And it really is excellent. Well worth a watch. I think the best way of describing it is that it’s a noir really. It starts off with death so you know all the characters are somehow doomed and intertwined and the narrative shifts PoV absolutely brilliantly to reveal just how. I can’t do justice to just how well this film is structured and how each reveal clarifies something and obscures something else.
This next film could go in a triple bill with Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun as modern masterepieces of film centred on children’s experience.
Unfortunately it’s another tearjerker but adolescence can be so very, very sad.
I started to watch Shadows because I’ve never (to my shame) actually watched any Cassavetes. But it annoyed me and I turned it off. The gurning. It looked like Bobby de Niro. And I want to smack his face every time he screws it up in that stupid expression he habitually wears. The wind changed Bobby! Your face did get stuck!
Shadows is pre Gina Rowlands. I don’t think any of the actors in it had big careers and to be honest I don’t think that’s much of a loss.
I’m going to feel okay about skipping forward to his later career then. I can see how this was influential, including in its presentation of acting, but the tics just annoyed me too much to watch it.
I think most of the Mingus music was chopped out of the second version of the film (which is what I was watching) which obviously doesn’t make me happy either!
There still is some and the sax solos are based on his themes but knowing there was more frustrates me. Who could re edit their film and think “you know what this needs? Less Mingus music!”
It’s filmic shorthand for “The British weren’t bad, see, they had a Black soldier! He had no option but to fight the enemies of his adoptive [but not Imperialist] country [that started this mess]. It’s a misunderstanding, really.”
If he was a white soldier they couldn’t Bothsides it.
I am so down for the crossover sequel in the expanded Barbie/Oppenheimer universe.
ETA: Where they presumably put aside their differences and unite to fight their common enemy, the Fast and Furious franchise.
Article about young (child) actors being categorized as supporting actors even if they are evenly matched with an adult lead. Also, less-experienced female actors against male actors.
