Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

sharky_55 The Pawnbroker deals not within the Holocaust but in its aftermath - such an event having an undeniable aftershock in the world's community. This type of treatment has a different power in 1964 than nowadays, where the Holocaust is a sacred and delicate topic reserved for but the most revered directors, demanding utmost solemnity. Compare this to Lumet's direction. See, for example, how the lively character of Jesus Ortiz is introduced to us. The setting is the dim, still pawn shop, and then Jesus bursts in from the side entrance like a sitcom character, blasts his trumpet a few times, and bumbles around without doing much work. The second person who breaches Sol's cage is a loud black woman, almost a walking stereotype, who reacts to his meagre offer for her ornate candlesticks with hysterical, over-the-top laughter, as if they were both in on a practical joke. Sol remains unmoved. Rod Steiger is a frigid and cold type. He shuffles silently around the interiors of his pawn shop, and Boris Kaufman captures his profile in a way so that it is always obscured and hidden behind layers of protection and distance, either physically in the shadows of bars over his face and the steel-mesh cage, or in his body language, in the way Steiger never holds a gaze while his customers unload the tales of their merchandise. They might as well be talking to a brick wall. Sol is unwavered by their nostalgia for these relics, and has a good reason for being unwilling to delve back into the past. His curt, clipped replies offer no weakness to probe or enter, and act as a foil to the emotional desperation of the customers who are often parting with treasured belongings because of dire financial need. In one particularly haunting sequence, a man walks hobbles in looking not for money but merely a face to talk to and an ear to listen, and Sol coldly turns him away. Lumet unveils the cracks slowly, as if wanting to avoid the branding of a Holocaust film immediately so that we are not so quick to cast our sympathies out. The direction doesn't force Sol's hand, but merely presents his circumstances in a way which reveals his past and how unforgettable the torment of the concentration camp must be. At first, subtly, he introduces characters which shake up the equilibrium of the lowly pawn shop. When black boys come in to pawn an expensive lawnmower, Sol directs a thinly veiled accusation at its origins, and we can feel the tension in the room. The object rocks his apparent cold impartiality, and through Steiger's eyes we witness him wresting between his disdain for the 'scum' and the silent front he has forged through years of suffering and mourning. Another is Marilyn Birchfield, the local social worker, who is so entirely honest and open-faced that we wonder how she has survived so long in Harlem. Because she presents herself as a figure of charity and future change, Sol rejects the very idea of her; such kindness and humility does not agree with his pessimistic worldview, forged from the horror of his experiences. When she tries to reach out (on the balcony of a sunny, skyscraper apartment, no less) he bitterly unleashes what he swore he would not release, and refuses her hand. The past is revealed in stuttered flashbacks, not as grand condemnations but as filtered and intensely personal memories which resurface despite Sol's insistence on pushing them down deeper. Lumet channels Alain Resnais, who in Night and Fog created a haunting juxtaposition of the past and present. While the camera hovers all around the city and slums, it picks up on indiscriminate events which are magnified through his vision; a man trying to escape from a gang of thugs reminds him of the barbed wire walls of the camp, and a pregnant girl pawning her ring forces his mind back to the image of Jewish wedding rings being picked off the conveyor line of the same fence. One sequence involving an prostitute's offer plays out like a tape rolling between two scenes over and over, as the site of bare breasts invokes an ugly memory of the rape of his wife. The unsettling effect is combined with overlapping sound tracks until the two scenes converge into one painful, singular moment for Sol. Sexual bliss has been long eradicated from his life - see how the edits flit from Jesus and his girlfriend in an animated tryst, and then to Sol and his partner, who treat sex like an oft-forgotten obligation, an act of silent passion.Steiger's greatest moment comes when he realises his complicity all these years with the local racketeer Rodriguez and his prostitution den, and his entire face scrunches up in agony because his distance has been all for nought. Quincy Jones' jazzed up, uninhibited score hurtles along with the camera through Harlem, and betrays Sol's old world sensibilities by being piped out from every murky street corner and store. There is excitement and energy leaking from the seams of the post-war society, one that he is quick to stamp out of his protégé. But in Jesus' death he finds new meaning and existence. The man who once felt the greatest pain of them all is allowed vulnerability once more, and perhaps a new start can finally begin.

