Posted on 07/03/2004 2:37:52 PM PDT by mrustow
(I first submitted the following movie review to Amazon.com on May 20. On May 26, I resubmitted it. At 926 words, it is well under the site’s 1000-word limit, and I “bleeped” all foul language with dashes. And yet, Amazon’s politburo killed the review without explanation.)
Waking the Dead is perfectly mediocre: 50 percent wonderful, and 50 percent dreadful. It tells of a man’s reaction to the mid-1970s political murder of the love of his life, a love whom he cannot bid farewell. Set during the early 1980s, we see flashbacks to his love affair, as in the present, while campaigning for political office, he either imagines that his lover’s ghost has come back from the dead to visit with him, her ghost really does visit him, or she never died. He almost goes mad.
"Sarah Williams" was a leftwing activist in the sanctuary movement, trying to protect Chilean refugees seeking asylum in America from South American dictator Augusto Pinochet. "Fielding Pierce" was an idealistic coast guard officer from a working class, union family. Fielding planned on entering politics, but was of a more liberal, reformist bent, in a sense no longer recognizable in an age in which “liberal” is a euphemism for socialist, or worse.
First, the bad news.
The movie should have been thirty minutes shorter; although it lists as only 105 minutes, it seems interminable. And in a picture with little action, and many quiet, talky scenes, the dialogue is mostly poor. Instead of cutting slow scenes, director Keith Gordon plays with the editing, with blink-like pauses within a scene. And the constant back-and-forth in time confuses some viewers (e.g., my wife). That screenwriter Robert Dillon was nominated for an “Independent Sprit Award” tells you all you need to know about that award.
Now, to the good news.
Jennifer Connelly and Billy Crudup are attractive as the lovers, have excellent chemistry, play likeable characters, and give vivid performances. You hurt for them. The cast includes some talented players whose faces (Stanley Anderson, as Fielding’s father, Broadway’s Janet McTeer as his sister, and Hal Holbrook as his political mentor) you might recognize, but who are not, or in Holbrook’s case, are no longer name “brands.” (Ed Harris is listed in the credits, but I must have blinked when he appeared.) And there are two scenes that jump out from the rest.
One is of a campaign stop during Pierce’s campaign for the House. It is filmed as if by a Madison Avenue ad director, with jump cuts to accentuate activity, and now in black and white, now in color.
The other scene is a flashback to the sanctuary church group. The lovers are eating with the smug, Marxist pastor, and a smug, forty-something, Chilean refugee couple. The self-righteous refugees are mercilessly attacking America, and Fielding for wanting to enter the “corrupt” world of American politics. The wife then announces, triumphantly, “Everything is politics,” blissfully unaware that she has just refuted her own argument. (If everything is corrupt, politics is then no worse than anything else, and there’s no reason NOT to go into politics.) Fielding laces into her:
Uh, I'm sorry, but do you believe that I'm going into politics so I can become a corrupt son of a b---h who sells electrodes to the Chilean secret police?... I am so sick of having to apologize for being an American.
Pastor: North American.
Fielding: Uh, God, I'm so sorry. Yes, North American. But I can't help noticing that when people run to freedom they tend to wash up on North American shores. This country is still the best that we've been able to do in the whole f-----g history of the planet.
Sarah: You’re arguing by yourself.
Fielding: I'm in this whole f-----g room by myself, and I'm choking on the collective sense of superiority.
That scene had perfect pitch. I have heard “educated,” foreign “aristocrats” say the same thing, practically word for word, and the anti-Americanism of the American pastor, who refuses to grant the very existence of the country which rescues the refugees he champions, has since been institutionalized. (Every time someone refers to America as “North America,” he is insulting America in the most pathetically petty way he can.)
Waking the Dead is based on a novel by Scott Spencer (Endless Love), who specializes in obsessive love. Initially, I assumed that the story was influenced by Ghost (1990) and To Jillian on Her 37th Birthday (1996), but then discovered that Spencer’s novel was published in 1986. Director Keith Gordon had previously made one very good movie, in A Midnight Clear (1992), and a near-masterpiece, in Mother Night (1996). A Midnight Clear is about a momentary cease-fire, in the last days of World War II, between some isolated American and German troops. It is a poignant, tragic, flawed movie that works better for those who, like Gordon, have a post-Vietnam sensibility. Mother Night is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s eponymous, 1966 masterpiece novel (no, not Slaughterhouse-Five), in which American-born playwright "Howard Campbell" (Nick Nolte), who lives in Germany during the Nazi Era, is engaged by U.S. intelligence to become an apparent traitor. Campbell makes Ezra Pound-style radio broadcasts in support of Hitler, which are used to send coded messages to the Allies. Campbell’s cover is so deep, however, that even after the war, the Allies will never admit that he worked for them.
