The professional movie critic...they watch so many goddamned films that they can barely tell the difference between the wheat and the chaff antmore. Best to start with a familiar phrase - the wheat and chaff story - families, let's start loving. It's a cliche that only kindly old ladies really dig the E.M. Forster style Merchant-Ivory style literary adaption, the typical drawing room comedy/drama with dashing young brits, a few crusty elders and manners so arch to suggest another century (you do the reading up kids). I for one, which is enough thank you very much, thought this film was very exciting and not just another trip down the genteel and dusty path. And I saw it in a cinema full of the elderly. I went to a free morning screening for the aged Palace members and all I got was this strange prose style.
Rob Lowing...I'm still onto you, you mindless hack. I'm never lonely while lighting the midnight lamp; i've got your banality to bed down with every solemn sunday night. Thing is, Rob thought the whole thing was a little bit dull, not enough sassy teens and butt shots for her type you see. No, she says, that being the way most things start with her. I'll not take another breath till I get my way. One question? Can I do an underpants dance at your funferal? (that's a deliberate misspelling Eugs, or a pun even, in that Joycean style, punnunningly going on forifyounevever.)
It's good to see Mamet branching out. I know a lot of people are going to now write him off as some rare species of Faggotus Cocksuckerus but this film is a welcome relief from the usual fuck you!, fuck me?, fuck you! routine. That yankee buffalo had just about swallowed up all the screenwriters in Hollywood. Mamet is testing the waters, trying out morality tales in different scenarios. So c'mon folks. A round of delicate golf clapping. Hey, you two in the back...get a room, eh?
Mamet overcomes the motionless theatricality of the play by dividing the action into separate rooms. A secret is disclosed, and all parts of the family move off to discuss it. The family seems strong, splinters away and then reforms to progress. The film is strange...it's politics is of another era, yet there are many readings, many messages. The determination of the father to test his belief in his son. The distractable nature of the media. The durability of family in crisis. When you list them like this, they admittedly seem quite minor. The film has no central force, no big court scene, no certified Mike Myers "oscar moment"...I NEVER LEARNED HOW TO READ! Instead, the film remains witty, perceptive and offers us a world rarely considered in these crazy, hazy, lazy, grumpy, drunky, flunky, sunky, monkey man days. I laughed, and not just when realised I just wrote that. Or that. I did not cry. This I wrote in capitals in my note book.
NEED MORE MOVIES THAT MAKE ME CRY ... like The Mod Squad. I strongly recommed it. The Winslow Boy that is.
adam rivett
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