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“There Will Be Blood”
Since I saw him first in “My Left Foot,” Daniel Day-Lewis has become my favorite actor, Al Pacino a close second. DeNiro is fading fast as he has lost his sure-footing at least in my eyes these past ten years. I recall Olivier’s comment that a good or great actor does it all with his eyes, and his admonition to us is to watch the eyes. I’ve been doing that for some time now and Daniel says quite a bit with his eyes. He does not act, the style of Tracy and Stewart is just different; Brando had it but…
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“Where Do We Go from Here?”
I believe this was the first movie I ever saw as a human being; vaguely, as I recall it, for I saw it in the 40s, a series of episodes in time, from the American Revolution…to…I cannot remember. As we grow older, as we age, the past in a cliche sense becomes starkly clearer — think of Bernstein in “Citizen Kane” talking about the young girl with the white parasol that he saw decades ago and still thinks about her. It is an instinctual imprint, is it not? very primal, and I like primal. I know that after 16 the…
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“Black Narcissus” and other films of note
I just got a 50 inch HDTV. Both my fiancee, what an odd word at my age, and my son, Jordan, 31, have urged me to make the purchase…so I have made merry. When Ben Hur makes his big move in the hippodrome, the chariot wheels brutally cross my bed. Films such as “Black Narcissus” (Michael Powell) come across vividly, and my childhood avatar, Sabu, plays a horny prince infatuated with the poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons. The psycho-sexual tones among the nuns is delicious as well as the repressed sexual hysteria. Remember Simmons in “The Big Country” and Lean’s “Great Expectations.”…