There is something about the existential angst of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) that--I don't know--might have felt at home in an anthology with John Cheever's "Death of Justina" or on a double-bill with whatever film about the silence of God that Ingmar Bergman had just released in 1963.
The larger point, though, is that Hollywood has participated from the beginning in shaping our attitudes in the service of a political or ideological point of view. The Reader was not the first portrayal of the German people as being beleaguered by Nazism, nor was Quentin Tarantino the first to mine the fascist mindset for Juvenalian satire.
Oh, we like to congratulate ourselves in the West (and America in particular) that women have more rights than they did at some indeterminate time in the past or in some repressive culture with which we can compare.
Huston said of directing: "[...] I try to direct as little as possible. The more one directs, the more there is a tendency to monotony. If one is telling each person what to do, one ends up with a host of little replicas of oneself" (260).
The nature of a celebrity interview is that it can be hit or miss. Surely it is interesting to hear Chaplin opine in 1957 that this new kid, Marlon Brando, has "something." But that doesn't relate much to the film.
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.
If you enter the terms "servant," "losey," and "creepy" into the Google search engine, you get approximately nine hundred hits. Not all of them, of course, are using the "c" word in connection to Joseph Losey's 1963 film starring Dirk Bogarde and "introducing" James Fox, but enough of them are to make it clear that "creepy" is the adjective of choice for talking vaguely about Losey's film without having to get too specific.
Claude Chabrol, who is still alive and still working, has seventy-one directorial film credits listed at IMDB.com. By means of comparison, Michelangelo Antonioni has thirty-six, Robert Bresson seventeen, and Peter Brook a mere baker's dozen.
