Struggle he unquestionably did. He reports both in the audio commentary and in his 1956 interview with Cahiers du Cinema (reprinted in the Andrew Sarris edited anthology Interviews with Film Directors) that he and friend William Faulkner struggled with the story because they had no idea how a pharaoh talked or acted.
Peter Brook has forgotten more about Shakespeare than I'll ever know, and Adrian Lester is an underrated and underappreciated actor.
Where to start? Well, I finally understand those singing puppets in the Fandango commercials.
As such, there has always been something troubling to me about the increasing insistence of Disney and Pixar films that the villains not only be wrong, but incorrigibly evil--not merely defeated but destroyed.
"You're tearing me apart!" The line--the plaintive cry--is synonymous with Rebel Without A Cause and hence with Nicholas Ray.
My relationship with the films of Ingmar Bergman has been analogous to that with a popular elder at a new church: I respect the title and all, but I usually find myself squinting when people tell me he's more than just deathly serious.
The situation is timeless, but the setting is very much of the moment.
Or, perhaps it is just my personal history (or lack of it) that leaves me probing the surfaces of Buñuel's works like blocks of marble, trying to feel my way around to the human portrait that lies beneath. Am I not Roman Catholic enough to "get it"? Not Latin enough? Surely it's not a case of my being not cynical enough? I mean, I find the contemptous light to which everyone in Buñuel's universe gets held up to misanthropic and tedious, and that's coming from a man who loves Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Sean Bean and McGregor get tied together through the barbs. We are all interconnected. It’s allegorical. It’s metaphorical. It’s allephorical.
Victor Hugo's novel is a timeless classic which has been retold and well loved since its inception, in part because it tells the story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The contemporary stage adaptation focuses on the antagonistic relationship between Valjean and Javert, but Bernard's film really focuses more on Valjean's spiritual development, echoing the novel's emphasis on his experience of grace and the way that it changes him gradually. Valjean is one of the great characters in the history of literature, and Harry Baur is totally up to the task of bringing him to life. The film feels less like an adaptation than a translation, and every time I assumed there would be a concession to staging or special effects--the barricades, the sewers--Bernard is able to take us there without drawing attention to the effects for effects sake.
