I mentioned to a digi-friend the other day that I'd watched this film, and he said he had too, but that the twist was obvious. I get irrationally angry at people who think that that is an appropriate critique. It's a film. Of course it's obvious. What was he expecting? So I told him that if you want unexpected, your best bet is real life. And then I thought about what made me upset. I enjoyed watching the film. I actually looked up the plot on Wikipedia so I knew what to expect. I like films better when they're spoiled for me. And while I understand that lots of people are not that way at all, I wonder if, when we complain that we saw something coming, what we mean is that the film bored us so much that our minds skittered ahead to fill in the blanks. For filmmakers, the ramifications of that possibility are that their burden is to keep the viewer's mind engaged in the present: interested in what is on screen rather than trying to create suspense with emptiness....
Peter Bogdanovich does the retro thing again in this film, although where What's Up Doc ? hearkened back to the mere screwball, Paper Moon more fully embraced a slightly different thirties style, more like Clark Gable than Cary Grant. Those of you who enjoyed O Brother Where Art Thou will recognize many of the elements of this film, although the comedic elements aren't quite the same. Although the scripts had the same, long lines and monologues that older films seem known for, in Paper Moon the actors more fully embraced them, delivering them like they would Shakespeare, instead of George Clooney's rattled-off, barely intelligible, and over-written one-liners from O Brother. Although Tatum O'Neal won an Oscar for her performance here, I truly think both Peter Bogdanovich and Ryan O'Neal deserve some significant credit (though I think I'm going to have to disapprove of any father who would allow his nine-year-old to smoke at all, let alone on camera) (and...
This film was remarkably amusing. The acting was certainly adequate to the task of a light comedy, and the scenes had a sort of fluffy chemistry that kept me laughing. Although this 50's flick makes a good attempt at equality between newlyweds Chantal (Sandra Dee) and Eugene (Bobby Darin), I still felt the ending erred on the side of the female, balanced only by the portrayal of vamp Tina (Stefanie Powers). If the film had been more about individuals, I'm not sure I would have worried so much about the battle of the sexes, but as it stood, the male and female characters seemed to line up into teams - the mother helping her daughter, and the fathers helping their son, each gender keeping secrets and using strategies against the other. The coloring and camera style smacked strongly of the fifties, and I felt a little as if I'd stepped into some thick fantasy in chiffon and chintz, but that seems to be a characteristic of the age/genre. As a relative feminist in some are...
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