Word: marber
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mike Nichol’s new film Closer is infused with this type of magical chemistry, and at times the potency of the alchemic mix threatens to make its world teeter off balance. With a screenplay by Patrick Marber, adapted from his play of the same name, the picture is a tone poem to both love and its darker side...
...pulverizing few minutes in Closer, the funny, hurtful, splendidly acted new film that Mike Nichols has made from Patrick Marber's play and screenplay. The scene leaves the audience as flush and drained as the participants. "I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody," says Nichols, 73, who has directed his fair share of cinematic sexual frissons. "But people are shocked. It's not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, 'I just don't know those people.' Well, they...
...this is in Marber's play, which the film follows closely. What Nichols and his cast bring to it is the eloquence of gesture. At the start of the film, on a London street, Dan is stalking Alice, or just appreciatively lurking, and when she gets hit by a vehicle he Galahads her into a cab. They are strangers, but in the forced intimacy of a back seat she removes his glasses, breathes on them and returns them. Her flirtation is a way of both expressing interest and asserting control. (You're a mess, her fiddling says...
...chastised. (Nichols compliments Roberts as "the CNN of actresses: on the close-up you actually see a crawl--noun by noun, adjective by adjective--of what she's thinking.") They keep Closer alive and lively, worth watching for clues even as we attend to the wit of Marber's dialogue. It's a film of cutting words and subtle sign language...
...Portman because she wanted to work with Mike Nichols, who directed her in a stage production of The Seagull in New York City in August 2001. For a few years, they searched for a project, briefly considering a movie about Andy Warhol star Edie Sedgwick before settling on Patrick Marber's play. Portman had avoided sexually charged roles ever since she played, in close succession, the street urchin in The Professional and the 13-year-old who flirts with Timothy Hutton in Beautiful Girls. "I had a bad early experience when The Professional came out. I'm really proud...