![]() ![]() ![]() "Inspector Bellamy" (Unrated, 110 minutes). Directed and animated by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Foe adults who will admire its beauty and profundity. This is an animated film combining elating visuals with a virtuoso voice performance by Christopher Plummer. It may be the only love he is capable of experiencing. ![]() The story of a man who finds love only once in his life, for 15 perfect years. Mike Leigh's new film is one of his best, placing as he often does recognizable types with embarrassing comic and/or dramatic dilemmas. Their frequent visitor is Mary (Lesley Manville), a unhappy woman with a drinking problem who needs shoring up with their sanity. Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and long and happily married. Many of the older titles are already streaming on Netflix and Amazon. What does Two Thumbs Up mean in this context? These films are worth going out of your way to see, or you might rent them, add them to your Netflix, Blockbuster or TiVo queues, get them by VOD, watch for them on cable, anything. Linked here are reviews in recent months for which I wrote either 4 star or 3.5 star reviews. Just another example of the many ways the Coens' movies are as much fun to listen to as they are to watch. The film's deep-vocal culmination, perhaps, is an an off-stage solo by JK Simmons as Mattie's lawyer, J. Near the top of the film there's a series of duets, particularly musical in character, beginning with Mattie's post-hanging interrogation of the sheriff, her first encounter with Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, in outhouse for additional resonance), and her negotiation with Colonel Stonehill. Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) may be the youthful contralto soloist (despite her age, she's no soprano!), but she's surrounded by male voices in the lower registers (which helps to make Josh Brolin's countertenor Tom Chaney all the weirder and funnier). Henry Hathaway tried to make the words sound as conversational as possible the Coens go for Baroque - high stylization that's not quite horse-operatic, but in an American vernacular that's like Bach transposed to "Deadwood." Certainly Charles Portis's language (which sounds like Coen dialog, after all), and the way it's delivered - the tempi, rests, rhythms - are decidedly musical, as the lyrics always are in Coen movies.Įvidently, that's one reason they wanted to make the movie - and if you compare some of the very same lines in the 1969 film with the 2010 film, you'll immediately hear the difference between speaking and singing. ![]() Watching the first part of the movie again, it struck me that the movie itself is a sort of cantata for tenor, baritone and bass voices. I've expressed my admiration for Carter Burwell's Mahleresque orchestrations of American hymns and folk tunes in his score for "True Grit" (2010). You might like one picture better than the other for any number of reasons, but I find their similarities more illuminating than their differences: To illustrate a similar comparison this time, I've used a one-minute segment out of "The Social Network" (Multiple levels of storytelling in The Social Network). 22.) My point was that, as far as narrative filmmaking is concerned, there isn't much difference. 13 in the Muriels balloting the former in a tie for No. You might recall that last summer I compared the editorial, directorial and storytelling challenges of a modest character-based comedy ("The Kids Are All Right") to a large-scale science-fiction spectacular based on the concept of shifting between various levels of reality/unreality - whether in actual time and space or in consciousness and imagination. (Coming soon: a piece about the Winkelvii at the Henley Gregatta section - which came in 11th among Muriel voters for the year's Best Cinematic Moment.) ('Cause, as we all know, there's so much more to life than "winning.") I was pleased to be asked to write the mini-essay about "The Social Network" because, no, I'm not done with it. It's a wrap for the 2010 Muriel Awards, but although the winners have been announced, there's still plenty of great stuff to read about the many winners and runners-up. ![]()
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