Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

Romeo and Juliet meet New York, Bernstein and a lot of hair spray. The musical numbers are as earwormy as expected and the story quite beautifully told. I wonder how the (racial) stereotypes were put down in the film: "Polish-Irish" vs. "Puerto-Rican/Spanish". The white guys with their 50s make-up and their baseball jackets are inherently funny to look at and give the film its beautiful Americana vintage look. On the other hand, the Puerto-Ricans look like a caricature of a pool overseer and animator in a Club Med resort. Their skins appear to have been sloppily painted on with an early prototype of a car finish airbrush and their hair towers are marvels of construction - they must have hired a static engineer on set to keep those quiffs staying upright. Maybe it has to do with how the film reacted to the pigment, but it seems more like a minstrel show to me. The biggest hurdle for the musicals I have seen so far is to keep the story interesting. Ve...

The pocket pool hustler Fast Eddie tries to win against the king of billards: Minnesota Fats, but his blind ambition and hubris makes him lose. He manages to overcome his faults but pays a high price. Newman was impressive in the film, but the performances of Piper and Scott took the cake. Her vulnerable, strangely undetermined Sarah, confronted by the unscrupulous and straight-talking Bird was fascinating to watch. The way Piper delivered her lines was amazing, especially the love scene. I felt I could almost touch her constant wavering of opinions. Newman left me strangely cold, it's hard to pinpoint why - maybe he should have been established more ruthless in the beginning of the picture. There was a highly surrealist element in the script: the incessant drinking. The characters easily downed a load of bottles of Bourbon and who knows what during the first big match at Ames. Everybody seems to be drinking gallons of booze throughout the picture, yet they seem only ...

 A provincial judge is to preside over a tribunal judging second-row Nazis in Nuremberg when public interest in the trials have stopped. The film strikes a fine balance between documenting the mood of the American occupation, the German population living in the ruins and pushing the story forward. Although highly entertaining and very impressively acted I felt that the German characters (all of them) were a bit too exaggerated for my taste. Burt Lancaster was interesting to watch, with his minimal reactions he somehow got me to sympathize with his character. So, morally, the judge's decision caught me unguarded - maybe the script could have played on that a bit more. There were some great camera pans that were nicely synchronized with the action. Not Dreyer, but close at some places.