Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz Forster's 'Nicest' It seems to me that I've seen more interesting and praiseworthy films so far this year than in all of the last few years combined. Among the most...
...But this seems to me the most perfectly realized of their works...
...My Beautiful Laundrette Another welcome sleeper, here focusing on the conflicting loyalties and difficult adjustments of a college-aged Pakistani seeking to make a life for'himself in post-imperial England...
...the musical score functions as an expressive element in its own right, and all these elements are brought together into an integrated whole by Ivory's direction...
...The scripting is unusually literate...
...U Hits and Misses Crossroads Some superb Delta blues on the soundtrack, and an engaging performance by Joe Seneca as an aging Southern bluesman, but the movie is burdened by a hopelessly hackneyed screenplay and less than credible acting by Ralph Macchio as (what a premise...
...the black bluesman's white, Long Island-raised disciple...
...Excellent acting throughout, but the show is almost stolen by Treat Williams as the older male icon of the adolescent heroine's "trashy dreams...
...Lucy's personal dilemma comes down to a choice between two men (and, by implication, two ways of life): Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day Lewis), a snobbish aesthete, or George Emerson (Julian Sands), socially undesirable and unpolished, but virile and emotionally alive...
...Oates's spare story is intelligently expanded to set the drama within a socially and psychologically disconnected middle-class family, and within an environment featuring a smarmy yet seductive suburban shopping mall and drive-in hangout...
...Among the most thoroughly satisfying of recent releases is A Room with a View from the well-established filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant (producer), James Ivory (director), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer), based on the novel by E. M. Forster...
...You can't help but be captivated by the manner in which the story develops and the finely observed social and psychological perceptions that accompany its unraveling...
...This team's prolific collaboration dates back to 1963, and includes such efforts as The Europeans, Quartet, and The Boston-ians...
...the costuming is gorgeous...
...That is all that I can find fault with, however, in this "nice" motion picture...
...Pungent, unsentimental, and iconoclastic, Laundrette shows a seldom-seen face of Margaret Thatcher's England...
...Directed by Joyce Chopra, scripted by Tom Cole, and based on a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, the film depicts the sexual coming of age of a physically precocious fifteen-year-old American girl, wonderfully portrayed by Laura Dern...
...As in other Forster works, the essential conflict is between the demands of propriety and class-conscious social convention on the one hand, and those of natural impulse and emotional involvement on the other...
...The' daring and original screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, an Anglo-Pakistani, has Omar aided in his endeavors by Johnny (strikingly portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis), a punkish, white, working-class Paki-basher who, ironically, becomes his hired hand and lover...
...the cinematography provides superb images of gentrified life at the turn of the century...
...Smooth Talk A sleeper that should provide an agreeable awakening for its viewers...
...At the center of this conflict is young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), a flower of the lower gentry, whose lack of self-understanding threatens to inflict misery upon herself and all those who care for her...
...Niceness rarely makes for engaging drama, but this book and the remarkably faithful film adaptation are delightful exceptions to the rule...
...I have some reservations about Helena Bonham Carter's performance, and the use of a couple of flashbacks seems awkward and unnecessary...
...A comic romance built upon a comedy of manners, A Room with a View is the lightest of Forster's novels and, as the author suggested, probably the "nicest...
...the casting is miraculously appropriate (Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, and Simon Callow are outstanding...
...The film regards with critical dispassion the claims and expectations of an extended expatriate Pakistani family, and the class, racial, and sexual conflicts in the midst of which young Omar seeks success and happiness...
...All major aspects of the production contribute to the spell it casts...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
