The Frame » film-1992

The Crying Game

Jandy — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:01:24 +0000

An IRA cell captures Forest Whitaker, eventually ordering Stephen Rea, one of their number, to kill him. However, Rea has been talking with him while guarding him and finds it difficult to shoot him. When he’s killed anyway, Rea leaves his group to go find Whitaker’s girlfriend. Instead of telling her who he is, though, he falls in love with her. There’s another twist, which I won’t reveal, but if you know anything about this film, you probably know it already. It’s pretty much all anyone ever talks about with regards to The Crying Game, even though it’s really sort of a secondary thing. Heh. I didn’t even know it was an IRA film until I started watching it, though with Neil Jordan directing, I should’ve had an inkling. Jordan is a really good director, able to take strange plots and turn them into something more. Ultimately The Crying Game isn’t quite as successful as I’d hoped. It’s a quite good crime/terrorist thriller, but the, uh, unrevealed plot twist actually seemed unnecessary and sensationalist to me–though I suppose it does fit in with Jordan’s interest in identity, a fascination that I, oddly enough, felt was better realized in Breakfast on Pluto.
Well Above Average

Orlando

Jandy — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:23:51 +0000

In this adaptation from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando a nobleman born in the 16th century whose life encompasses the following three centuries. And, oh yeah, sometime in the mid-19th century, he becomes a woman. These two things are never explained. And the book works, but the movie works less well, largely because director Sally Potter decided to make it about how much better it is to be a woman than a man and thus the early part of the story is dark and ugly, while the second part is brighter and airier. I don’t have a problem with directors making adaptations their own, but in making the film the way she did, she sucked out almost all of the humor from the book (which is tremendous) and we’re left with a dry feminist tract. That said, Tilda Swinton does quite a good job portraying Orlando, and a lot of it is well-done. Generally, though, I’m all for the director making her own choices, but I don’t think her choices helped the film a bit.
Above Average

Unforgiven

Jandy — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:11:48 +0000

After my disappointment with the generally-acclaimed The Proposition last month, I was a little wary of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning revisionist Western, but that wariness turned out to be unfounded. Eastwood plays a former gunslinger asked to come out of retirement in order to track down a man who beat up one of the local, um, women of ill repute. There’s ethical issues of whether it’s okay to beat up a prostitute, whether she’s worth avenging, not to mention Eastwood’s personal reservations about re-entering a world of violence after he successfully left it and forged a new life for himself and his young children. His fear of his own ability to carry out only one job and not be pulled back into a love of violence is really the emotional center of the film, and Eastwood holds the other disparate elements together very well both as an actor and as a director. As a director, he has a wonderfully old-fashioned touch that makes you almost feel that you’re watching a great Golden Age film (he pulls this off with Million Dollar Baby as well), yet with a level of ethical probing that was only found in the very, very best of Golden Age westerns.
Well Above Average

Glengarry Glen Ross

Jandy — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:50:25 +0000

Geez, who knew real estate was so cutthroat? A firm of investment real estate brokers is cutting back its staff, by giving its worst leads on potential customers to the oldest and weakest brokers; in an attempt to save their jobs, a few of them band together to steal the good leads. And…that’s it. Pretty much. I’ve heard about this film from various sources for a while, but the story just wasn’t one that interested me a lot. However, I will give it a hearty thumbs up for some great acting from Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, and Kevin Spacey. This was late in Lemmon’s career, early in Spacey’s, and the scenes where they face off, arguing over the leads and the jobs, are pure acting gold. The fact that the actors can take a story this slight and a script this talky about a subject that hardly appeals to me and make it interesting at all is a feat.
Average