whatalovelypark
Joined Sep 2012
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whatalovelypark's rating
I stumbled across this on youtube while looking for the opera, a scene of Millais-Scott reciting the love poetry. The movie grew on me and I have now watched it a number of times and find it fascinating.
This is an almost comic strip version of the Biblical event. Wilde's play has serious issues with repetition, but the director's wife's version of the play is vastly superior to the archaic language version I have. It sticks to the original very closely. The Salome character is remarkably modern. She is in a bizarre family situation. Her father's brother had her father killed. Her mother then married her father's brother. Her now step-father openly courts her. Her mother spends her time allegedly having sex with soldiers. John the Baptist, the prophet, says appalling things about both of her parents and the rebellious Salome is naturally attracted to him. She gets him out of prison, attempts to seduce him, recites love poetry to him, and does a strip-tease dance for the king to get whatever she desires, which is to have John beheaded so she can finally kiss/seduce/dominate him. I think it is still the only time I have seen a female character attempt to seduce a male with love poetry, yet it was written in the 1880s. I'm surprised this character hasn't become more popular and the peak of it's fame was probably in the early 20th Century including two silent films.
A lot of the play isn't that entertaining, though the actors do a great job of bringing the play to life. The most interesting thing is the performance by Imogen Millais-Scott, who uses all kinds of vocal styles and mime in her performance. There are significant periods where she is on stage where I end up simply watching her rather than the actors who have all the lines. She uses mime to add an entirely new role to whatever else is going on. A comparison performance might be Nicholson's over-the-top Joker in Batman (also written by an Englishman). Her performance is high school princess-child-provocoteur-dominatrix-psycho.
I found myself watching this film quite a few times and it is such an antidote to the overwhelming seriousness of so many recent productions. The only comparable visual media I can think of is probably children's television, maybe Aardman. It is very much in the English over-the-top pantomime/Flying Circus/Aardman style, but more realistic and threaded with underlying English visciousness.
This is an almost comic strip version of the Biblical event. Wilde's play has serious issues with repetition, but the director's wife's version of the play is vastly superior to the archaic language version I have. It sticks to the original very closely. The Salome character is remarkably modern. She is in a bizarre family situation. Her father's brother had her father killed. Her mother then married her father's brother. Her now step-father openly courts her. Her mother spends her time allegedly having sex with soldiers. John the Baptist, the prophet, says appalling things about both of her parents and the rebellious Salome is naturally attracted to him. She gets him out of prison, attempts to seduce him, recites love poetry to him, and does a strip-tease dance for the king to get whatever she desires, which is to have John beheaded so she can finally kiss/seduce/dominate him. I think it is still the only time I have seen a female character attempt to seduce a male with love poetry, yet it was written in the 1880s. I'm surprised this character hasn't become more popular and the peak of it's fame was probably in the early 20th Century including two silent films.
A lot of the play isn't that entertaining, though the actors do a great job of bringing the play to life. The most interesting thing is the performance by Imogen Millais-Scott, who uses all kinds of vocal styles and mime in her performance. There are significant periods where she is on stage where I end up simply watching her rather than the actors who have all the lines. She uses mime to add an entirely new role to whatever else is going on. A comparison performance might be Nicholson's over-the-top Joker in Batman (also written by an Englishman). Her performance is high school princess-child-provocoteur-dominatrix-psycho.
I found myself watching this film quite a few times and it is such an antidote to the overwhelming seriousness of so many recent productions. The only comparable visual media I can think of is probably children's television, maybe Aardman. It is very much in the English over-the-top pantomime/Flying Circus/Aardman style, but more realistic and threaded with underlying English visciousness.
If someone asked me to show them an example of brilliant acting, I would probably choose this or Tinker Tailor. Alec Guinness is in most scenes, and aided with a brilliant screenplay, by the author himself, he is always so watchable.
This is one of those rare things, that movies simply can't be because of time restrictions. Every little detail is there. The car, the house, the dialogue. The time. The time for Guinness to do what the best actors do: a guesture, a shrug, a stare. The supporting cast is generally excellent.
I can't watch many things a second or third time. Not many things are worth watching again. But this is. It is the exact antithesis of modern television and movies - slow, deliberate, relentless. It will never age.
This is one of those rare things, that movies simply can't be because of time restrictions. Every little detail is there. The car, the house, the dialogue. The time. The time for Guinness to do what the best actors do: a guesture, a shrug, a stare. The supporting cast is generally excellent.
I can't watch many things a second or third time. Not many things are worth watching again. But this is. It is the exact antithesis of modern television and movies - slow, deliberate, relentless. It will never age.
This can only be understood in the light of Rocky winning best picture at the 1976 Academy Awards.
This is your standard inspirational movie. You can almost time to the minute that the 'girlfriend' appears.
It's a movie aimed at people who are inspired by motivational speeches, where every aspect of the speech is predictable. But many people like predictability, that's the attraction. This movie is the predictable inspirational movie with a few alterations. The teacher is the enemy and there's some shades of grey sadism. And it's about jazz, not boxing.
In many ways it could be a parable of our times. Gone is the brawler from the working class, instead we have a middle-class white person wanting to play jazz - a nearly dead art form, kept alive by music schools for middle-class white people. The middle-class white person is now achieving heroism. Overcoming your background is now an existential experience, not a reality.
In terms of jazz, it's a million miles away from the black people who dominated this art form: Billie and Ella, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Mingus and Monk. It's closer to modern classical music: gone are the days of Rossini and Puccini writing brilliant music to earn a living, instead we have piano competitions. Of course, if the student was black, it wouldn't have a market. Well, actually the student probably wouldn't be black to begin with.
Black jazz is dead. Long live middle-class white people 'fighting' for a shot at 'perfection'. Can you imagine Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell in some kind of 'duel' to see who could out-do each other on a piano? This is the 45th best film of all time, according to voters. What times we live in. This film makes Eddie Murphy in Beverley Hills Cop look like hard realism based on a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of journalism
This is your standard inspirational movie. You can almost time to the minute that the 'girlfriend' appears.
It's a movie aimed at people who are inspired by motivational speeches, where every aspect of the speech is predictable. But many people like predictability, that's the attraction. This movie is the predictable inspirational movie with a few alterations. The teacher is the enemy and there's some shades of grey sadism. And it's about jazz, not boxing.
In many ways it could be a parable of our times. Gone is the brawler from the working class, instead we have a middle-class white person wanting to play jazz - a nearly dead art form, kept alive by music schools for middle-class white people. The middle-class white person is now achieving heroism. Overcoming your background is now an existential experience, not a reality.
In terms of jazz, it's a million miles away from the black people who dominated this art form: Billie and Ella, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Mingus and Monk. It's closer to modern classical music: gone are the days of Rossini and Puccini writing brilliant music to earn a living, instead we have piano competitions. Of course, if the student was black, it wouldn't have a market. Well, actually the student probably wouldn't be black to begin with.
Black jazz is dead. Long live middle-class white people 'fighting' for a shot at 'perfection'. Can you imagine Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell in some kind of 'duel' to see who could out-do each other on a piano? This is the 45th best film of all time, according to voters. What times we live in. This film makes Eddie Murphy in Beverley Hills Cop look like hard realism based on a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of journalism