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GUARDIAN Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:05:00 GMT
John Flynn's Rolling Thunder is finally out on DVD. He may not have made enough films, says John Patterson, but when he did, the script came first
John Flynn's Rolling Thunder (1977), available this week for the first time on DVD, takes you back to a time when Hollywood still made grown-up medium-budget thrillers like Charley Varrick, Mr Majestyk or Jackson County Jail. Flynn died in 2007 and never made enough movies; this one reminds us how good he was.
Rolling Thunder was written by Paul Schrader and – like Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza, written by Schrader and his brother Leonard – it signposts themes and imagery that would obsess Schrader in his own movies: Vietnam veterans, samurai ethics, and orgasmic explosions of cathartically violent revenge. Oh, and horribly mutilated hands. POWs Rane (William Devane) and Voden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after years of torture in a Hanoi prison. Rane's wife leaves him and his young son barely knows him. Rewarded by his hometown.....
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GUARDIAN Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:03:00 GMT
He's been the toast of Sundance three years running, but the charismatic cult leader from Martha Marcy May Marlene says 'one of my strengths is that people don't know who I am'
Actors are supposed to bask in glory when it comes, but right now John Hawkes seems to be grimacing through it. Partly that's because exposure is the last thing the Texan actor was seeking, partly it's because his latest role has also taken its toll on his body. He's just got back from this year's Sundance Film Festival, where his movie, The Surrogate, received awards, standing ovations and the biggest sale ($6m). Playing a polio-stricken poet in search of sexual experience, Hawkes had to spend most of the movie lying in bed. "His spine is horrifically curved and he can only movie his head 90 degrees," he explains. "So it was my idea to make a soccer ball-sized piece of foam so that would lay under my left side to curve my spine. And it was uncomfortable. Health professionals have told me my organs have.....
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GUARDIAN Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:32:17 GMT
Belgrade, Coventry
Torvald, an obnoxiously smug Scandinavian banker, has a large illuminated fish-tank as the focal point of his tastefully minimalist apartment. He also keeps a trophy wife who skips round the strange, cuboid furnishings with a kind of manic, manufactured glee that suggests she has rather less freedom of movement than the fish.
Nora is a 90-minute reduction of Ibsen's A Doll's House made by Ingmar Bergman in 1981. It was originally conceived as a stage trilogy exploring the gender war alongside Bergman's reworking of Strindberg's Miss Julie and his own Scenes from a Marriage.
Ibsen's play concluded, famously, with the door slam that reverberated around the world, yet the play's credibility relies on carefully measured narrative development. It also requires an understanding of its 19th-century context in which it is unthinkable for a woman to run up debts without the knowledge of her husband. Bergman's version is short and sharp, but it reduces the shock,........
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GUARDIAN Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:00:00 GMT
Roman Polanski's chattering-classes drama just isn't nasty enough, says Peter Bradshaw
Roman Polanski's new movie is a brisk chamber piece, taking place in real time in a New York apartment and based on the stage play by Yasmin Reza, with whom he has co-written the script. At its best, this is a spiky satire on contemporary bourgeois correctness; at its worst, it's a strained piece of upscale dinner theatre, a self-conscious controversy item by, for and about the chattering classes. Jodie Foster and John C Reilly play Penelope and Michael, a well-meaning couple whose son has been seriously injured by another boy in a fight, and the aggressor's parents, Nancy and Alan, played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz – appreciably richer and sleeker than their counterparts – have come round for an excruciatingly civilised chat to settle the situation. This, of course, turns into a verbal brawl nastier than anything in the playground. Battle-lines are drawn and redrawn.
The situation is..
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GUARDIAN Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:15:01 GMT
Something's lurking in the woods in this disquieting, ambiguous indie about a young woman escaping from a cult
This is a disquieting and ambiguous movie in a classic US indie style. It may not be entirely perfect – I sat down to it twice before fully hearing its insistent, sinister whisper – but there's an unsettling darkness in the deep green, sun-dappled shade of its woodland locations. Sarah Paulson plays Lucy, married to a wealthy, priggish Brit called Ted (Hugh Dancy), and currently on vacation in their huge, lakeside home. Out of the blue, she receives a payphone call from her troubled younger sister Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), from whom she hasn't heard in years, demanding to be picked up from somewhere in upstate New York. Martha comes to stay, and it becomes clear she has escaped from a cult run by a deeply scary Mansonesque guy called Patrick – a chilling performance from John Hawkes – who had the creepy mannerism of renaming all his devotees as a way of establishing.......
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GUARDIAN Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:30:00 GMT
An eerily compelling documentary about lost souls in a lost place
"The harder you work, the richer you'll die." Maybe this single line justifies the price of admission to Bombay Beach, an eerily compelling documentary about lost souls in a lost place, made by the former music-video director Alma Har'el. Bombay Beach is the name of a ruined ghost town on the Salton Sea in southern California, a saline lake. It was a smart vacation resort in the 1950s and 1960s, but abandoned when the water level rose. Now its seedy chalets and trailers are homes for America's most needy, like a refugee holding camp for the poor, surreally living in the fragments of a forgotten dream of leisure and prosperity. Har'el tells the story of three or four of these marginal souls, and does so with compassion and insight. One man had been arrested just after 9/11 on charges of maintaining what appeared to be a huge weapons and ammo dump in this wilderness: he says he's no militia extremist, just a regular...
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