The Good Shepherd(Robert DeNiro, 2006) Eric Roth's screenplay for The Good Shepherd seems to have gone through as many hands as states' secrets before actually being put before the cameras. A "personal" telling of the formation of the CIA,Francis Ford Coppola was the first director to have signed to it—then retained enough interest to keep an "executive producer" credit (although Wayne Wang, Philip Kaufman and John Frankenheimer—who interested his Ronin star, Robert De Niro in the project—were also briefly attached before De Niro, who was working on his own CIA project, took it over). Bless my tapped telephone line it has that same sort of "Godfather" family epic-feel to it, with just enough schmaltz and soap to keep it from getting too caught up in its overarching theme of constant paranoia. It also carries the similar pall of "the sins of the father" to it. You just know that the ambitions of the men in the movie will doom their families, if not themselves.
Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is recruited out of college to join the Skull and Bonessecret society, and with his first ratting out of a professor (Michael Gambon), his career as a spy takes the fast track. It's derailed slightly when a quickie with the Boss's precocious daughter (Angelina Jolie) results in pregnancy and a marriage of convenience. Then, when fencing with the Soviets keeps him overseas for years, his fair-weather family-life causes a Cold War on both sides of the Atlantic.
Soon, Wilson learns, a little too late, that he should trust no one, as he plays against (and develops a mutual admiration with) his equal in the KGB. But its the same old story we've gotten used to in the spy genre. Everybody's a snake looking out for Number One, and trying to make "that Big Score," and yeah, okay, there's only a gray flanneled thread of difference between the spy network and Corporate America.
Which brings us right back to "Godfather" country. CIA-Mafia-GM, there's no (*yawn*) difference. The only likable character in the entire film is director Robert DeNiro's turn as "Bill Sullivan"--a veiled version of Bill Donovan, but he's there for two quick dashes of cold-water perspective and is gone. Matt Damon seems not to age at all during the film, whereas Angelina Jolie does seem to gain twenty years. This film came out at the same time as The Good German, and I was hoping someone would combine them into "The Good German Shepherd". Well, I can dream...
It's interesting (well, to me, anyway) to wonder why Damon chose this part, seeing as how his "Bourne" films are merely the "fantasy" side of the "spy" franchise. If he thought that playing the "button-pusher," rather than the blunt instrument was an acting "stretch," he couldn't be more wrong.
DeusExMarvela
or "Trust Me, True Believer" (My Flurken Swallowed My McGuffin)
The first of 2019's "Captain Marvel" movies is here,*and it has a lot of significance for movies, Marvel movies, and Women-in-Films, and as a result it's stirring up "the usual" dust-up's on increasingly unreliable review aggregates and social media. It's like the perfect storm of click-bait, but it has nothing to do with the movie itself. ...Which is good, clever (in the details stream) and provides a great role for the peculiar talents of Brie Larson, who's been a joy to watch in everythingI'veseenherin. It's a good entertainment, but not a great movie. But, worth seeing...if only because you're going to get a hint of how The Marvel Movie-Makers are going to solve the issues caused by the cliffhanger of Avengers: Infinity War—which, in short-hand, is "they're going to cheat" by some story-telling sleight-of-hand while they were distracting you with other stuff. Fair enough.
After an atypical Marvel Studio's logo—the "R.I.P Stan Lee" version—we meet "Vers" (the afore-mentioned Ms. Larson), who is having nightmares and can't sleep. The dreams have something to do with a crashed ship on a blasted landscape, where Vers is bleeding green blood and looking at a woman (Annette Bening) as she's pointing a weapon at an alien form (a Skrull, if you're familiar with Marvel comics) and wakes up. She goes and wakes up Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), her commander in the Starforce, based on the planet Hala of the Kree Empire (yeah, that's a lot of exposition there) is annoyed, but still accedes to her demands for a fight-work-out where he tells her she needs to tamp down her emotions and not rely on her abilities of using force-blasts out of her hands (luckily for him), a gift of the Kree for her abilities (and, of course, if she's not a good little girl-soldier, those powers will be taken away). Face front, soldier.
Rogg assigns his Starforce Squad to rescue a Kree spy from captivity, but the mission is a blind, designed to lure the Starforce agents into ambush by a band of Skrull warriors led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn, who we don't get to see enough of). Vers is captured and subjected to a memory scan in which she starts to remember that many years ago, she was a human on Earth, an Air Force pilot, working for a Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). Her memories of her past inspire her to escape, she grabs a convenient space-pod, jets out of there and crashes on the most convenient planet nearby, C-53 according to the Kree.
