Sorry to see all that talent wasted.

I found "The Widow of St. Pierre" (I hope I have the title of the Binoche film right) a lot more interesting and believable about the same neighborhood.

No motivation, absurd hypothesis. I'm sorry to see Wiliam H Macy involved in trash like this. If he didn't use a body double in the nude scenes, I hope he got some kind of kick out of them.

Do you really believe that bad luck is involved in losing money in Las Vegas? That luck is contagious, so that standing beside an unlucky person can affect your bets or the sequence of cards in blackjack? Do you really believe a Nevada Casino lets anyone run up a debt of $150,000? That they would beat up a winner who did nothing more than shoot craps with the house's dice? If you can answer yes to any of the questions, Nevada is looking for YOU!

It seems that a manuscript of Jane Austen's play "Sir Charles Grandison" was in fact discovered fairly recently. I have not read it, but I cannot believe that Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala could really have understood it. Austen's young writings are brilliantly comic, but if there is anything funny in `Jane Austen in Manhattan' I missed it.

The film could have been a good satirical comedy. Maybe parts of it are funny to the Manhattan in crowd of the off-off-Broadway theatre, but you will have to know the participants in that activity a lot better than I do to enjoy this movie.

The central figure seems to be that played by Sean Young. James Ivory does not bring out any aspect of competence or charm this young woman may have, thus making the contest for her participation in the two competing efforts to produce a play pointless.

The legitimate technique of leaving the transitions to dream/fantasy unmarked is then followed by a failure to let the viewer know whether the return is to reality or to another fantasy. I was bored by the profusion of dead ends and red herrings.

Isn't Julianne Moore in there for a few seconds, introducing the role quickly taken over by Tilda Swinton?

This tale of a minor tragic episode in the life of a young married woman has some jokes in it, but I can't feel too bad about laughing. It's got to be better than crying. I agree with all those who talk about how wonderfully Jennifer Anniston plays the part. Any awards she gets for it she fully deserves

The overall message, which is not stuffed down your throat, is pretty grim - step out of line and you'll be stepped on, and worse, the other line doesn't go anywhere anyway. The best to be hoped for is what you've already got. The film impressed me very much.

Happily I can't remember the end that Elaine May disliked so much, but it didn't hurt my memory of the laughs. Both May and Matthau are as good as they get, and Matthau's car is a particular delight. The change in Matthau's character is completely believable. I don't understand why this gem is so generally overlooked. Perhaps it is because neither star is a STAR, but it's a pity.

I saw this when it was first released and again in 2002. Are the differences between my unassisted recollection and the movie as I see it on video now changes in me, in movie-making, or in life? Were we living in such an authority dominated world that such a thin case as the DA has in the movie would have prevailed? Fortunately I never found out, but there is some truth in that idea. Locally we used to have half a dozen fatalities among prisoners in the local jail caused by falling down stairs (people picked up for drunk and disorderly, not for murder).

But the movies have changed too. There is more texture in the average modern mediocre film than in the best of 1946. The use of an actor with an English accent to play a roadside cafe owner, presumably in California but certainly in the United States, would be absurd today. For that matter, Turner's starlet school accent is pretty strange too. Garfield is the only one who speaks convincingly to an ear in the year 2002.

And then I have seen a film or two since 1946 (and a couple before that, starting in the mid 20's), so that the impact of an ominous sound track is much reduced. I probably would have given it an 8 in 1946, but it's dropped to 7 (which is pretty good from me) now.

Beautifully done film. As a person who lived in Great Britain at the time this movie is laid in, I found only one tiny anachronism. Even a hearing impaired American can enjoy much of the irony. The acting is as good as any that Merchant-Ivory have evoked, but with cutting edges that they and Henry James never achieved (or dared?).

My one caveat applies as well to another fine film, "Michael Collins". In my experience, the word f**k and its declensions was an extremely rare expletive before 1960 or so. Its use in these films is a little like the wrist watch on the Roman Centurion. Is it possible that a film cannot receive a desirable R-rating without frequent use of it?

It is gratifying to see that top actors are willing to take relatively small parts for top directors like Altman, Lee, the Coens and others.

Tillsammans has good acting, good camera work and some pretty good laughs going for it, but plot? A no good drunk has an epiphany through a middle aged divorced man? Reformation through football (association football, or soccer to us Americans)? It's amusing enough, though.

Pauline just manages to keep her place in the center of this film, and how nice that is. Her indecisive cousin, a Rohmer type, almost takes over the film with a great figure. The two men are as unreliable as Rohmer's men always are. Pauline, though, is just the acute teen age observer that one can really love. Her boyfriend shows a lot of rectitude too.

This film is a kind of testament to whatever it is in teenagers that makes most of them survive fairly intact, incredible though that survival may be in retrospect. A sweet Rohmer film, and my favorite.

