The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Directed by John Schlesinger
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The best scene in The Falcon and the Snowman is when Sean Penn tries to sell his Russian handlers—a wonderfully bemused David Suchet and Boris Lyoskin—on a coke enterprise. They’ve got embassies all over, Penn figures, so why not make some money moving blow through them up from Peru or whatever. It’s maybe halfway through…
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Midnight Cowboy gets to be a character study, but doesn’t start as one, which is an interesting situation. About forty-five minutes into the film, which runs just shy of two hours, Midnight Cowboy chucks the narrative urgency. Maybe not chucks, maybe just shuts down, because it does take the film a while to lose that…
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The Day of the Locust is a gentle film, at least in terms of Schlesinger’s direction, Conrad L. Hall’s cinematography and John Barry’s score. The film’s softly lit but with a whole lot of focus. Schlesinger wants to make sure the audience gets to see every part of the actors’ performances. He also wants the…
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Do the Brits have any major film movement? In the 1920s, the Germans had the expressionist movement. In the (what?) 1960s, there was the French New Wave. In addition to contributing more Greenhouse Effect-causing pollutants to the atmosphere, the United States has perfected the over-produced blockbuster. The British, however, have never really had a movement.…
The Stop Button 