That would be Earth circa 1995.
You can tell. You can just tell. Well, Vers' checks out a couple video's, then tries to find a way to contact Yon-Rogg, which she does by hot-wiring a telephone—in a booth—and telling him that she's on the hunt for Skrulls and don't wait up. Thing is, with Skrulls, they can shape-shift. Makes it easy to detect...except if you start asking them questions because any memory they might have of their shifted shape is only a few seconds old and they're no-good at long term memory.
Meanwhile, Skrulls have chased Vers to Earth where they start doing good human imitations and looking for her. They should just ask around because she's walking around L.A. "dressed like she's ready for laser-tag." That line is from a young agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who with his partner Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), is getting a lot of reports about a woman going around Los Angeles looking a little surly, dressed in rubber armor, and freaking people out, like the Security Guard outside that Blockbuster whom she approached and asks "Do you understand me? Is my Universal Translator working?"
This is where casting is kind of important. A lot of actors would play up the confusion, the fish out of water aspect, but not Larson's Vers. She walks around like she owns the place and doesn't give a rip if people are giving her second and third glances. She's got a job to do and she charges through it, with an attitude like she's dealing with morons—which she might be and probably is, so just go with it—it seems to be working with these monkey-people. No "Prime Directive" issues here. Just go with the "direct" approach.
Meanwhile, Fury has his own encounter with a Skrull, while he's simultaneously doing a "French Connection" style chase with an elevated train with an escalated fight between Vers and one in disguise. Taking the body of Fury's Skrull back to S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury decides to find "Blockbuster Girl" and find out what the hell is going on because he's never encountered anything like this before, and his desk job is getting a little dull.
Turns out they're looking for the same thing—Vers' identity, and between a visit to Project Pegasus, where Dr. Lawson had worked on a top-secret "light-speed engine" and the crystal containing Vers' extracted memories, they discover that Lawson was killed in a mysterious plane crash, where all were lost, including the pilot, a USAF flier named Carol Danvers. That's part of her memory. Afterwards, she was evidently taken straight to Hala...for some mysterious reason, given abilities by the Kree and enrolled in their Starforce. Why?
After pouring over the files from the crash, Fury and Danvers take a flight to Louisiana to talk to a friend of Danvers', a fellow pilot named Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and she is recognized instantly by her and her daughter, Monica (Akira Akbar), and they fill her in on the woman she's forgotten to be. At the same time, Talos appears, with a story of his own, and the adults in the room determine that it's time to do things the right way...for once.
Carol Danvers: [Referring to the front of the baseball cap that Fury has given her ] What is this? Nick Fury: It's a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo. Carol Danvers: Does announcing your identity with branded clothing, help with the covert part of the job? Nick Fury: ...said the space soldier who's wearing a rubber suit.
Okay, there's a lot going on here, as fully 3/4 of the movie is a grand setting up of a story that the last quarter completely subverts. Even stalwarts who've been reading the Marvel "Captain Marvel" stories over the years are going to be a little confused at how the five screenwriters (all but one are women) have turned and spun the "Mar-Vell" stories on the tip of curved blade atop the Starforce's helmets—the film-makers allude to this by making Danver's hair part of that design, which I found very clever. Trust me, there's a lot of back-story to tell, but it managed to be done in 2 hours and squeeze in a lot of credits (with inserts—one is advised to stay to the very end).
What they've done is turn the comics' Carol Danvers from the standard Marvel "girlfriend" who got lucky enough to acquire superpowers, to a person who grew up determined to be the best she could be—who then got lucky enough to acquire superpowers. She already HAS the responsibility before she gets the great powers. It's an improvement, if hewing a bit close to the Lantern Corps story. But, Carol already knows right from wrong and her responsibility before being rewarded by the..."thing"...event...that gave her powers.
Now, she just has to decide who's side she's on.
Performances are good, all the way through, with Larson being the stand-out, but a shout-out has to go to Jackson who does his most prolonged...and...best performance as Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Especially, as he's got to play a much younger version of the character than he ever has before. Yeah, okay, he's been pixelated to lose a few years in appearance, but, hand it to the guy, he STILL has to play a character 25 years younger, and that takes attitude, bearing, and energy and he's all that here (the actor is 71 years, ladies and gentlemen).
