• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
  • Review: “Anna Karenina”
  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by colincarman in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

casablanca, classic, drama, humphrey bogart, ingrid bergman, oscars, paul henreid, romantic, world war II

Grade: A (SEE IT)

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID.

Yet 1942’s “Casablanca” (winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Picture) isn’t a kid anymore.  Tonight, to celebrate the film’s 70th anniversary, Turner Classic Movies will screen, for one night only, a digitally re-mastered edition of the classic World War II romantic drama and mainstay of Top 10 Classic Films lists.  “Casablanca” isn’t just the perfect film; it’s an iconic collection of top-shelf actors (Bogie, Bergman, Rains, Henreid, Lorre), a superb script, perfect pacing, music, melodrama, comedy…say when!

If you can’t visit Rick’s Café Américain tonight, be sure to rent a copy, which is just as well: TCM’s screening includes an introduction by Robert Osborne and commentary by that senile satyr otherwise known as Hugh Hefner (hardly worth the price of admission).  The observations of Osborne are surely worth taking in, but at this point, “Casablanca” and its basket of quotable sayings have already worked their way into popular culture: the misquoted “Play it again, Sam,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” (which cleverly comes at the film’s ending), and of course, “We’ll always have, Paris.”  Fortunately for film buffs, we’ll always have “Casablanca” for five, fine reasons on which you can rely:

  1. SPANNING THE GLOBE.  There are arguably thirty-five nationalities represented in “Casablanca,” the most cosmopolitan classic of all time.  At a surprisingly modern pace, it moves from Vichy-occupied Morocco to Paris with talk of America, Germany, and Bulgaria in between.  Not only are Rick and Ilsa different nationalities, united by their hatred for the Gestapo, the interracial closeness between the couple and their portable musician, Sam (played by drummer Dooley Wilson) is also forward-thinking for its time.  “Casablanca” transcends most, if not all, geopolitical borders.
  2. MAX STEINER’S MUSIC.  Described by Louis as the “most beautiful woman to ever visit Casablanca,” the luminous Bergman plays Ilsa Lund, a Norwegian ex-lover of club-owner Rick Blaine.  It’s the music that transports her and the house pianist Sam whose take on the 1930s song “As Time Goes By” sends her into a forlorn dream-state.  Enter an enraged Rick, saying “Sam!  I thought I told you never to play that –”  From there, the score by Max Steiner moves to melodramatic orchestration but incorporates bits and pieces of “As Times Goes By.”  Still, that wasn’t enough to win Steiner an Oscar for Best Original Score that year.  But that’s okay, Steiner also lost after writing the music for that little picture called “Gone with the Wind” (1939).  Heard of it?
  3. LOVE AMONG THE RUINS.  One of the many charms of “Casablanca” is that intelligently intertwines wartime politics and romance.   When the film went into general release in January of 1943, Americans already knew the city’s name because of the Casablanca conference, a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill; the Office of War Information kept the film from troops stationed in North Africa, worried that it would stir up resentment toward Vichy supporters.  “Your business is politics,” Rick tells Captain Louis Renault and his cohorts, leaving the table.  “My business is running a saloon.”  The irony, however, is that as hard as he tries, Rick just can’t keep politics at bay since a war-time, international romance is inherently political.  During the France flashback sequence, Bergman tells Bogie: “With the whole world crumbling, we picked this time to fall in love.”  “Yeah,” Bogie mumbles, “it’s pretty bad timing.”
  4. FOR LOVE OR VIRTUE?  The major conflict of “Casablanca” resides in Rick’s last-minute decision: in the famous and final plane hangar scene, gauzed in fog and especially beautiful in black-and-white, the boozy club-owner in a white tuxedo must hang onto the woman he loves or help her and her husband, a Czech resistance leader, escape Morocco (with the Nazi noose tightening) in order to continue the collective fight against Hitler?  Alongside another World War II dilemma, “Sophie’s Choice” (1982), there’s forty years before, Rick’s choice in “Casablanca.”
  5. LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!  Directed by Hungarian-American Michael Curtiz (“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “White Christmas”), “Casablanca” is that rare film in which production , plot, and performance are all perfectly matched.   Amazingly, Warner Brothers, in the early 1940s, pumped out a picture nearly once a week and Curtiz’s classic was just one on the assembly line.  And yet  “Casablanca” is the exception; like fine wine, it just gets better with age.  Naturally, this film has a phrase for that, too.  As Sam sings, it’s “You must remember this/as times goes by…”

