The Freshman (1990)

The Freshman MB

“There are three types of people in New york, there are people who get paid a million dollars a day and get laid in some tower every night, then there’s the people who live in Time Square and eat Yankee Doodles off the sidewalk. And then there’s the guys like me, I call us the glue of society. We go? forget about it! all hell’s gonna break loose.”

Now this line is spoken by the one and only Victor Ray, (Bruno Kirby) at the beginning of the film, The Freshman (1990), it basically sums the movie up in a nutshell. This movie’s theme is: the important things in life, and the social hierarchy of New York City.

The movie is about a young man from Vermont, Clark Kellog (Matthew Broderick) about to move to New York to start his freshman year of college at New York University, “ a ‘good’ school”, as judged by Victor Ray. Victor Ray meets Clark just as he arrives into the center of New York, Grand Central Station. Clark is intimidated and scared and because he it looking up at the ceilings and staring in awe at all the people. He mistakenly trips over a homeless man sleeping on some steps and falls.

When he looks up, laden in a sleazy beige suit, bling and jingling bracelets, hair slicked back, and a thick mustache to top it off, there is Victor Ray, “of the Victor Ray car service.” He offers Clark the minimum price for an air-conditioned ride in a “mint condition Bonneville” Cadillac. Victor Ray drives off with all Clark’s luggage and the $500 his stepfather gave him to live on.  In his first fifteen minutes in New York, Clark has managed to get his money and all his clothes stolen.

He cannot catch up to him the thief, so he goes to NYU and visits his dorm room. When he walks in, he meets Steve Bushak who righteously teaches him that in New York City, everyone is a victim. Then Clark meets his professor, Fleeber (Paul Benedict), a wonderfully colorful character who thinks Clark is proposing a movie idea, when really he is telling him the truth! (about his “evil” step father Dwight, who gave him barely any money to live in New York and the “hoodlum” who took all his belongings). But, while talking to Fleeber in his office, Clark sees Victor Ray walking down the street with his stuff so he excuses himself and exits through the window, and then there is a great chase through the streets of Greenwich Village and through Washington Square Park. When he Clark catches up to him, Victor Ray offers him a job working for his uncle, Carmine Sabotini, “a great man.”

When Clark arrives in the “best neighborhood in New York”, according to Victor, he is surprised to find that Carmine bares an uncanny resemblance to Don Vito Corleone, which Victor tells him not to mention. Clark learns that his job is just to deliver a package from JFK to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but the package brings them into quite a few tricky situations. Clark finds out that the package is a Komodo dragon which is an endangered species. He tells Carmine about Greenwald and Simpson, two agents from the “fish and wild life division” who are onto Carmine and his business in importing and serving endangered animals at the Gourmet Club. (His very exclusive restaurant supposedly serving endangered animals for no less than a couple hundred thousand dollars a plate. “Tip included!”) He runs this business with Larry London (Maximilian Schell.) On the last night of the Gourmet Club, action ensues, and as Clark beautifully puts it: “My heart was pounding as I crossed the dance floor. In a few minutes I would be free or dead… or Rodolfo Lasparri of Palermo, Sicily!“

The movie has a great ending, Carmine, Clark, and the Komodo dragon walk across a cornfield. It’s hard to pick a favorite scene or quote beacause every line and every shot in this movie is genius, but I think the most touching scene is when Carmine visits Clark in his dorm room and Clark tells the poem that his late father wrote. I find this scene so moving. It’s a great poem, and like Carmine, I like the last line.. “To the certainty of his fur”.

My favorite characters are Clark, Fleeber, and Carmine’s daughter, Tina played by the lovely Penelope Ann Miller.

This is definitely in my top 5 favorite movies. It’s a great film, I love it.

A+

Lucy

"The Artist" (2011)

Okay, so I’m in love with a movie.

The Artist is about a famous and successful silent film actor in the 1920’s, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin). He runs into Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) (literally) outside one of his film openings. She bends down and bumps into him there is a moment of charming confusion but he gracefully and quickly picks up by starting to laugh about it, so does everyone else, and she does of course. She poses a lot, at one point kissing him on the cheek. So this turns up on the front page of the newspaper the next morning, with the headline: “Who is that girl?”

This movie is charming, witty, and beautiful. Jean Dujardin is great and gives a superb and exciting performance. Bérénice Béjo sparkles as Peppy Miller, an aspiring dancer who wants to be a famous actress. Her smile always makes me beam and I came out of this movie happy for no reason.  The movie has a subtlety and charm to it.  The denouement is surprising and heartbreaking.

I saw the movie two times, and cried in the same scene both times. This scene is when George is in the hospital from a fire that he started in his apartment, and Peppy runs up desperately to the hospital room, still dressed up for the movie she was shooting. With the sympathetic doctor and nurse looking on, she notices the burnt film cannisters on the table next to him, pulls out some film and looks at the film.  This is the film he was clutching when they found him, says the doctor. This film is of Peppy and George dancing, she cries because she realizes that he really loves her.