And he's a great match-up with Larson—as they were in Kong: Skull Island, but this time's the roles are reversed (I kept expecting her to say to him: "Bitch, please..."). Fury is looser and more of a smart-ass, while she's regular Army in the uniform of a renegade and their banter may not have the wit, but it has the speed of old Howard Hawks banter, which combined with the duo's abilities to change expression on the thinnest of dimes, well, they're just a fun couple, and Fury's regard for this super-soldier from the sky explains a lot about everything he's done in the Marvel Universe movies.
It's the first time a woman has directed a Marvel movie, or co-directed one, and one wishes that Ann Boden and her co-Ryan Fleck had more of a command on things behind the camera as they do in front of, but it's just not so. They are well-regarded for their indie flicks, but their action scenes will leave you scratching your head about what's going on and who's doing what to whom. It might be they haven't figured out how to separate individuals who are all fighting in same uniforms, or the best way to hide a stunt-double, but the early fight scenes are a mess, and when the action turns cosmic, they shoot from a distance (to save on the rendering, or because we've gotten tired of super-heroics on a Richter scale?). No pun intended, but it gives it less of an impact. And, as we're just a little clueless about what Danvers' powers are, exactly, a little closer demonstration might have been nice—Marvel, whether in comics or movies, tend to be a little vague about power-scales/distributions.
Without going into too much detail (now's my chance to be vague), as much as I enjoyed a lot of Captain Marvel, there's the sense that The Studio was holding this one back (or something else in the "I dunno know what it is, but it sure packs a wallop" side of the Marvel school of cosmic speculature) as its "Ace in the Hole" for writing itself out of the "How are they going to get out of THIS one" dilemma posed by the Thanos-culling of the MCU in Infinity War—and that is by telling you about somebody you didn't know about, with some powers that haven't been figured out yet, but will when it becomes convenient in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. In the meantime, just put in a "TBD" for that power-level and expect it to be risky and that "I've never gone this far before, I don't think I can handle it..." to be uttered at some point. I sure hope not. In the idiom of the internet, that would "suck."
So, the result is a movie with minor joys and good intentions that will eventually be enough to solve the Marvel Saga's immediate problem, and maybe—just maybe—allow the idea of more female-centric superhero movies in the Marvel Universe (how long has Scarlett Johansson been waiting for her "Black Widow" movie? Quite awhile, and enough that you can imagine her studio contract expiring before they get around to it).
Oh, and one other neat little idea in Captain Marvel—Stan Lee's cameo. The movie's setting being 1995, we see him on the elevated train trying to memorize his scene from Kevin Smith's upcoming Mallrats** (which came out about that time), a neat little call-back for his next-to-last cameo in the Marvel movies. As irritating and non-essential as they could be, one already misses the prospect that he won't be around for more of them, and that's a sad thing. Excelsior, true believers. (Just don't say "Shazam!")
*It's a loooong story and since this post is about this current version of the trademark "Captain Marvel" we won't get into it. We will give this one it's due.
Maintaining Good Working Hobbits or A Dense Overlay of Smaug
The second of Peter Jackson's three "Hobbit" films,The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is, predictably, more of the same. It's a three hour ramble, a complication and a darkening of the tone of the first film—as usually happens with the second of a trilogy, so that we, the audience, can climb out of our emotional valley in time for the resolution of conflicts in the third. Standard Operating Procedure. We are given a quick recap of the first film—going back in time to when Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellan) first put the idea into the head of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and getting the dwarf crusade rolling. Once the summary is done (in brief: Gold, Mountain, Dragon, Dead King, Arkenstone, New King, No Elves Allowed), they skip over An Unexpected Journey and head back to the Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves on the path to Lonely Mountain (Sindarin Erebor), orcs still snapping at their behinds and making their way to the entrance of Mirkwood. A quick visit to the skin-changer Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt), who usually appears in the form of a bear—not much is made of him, even though he got his own poster with Gandalf last time—and they get to Mirkwood (by pony), at which point Gandalf goes "walkabout"—he does this every movie and they probably split the story to accommodate a "Gandalf disappearance"—so the wee folk must enter the spooky forest alone, with a promise from the wizard that he'll meet them at "the Lookout."
"The Lookout"—he said he'd meet us; he should be easy to find...
