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I don't know that Dylan is consciously lying, any more than the children in the McMartin School case were consciously lying. I think that she honestly believes what she says, which may well have been inculcated in her by her mother when she was a little girl. Which still makes her a victim, but not of Woody Allen.
He simply strikes me as being a somewhat introverted intellectual & a more private person. I'm a little wary of long-distance diagnoses, especially for the syndrome du jour. Human beings are far more complicated than any easy label.
True, but he's the type who would go out of his way to live in that fashion anyway, as much as possible. Clearly he had some money from somewhere!
Or, we can chalk it up to an exaggeration of reality in order to highlight the comedy. :)
Well, he was a practicing psychiatrist for many years, and that's a high-paying field. ANd he no doubt made plenty of wise investments along the way.
There's no evidence of that. And in understanding of the complexities of human emotions & relationships, as well and his obvious deep feeling for the absurd but endearing (and yes, sometimes destructive) nature of human frailty, mitigates against such a diagnosis, I would think. Certainly the intricate web of socialization & all of its unspoken rules & variations is no mystery to him.
I suspect we don't hear a gun for the same reason we don't see a tennis ball in the final scene with the mimes, but we still hear it in play, emphasizing the difference between perception filtered through our preconceived model of the "real" world, and whatever reality actually is … or isn't ...
A silencer? :)
But that doesn't really matter. the film is a study, or an experiment if you prefer, about what's real & what isn't, what we think is real & what isn't, how we shape our own model of truth & how we assign meaning to the world. But it's not pretentious at all, IMHO. Thought-provoking, an art film? Certainly! Which is what it was made to be, both entertainment & questions to ponder afterward.
"My, aren't you full of questions!"
I've adopted that as my go-to response to the persistently nosy.
So hard to choose just five, but here goes ...
America
The Boxer
Bridge Over Troubled Water
The Sound of Silence
Old Friends
It's an excellent series, with Urich & Brooks really bringing the characters to life. It features smart, literate scripts, and it benefits from actually being shot in Boston. I thoroughly enjoyed it when it was originally aired, and it still holds up wonderfully for me today.
Agreed, his comic approach is all about the little details of everyday life, the complications we so often make for ourselves, our sometimes overwrought fears & sometimes unrealistic expectations … in short, the human condition. And in all of that, there's plenty of room for serious examination of the flaws all humans have to some degree or another, and the big questions about life, justice, fate, love, loss, death. It's not unusual for a funny, even absurd bit of his comedy to wind up saying something quite meaningful about our lives.
And many women of that time were definitely attracted to the suave, cultured, sophisticated man, a type that he could play to perfection. Here he does add a touch of weakness, as it fits the character; but that's something Shelby has obviously kept hidden well enough prior to the story. As long as life is smooth sailing, he's confidently in his element.
The science part doesn't bother me so much, as any film can only use what's fairly well-established as scientific fact at the time it was made. And much of that changes over time—increasingly so today, too.
For me, the human stories are what's wrong with this film. I just don't think they work well at all. Nolan's stated intention to match & even surpass 2001 by infusing a powerful emotional human element in this film only drags it down, I fear. The blandness of the astronauts in 2001 is part of the film's theme & belongs there. The human element in this film strikes me as melodrama, which is not at all suited to it.
Exactly. While no Bond film is really "realistic" (and we wouldn't want them to be), this is the one that comes closest. And that gives it an extra intensity & believability, I think.
I don't think it's so much a deification of Bobby Kennedy the man. It's more about what he stood for & represented to so many people, making him a kind of vessel & embodiment of their ideals & hopes. The film is about the shattering of all those hopes projected onto him. Although it's fair to say that he had changed considerably since JFK's death, becoming more introspective & eloquent.
I think partly because McGoohan envisioned Number Six as an intelligent, focused, determined man who preferred to avoid violence whenever possible, even in his Secret Agent days. There he reflects McGoohan's own strongly held beliefs.
But even more to the point, Number Six could see that violence wouldn't secure him much of anything in the Village, other than severe punishment—perhaps resulting in permanent physical or brain damage—or else outright death. He realized that early on.
The real battle was one of intelligence & perseverance, as demonstrated with the "Hammer Into Anvil" episode—he takes the measure of the latest Number Two & systematically, ruthlessly destroys him by psychological means. And there's also probably a certain amount of grim satisfaction in using the Village's own methods of psychological manipulation against it.
In the real world, where one might well feel a prisoner (one of the primary themes of the series), the use of violence always ends badly for the individual. What matters is maintaining one's own individuality & authenticity—as Camus put it, in the midst of winter, finding inside of yourself an invincible summer. McGoohan, of course, would have been quite familiar with Camus, existentialism, and the philosophical emphasis on personal authenticity during the late 1950s through the early 1970s.
I think it was the right performance for this film. Her character is supposed to be both self-centered & stupid … and yet she winds up possessing the secret that could destroy the world. Anyone who's even remotely intelligent & cultured doesn't fare too well in this film, from Christina to Trivago to Soberin.
Lily/Gabrielle is an immature, unfinished caricature of an adult, a low-IQ child ineptly playing at being either a waif in distress or a seductress ... but she still manages to get the better of everyone, including Hammer. The only thing that stops her is her own insatiable greed & ignorance. Gaby Rodgers conveys all of that quite effectively, I think.
What I mean is, even if she really is a bad actor, the things that make her bad actually work for her character. Just as we can see through her playacting, many of the characters and see through it too. Which is her secret advantage. Everyone underestimates her. She may be obvious & not very bright, but she also has sheer animal cunning, working on impulse & instinct rather than brains. She's not even smart enough to know any of that, she just knows that she can get what she wants.
I agree. He's stated that one of his favorites roles, from an acting viewpoint, was as Word Man in Eddie & the Cruisers. He liked the idea of technically being the lead, but doing so in the background, a quiet, almost secondary observer of the more dynamic characters. It had to be a subtle balance for him. Which means the acting challenges & opportunities are important to him, an excellent attitude & approach for a character actor.
No, his father never gave Neil much of a chance. And while Neil's anguish seems like a rather small and temporary problem from an adult perspective, it didn't seem that way to him. Most teenagers who are just beginning to get some sense of themselves as actual human beings, with hopes & dreams of their own, feel everything to extremes. I certainly did. And so did all of my classmates in high school. The first time you feel those enormous adult emotions is when they inevitably feel the most powerful & overwhelming, because you have nothing to compare them with. Further, Neil knew that he didn't exist as an autonomous person to his father. He was simply his father's way of achieving the things that his father had always wanted by proxy. Neil was a means to an end. His father wasn't consciously aware of this, he honestly believed he was doing all of it for his son. But the key phrase there is "HIS son" -- Neil's perfectly planned & successful future was to make Neil's father feel like a success, no matter what the cost to Neil.