The post August: Osage County review appeared first on Game News.
]]>Streep is Violet, the cancer-stricken yet still formidable matriarch of a deeply dysfunctional Oklahoma clan, thrown back together by the death of her hubby Beverly (Sam Shepard).
Roberts, meanwhile, is Barbara, the oldest and most bitter of three sisters whose return to their parents’ abode whips up a hornets’ nest of resentment, recrimination and long-buried secrets.
Based on a Pulitzer-winning 2008 play by Tracy Killer Joe Letts, A:OC exudes an air of studied theatricality no amount of sun-drenched exteriors can dispel.
But then it could hardly be otherwise in a film whose centrepiece is a 20-minute dinner scene, faithfully transplanted from stage to screen by director John Wells with all its hilarity, claustrophobia and escalating tension intact.
It’s a magnificent set-piece, a broiling banquet of bad manners that has Violet hurl malicious barbs at everyone around her. (“Nobody slips anything by me!” she glowers.)
Yet it’s one that comes at a price, there being little else to match its venomous ferocity. The acting obviously compensates, with Margo Martindale exceptional as Violet’s vindictive sister, Chris Cooper superb as her husband, and Julianne Nicholson affecting as the deluded sibling still cradling hopes of happiness.
Even in this tight-knit ensemble, though, there are some weak links: Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch stick out like sore thumbs with their underwritten characters and even dodgier accents.
A:OC , then, is a movie with failings as well as strengths. But when it’s good, as it often is, it’s very fine indeed.
Verdict:
This classy adap of a much-garlanded stage play will appeal to discerning audiences who can tolerate unpleasant characters with potty mouths if they’re played by Oscar winners.
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]]>The post Chinatown review appeared first on Game News.
]]>The most memorable sign-off ever, right? Wrong.
Roman Polanski’s peerless gumshoe mystery actually ends with a testy cop ordering rubberneckers to “get off the street”.
Fortunately that’s one of the few unremarkable lines in Robert Towne’s script, a magnificent dissection of corruption boasting career-best turns from Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston.
A hurrah too for the ensemble, the likes of Burt Young and weak link in this 1974 masterpiece.
Unforgettable.
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]]>The post The Shining review appeared first on Game News.
]]>The key scares of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 art-horror are such staples of Scary Moments schedule-filler, it’s tempting to think we know the Overlook inside out.
This bang-up reissue says otherwise.
Seen in its rightful place on the big screen, it’s clear to see how hard Kubrick’s Steadicam symphony of sound, space and seductive motion works to unsettle certainty: to make itself unknowable.
Don’t be fooled by source novelist Stephen King’s simple “homey”-horror set-up, where blocked writer and (barely) recovering boozer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) finds that winter with wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and kid Danny (Danny Lloyd) in a haunted, high-altitude hotel isn’t healthy.
Madness ensues but the fact that Kubrick screened David Lynch’s Eraserhead for his crew proves he wasn’t serving up stalk’n’slash gruel.
He was aiming for mind-mashing mystery, blurring place, spooks and psychology in ambiguity.
Unreliable POVs help, from the eye-in-the-sky (whose?) opening to crackers Jack, wired Wendy and odd Danny, with juggling viewpoints that throw our orientation.
But the crux of his design is the construction of the Overlook as a world unto itself, not just in its isolation but in his abstract orchestration of its parts.
Watched in this (25 minutes) longer version on the big screen, the oppressive reds, mounting heart-thump noises and deep corridors all bring a sense of cabin fever: we’re right in it.
Nicholson’s perhaps overbearing big bad wolf-ery almost shatters that air of elevated control, though not without purpose: when he axe-chops door/screen simultaneously, Kubrick strikes with subliminal, metahorror intent.
The cinema becomes the Overlook’s double and the brilliantly teasing final image entangles us further in its enigmas.
As recent docu-essay Room 237 showed, the Overlook’s mysteries aren’t spent. We’ll always go back.
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