I'm really not getting the praise for this film's fast pace, because a slow pace is very characteristic in this drama, and although it can be respected for its audacity and frequent effectiveness, more than that, it brings momentum to a crawl as the key blow which sends the final product falling just shy of rewarding. William Friedkin incorporates his trademark hyper-atmosphere here, yet he doesn't exactly have the chilling material of "The Exorcist" to bite here, thus, the film resorts to a certain quietness and limpness to pacing which are pretty dull, and recurrent. Obviously, these characters are drawn well enough to be memorable, seeing as how they are well-portrayed and ushered in a number of roles which went on to be conventional in police dramas, yet there's still a surprising lack of depth here, which distances you from the characters, just as coldness in directorial storytelling distances you from most every other aspect. The film gives you hardly any background on its characters right away, and I ran with that, expecting gradual exposition to compensate, but to my surprise, this film ended up feeling more interested in its action and conflicts than their motivations and the characters involved in them. ![]() No, the film is reasonably compelling, but by no means is it especially fast-paced, you know, when it doesn't come to exposition. Shoot, this director is the dude who went on to do "The Exorcist", so you know that this film is going to be both bone-chilling and. I'd say that cartoony cheesiness on the level of "The Puppets" in this film is also reflected in Gene Hackman's character having a nickname taken from a cartoon character, but Popeye means business, almost as much as this film's Popeye. Nevertheless, this film is hardcore enough for me to ruin some childhood memories by saying, "So we've been told, and some choose to believe it I know they're wrong wait and see! Some day we'll find it, the French connection!" I was attempting to go for some kind of irony there by referring to something as cheery as "The Muppets" in a discussion about a film this brutal, but this film was always to be a little bit cheesy, because, come on, we're supposed to take French drug trades seriously here. I'm interested in the fact that this was the first R-rated film to score Best Picture, therefore, with "Midnight Cowboy", an X-rated film got it first.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |