Word: righting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three-act structure the way most movies do. It tends to lurch along like--oh, say, a disputed election in Florida. Take the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Since we are all still here to savor this accurate reconstruction of those anguished days, we know everything came out all right in the end. But seen through the eyes of presidential aide Kenny O'Donnell (Costner), it is still a suspenseful tale. Well acted too, especially by Costner, and Greenwood as John F. Kennedy. The players don't particularly look like their historical models, but they make us feel their life...
That, stripped of the fancy writing that rendered Cormac McCarthy's novel unreadable to some of us, is the narrative essence of All the Pretty Horses, and it's not a bad one. The lads almost immediately encounter a funny, violent, nutsy kid (Black), and you know right away that his heedlessness is going to cause them a lot of bother. Among other things, his wild--indeed, murderous--ways will eventually mess up Grady's soulful romance with Alejandra (the lovely Cruz), daughter of the rich rancher the boys sign on with...
...arms of a buddy. Chuck Noland, the FedEx manager stranded on a Pacific island after a plane crash, has no one to talk to, to bray at, as he did to his harried underlings at work--no one to shore up his resolve or share his desperation. Well, all right. Chuck is a doer. So he will fashion tools, clothing, shelter; find food, draw cave paintings, make fire. He will replicate the ascent of man, all by his lonesome. He'll be Robinson Crusoe without Friday, Gilligan without the crew, Survivor without all those annoying other survivors...
Lily Bart (Anderson) has a knack for audacity. "My genius," she says, "seems to consist in doing the wrong thing at the right time." Men want to leave their fortunes to her, or their wives for her. But in old, moneyed Manhattan, sensation was more narrowly defined, more severely censured. Lily's charm is punishable by exile...
...relentless predictability. Vianne always knows, and we always know, what effect her concoctions will have on her customers. They always shake off their repressions and troubles at precisely the right inspirational moment. Dench's character even manages to die just when she should, with her life's work neatly completed. Made with a sort of tasteful vulgarity, this movie never disappoints the slack-minded audience's anticipation of the humanistically healing banality, the life-crushing behavioral cliche...