The underlying theme tying Mother Night to Waking the Dead, is that our sorry lives can only be redeemed by one great love, and even that redemption is bound to be crushed beneath the jackboots of totalitarian politics. Keith Gordon is, at heart, a German romantic.
If Waking the Dead is on TV, give it a try. It might also be worth a rental, as a date-at-home movie.
It's their website. Can't they delete anything they want? I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
It's a good review. Contact the guy who runs reelcriticism.com. If he doesn't have a review up on that film already, he might run it.
Reviews are posted on imdb.com, too, but I think theirs are usually much shorter.
Actually, I think what got you zapped is that you explicitly tell people in your closing paragraph not to buy the movie... your review doesn't seem politically out of bounds.
If you review films this well, you probably should not be wasting your talent giving free content to Amazon. Start your own reviews site and build your own following.
d.o.l.
Criminal Numbr 18F
Yes, it's their Web site. But Jeff Bezos doesn't say, "It's my Web site, and I can delete anything I want." He encourages everyone to submit, and says all submissions following the guidelines will be posted. That's not truth in advertising.
And something the writer didn't mention, is that Bezos says that "all submissions become the property of amazon.com." In theory, that means that amazon could sue the author, claiming that he violated amazon's copyright, in publishing the work that amazon suppressed.
If Bezos were honest, and admitted that he runs a pc shop, he'd have gone out of business by now. For years, he was losing billions, and had his first profitable quarter only about a year ago. As any university president could tell you, when you're in the business of the free exchange of ideas, but you don't believe in the free excahnge of ideas, the only way you can survive is through deceit and suppression.
And here I thought Amazon was so against censorship. Don't they have books promoting pedophilia for sale?
I believe so. Isn't that why Clayton Cramer severed his relationship with Bezos?
It's too long. The purpose of a book review on Amazon.com an other book websites is to give others informatation about whether the book is worth reading not to go into great detail about a book's strengths or shortcomings. One or two paragraphs should be sufficient.
The site says the word limit is 1000.
First heard that about 25 years ago in a bar in San Francisco.
The fellow was from Central America. and pleasant enough, but insisted that I should not refer to myself as an American.
I nodded patiently, took a pull on my bottle of beer and told him that as far as I was concerned "American" is what I am, and "American" means people from the USA.
He looked stunned. I got the distinct impression that everyone he had met previously in the Bay Area had knuckled under immediately to his preposterous demand.
Meanwhile, they were livin' large, at the expense of the American taxpayers they so gleefully insulted. Why were they in my apartment? They were friends of the Honduran guy I rented a room to. Of course, aristocrat that he was, he looked down on me, and acted as though the place were his. On Thanksgiving Day weekend, I threw two of his friends out. He invited them over without saying a word to me. I answer the phone late at night, and some spoiled young American woman is demanding to speak to another immigrant Fulbright, talking to me as if I were the help. That's when I realize that Carlos had decided to invite people over. I locked myself in my room.
So, Carlos' rich, slutty American girlfriend shows up from Connecticut, and the other Fulbright and his American slut show up. The other couple take over my living room, which they proceed to turn into the Whorehouse Motel. I mean LOUD. ALL NIGHT.
At about 3 a.m., I got up to go to the bathroom. They started laughing their heads off, because I had apparently interrupted them. Of course, I interrupted them. How could I not have?
At 8 a.m., it was quiet in the living room, so I called the fellow in, before he and the whatever could get busy again. (I was youung once, and could understand this, if it were their OWN apartment.) He was actually a very friendly guy, and had been over before, but without the slut. I called him into my room, and told him that he and the girl would have to go. He was a man about it, but when Carlos found out, was he hot! Told me that I was obliged to come to him with my complaints. I told him it was my place. Period.
The Fulbright Program is just a big party for rich kids, foreigners and Americans alike. (I'd already run into my share of Americans while living in West Germany.) They are told that they are the ruling class, and are not to comport themselves like or with "the little people." Carlo did minimal work as an engineering student, maxing out on sex with an endless procession of wealthy sluts, American and Latin. When he finished his studies, instead of obeying the laws and the Fulbright rules, and immediately returning home to Honduras, he got a cushy job with the NYC Dept. of Transportation. (Fulbright has a history, both with American and foreign students, of violating its own rules.)
How much you wanna bet, that Fulbright officials speak of "North America"? It's a given that pc profs do.
BTTT
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