A very vivid, masterfully made, elegantly written, performed, shot, edited wonderful production all around. Lumet's very satisfying 12 ANGRY MEN is as good as DAZED & CONFUSED, I think; and it evolved, at least for me I suppose, out of similar hangups. Or I'd just underrated it for other, dense reasons. Better than DOUBT very probably, and better than MIRACLE ON 34TH ST assuredly. Etc.!
Well, Martin Balsam plays Juror 1, the jury foreman, calm, methodical. John Fiedler plays Juror 2,…
Totalitarian here, but that's bald totalitarian the way Orwell lays it, so it's just dystopian. Like, when criminal justice becomes automated, it'll be sort of worrying but sort of benevolent (like the risk assessments documented in an episode of Crazy/Genius?), but the worries will mount and intensify until they suddenly spill into a 1984 system. Huh? Huh?
And anyway, America of today isn't so hot, what with the racism, prisons, fanatical cops, environmental stubbornness, deranged religion, endless war, unchecked mass…
Sheen as Frost and Langella as Nixon. Brilliantly told, and though there are some facile leaps at points (voiceover nostalgia? so much simple, repetitive, gleaming, Ron Howard-branded snazziness?) it still delivers much better many years later than when I first saw it, when it first came out. Puts some better sense into how I took SECRET HONOR's one-man-show roughness, for instance, too.
O, from a Peter Morgan play, very British. And I usually don't hate films adapted from plays as a matter of fact -- AMADEUS, GALILEO, FENCES, PROOF, DOUBT, WIT, etc., etc. -- but just kind of dislike. Sometimes.
Not bad like CYBER CHASE exactly, or agèd, way-back Scooby-Doo pieces such as this: bad in its own special, newer way. The Coco Diablo stuff's cutely swerving, but doppelganger ghosts are lame. And it's just meaninglessly joke-joke-joke-joke-joke, which once in a while's fun but usually stays off-key. Kids these days, they're hyper sometimes, and it's disturbing.
Profoundly misunderstood and underrated! My God, I cannot believe some of the negative reviews this received. The relentless and psychotic quirk that it wears is brainy and hit-or-miss, but the humor is legitimate and fun and (mostly) quite flexible in hitting all the nooks and crannies of its syrupy, Thoreauvian screenplay.
If more mid-budget pop movies were this insanely smart and bold -- and if Sandra Bullock continued being a creepy obsessive (delivering weird, no-holds-barred hilarity within a colorful, wacked-out…
Bergman's early-'80s beauty! Supposed to be his swan song at times… and we're lucky it wasn't (everyone should have long, beautiful, productive lifetimes if they're wise, positive, the longer the better) but sometimes it seems a touch unlucky (the wise cap at the end would be perfectly positioned at the end, not near the end? Sorry! It's a shame to say, clumsy to play with people's lives like they're playthings and not my fellow human individual mortals, but it has…
