Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Derrick Gibbons An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

DKosty123 This is a film that when you say James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Shirley Knight, with Francis Ford Coppola writing and directing, you'd expect an 8 or 9 rating. When you watch the film, it does not quite live up to the sum of these parts. There are a few reasons. Shirley Knight is brilliant, and her character is addressing the issue of Roe V Wade (1973) here 4 years before the court decision. I credit Coppola for bringing that into the plot. What gets hard to understand is that she runs away because she is pregnant from her husband, not sure if she is going to be a good mother, and not sure of anything it seems. The script has her calling her husband, yet it does not really explain if she loves her husband, though I suspect not. James Caan is very good as the brain damaged football player whose nickname is killer and who has been given $1,000 to leave the college he got injured in a game at. It is not a big dialogue role which had to be tough for the talkative Caan but he brings it off pretty well. Duvall is the lonely cop whose wife died in a fire and comes into the picture pulling Knight over for speeding and decides he wants to use Knight to replace the departed one.Knight's conflict in my opinion is not explained well enough and that is the weakness in this one. If that were explained better, the film would hook the viewer more. Because of her considerable talent Shirley does hook the viewer in late in the film, but if the hook had come earlier, this would be a batter film.While this film does feature a dream Wedding Sequence with Knight's husband. The sequence uses the same music as is used at weddings in the Godfather films. There is some foreshadowing for Coppola. This is a good film, that is just a little short of being a great film. While the parts should have made it, the results do not.

PWNYCNY This is a great movie. This is a powerful. It's about people dealing with repressed emotions. It is about denial. It is about love. It is about an angry woman who falls in love with a brain-damaged ex-football player, and cannot accept the fact that she in love with such a man. It is about a traumatized police officer who denies his real feelings for his deceased wife. It is about the ex-football whose calm and pliable demeanor masks rage. This may be Francis Ford Coppola's greatest movie. It is unpretentious, it is real. The story is timeless; the themes relevant and compelling. A woman wants to break away from convention, and so flees. She is out of control, but maintains her sense of compassion. She wants love, desperately, and feels love too, but is too mixed up to sort out her thoughts, which remain jumbled in her mind. What she cannot admit is that the object of her love, the person for whom she really, truly cares for, is a man that is so far removed from what she considers to be one worthy of love, that it freaks her out. And this is the gist of the story: how people are so out of touch with how they feel that they cannot accept the truth even when it is right before their very eyes. She ran away from home, and came to the end of her journey, but too late. She wanted to be free but was unwilling to jettison all the bourgeois, middle-class junk that was keeping her enslaved. The character of Killer, played with great skill by James Caan, symbolizes the kind of man that contemporary society mocks and scorns - he is quiet, kind, loyal and strong without being pushy or bossy. Yet he is what the woman really wants, except that she cannot admit it, because of her own hang-ups, until it is too late. The strength of this story is contained in its honesty. The story and the characters are plausible and are not caricatures. It's just too bad that in this movie the truth is unpleasant, but if it were pleasant, then the movie would be hokum, and who needs that?

moonspinner55 Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed this stunningly personal story of a married woman's flight from her husband--and the reality that perhaps the youthful glee and excitement of her younger years are behind her. We learn little about this woman's marriage except that she has been feeling her independence slipping away as of late; she's also recently learned she's pregnant, which has further complicated her heart (she doesn't want to be a complacent wifey, despite the maternal way she speaks to her husband over the phone). She meets two men on her journey: a former college football hero who--after an accident during a game--has been left with permanent brain damage, and a sexy, strutting motorcycle cop who has a great deal of trouble in his own life. The clear, clean landscapes (as photographed by the very talented Wilmer Butler) are astutely realized, as are the characters. Shirley Knight, James Caan, and Robert Duvall each deliver strong, gripping performances, most especially since these are not very likable people in conventional terms. Some scenes (such as Knight's first call home from a pay-phone, or her first night alone with Caan where they play 'Simon Says') are almost too intimate to watch. Coppola toys with reality, turning the jagged memories of his characters into scrapbooks we've been made privy to. He allows scenes to play out, yet the editing is quite nimble and the film is never allowed to get too heavy (there are at least two or three very frisky moments). It's a heady endeavor--so much so that the picture was still being shown at festivals nearly five years later. Some may shun Coppola's unapologetic twisting of events in order to underline the finale with bitter irony, however the forcefulness and drive behind the picture nearly obliterate its shortcomings. *** from ****

MisterWhiplash In some scenes in the Rain People, Francis Ford Coppola's precursor to his hey-day of the seventies, there is the mark of a similar situation to 1969's Easy Rider, but not exactly in the same reference frame. Here we have a drama about disconnected people from society, in some ways alienated by the choices or by limits imposed by one mean or another. It's one of those rare original dramas where some scenes stand alone as total knockouts. Even with such a low-string budget and a very freewheeling, so to speak, attitude about filming the movie, Coppola is able to capture everything that needs to be said through these clearly defined characters and the curved, unexpected degrees of one character versus the helplessness of another, or vice versa, or both. And, as one might be inclined seeing as how it is very much about the cutaways of suburban life of the 1960s, it has that escapism of the film mentioned before, but of a more concrete, near timeless quality with the drama and the underlying issues. In a way, if Bergman were on route as a quasi-guerrilla 20-something filmmaker out to get the strange truths of everyday outsiders, this might be it.But along with all of the very direct and sometimes self-conscious photography (though also with a more documentary approach at times, akin with its indeterminable characters), the actors all fit into place. Shirley Knight, an actress I'm not too familiar with, has a complex, diverging role as a pregnant wife running off in a sort of existentialist conundrum of what life is there to have. There are moments of some awe-inspiring acting by her, and one of my favorites (if not my favorite) is when she is on the telephone calling her husband the first time. Such a tense scene on both ends, and in every small gesture and inflection of a word so much about her is spoken with so little. It's extraordinary in ways that mirror others in Coppola's films. Then comes in the character of 'killer' played by James Caan. This, too, is a dangerous character to take on, as it is a mix of childish bewilderment and amusement with scarred memories. Think Forrest Gump if he didn't make it past the football and wit. It's one of his best, actually, by being the most minimalist- for a guy who's usually playing tough guys in movies, here's one that also is part of the crux of the story and of Knight's character. Also very good in a supporting role is Robert Duvall as a cop with a rough side and rather checkered past; kind of an early sample of other defected characters he would play later on in his career.So the characters, and what Coppola risks in having an uneasiness running in them, are really what make up the film, as whatever story there is it is definitely not resolved in the usual way you might think or expect. The last ten or so minutes are like others in Coppola's work, where the specific tragedies on all sides are undercut by the emotional- and psychological- implications this will leave on the principles are amplified to the sublime and sad. This is, for its time, brave on the part of what is trying to be represented (in both the freedom as well as the flaws and ambiguities) in the subject matter. And the style of the picture adds a fragmented kind of view onto it all with quick flashbacks that are graphic and self-contained in a contrast with the longer shots in some crucial scenes. It's a road movie of its period, but its also got a lot more working than it would under another filmmaker with less chances to take on the nature of these outcast characters. One of the best films of 1969.