This movie ambitiously portrays an artist wielding the power of truth as a sculpting tool. It’s clearly an adaptation of a stage play, and has both gems and stinkers in the dialogue. It’s a thought-provoking film, but takes a pretty dismal view of people in general. Even the artist, the only one who sees the truth, is only able to use it to bring out the worst in people. In the end, the artist sculpts the world into the thing she’s most critical of.
3 responses to “Movie: The Shape of Things”
Rent “Chino”, with Charles Bronson. a very plain movie that depicts one man’s trumphs and tragedies in a very unglorified manner, i.e., plainly (nothing Hollywood about this flic,, very foreign.. italian, i believe).
it’s better the 2nd time. the music is very cooooooool.
i rented “Dead Man”, with Johnny Depp (and many other cameos). it’s filmed in b/w. it’s a western. it’s extremely so-so. there just nothing in the “new” section but well wrapped dog vomit.
i saw this and nearly gagged, but Robert Mitchum was in it.. what had to be his last movie. unfortunately, he prolly gets a total 90 seconds of screen time.
Depp does good in it, as usual.
rent “Chino”. you also gotta see “The Missouri Breaks”.
My rental queue has been duly updated. Netflix doesn’t have The Missouri Breaks, though. I wonder why, maybe it never made it DVD.
I sort of liked Dead Man. That’s the movie that stuck the William Blake lines in my head forever:
I think Neil Young did the crazy, guitar-only soundtrack. Not a mainstream movie, for sure.
ha.. you saw it. funny.
no, it wasn’t mainstream. but i was already gagging at looking at all the new releases. revolting, really. ‘cannibalism’ has sure caught on as a sellable genre. ha! as i wrote this, i remembered the gruesome scene from deadman. hmmm.
actually, there are a couple of gruesome scenes.
the good points are that the movie was obviously done on a low budget, but the quality of the scenes / props / wardrobes / etc. did not suffer. you could easily pull most scenes out of that and put them in a BIG production flick.
yeah, the poem is nice. Jim Morrison sings them in one of his songs to brilliant perfection.
the soundtrack.. it was iffy to me. it worked sometimes and other times i didn’t want to hear it.
the town of Machine. i would have like to have spent more time there. it had some interesting characteristics that i would like to have seen developed. + Mitchum. that was waaay too short for me.
the town of Bodie needs to have a movie made about it. a good “day in the life” flick with several main characters interacting with other re-visited characters. the movie should span the a couple of years, including its [final] fiery end.
i dunno.. guess i am just into the western deal.
rent “Paint Your Wagon”. waaaaay California old west.