Word: pakula
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While Helmut Kohl was visiting Moscow last week, a flood of U.S. visitors came to town as well. Among them: 21 Congressmen, most of them invited by the Supreme Soviet; twelve peripatetic New England newspaper editors; Film Director Alan Pakula, who was screening his film Sophie's Choice for Soviet film makers; and eleven-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Me., who was on her way Andropov a youth camp in the Crimea. Samantha had written to Yuri Andropov in April, and he answered with an invitation to visit his country at Soviet expense...
...producer okayed a script about New Zealand simply because he'd never been there and wanted a paid vacation. Agent David Begelman lied to Goldman, saying a famous director had had a nervous breakdown, so that Goldman would turn to one of Begelman's clients instead. And director Alan Pakula (Sophiz's Choice, Klute) told Goldman to give him versions of All the President's Men that were both longer and shorter, harder and softer. "Don't deprive me of any riches," Pakula said...
...WHILE since the last time anyone tried to make a movie in the style of Sophie's Choice a sweeping, panoramic, more-than-full-length feature patterned with word-for-word faithfulness on a bestselling epic. The classic of the genre is, of course, Gone With the Wind. Alan Pakula's new film has much of the grandness and majestic scope of such predecessors Based on the long-time 1980 bestseller by William Styron, which attempted to make some kind of comprehensive statement about the naive American outsider and the Holocaust, the movie progresses through Poland and Auschwitz, showing clips...
...haunted by a terrible past. Extended flashbacks, shot on location in Europe with English subtitles, slowly unfold the extent of that terror up to Sophie's final and tragic "choice," so that the viewer's reactions parallel Stingo's own. Longer than the conventional flashback, these sequences demonstrate Pakula's scrupulous care in reproducing Styron's tone. An actual concentration camp in Yugoslavia forms the background, and Meryl Streep as Sophie appears with near-shaven head, made up to look perceptibly younger and gabbling fluently in German and Polish...
...been made of the perfectionism with which Streep attacked the demanding role of Sophie, breaking out of her previous understated image into rampant emotionalism, and perfecting the heavy Polish accent and halting speech that make the illusion complete. Likewise, it is difficult for even the queasiest to fault Pakula's respectful and sensitive handling of the Holocaust material...