Chris Wisniewski
In truth, De Palma is neither a misogynist nor a feminist: women are often his camera’s subject and its object, and his films trade on the Hitchcockian fascination with the cinematic image of woman as a locus of desire and violence, attraction and disturbance
There’s something personal and intimate about Eastwood opening the film this way that stands in stark contrast to the crass awards pandering we’ve come to expect from most American filmmakers at this time of year.
To be in the hands of a Mizoguchi is to experience something singular and undeniable; there have been many great filmmakers, but there are only a few who are great in the way Mizoguchi is great—instinctively, insistently, almost primally.
It’s the film’s delirious sense of anxiety, born out of the confluence of faltering masculinity and powerful female sexuality, that propels its farce forward, and perhaps that’s why Rock Hunter is so interesting to watch today.
In its closing moments, Almodovar announces (though he’s made it clear long before) that All About My Mother is a film about acting, about women, about acting like a woman, about drag, about mothers, about acting like a mother.
We are with them, in medium-close shot, feeling their pain throughout this cathartic conversation—suddenly the camera pulls back and twists us around, until we, too, are staring at them from a distance, as they sit, alone and isolated.
Hathaway, and everyone who surrounds her (sorry, Adrian Grenier; blame the writing), is pretty much a snooze, and it’s left to Streep to pick up the slack, by channeling not Bette Davis but a Best of Everything-style Joan Crawford.
In the company of so powerful and graceful a work of human empathy, criticism itself hardly seems relevant.
Intention aside, even the most talented filmmaker’s commitment to a certain kind of realism can leave him precariously perched between sympathy and pity, social engagement and smug condescension.
If you look at the movie instead of the culture’s idea of it, that penis just becomes one among many red herrings. The Crying Game is too complex and elusive, beguiling and beautiful, tragic and heart-wrenching to be reduced to something so banal as a “gender-bending” twist.
Since Forty Shades of Blue is essentially a melodrama-cum-woman’s picture, its success ultimately hinges far less on effective narrative than it does on raw emotion. In that regard, Sachs relies heavily on his actors.
If I dutifully labeled Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator a “classic film satire,” most people would nod their heads in agreement. Overlong? Maybe. Not quite as tight or as funny as Chaplin’s best films? Certainly. Still, a “classic film satire?” Undoubtedly. But what does that mean, really?
It’s literally the oldest story in the book. But what accounts for the enduring appeal of the voyage—what has made it, from Homer and Joyce to Spielberg and Kubrick to Mastercard commercials—such a persistent cultural trope?