In Memoriam: Whitney in “The Bodyguard” (1992)

12 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by colincarman in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

dolly parton, jodie foster, john hinkley, kevin costner, lawrence kasdan, the bodyguard, whitney houston

“The Bodyguard” (1992)

“THERE’S A BIG difference between wanting to die and having no fear of death.”  That’s Kevin Costner teaching the late Whitney Houston (1963-2012) a thing or two in the romantic thriller, “The Bodyguard” (1992).  The love-birds have just seen a samurai film, one that Costner’s character has seen sixty-two times, and strolling along the sidewalk toward dinner, Houston asks: “And because he had no fear of death, he was invincible?”  “What do you think?” queries Costner.  “Well,” she smiles, “he sure creamed them all in the end.”  We all know where dinner and a movie typically lead.  Back in his basement, Costner dramatically unwraps Houston’s  scarf, tosses it in the air, only to let it fall and separate on his samurai sword.  Paging Dr. Freud!

Two decades on, the plot of “The Bodyguard” is not only familiar but simple: before the supremacy of J.Lo and J.T. there was the fictional Rachel Marron, that “triple-threat” of actress-singer-dancer aptly embodied by Houston herself.  She enlists the protection of Frank Farmer, a former Secret Service Agent who rues the day he didn’t do enough to protect Reagan from his assassin John Hinkley Jr. who, in 1981, thought killing the President would win over his obsession, Jodie Foster.  (Speaking of the obsessive re-watching of films, Hinkley saw “Taxi Driver” at least fifteen times.)   Originally, Lawrence (“The Big Chill”) Kasdan wrote the script for “The Bodyguard” in the 1970s for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross.

Still far from her own untimely end at the age of 48, Houston’s big-screen debut in “The Bodyguard” was just the beginning of her movie career.  She made two more films – “Waiting to Exhale” and “The Preacher’s Wife” – before returning to the studio in 1998.  At her zenith, Houston’s vocals spanned an astounding three octaves and she showed, with her Super Bowl performance of 1991, that “The Star Spangled Banner” was about as easy to sing as “Happy Birthday.”  At the time of her death in Beverly Hills one month ago, she was reportedly proud of her comeback performance in a remake of the 1976 film “Sparkle.”  We’ll get the chance to see the mezzo soprano sparkle one last time this summer with the film’s posthumous release.

Looking back, much of “The Bodyguard” feels flat and dated: the slow-motion assassination attempt on stage at the Oscars, that nifty James-Bond karate chop that can knock a man out with just one jab to the neck, the weepy epilogue in which Frank and Rachel bid their adieus on the tarmac before Rachel changes her mind, ordering her pilot to “Wait!” and running back into Farmer’s arms.  Of course, “The Bodyguard” the film is less memorable than “The Bodyguard” the soundtrack, which grossed over 400 million dollars worldwide and went platinum 17 times over.  Its crown jewel, “I Will Always Love You” spent an unprecedented 14 weeks at No. 1 in America (at one point, moving a million copies a week.)  It was actually Costner that suggested she cover Dolly Parton’s 1974 country ballad.  (He and Houston fought the record company to add the 45-second a cappella introduction.)   In the film, hearing it in the bar Farmer takes her to, she asks: “This is a cowboy song, huh?”  “Yeah,” Farmer replies.  She laughs into his shoulder, and confesses: “I mean, it’s so depressing.  Have you ever listened to the words?”  The two laugh.  “It’s one of those someone-is-always-leaving-somebody songs.”

In terms of the art-life overlap, it’s striking that though Houston, as Rachel, is surrounded by handlers, publicists, choreographers, family members, and, of course, her bodyguard, she’s still so vulnerable, her life imperiled.  “I’m here to keep you alive,” Farmer tells her.  One of the ironies of Houston’s turn in “The Bodyguard” is that, on-screen as well as off, she was in desperate need of a better protector and guardian angel.  In the end, I guess Houston’s biggest film has become one of those someone-is-always-leaving-somebody kind of movies.

