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Reviews
Black Swan (2010)
What makes a great performance?
As the 1970 movie "Performance" with Mick Jagger will tell you, the only great performance is one that achieves madness. Well that's not really true, but this movie wants to define it kind of like that and kind of like George Costanza in Seinfeld, "It's not a lie if you believe it."
Anyway, I enjoyed the movie. I love ballet. The level of dancing bothered me at first then I got into it, especially the close-up filming of the end of it. All the acting was great, especially Portman and Barbara Hershey.
My big complaint - SPOILER ALERT - is that during the actual performance, between acts she's alone in her dressing room. In reality there would be a dozen assistants helping her change hair, makeup and costume!
Also, I never noticed what a horrible plot line Swan Lake has. One of those morality warnings for girls. Not a lot of great choices in there.
Numb3rs: Guilt Trip (2009)
Ray Wise is so much fun to watch
He didn't have a lot of screen time in this, but what was there was so choice!
Viva Leland Palmer. There's a lot of depth to those twinkling eyes. His words in the script challenge the other characters intellect and his delivery hit them hard. Luckily the other cast members and the director knew what to do with him.
Thanks to the crew of Numb3rs! A quality show even if somewhat limited by the topic. I know the math community says the show "jumped the shark" in that regard a long time ago.
The whole cast is excellent. Krumholtz, also able to be funny and twinkling even in non-humorous moments. Morrow is smoldering, though I don't like the "spiritual" turn imposed on him lately.
Faith is so overdone and overexposed.
Sputnik Mania (2007)
Amazing Overview of the Eisenhower era
SPOILERS I never had much education about the Eisenhower years, now this documentary is complementing a book I'm reading, " The American Way of War" by Eugene Jarecki, the guy who did the film, "Why we Fight". Ike was a military man who tried to hold back the military, and apparently so was Kruschev, in some ways.
Sputnik inspired awe, then fear and the arms race. But Ike tried to put a peaceful spin on it to the end.
Also amazing, if I remember the film correctly, 1958 alone had hundreds of atomic tests by the US and the USSR! I had no idea there were so many.
And seeing the strange, reluctant reliance on Werner Von Braun, and Von Braun's utterly cloudless, arrogant demeanor - what a complicated world this is, was and will always be.
John Adams (2008)
Barry Lyndon tributes
All kinds of tributes here to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, especially the use of a lot of the same classical music pieces and some camera work, such as Laura Linney's looking out from under her elaborate hat at the end of this episode. A little distracting to those of us who remember Barry Lyndon, which portrayed very different problems and relationships. Barry Lyndon was about the inevitable triumph of the British stiff upper class over the bullheaded Irish upstart. Sort of the opposite to the American revolution.
I think the music editors were just going for a stately, period sound without worrying too much about the source being inappropriate.
Still, a very interesting series. American politics then and now...I'm looking forward to the next episode, "An Unnecessary War". The acting is really amazing, unlike the acting in Barry Lyndon!
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
One of My All-Time Favorites
I am relieved that people are still making movies this smart and moving. To take a bit of total kitsch like the Gong Show and the Dating Game and the Newlywed Game and turn it into a metaphor for the best and worst in all of us may have been Chuck Barris' achievement with his book (I haven't read it, but want to now.). To turn that book into a funny and ultimately sorrowful movie was the achievement of Clooney, script-writer Kaufman and Sam Rockwell, who makes Barris so real as the unreal dual life centerpiece.
Clooney and Kaufman have a post-post modern thing going that makes each line in the movie, the colors and all the editing choices pack more punch than "normal" movies, but it's not style for style's sake. (Other movies associated with Clooney have this quality too, like the brilliant Three Kings.)
Barris' final idea for a game show, the three guys with guns evaluating the best and worst of their lives, shown over the black and white face of the real Barris, with it's real tragedies written all over it (a daughter who OD'd, at the least) is the perfect ending.
It doesn't matter at all whether the CIA stuff happened. It makes a reason to show to an extreme the detachment, the difficulty with all other human beings that can make a person successful yet miserable.
The portrayal by Rockwell also reminded me of many people I knew that were adorable and creative but hurtful a**holes because they were so screwed up.
And by the way. I liked the Gong show too. I don't think it humiliated people or was a new low in TV. I think it poked fun at other game shows and talent shows. It pre-dated Letterman's Stupid Human Tricks by many years and like that concept, seemed to embrace the weirdness in all of us.