Some films are like dreams or secrets, complex, delightful, strange, and revealing; and one inclination is simply to savor them in silence and another inclination is to share them with those you feel close to: and, the black-and-white sound film Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day is like that, a dream, a secret, original, gorgeous, and wise.
Tag: film
War Becomes A Man: A Modern Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, starring Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler
This is a world of economic strife, hunger, mass protests, militant policing, automatic weaponry, great tanks, constant television reportage, rumor and suspicion. Coriolanus stands out in a competitive, hostile world; and whereas others—activists, politicians, and soldiers—come together to converse and conspire in order to achieve goals, Coriolanus is able to act alone.
Abraham Lincoln and Southern Reaction: Robert Redford’s The Conspirator
The Conspirator is a film of surprisingly fresh beauty. Its locations are impressive. Whether scenes were set in a private home or a large but bare prison, they had a visual richness that fed the senses, the imagination.
The Wisdom to Know the Difference: Halle Berry’s Performance of Truthful Depth in Things We Lost in the Fire
Audrey, a homemaker who likes cooking and woodworking, is a woman who expects a certain logic of her life, and, though she knows instinctively and intellectually what decent behavior is, her pain, judgements, and selfishness sometimes make her punishing. Halle Berry’s performance is shaded with anger, dismay, and grief in various combinations and intensities; and it is a deep, truthful, impressive performance.
The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess and Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity
Clift’s performance is austere and sensitive, and he is so deep inside his character that one cannot see a false moment or move. Michael Logan seems like a man who has found a way of being himself by being a priest: he is alert, direct, frank, moral, and sensitive, contemplative, sacrificing, and of service.
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, a great film focused on Sicilian aristocracy and cultural change
Burt Lancaster is the patriarch, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the prince of Salina, and his way of life is threatened by revolutionary change: the struggle to unify Italy, and the rising commercial middle class, are at his door. There are predictions that the aristocracy will lose its status, the prominence of its values, and possibly its lands, and that the church may lose as much too.
Death Ends A Holiday: Julia Murat’s film Found Memories
Are they happy or unhappy? Are they afraid or resigned? Are any of them ready to die? The simplicity of the lives of the people in the village gives them a dignified, mysterious quality verging on myth: can they stay alive forever, simply because they choose to? The film achieves its power honestly, plainly, slowly, but power—and finally charm—it does have.
Earth Under Attack, As Entertainment: Attack the Block, and Cowboys & Aliens, two humorous science-fiction films
One of the interesting aspects of this vivid film, full of anticipation, amusement, and anxiety, is the fact that at first the young people are irritating and threatening, the kind that one would cross the street to avoid. Their attitude is rude, language offensive, and acts easily contemptible. It is a lesson that the film allows us to see another side to them—that they can be both resilient and sweet.
Notes on an African-American Canon in Cinema: On Sidewalk Stories, Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou and other films
African-Americans have wanted to claim and define their own public images in every art—literature, paintings, sculpture, dance, music, film, videos, television. The presentation of African-Americans in the legendary moving picture Birth of a Nation—which presented blacks as both culturally ambitious and personally barbarous—was a continuation of old stereotypes that led to actual violence against blacks. People—blacks and whites—protested the film, inspiring its director D. W. Griffith to make Intolerance, an anti-prejudice reaction to his own film. The African-American image has yet to cease to be controversial.
The Heroic Age of Denzel: the films Antwone Fisher and Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington
I had thought the film a lot simpler than it was—I thought it was some kind of celebration of ghetto life, but I could not have been more wrong: it is about how an abused boy joins the military and meets a navy psychiatrist who helps him to understand his past and use his anger as energy for self-improvement, and to use his loneliness as a spur to connect with a healthy branch of his family. Consciousness leads to purpose.