Patrick's+Film+Responses



[|//The Shawshank Redemption//]...Making Prison Pretty.

Proving once and for all that mis-used products of a faulty judicial system make awesome movies, // The Shawshank Redemption // stir-fried my head and heart into a million teary-eyed shards. Though the happy/sad scene ratio is off, it still relays the overall message of redemption (even for transgressions you didn’t commit) in a moving way. Though not particularly ground-breaking in the sense of using original techniques and going where no film has ever gone before, it outdoes many of it's peers within the prison drama genre.

__Ex-Post-Fact-O Added Thought__ I also hated the last shot. An epic movie based around cold, stony, imagery should not end on such a Club Med Commercial shot! Even if the theme of the film is (fancy that) //Redemption// and the resolution of the movie is bright, it's a crappy way to sum up a film about the trials (literally) of man. It's like (for you musicians) ending a song on a chord that is completely out of key and tonality from the rest of the piece, there is no cadence!

 [|//Casablanca//] will rattle your wingspan and liquidate your shoes! More then just a source for awesome pick-up lines and nifty allusions about Kaisers and the Third Reich, Casablanca is also the laugh-and-then-cry hit of the moving picture. A tangled web of flashbacks, French horn stabs, lost loves, political turmoil, and funny words like "Vichy". Humphrey Bogart plays the alpha-male, Rick, a self-deprecating barkeep enveloped at all times in a thick smoke. Lazlo, a leader of the resistance, must escape between the fingers of Captain Renault and Major Strasser and needs the bug-eyed man's irrevocable letters of transit, hidden (unbeknownst to the cast of characters) in the cliché black man's piano! He enlists the help of Rick, and somewhere down the road, we all find out a little bit about ourselves.

[|On The Waterfront]

Brando gives me the love bug! I say this with conviction//. On the Waterfront// knocked me out with social justice. I thought the dialogue was beautifully written and the acting superb. The way the cinematography was crafted sets it just a step above other “film noirs” of the time, giving it a more modern composition, especially the removal (at Brando’s insistence) of the mid-plot synopsis during the train-yard scene. Many film noirs have a sort of rundown in the middle, and we really don’t need a half-time report, it just makes the character sound ridiculous because, unless it’s very subtle, no one would really talk like that. I’m not sure if you would call //Waterfront// a film noir, but it borders the edge of that style, yet expands on it in more original ways (also the added bonus of it not being a detective story) while retaining that quintessential 1950s feel (BERNSTEIN AND HIS DAMN CELLO STABS!). The only thing that put a damper on this great film for me was its use by director Elia Kazan to justify his blabbing to McCarthy era commie-hunters. With the biblical images, specifically the ending, Kazan martyrs himself and turns himself into Christ-like figure for a big ole “I’m sorry”, making him all the bigger of a prick.

[|This is Benjamin. He’s a little worried about his future.] WHOA! Where to start in on this bad boy? I won’t surmise it all, because we all watched it, but I’ll start things off from the top. Airport. Genius! White wall. DEEP! Big Simon and Garfunkel fan. Hit me at home. Ok, the party. It’s where we first see the complete lack of communication between the generation gap, and where we first get a feel for what’s ailing our boy Benjamin. At first I thought that being concerned for his future was a pre-meditated line he spat out to keep the grown-ups from asking too many questions, but as you observe him, you quickly realize that he is (and with very good reason) //quite// concerned about his future. He wants it to be //different//, as he says. His parents (like all the other parents have done for all the other kids) have laid out a future for him, and it’s dawning on him that he is just a puppet for an overly-tan brother with a funny moustache who looks eerily like Panama Jack. So, suffice it to say, Ben is in a very fragile state of emotion when his parents throw a ridiculous party at which he is badgered and prodded by childhood figures he barely knows, for the sake of his parents bettering their own social image. I’m not sure of Ben’s character is consciously //aware// of how insensitive his parents are being, how blind and self-centered they are, or if he is only mindful of his own misery and franticness. This scene also produced one of the funniest lines (though competition is stiff) in the film: “ONE WORD: PLASTICS”. So, as we know, he drives Mrs. Robinson home, she tries to seduce him, he runs away scared as hell. Then in a scene implicative of the water imagery where his father gives him a completely irrelevant set of scuba-gear for his birthday, he wades somberly in the depths of a pool, looking lethargic, the purchase of his father separating him from the water, from the thrill of living, from holding your breath and getting a little chlorine in your eyes. So he pays a visit to Mrs. Robinson, a rendezvous in the Taft hotel (where he has a toothbrush…or //does// he?) and in an awkward, hilarious comedy of errors (which just so happens to be psychedelically edited like pro) they make love…well you might not use a term so tender, so I’ll say they “bump the nasty”. And miraculously, Benjamin’s eyes are opened to a world of freedom, where he needs not be so tense and confused; he can just take things as they come. The film progresses and, against Mrs. Robinson’s will, Benjamin begins to court her daughter Elaine. Ben falls wildly in love with her, and she with him, until Elaine finds out of his fling with her mother, at which point she can not bare the sight of him, and returns to school in nearby Berkley (you can get there in a 20 second driving montage, all you need is “Scarborough Fair”). Benjamin, determined to marry her, follows and gets an apartment in Berkley, following Elaine around begging her forgiveness. She has been claimed, however, by Carl, a young urban professional on the grounds that they would “make a great team”. Here Carl is a symbol of continuing life in the vein of their parents, desensitized and bitter, cut off from the spectrum of human emotion. If Elaine marries Carl, she can be like her mother, or her father, or any of the other assimilated adults. If she falls back to the loving arms of Benjy Boy, her future is uncertain, but it is exciting, and, above all, sincere. Well time passes and eventually Ben, having returned home, finds out she is marrying Carl. THE NERD! So he crashes the wedding, banging violently on a glass window, and the damsel sees him in his agonizing desperation and decides to split. But, of course, not before he beats away several men in suits with a cross (bring the kids!). They run like mad dogs out of the church and hop a bus, the film ending with a shot of them sitting at the back of the bus. They laugh at what they have just done, but then, slowly, the grin fades and they are left to face their ambiguous future. SMOKE THAT, LOVE–FREAKS! media type="youtube" key="PSxihhBzCjk" height="344" width="425"

[|Chinatown]…leave it alone! So many loose-ended doo-dads brought together at the cold hands of an old pervert and a nose-cutting midget. Well, I do declare, that I rode the ups and downs of Chinatown like some kind of nitty-gritty rollercoaster in a drought. Needless to say, Polanski defies that traditional bondage of the pissy mistress film-noir while evil triumphs over good in the proverbial down-and-out world. 