Pictureland

Wayfarers across the centuries, English novelist Thomas Hardy and Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg meet in the fictional country within a country of Wessex, which the novelist described in his preface to Far From The Madding Crowd as "a merely realistic dream country."  It is in the partly-real, partly-imagined Wessex and Hardy's 1874 novel that the writer and filmmaker quite amicably meet and combine their talents.  Of course, such bonhomie does not necessarily guarantee excitement, the kind of friction that often produces artistic brilliance. This latest  (and fourth) film version of Far From The Madding Crowd demonstrates a shared feeling for landscape and a somewhat reluctant romanticism on the part of Hardy and Vinterberg.   Brought newly to the screen, Hardy's beloved novel is above all a handsome piece of work in which the visual appeal of its actors, its wardrobe and landscape are happily allowed to trump the novelist's typical fatalism and te...

So, you want to be an artist?  Let Inside Llewyn Davis be a lesson to you.  Are you ready to watch lesser talents succeed where you fail?  Ready to watch the money cascade on the seemingly undeserving while you can barely pay your bills (or can't at all)?  More daunting yet, you might find out that for all your commitment, your integrity, for all the deep feeling you have for that art at which you toil, you simply aren't talented enough to succeed, to produce the great work.  And if things are going particularly badly, you might be haunted by an orange tabby cat, as is the case with struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac). This is not the first time that Joel and Ethan Coen have touched upon themes of art versus commerce, of cultural divides, as they have ranged around in location, subject and genre during their thirty years of filmmaking.  Nor is this their first period piece grounded in American roots music.  What is different at this p...

The laconic hero of Drive is not just a man without a name, the lonely fellow is a man without a decade.  "The Driver" (Ryan Gosling) sports an anachronistic white satin jacket through much of Drive , which is announced in titles whose pink script is consciously reminiscent of those of Risky Business .  Only The Driver's first getaway car, a late model Chevy Impala, ties him to the present .  "The most popular car in California," announces Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the mechanic who sets up the young man with the souped-up getaway vehicle for the first job we see The Driver perform with icy precision. The first action sequence during which Gosling's mysterious character is wheel man for two robbers gets Drive off to a bracing, promising start.  Before the Impala starts roaring along the streets and ducking into underpasses of nighttime Los Angeles, before The Driver pulls on his taut, leather gloves and inserts a trademark toothpick into his mouth, th...