Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...language with the R.S.C.'s crack vocal coach, Cicely Berry. "You've got to make Shakespeare sound so new-minted you could almost hear it in the street," says Judi Dench. Sinead Cusack, who is ending her first Stratford season, says of her earlier work in film and television: "You don't learn very much there, if you haven't had training beforehand. The R.S.C. is the best training ground in the world...
...Vickie, his brother Joey, his best friend Pete Petrella. Pete stood up to Jake's insults, and stood by as his hard-luck friend; later, under the name Peter Savage, he helped Jake write his autobiography and served as consulting producer to the Raging Bull company. In the film, Pete's history is subsumed into the character of Joey (Joe Pesci): the fighter's manager and punching bag, his Sancho Panza and lago. By insulating Jake from the Mafia men who want a big piece of his career, Joey also isolates his brother from the real world...
...Bull introduces its three main characters, the moviegoer knows all there will be to know about them. Jake is the loner with a special, terrible gift he can't control; Joey is weak, loyal and scheming; Vickie is an enigma wrapped in gilt. The first hour of the film sets up the situation with a naturalistic vigor and cinematic resourcefulness unique to Scorsese. He knows precisely how to move the camera, dress a set, direct his splendid actors, underlay the music, edit to keep the viewer off guard and consistently impressed. But Raging Bull has nowhere...
...months to play the aging Jake. As Jake in 1941 or Jake in 1964, as comer or loser, as raging-bull boxer or battering-ram husband, shouting obscenity or whispering apology, De Niro is always absorbing and credible, even when his character isn't. When the film is moving on automatic pilot, De Niro is still sailing on animal energy, carrying his able, unknown co-stars with him. Perhaps this should be enough for a movie: bravura acting paired with dazzling, hyperkinetic direction. Why look a gift Bull in the mouth...
...gumption she has not acquired in her life as a certified Jewish American princess. It is hard to believe that a woman of 28, no matter how dippy, would think that yachting is an activity much pursued even in the new new Army, but such mild comedy as the film offers lies in watching a middle-class lady come to terms with the rigors of basic training. Even so, it cannot be said that having the tired old situations of service comedies worked by women instead of men freshens them much...