Anyone familiar with the book knows that you don't find out where G.the G. goes until the last chapter, and that was after Tolkien had written "The Lord of the Rings" and got continuity-conscious. But, here, we do get to see where (hint: he went there LAST movie), and Jackson's The Lord of the Rings gets set up all good and proper (except Benedict Cumberbatch is voicing the character now—wonder if Jackson will Lucasize everything to make it all match up). The dwarves and hobbit are concerned with icky things and splendors that one would associate with a place called Mirkwood, and the ring that Bilbo snatched from Gollum is starting to exert its unholy influence turning the peaceful little guy into a berserker bad-ass. Travel packages with unruly companions and nasty accommodations with large pests and diffident natives will do that to anyone. But, Bilbo proves his worth on more than one occasion and eventually they do make it to the Halls of Lonely Mountain, a few shy of a full dwarve-deck and make their way to a meeting with the titular character that's been hoarding all the gold and keeping it for himself—the ultimate one percenter of Middle Earth.
Bilbo above the canopy of Mirkwood
Smaug is the dragon, living in the massive storage caves of the Mountain, and he spends his time, far from desolate, sleeping among the gold and treasures of the dwarves like a big scaled, fire-breathing Scrooge McDuck. When Bilbo's attempts to find the Arkenstone awaken him, there is quite an extensive cat-and-mouse game as the small hobbit scurries around the cumbersome dragon. Or I should say Cumberbatch, as the ubiquitous actor provides a nicely arch resonant voice to Smaug, which is accompanied by a lip-curling animation to enhance it. This is where the film shines, as the territory is new, the imagineering of the dragon is fresh, and the surprises are many. After the previous two hours, that's a bit refreshing.
For if there's a problem with Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit, it's that, by now, we are so familiar with the way he does things that nothing much really resonates anymore. The heavily belabored ripostes by the actors seem a bit too predictable—when Bilbo changes his story to Gandalf that he found his courage in the goblin caves last movie (rather than The Ring), there's a close-up of Gandalf as he says what half the audience is expecting: "You'll need it." Really, that one and "You should be" are certain candidates for Screenwriting 101 "easy irony" along with "You just don't get it, do you?" and "They're standing behind me, aren't they?"
And the action sequences, this time assistant-directed by actor Andy Serkis. go on and on, in ever-increasing silliness. If last movie set a more rollicking, silly tone than The Lord of the Rings (in part by the influence of Guillermo del Toro), now the joke's wearing a little thin. Extended fights between orcs and elves are no longer thrilling, they're a demonstration of every possible way you can kill something with an arrow. An extended rush down a rapids in barrels is accompanied by additional orc-elf fighting, where the barrels are used for any other purpose besides transport, as every tree-limb and branch over-hanging is used as a foot-hold. Some of this criticism isn't fair, because if this had been the first film in a trilogy of Tolkien adaptations, the marvels of the film would send people off a CGI cliff in amazement. It mustt take at least forty-five minutes to tumble down it, though.
One should, however, point out that the "we've been down this glade before" problem didn't occur with Jackson's earlier Tolkien trilogy, where there was enough material to keep things seeming fresh each film, and Jackson and his screenwriters did enough juggling of the narrative to keep things seeming new from film to film. Their attempts here amount to trying to add a romantic element between the elf warrior Tauriel (Evangeline Lily) and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), much to the consternation of Legolas (Orlando Bloom, back in action). And while it provides a reprieve from tumbling and shooting and other too-frantic sequences, it does take away from the basic focus on the titular Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) whose story this is. Freeman's performance is, again, terrific, bringing all sorts of fretting elements to play, and making the transformation of his hobbit into a killer more than a little disturbing.
The vistas are staggeringly rendered, but some short-changing has been done with the characters in action sequences—Orlando Bloom seems to be the chief character robbed of some pixels, here and there, and the attempt to de-age him to a younger self doesn't really work (I've never seen it done convincingly, so far). The only real surprises come in snatches of casting with Lee Pace, disappearing into the role of the elf Thronduil, Lily's elven warrior, and Stephen Fry's Master of Laketown. Be on the lookout for some Laketown spies and you might even find Stephen Colbert for a brief second. Oh, and Jackson gets his own "Hitchcock moment" out of the way very quickly.
Oh. AndSPOILER ALERT there's another movie coming, so this one ends at a rather inopportune time. You only have to wait another year.
