Christopher Orr, The New Republic: 'Blindness'

Indeed, the medium of film itself seems almost singularly unsuited to Saramago’s fable. Early in the novel, a character describes the white blindness as like “fall[ing] into a milky sea,” an impression reinforced by the author’s own studiously vague prose—the sentences that run on for lines, the paragraphs that run on for pages, the dearth of quotation marks and other punctuation. Meireilles might have attempted some comparable visual motif but, let’s face it, few people want to watch an out-of-focus movie for two hours. So, apart from the occasional showy fade to white, he and cinematographer César Charlone present the story like a hyper-vivid dream. (The repeated Hitchcockian close-ups on a pair of dangling scissors are so overdetermined that one half expects the scissors to leap down and stab someone by themselves.) This is the exceedingly rare film that could use less showing and more telling.

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A. O. Scott: Blindness - The New York Times

[T]he characters in Mr. Meirelles’s film may be ciphers, as they are in the mechanical universe of Mr. Saramago’s novel, but they are also Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga and the rest of those names listed in parentheses above. And this simple fact makes a big difference. Mr. Saramago’s lofty, ideologically defended humanism has no place for actual human beings, but actors of this caliber don’t know how to be anything else. Ms. Moore’s pale, fine-boned face is too precise and delicate an instrument to obey the rather simplistic directives of the story, and the rest of the cast shares her inability to sacrifice physical or psychological nuance in the service of vague ideas.

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If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Seminal Image #866
If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Seminal Image #866

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Zelly and Me
Zelly and Me

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The start of something beautiful: Almost everyone quit the filming of Badlands, but those who stayed behind found they had made an American classic. Ryan Gilbey on the debut of the brilliant, perverse director Terrence Malick (via Ryan Gilbey on the making of American classic Badlands | Film | The Guardian)
The start of something beautiful: Almost everyone quit the filming of Badlands, but those who stayed behind found they had made an American classic. Ryan Gilbey on the debut of the brilliant, perverse director Terrence Malick (via Ryan Gilbey on the making of American classic Badlands | Film | The Guardian)

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Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid smeary, jittery camerawork and choppy edits that transform the visually disjointed, grim and dim spaces into confetti. Somewhere, Roger Corman is weeping. (via Elite Squad - Movie - Review - The New York Times)
Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid smeary, jittery camerawork and choppy edits that transform the visually disjointed, grim and dim spaces into confetti. Somewhere, Roger Corman is weeping. (via Elite Squad - Movie - Review - The New York Times)

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Jonathan Lethem on "The Dark Knight" (a couple of months too late, alas)

In these déjà vu battles, the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us standing awed in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel. If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us.

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How the West Was Won comes to DVD
How the West Was Won comes to DVD

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Pauline Kael on Days of Heaven Terrence Malick wrote and directed this story of adultery, set principally in the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle just before America entered the First World War. It’s both a nostalgic and an anti-nostalgic vision of the American past. The landscapes are vast and lonely, with the space in the images strained and the figures tilted; the characters are monosyllabic-near-mute. What is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily on us, but we’re not quite sure what it is. The film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it. Richard Gere plays Bill, who works in a blast furnace in Chicago; he gets into a brawl with the foreman and heads south, taking his girl, Abby (Brooke Adams), and his 12-year-old sister, Linda (Linda Manz), with him. They find work in the fields of a wealthy young farmer (Sam Shepard), who falls in love with Abby. When Bill learns that the farmer may be dying, he encourages Abby to marry him-so that she can soon be a rich widow. The movie is oblique, except for the narration, which is by Linda; she’s a little-girl wise guy, and all the humor in the film comes from her laconic remarks, but she’s also precociously full of the wisdom of the ages, and at times her illiterate poetry is drenched in wistfulness and heartbreak. Shot by Nestor Almendros, with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, the film is a series of pictorial effects-some of them, such as a train passing over a lacework bridge, extraordinary-but the overpowering images seem unrelated, pieced together. The movie suffers from too many touches, too many ideas that don’t grow out of anything organic. It’s an epic pastiche. Though the irregularly handsome, slightly snaggletoothed Shepard has almost no lines, he makes a strong impression; he seems authentically an American of an earlier era. But Gere, with his post-50s acting style and the associations it carries of Brando and Dean and Clift and all the others who shrugged and scowled and acted with their shoulders, is anachronistic.

