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john_burke100
Reviews
Inside Man (2022)
They do WHAT?
Fine acting, as the cast, including Atkins and West who were new to me-try hard to persuade the viewer that they're impersonating real people in something resembling the real world. The opening sequence is smart and skillful, and raised my hopes for the rest--I mean, how can you go wrong with Stanley Tucci and David Tennant? Yet the writers manage it. OK, I'll suspend my disbelief but I don't have enough rope to suspend it as high as this script, which piles up the implausibilities as it goes on, demands. The cast try this impossible assignment, and no blame to them for failing. Wait: why not a series with Tucci's and Atkins' characters playing private eyes? "Dillon and Grieff, Affordable Investigators: We never leave the office!"
China Moon (1994)
body lukewarm
Pale, passionless knockoff of "Body Heat." Pedestrian dialog, off-the-rack direction, dutiful acting in forgettable roles. Charles Dance is badly miscast as a Southern gentleman, and poor Benicio del Toro just stands around tossing lines at Ed Haris so Ed can deliver a comeback. If this picture made any money, Lawrence Kasdan should sue.
Voyage surprise (1947)
la France profonde
I saw this about 1959 at the Cinema Guild theater in Berkeley where Pauline Kael programmed it, then in the 80s on a terrible VHS tape, and haven't been able to find it since. Someone suggested a Hollywood remake; I can think of a lot of ways for that to work out badly, but if it leads to making the original available again, I'm for it. As others here have said, it's very funny, farce but with a pro-small-town, anti-corporate bite, and a lead actor, the tiny, super-energetic Sinoël, cackling "Voyage surprise!" to lure customers to his fanciful trip.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
David Amram!
This movie is very much of its time stylistically: an early version of hip, of the kind that Hugh Hefner set out to monetize around the same time. Sinatra the quintessential cool swinger, an exemplar of that style, is perfectly cast against type as a sweating, twitchy career Army officer with what we now call PTSD. An important element in setting this style is David Amram's music score. It's mildly dissonant (not aggressively modernist) with very spare instrumentation, using none of the conventional movie music devices to pump up the story; the mood is pensive, sad, hip in an intellectual way like the Modern Jazz Quartet (which would have made a good alternative.) My personal opinion is that Amram tends to be overlooked in surveys of 20th century American music; this score s a good example of why he deserves more attention. Listen for it the next time you revisit the movie and check how it contributes to the feel of he story.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
excellent music score
David Shire's score is one of the reasons I revisit this movie every few years. It starts right off pulsating under the opening title, adds brass, syncopation, dissonance--hey, sounds like New York in the 70s! And there's a blood-chilling moment when the lead hijacker calls to the subway conductor; there's been no music for a while, then there's a jangly cluster of high notes on the piano and you just know something very bad is about to happen. Beautiful work.