Getting to Be a Hobbit With Me or There and Back Again...and Again...And A-GAIN. Peter Jackson returns to Tolkien's Middle-Earth, the scene of his greatest triumphs as a film-maker. And it hasn't been easy for him. "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy took the film industry by storm, changing all sorts of accepted things, like "sittable" film length, production timetables (filming three films simultaneously), elaboration of production design, and whether a "fantasy" film can ever be taken seriously by the Oscar Academy for anything other than technical awards. In fact, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won Best Picture a few years back, more than one gossip-monger (or as they're known, "industry press") suggested it was for the entire series of films, rather than for the merits of the final one. I believe that. So, pressure immediately started to bring Tolkien's "The Hobbit" to the screen in as much the same way as possible, with Jackson producing and Guillermo del Toro directing, a good choice, actually (and the film benefits from his bizarre creature designs).
But, "The Hobbit"'s past caught up with it, and the several (animated) versions of it came into play over who owned the film rights, and so The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has a complicated production titles sequence with Warner Brothers the (North American) distributor and New Line Cinema and M-G-M as the production facilities. M-G-M's financial troubles (now long forgotten in the wake of Skyfall's nearly billion dollar take) caused del Toro to drop out, leaving Jackson and his orc-army of New Zealanders to once again handle the short-duties for the assembled hobbitage.
And how is it? Much as you'd expect. It's as if they'd never stopped production on the first series, and so sure of the continuity are they, that the moments immediately preceding the start of The Fellowship of the Ring are presented, as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do. The film's been getting lukewarm reviews, and I can't can't quite fathom why. Nothing's really different. The supporting cast is uniformly the same (there's no Viggo, but Frodo is briefly there, and Martin Freeman takes over the role of the younger Bilbo Baggins in a way that seems to suggest a more spry Ian Holm with much faster and more comedic reaction-sense), but the main criticism seems to be a more leisurely pace. This, I don't mind. Jackson has always regretted not showing more of Hobbiton, which might have given "The Lord of the Rings" more of a sense of "home," and as something worth fighting for—a theme played in spades in TH:AUJ.*
Seeing as so much of it is set in the Hobbit's land, and that the cast is dominated by a baker's dozen of knock-about dwarves (see below for a guide) that have a propensity for one-liners and malapropisms, the tone is considerably lighter and larkier (and dare I say "precious") than the Doom-laden "Rings" trilogy, and it is only once the band of adventurers get going that things change to the previous series' denatured color schemes, brooding skies, ugly thuggery and general bad-assery ensuing.**The pace may be slower, but the film is considerably richer for all of that, and with so many characters in this arc, it's rather a luxury to get to know them before they are threatened in all sorts of ghastly ways.
TH:AUJ is photographed digitally, but at a frame rate of 48 frames per second (what is being called HFR, or "Higher Frame Rate"), twice that of standard film, and in 3-D (to make what Jackson calls a more "immersive" film experience). The effect, once one has adjusted to it, is quite magical. Jackson doesn't try to do the 3-D tricks that Ang Lee does in Life of Pi, but the faster frame rate does improve the effect of things moving close by in 3-D; there is no longer the "stutter" effect, if something is moving by in the "near-field" at any rate of speed, which is something of a relief. And given that Jackson employs even more helicopter shots over New Zealand terrainhere than in the "Rings" trilogy (as well as parallel swooping "crane" shots during the many sequences underground), that's a big help. Where it has its drawbacks are in some scenes that make the CGI characters look like toys figures, some of the impressive building constructs look like play-sets, and a slight mismatch of CGI (particularly during flying scenes) melded with terrain.
Still, it is hard to quibble when the image is so sharp, Jackson's color sense is eye-popping, and he still manages to keep a shimmering image through murky 3-D glasses. It doesn't look like videotape (as so many reviewers seem to think), as the lighting is more graded and subtle, but the movement recalls a better videotape image, and even something moving fast still has a better chance of being registered by the naked, or glasses-hampered, eye. It also allows the telling detail in even the CGI-est of images, like the moistness in Gollum's eyes, or the deep crags under Gandalf's. It is oddly transporting, and given the care that everyone has put into it, it's a very rewarding experience.
Wilhelm Scream Alert: at 02:05 and 02:35
Ya can't tell a dwarf from a halfling without a program.