They call it a silent film but I think without the music in this movie, it wouldn’t be as good.  The movie is a lot like “Singing in The Rain” because Jean Dujardin is inspired by Gene Kelly:  in the scene where he watches his boss, Al Zimmer’s (John Goodman) sound test with his colleague, actress (Missi Pyle) Constance. She seems to have a terrible voice.  In “Singing in the Rain”, they also have this problem because Gene’s partner actress who stars with him in all his big films sounds ridiculous out loud like Constance in “The Artist.” George laughs and says: “If that’s the future, you can have it!” 
Absolutely A+
Love,
Lucy

Cape Fear(1962), Cape Fear(1991), Night of the hunter(1955)

“I’m goin’ give your wife and kid somethin’ they aint’ never gon’ forget, they ain’t never gon’ forget it counselor.” This is the line that has stuck with me the most from the film “Cape Fear”(1962). This movie is about an ex-convict, Max Cady, (Robert Mitchum) who comes back to town after being in prison for eight years. He went to jail for attacking a girl in a parking lot. The man who got him arrested was a lawyer who was also a witness to the crime, Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) . Bowden was working late on a case that evening, and walking home, he heard some whimpers in the parking lot, so he ran over and found Max Cady attacking the girl.  He fought with Cady while the girl screamed.  He was tried in court, and Bowden testified against him, playing the part of a witness not an attorney.

Now, he’s back in town and he’s out to get the lawyer’s family. Bowden has a wife, a young daughter, and a dog. This movie is definitely disturbing and quite terrifying, but  the cinematography is excellent and the shadowing is superb. (So is the directing, by J. Lee Thompson.           

Robert Mitchum is terrifying and haunting in this movie. There is a remake of this film directed by Martin Scorsese. This later film also features Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, but this time with Peck as Cady’s lawyer, and Mitchum as a police man working with Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte). Juliette Lewis gives a haunting performance.

The second film changes the plot alot. The daughter is obviously older (almost sixteen), and she is more sexually desirous. The music, is by Elmer Bernstein (Leonard Bernstein’s father. The music, in my opinion suits the first film much better. Here it sounds taken. So, even though Scorses’s movie is a more modern and explicitly violent film than the original, I actually find Mitchum much more terrifying that De Niro in the lead role of Max Cady and  in “Night Of The Hunter.” Except for at the end. During the desperate last scene during the storm on the boat, Robert De Niro is truly relentless, and therefore truly terrifying. He says all this on a breaking boat during a storm with his head severely burned!

I think the best performances in this movie are those of Robert De Niro and Juliette Lewis. The new version has some very disturbed and twisted scenes, a few of which I had to skip over.  The truly sick and horribly violent scenes in the newer film  makes me kind of hate it.  We see Robert De Niro hurt (very badly) the people in this town. The movie is more violently intense (people being set on fire, cannibalism, beating up with chains and wood, rape, and strong battery.) Cape Fear (1962) has a scene with Robert Mitchum beats up a girl, but we don’t see her get beat up and we only see bruises after. In the second movie, he brutally beats a girl and severely injures her resulting in her being put in the hospital. The only time when I felt that De Niro had any psychological value was at the end when I think he gives a great performance stating the fact that Sam buried the part of the report that says that the girl he brutally raped was being promiscuous.

 In the version with Robert Mitchum, Cady calls Sam Bowden’s innocent, 14-year old daughter “juicy,” but in the De Niro version, the girl is almost 16 and their relationship gets much more explicit: the girl is amost sixteen and a little sexually interested in Cady not knowing what a monster he is. Cady calls her up, posing as her new drama teacher.  He kisses her. The girl is slightly sexually interested in Cady and the mother is a little interested, too. In the first version, not only is the girl 1 but she is childish and unassuming. In the first film, the daughter is psychologically almost a small child, even though she is supposedly Fourteen and obviously developed; she has a baby face and she is very short.

Night of the Hunter also with Robert Mitchum as a murderer stalking a family.  In this case, he targets the children of a widow of a man who was arrested and hanged for a bank robbery and 2 murders. “Children are man at his strongest, they abide.” “They abide and they endure.”  This is said by Lillian Gish at the end of the movie, I think it’s my favorite line. Night of the Hunter is a much better movie than “Cape Fear” first or second. Mitchum’s character comes to town as “Preacher” Harry Powell and marries Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) and makes it clear very fast that the marriage is for “caring for her children, not for begetting more!”. Mr.Powell married Willa for the 2 thousand dollars that her husband supposedly hid in the river. But the money is  really in Pearl ( the  four-year-old daughter)’s doll.  Mr. Powell/He brainwashes Pearl into loving him and believing everything he says.  (She calls him “Daddy Powell.”)  But her brother John is a little older and knows better.  

The movie is just great, really one of my top 10 favorite movies.  Robert Mitchum and, of course, Lillian Gish give the best performances as, respectively, a preacher/killer/seeker of money and a bible-following “angel” who rescues homeless children and saves John and Pearl in the end. The movie isn’t gruesome although there are a few mildly disturbing scenes that still haunt me, but the whole movie sticks with me.

Night of the hunter: (1955) A+

Cape Fear: (1962) B+

Cape Fear: (1991) B

Lucy