Word: mask
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...coming-of-age clichés. These teen-agers are good-looking kids with big dreams and a bright line of patter. The coach carries on like a sensitive drill sergeant, psyching his team into a football frenzy by using curses, inspirational locker-room speeches and the odd face-mask violation. Michael Chapman, who graduated to the director's chair with this film after making his name as the cinematographer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Personal Best, brings a virginal intensity to each hoary plot device. He hardly gives his audience time to realize that the football team...
SOME HARVARD PRIMA DONNAS used to grouse that Sellars treated them like his hobby, puppets. Sellars' novel device in Pericles actually does just that--turns actors into puppets, using plastic masks on the evil characters. The technique produces an eerie, sinister effect; the masks, sometimes grotesque, sometimes animal, sometimes human, look frighteningly real. Though without masks, Pericles, Thaisa and Marina are equally un rounded as characters; when Lysimachus removes his mask repenting of his past ways, the easy gimmick becomes a tour de force...
...reading. The only people actually singing were those carefully following song sheets the band had distributed, and a few singing group members who had been forced to learn the words. But the bulk of the partisans moved their lips, talked with friends or put bottles in their mouths to mask their utter fight song illiteracy...
Motherwell never dissembled about his sources. Not only was a sign for the human body like Figure in Black, 1947, with its mask's eyes staring from the bent trapezoid of a head, clearly derived from Picasso, but Motherwell would also write more knowledgeably about Picasso than most of his contemporaries, critics included. If the rectangular opening that kept appearing, as a promise of space beyond the picture plane, in painting after painting from the early '40s to the Open series of the late '60s and early '70s derived its authority from Matisse's Blue...
...film has a saving grace, it's Michael Caine. As Fortnum, Caine plays Plarr's antithesis--a diplomatic has-been who is vocal, inefficient, frumpy and, more often than not, drunk. Fortnum's expressiveness is near-heroic beside the doctor's iron mask, but the endearing consul can't carry the film alone. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, Fortnum's sentiments flag for want of a receiver among the other characters...