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Mean Streets 1973
Great portrait of a narrow-minded, small-time criminal consumed by Italian Catholic neuroses. More verité and overtly French New Wave-influenced than Marty's subsequent works. The scene of Harvey Keitel stumbling around woozily intoxicated to "Rubber Biscuit" is iconic and incredibly influential.
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Lone Star 1996
The last John Sayles-scripted movie I watched recently was 1980's Alligator, one of a handful of pulpy genre movies he worked on early in his career. It was interesting to see how the serious-minded Sayles navigated the world of b-movie creature features. He came away with a few gator teeth in the seat of his jeans but otherwise unscathed.
He's more at home with Lone Star. A quiet, contemplative neo-western murder mystery about generational secrets and the blurring of mythology…
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Broken Blossoms 1919
You might expect a film adaptation of a story called The Chink and the Child made by Birth of a Nation director D.W. Griffith to be, well, not exactly racially sensitive. And, true, the character of Cheng Huan is played by westerner Richard Barthelmess, who squints his eyes to achieve an oriental look. But, if anything, Broken Blossoms is about tolerance, and in particular racial tolerance, it being the story of two ethnically different star-crossed lovers, whose flowering affections are…
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Orlando 1992
Sally Potter's high camp take on the Virginia Woolf novel is a tale of a gender-bending androgyne who lives for centuries; underneath the film's glossy artifice, though, there's a tragic core. It's like a slightly less gay Highlander, basically.
Tilda Swinton is superb, and whose incredible face looks like something you would normally find gazing out from an Elizabethan portrait. S/he carries the film, but it is also about the sumptuous costumes and art design, with any sense of precious artiness undercut by a Gilliamesque sense of irreverence and humour. Wonderful.