morrison-dylan-fan Getting back into watching TV shows, (with the jet-black BBC Comedy series Fleabag being the most recent great discovery)I decided to take a look at the shows on Netflix UK.As I checked up on the TV section,I stumbled on a movie that I had received high praise in a review on IMDb's Film Noir board, which led to me getting ready to trade things in with the pawnbroker.The plot:Since seeing the rest of his family killed in a concentration camp, Sol Nazerman (the only member of the family to not be killed in the camp) has closed himself off to the rest of the world,with the brief glimpses to the numbers on his arm bringing memories back to Nazerman that he tries to keep repressed. Working in a pawn shop used by gangster Rodriguez as a front for money laundering, Nazerman spends each day meeting the "Rejects" and "Scum" of society.Joining the pawnbrokers, Jesus Ortiz looks up to Nazerman,but is hurt by the fist Nazerman breaks his attempt at friendship with. As local social worker Marilyn Birchfield attempts to get Nazerman to let his guard down a bit, Ortiz decides to break the pawnbroker.View on the film:Mostly filmed at real locations (including a pawnshop at 1642 Park Avenue) director Sidney Lumet (who took over after Arthur Hiller got sacked,and Stanley Kubrick/Karel Reisz and Franco Zeffirelli all turned the project down) and cinematographer Boris Kaufman give the title an extraordinary grubby Film Noir atmosphere,with jagged wide track shots treading on all the rot and decay lining Nazerman's cold existence. Backed by the hard Funk of Quincy Jones,Lumet,Kaufman and editor Ralph Rosenblum display a masterful sense of collaboration. Digging into Nazerman's repressed memories,Lumet and Rosenblum's pin-sharp editing gradually brings the fragmented horrors that Nazerman faced into light,as the barrier put at the front of the shop places Nazerman in his self-imposed prison.Showing that he could do a role that Lumet was hoping to give to James Mason or Groucho Marx (!),Rod Steiger gives an incredible performance as Nazerman. Withholding everything apart from pure Film Noir vile for those he sees as the scum of society, Steiger incredibly keeps a vice like grip on Nazerman's repressed memories,which are treated with great psychological care by Steiger,whose wall of nihilism is built by Nazerman making all his other emotions dead to the world. Joined by some Blaxploitation jiving from Brock Peters smooth Rodriguez and the powerfully wounded Jaime Sánchez's take on Jesus Ortiz, Geraldine Fitzgerald gives a dazzling performance as Marilyn Birchfield,by stepping away from what could be big, emotional scenes,to instead give Birchfield's meetings with Nazerman a quiet, heartfelt sincerity.Breaking the Production Code in bringing Edward Lewis Wallant's book to the screen,the screenplay by Morton S. Fine & David Friedkin superbly walks into the Film Noir wilderness of Nazerman's life with brittle dialogue that spills the coldness Nazerman views society in across the screen. Taking the rather unique decision to look at the Holocaust in a non-War movie,the writers study the lingering after effects of the atrocity on Nazerman,whose brief releasing of the withheld memories leads to Nazerman finally feeling the decades of emotions he has been keeping on the shelves of the pawnbrokers.

Mike Davenport If you truly want to see something awful, ugly and be depressed in the end....Watch this! The subject matter could have made an interesting film, yet the characters, the setting, the music all contribute to nothing but wallowing in squalor! The plot has already been described here. Missing was the contrasting element to these pathetic characters and their equally dreary existence. It was all one tone. You wait for it to get better but alas, it never does. A bit of humor would have added an element of relief to an otherwise pitifully self-indulgent seediness. I like gritty as much as anyone, but when you see this, you will want to watch something like.....The Exorcist, just to get the taste of this one out of your mouth.Not all of us see a classic here, to some of us the emperor is naked! (and it isn't pretty!)

edwagreen The late Sidney Lumet really hit a home run in this film which depicts a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp vividly reliving his nightmare memories in flashback. The latter is so competently cultivated by the master director Lumet.Rod Steiger gave a superb, riveting performance as a holocaust survivor who is now trapped in a very difficult neighborhood and sees for himself what modern day prejudice there is now. It is not to be believed that Steiger and fellow nominee Oskar Werner, ("Ship of Fools,") lost the best actor award that year in the Academy Awards. Shocking that both lost and that the victor was none other than Lee Marvin for "Cat Ballou." What were the Academy voters thinking?With the superb supporting cast of Brock Peters, as the modern day scapegoat to the ills of society and Geraldine Fitzgerald, as an understanding social worker, this extremely powerful film shall always serve as a reminder in the never ending struggle for civil rights and human decency.