A cute touch is Pauline's two bathing suits - the one that is barely there shows the gawky but unselfconscious teen ager she is, and the modest one suggests the sexy woman she will soon decide to be.

Rohmer's work, even more than most good directors, is a series of essays on a single theme. This one gives more hope that women and men may be able to live together than most of the others do. Still I think Rohmer remains puzzled about how the sexes coexist.

The scene of Brenda Blethyn in the young couple's house is as funny as any movie scene I know. It was only later that I discovered I had been laughing at a woman having a real nervous breakdown, and that Mike Leigh was showing me what that phrase meant.

The dancing is amazing, the sets are beautiful and the music very good. Unhappily the editor chose to limit cuts to a few seconds, so that just as interest was aroused the image shifted off to a view of the auditorium or some other distraction. The musical continuity is perfect, but the visual continuity is sometimes puzzling. This may be a necessity in this live recording in Radio City Music Hall (perhaps this is a composite of several performances), but the choppy cutting is not.

This movie has technique going for it. The suspense doesn't last long, since the audience is let in on the whole thing as it unfolds. The main question is when will Michael catch on or Harry reveal himself? Unlike many films, Michael doesn't have to be stupid, nor Harry impossibly clever.

Viewed from a larger perspective, the problem may be how did Harry manage to live before he met Michael? The simple answer, I suppose, is that no one but Michael could trigger Harry's generosity.

Lots of impact in this film.

I wish subtitlers would realize that you should put really bold outlines around the characters, either heavy black around white or heavy white around black. Happily, the dialog is not too important - this is not a Rohmer film!

I don't know enough about psychosis to comment on the accuracy of the film, but it was certainly convincing to me. I can only hope that Australian society is as sympathetic as it is presented here. As a matter of fact, my personal contact with a psychotic showed American society off the screen much more civilized than Hollywood does.

All the actors come through well, but my prize would go to the woman. Some may think the ending a cheap shot, but it's hard to stop a realistic film from going on forever.

Diane Kurys manages a very substantial shock without any blood (or maybe a drop). More shocking is the low rating I find my IMDB companions give this film. Its simplicity moved me, and Kurys gets a lot of suspense without straining for it. The actors are all pretty good looking, too. The film says a lot about a woman striving for independence, and suggests that she may have succeeded.

An excellent account of French bullheadedness, with only the baddies coming out on top. Refer to the Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus affair and Pierre Boulle's early novels for other examples.

I wish the lighting had been a little brighter when I was asking myself which woman was having such a great time in bed with the noble murderer. I guess it must have been the Captain's wife, since we were left in no doubt about the other woman.

Be warned that nothing explodes in it.

The only relieving virtue is the effective acting, but at the service of a nothing interpretation of a perfectly satisfactory plot. If I understood it the girl was driven nuts by a domineering mother, and cured by getting together with another lot of abused girls in a mental hospital. Hollywood at a typical low.

This early Coen Brothers film is filled with double double crosses. Gabriel Byrne, in one of the leads, makes his character strangely attractive. The ratio of people hit to shots fired is probably pretty close to the truth. A tiny anachronism is the presence of dial telephones in an American city before 1925 ( either that or some other problem with whatever it is that places the plot that early). Another tiny plot hole is that if the outsider's bets on the fixed fight keep the fixer from profiting, the outsiders fail to profit too.

The ethical gangster is pretty funny - heavier handed humor than later Coen, though. I wish we had a rating of 7.5 - I put the film better than 7, but it hasn't enough emotional impact on me for 8.

I have big crushes on Juliette Binoche and Lina Olin, and it's great to have them photographed so well, but chocolate as the salvation of mankind and the cure for all its ills??? Give me a break!

Who would doubt that Hallstrom would produce beautiful images, but that's as far as it goes this time out.

I am a little unclear about what moves the female protagonist to act as she does, but since a woman wrote the novel and another woman wrote the screen play and directed the film, who am I to quarrel with that? The male protagonist is older than I was when I suffered the way he does. I sympathize with his pain, and the movie makers are right about the common response to it - trivial violence, rather than the tragedy of commonplace film.

I think it is a very good film. My only reservation is that an excessive amount of it occurs in the man's car, but I guess that's life in Salt Lake City.

Maybe I've OD'd on Rohmer, just having looked at this film, "Full Moon over Paris" and "The Aviator's Wife" (all on DVD)in a single week. The tone of this picture is light for Rohmer, but his heroine is just as indecisive about how to get her man as his others are about which man to choose. A nice comedy.

Maybe I've OD'd on Rohmer, just having looked at this film, "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" and "The Aviator's Wife" (all on DVD)in a single week. This has the silly addition to Rohmer's other obsessions, of the idea that the full moon causes unusual behavior. Actually the girl behaves just the way the protagonists of the other films do when the phase of the moon is unspecified, that is, very indecisive. The main male character is nicer than the one in most of Rohmer's films.