yes Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Cinematical Seven: Movies with Nameless Main Characters
Filed under: Cinematical Seven »
Making a movie about a character whose name you never reveal sounds backwards and bizarre. How are we supposed to identify with the protagonist if we don't even know what to call him? But many films go that route, including this week's movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which doesn't name the man or the boy who occupy almost every frame of it. That's in keeping with McCarthy's novel, which is spare and bleak and doesn't use much punctuation, either. (The apocalypse wiped out most of the world's apostrophes.) Here are seven other movies whose central characters' names are kept hidden from us.
Fight Club. Currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, this modern classic follows novelist Chuck Palahniuk's lead by not naming the narrator, played by Edward Norton and identified simply as "The Narrator" in the credits. (Some viewers have thought the character is named Jack due to the Narrator's use of expressions like "I am Jack's cold sweat" and "I am Jack's raging bile duct," but he'd previously established that these are metaphors adapted from an old educational pamphlet he read where "Jack" was the generic name given.) The Narrator is intended to represent 20th-century men in general: repressed, emasculated, and timid. Of course, if you've seen the movie, you know we might actually wind up learning his name after all....
Ebert Picks Fest Slate (Including 'Hulk') and Announces His Return
Filed under: Newsstand », Other Festivals »
Roger Ebert's January announcement that he was going in for another major surgery began a long and disquieting silence. As the reviews he had written in advance started to run out, with no updates on his health and more and more of the content on his website being contributed by its steadfast editor Jim Emerson, some people began to worry that something was very seriously wrong. March saw the announcement that Ebert would reappear for his annual Overlooked Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign, but there was still no word from the man himself. Yesterday, much to my relief, a typically funny and self-deprecating message from Roger appeared on his site and in the Sun-Times. It confirms his planned appearance at Ebertfest in late April, and, better yet, announces that he will return to reviewing movies shortly afterward. The bad news is that the surgery didn't restore his ability to speak, which will for the moment preclude Ebert's return to his TV show where Richard Roeper has been valiantly trying to hold down the fort. (Is anyone still watching?) That aside, though, the dispatch is overwhelmingly good news.
New Releases: Yes
Joan Allen is getting older. It's not that her face - which, since Pleasantville, has been inseperable for me from the mental image of Reese Witherspoon-all-grown-up - has changed, so much that age is using the actress like a chalkboard. Joan Allen today looks like Joan Allen of ten years ago, with wrinkles scribbled on.
It's striking to see an actress in such an obviously advancing state of ... um ... maturity, take on back-to-back roles that deal with sexuality, as Allen has done with The Upside of Anger and, now, Sally Potter's Yes. Allen's presence as an erotic subject in Potter's film is a brave and powerful one; it's too bad the film neglects that presence for a linguistic gamble that, somewhat sadly, the actors don't really pull off.
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