Word: finney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sleep is supposed to be the kingdom of our own monsters -- that nightscape where the id, unshackled by scruple, runs wild and plays out every dreamer's scenarios of fear fulfillment. But in his 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney had an even spookier idea: that sleep is when the sentry of common sense nods off and allows our enemies, not ourselves, to invade and conquer. Pod seeds fall from outer space and rob sleeping humans of their emotions, their very selves. It was Us vs. Them, cold-war style -- and in this cunning parable of persecution...
...Finney's fable has passed the time test (40 years is forever in pop culture), having been filmed twice as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Don Siegel in 1956 and Philip Kaufman in 1978. The first movie, punctuating California's small-town sunniness with the thunder of deadpan mobocracy, became a cult classic. Both pictures met the horror-movie challenge: they kept moviegoers up all night, ashiver with apprehension...
Hopkins, of course. No other actor of his generation need apply. Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi -- each brings the handsomely monogrammed baggage of an outsize personality. They would be too big for the role, tell too much. Hopkins is just the man for this. For much of his career, as a prissy Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter (his first film, 1968) or the Rupert Murdoch-like press baron in the 1985 play Pravda, he had his own suitcase of mannerisms: the clipped elocution, the run-on sentence, all the pensive ahhs and umms...
...MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN (JILL CLAYburgh) abruptly leaves home and family for no reason she cares to articulate. Her husband (Albert Finney) mopes and eats mayonnaise-and-potato-chip sandwiches. Their younger daughter drops out of high school. An older daughter drops back in on their South Carolina home, married, pregnant and edgy. The domestic disorders of the Odom family are shown quite realistically in RICH IN LOVE. But they are not comically or dramatically painted by writer Alfred Uhry and director Bruce Beresford (the Driving Miss Daisy team) as the movie drifts to a predictably sweet conclusion. Its heart...
Things have definitely changes since 1963, among them Albert Finney, who played the role of Tom Jones in Richardson's movie. Finney now possesses all the characteristics of a late-middle-aged man, from the beefy chin to the salt-and-paper hair and loosening skin. Like others his age, Finney endured the 60s, probably just barely, coming out of that decade a shell of the physical god he was in 1963. He is almost a different person from the Finney of 1963, who fit neatly into the role of Tom, the bronzed free spirit skipping about the fields...