Pauline Kael on Days of Heaven

Terrence Malick wrote and directed this story of adultery, set principally in the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle just before America entered the First World War. It’s both a nostalgic and an anti-nostalgic vision of the American past. The landscapes are vast and lonely, with the space in the images strained and the figures tilted; the characters are monosyllabic-near-mute. What is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily on us, but we’re not quite sure what it is. The film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it. Richard Gere plays Bill, who works in a blast furnace in Chicago; he gets into a brawl with the foreman and heads south, taking his girl, Abby (Brooke Adams), and his 12-year-old sister, Linda (Linda Manz), with him. They find work in the fields of a wealthy young farmer (Sam Shepard), who falls in love with Abby. When Bill learns that the farmer may be dying, he encourages Abby to marry him-so that she can soon be a rich widow. The movie is oblique, except for the narration, which is by Linda; she’s a little-girl wise guy, and all the humor in the film comes from her laconic remarks, but she’s also precociously full of the wisdom of the ages, and at times her illiterate poetry is drenched in wistfulness and heartbreak. Shot by Nestor Almendros, with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, the film is a series of pictorial effects-some of them, such as a train passing over a lacework bridge, extraordinary-but the overpowering images seem unrelated, pieced together. The movie suffers from too many touches, too many ideas that don’t grow out of anything organic. It’s an epic pastiche. Though the irregularly handsome, slightly snaggletoothed Shepard has almost no lines, he makes a strong impression; he seems authentically an American of an earlier era. But Gere, with his post-50s acting style and the associations it carries of Brando and Dean and Clift and all the others who shrugged and scowled and acted with their shoulders, is anachronistic.

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Pauline Kael on Empire of the Sun At the outset, this Steven Spielberg epic is so big and majestic you want to laugh in pleasure, and it stays that way for about 45 minutes-Spielberg takes over Shanghai, and makes it his city. But then, first in brief patches and then in longer ones, his directing goes terribly wrong. The story, taken from J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, is set at the outbreak of the Second World War, and it’s about Jim (Christian Bale), an 11-year-old British schoolboy, who is separated from his parents when the Japanese Army invades the city, on December 8, 1941, and how he changes in order to survive three years of starving in a prison camp. It isn’t told straightforwardly, though. Spielberg throws himself into bravura passages, lingers over them trying to give them a poetic obsessiveness, and loses his grasp of the narrative. For the sake of emotion-to have something to say, to give the picture some meaning-he pumps it full of false emotion. (That’s what his poetry is.) The picture is a combination of craftsmanship and almost unbelievable tastelessness. Every time Spielberg tries to make a humanitarian statement, he falls flat on his face-not just because his statements are so naïve but because they go against the grain of Ballard’s material. John Williams’ editorializing music swells and swooshes, trying to make you feel that something religious is going on. Christian Bale is a fine performer, directed superlatively; also with John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, and Joe Pantoliano. The adaptation is credited to Tom Stoppard (it was also worked on by Menno Meyjes); the cinematography is by Allen Daviau. Spielberg had permission to shoot in Shanghai for only three weeks; the settings were matched up and constructed in Spain and London.

Pauline Kael on Empire of the Sun

At the outset, this Steven Spielberg epic is so big and majestic you want to laugh in pleasure, and it stays that way for about 45 minutes-Spielberg takes over Shanghai, and makes it his city. But then, first in brief patches and then in longer ones, his directing goes terribly wrong. The story, taken from J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, is set at the outbreak of the Second World War, and it’s about Jim (Christian Bale), an 11-year-old British schoolboy, who is separated from his parents when the Japanese Army invades the city, on December 8, 1941, and how he changes in order to survive three years of starving in a prison camp. It isn’t told straightforwardly, though. Spielberg throws himself into bravura passages, lingers over them trying to give them a poetic obsessiveness, and loses his grasp of the narrative. For the sake of emotion-to have something to say, to give the picture some meaning-he pumps it full of false emotion. (That’s what his poetry is.) The picture is a combination of craftsmanship and almost unbelievable tastelessness. Every time Spielberg tries to make a humanitarian statement, he falls flat on his face-not just because his statements are so naïve but because they go against the grain of Ballard’s material. John Williams’ editorializing music swells and swooshes, trying to make you feel that something religious is going on. Christian Bale is a fine performer, directed superlatively; also with John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, and Joe Pantoliano. The adaptation is credited to Tom Stoppard (it was also worked on by Menno Meyjes); the cinematography is by Allen Daviau. Spielberg had permission to shoot in Shanghai for only three weeks; the settings were matched up and constructed in Spain and London.

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