* Thauj...sounds like a character name. ** Speaking of which, things have now approached and gone past the "Indiana Jones" threshold for physical believability here. There's one particularly Rube Goldbergian sequence fighting trolls in an underground mine that strains credulity—but then, we're talking about a movie with dwarves, trolls, elves, ancient wizards, fire-breathing dragons, giant spiders, animated cliff-sides, and orcs riding big dogs. That's enough to throw any griping fan-boys off their dyspepsia."Dude, this movie troll-kinged the bridge..."
Well, I'm beginning to think all motley-groups of adventurers with different skills that come in handy at particular junctures spring from The Wizard Of Oz-even the Seven Samurai and their progeny.
Think of it: Dorothy in her concussed fever-dream comes across familiars who all want, but seemingly don't possess, the very qualities that Dorothy finds wanting in an unfair world (and probably herself)--brains, heart and courage--only to tell herself in her unconsciousness that her guardians/charges/friendspossessed them all along (as, she must conclude, did she). Only then, can she return to the harsh reality from which she escaped, emboldened by her new confidence, and new eyes to see her world anew as one of hope, rather than despair.
Now, here is Tersem Singh Dhandwar's (he's become mono-named ala Liberace and Prince to just "Tarsem") 2006 film (just making it now to theaters, after caroming through the international film festival circuit) of The Fall, and it's a fascinating little de-construction of the Wizard of Oz template, and quite a successful "Tell me a Story" film in that same regard, as the fantasy within the film frames the reality that creates it.
It takes place in a Los Angeles hospital ("a long time ago" reads the caption to put the audience in the proper frame of mind), and a young immigrant girl, Alexandria, whose Indian family subsists on picking fruit, is in the hospital, recovering from a fractured left arm. Her condition and curious personality allow her the luxury of having the run of the place, and in her attempt to send a note to her favorite nurse, she crosses paths with a film-stuntman, recovering from a stunt/suicide attempt because his girl had been stolen by the film's leading man. The two form a bond of need. She befriends him, and visits him daily for friendship and for the story that he weaves of a band of adventurers, each with their own distinctive skill-set, who, together and separately, are on a quest for revenge. He's still depressed, and uses the girl's visits and her hospital access for reasons that have nothing to do with friendship. It's a combination of high fantasy and high drama, which cannot exist together. The quest is fantastical and its melodrama(derived from silent movies) masks the very real pain of the story-teller while also reflecting it, as with Oz. When the two collide it makes for the most uncomfortable part of the film, which goes on a bit too long, and shifts the film into cruelty, but it's only a slight misstep on the way to a satisfying denouement.
The narrative works well--so well that it is almost overwhelmed by Tarsem (who directed The Cell and some mind-blowing music-video's) and his spectacular visual sense, with locations cherry-picked from 17 countries (although one suspects most of those are in one dizzying 30-second sequence) accomplished over a couple of years, incredibly enough, without the aid of digital graphics--merely the hyper-imagination and design-sense of its director. But those images stay with you for days and linger, whether they are in the out-there fantasy realm, or the way Singh shoots the drab hospital environment--his unique eye never fails to enchant.
The performances are low-key, although one has to acknowledge the actress who plays Alexandria--five years old, and with English not her native language, she learned the dialogue phonetically, even though the performance seems, at times, to be made up on the spot. Credit Tarsem for the way that Cantica Untaru plays her scenes, but also the young actress, who is this film's Dorothy and for whom the audience's heart is lifted over the rainbow.
Fortunately,there are still some film-makers out there that can use the old tools of film-making in new ways to find some way of communicating beyond the photo-realistic, and create the feeling of "the new" and make you see with fresh eyes.
The Good Shepherd (Robert DeNiro, 2006) Eric Roth's screenplay for The Good Shepherd seems to have gone through as many hands as states' secrets before actually being put before the cameras. A "personal" telling of the formation of the CIA, Francis Ford Coppola was the first director to have signed to it—then retained enough interest to keep an "executive producer" credit (although Wayne Wang, Philip Kaufman and John Frankenheimer—who interested his Ronin star, Robert De Niro in the project—were also briefly attached before De Niro, who was working on his own CIA project, took it over). Bless my tapped telephone line it has that same sort of "Godfather" family epic-feel to it, with just enough schmaltz and soap to keep it from getting too caught up in its overarching theme of constant paranoia. It also carries the similar pall of "the sins of the father" to it. You just know that the ambitions of the men in the movie will doom their families, if not themselves.