Poem: Coyote Dream

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by colincarman in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

In dreams, the fine line between

Coyote and canine is far from fearsome.

The dangerous, the domesticated

Hardly distinguishable: fur, fangs,

Pet, petrifying, I move among them.

In my sleep, I’m awake

To no difference boys and beasts.

But once my eyelids snap open like cheap blinds,

I’m made painfully aware,

At a trailhead, at winter’s cold core,

Of my own dogs, all puffed up but ultimately defenseless.

The pair are startled by the shrill barks

Then by the largest among them.

They see what was never really far-off

Some adversary, some ancestor

Skulking, lip raised, by the tree line

Flashing that purple streak of meanness.

Book Review at Review 19

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by colincarman in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=147

Poem: “My father stands in the swimming pool of time”

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by colincarman in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

[“My father stands in the swimming pool of time”]

My father stands in the swimming pool of time

That cement sink in the backyard around which

Kids’ teeth were chipped as they scampered, dripping,

Mouths full of birthday cake, unheeding

All parental caution to slow down.

My father paints the steps to the swimming pool of time

Every spring, for the past twenty-eight springs, he applies coat

Upon coat, always the same eggshell blue but with a different dog

Serenely watching over him, six feet deep and sweating,

A salamander inside a monochrome fresco.

My father leans against a mop in the swimming pool of time

For his sons and daughter, now for his daughter’s daughters

Who hear nothing metaphoric in his quiet work –

The repetition and rhythm of brush- and broomstrokes –

Nothing major in the unambiguous songs of birds and jetplanes.

My father coils a garden hose in the swimming pool of time

Empties its deep end of acorns, mud and branches

And the fake plastic coins the girls went diving for but soon

abandoned

Nearly seventy, every bit the skittish swimmer he was at ten, he stands

Above the drain, looking up, straight into the sun, then down again.

New Jersey. May 2011.

Recent Posts

  • It’s Alive…with Mary Shelley!
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!
  • Sign Posts!
  • What Killed Jane Austen?
  • Was Austen a Holy Roller?

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 260 other subscribers

Top Posts & Pages

  • Review: "The Descendants"
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!

Jane Austen

action alien alpha dog amanda seyfried animals anton yelchin blue valentine bradley cooper brad pitt British literature bromance carey mulligan charlize theron chawton christina hendricks christopher plummer colin farrell comedy crazy stupid love daniel craig dickens dracula drama emma stone england ewan mcgregor family frankenstein freud gay george clooney hampshire hbo horror jack russell terrier Jane Austen jessica chastain john lithgow joseph gordon levitt jude law kurt cobain mad men madonna mansfield park mary shelley matthew mcconaughey michael fassbender naomi watts oscars paris paul rudd philip seymour hoffman poetry politics portsmouth pride and prejudice romantic romantic comedy romanticism ryan gosling science fiction september 11 sex shakespeare shelley steven soderbergh summer blockbuster the hangover the help the social network thriller tim burton true blood twilight viola davis

Blog Stats

  • 52,644 hits
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Colin Carman Twitter

  • #M3GAN is MORE fun than Avatar & its budget was a third of Avatar’s catering M3GAN 2.0 - SNL youtu.be/MAprAHEw18I via @YouTube 1 week ago
  • RT @70RA: Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of love "So somebody ran out Left somebody's heart in a mess Well if you're looking for love Honey I'm… 1 week ago
  • @MadonnaGreece Las Vegas Oct & Denver Aug 1 week ago
  • @austenquotebot But you didn’t really mean what you said, right Jane? Hail @austenquotebot @ChawtonHouse 2 weeks ago
  • RT @JennyBoylan: Good night from Belgrade Lakes, Maine. https://t.co/3PWYUa26pI 2 weeks ago
Follow @ColinCarman

Colin Carman

Colin Carman

Archives

  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • July 2019
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Blogroll

  • Cinema Train
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Fogs' Movie Reviews

Category Cloud

Film Reviews Jane Austen Pandemic Posts Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs) Uncategorized

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Colin Carman
    • Join 175 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Colin Carman
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...