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Post by hi224 on Feb 13, 2023 5:35:17 GMT
anybody give that a watch at all.
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Post by politicidal on Feb 14, 2023 1:15:13 GMT
I'll see it at some point. And I'll be ready to dodge an oncoming slap through the TV screen.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2023 6:19:32 GMT
anybody give that a watch at all. I viewed Emancipation in the theater in mid-December and found it "good/very good"—one of the better films of the year, actually, and one that deserved an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography. Director Antoine Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson provide some memorably stylized imagery—plenty of hard, stark, haunting contrasts in an essentially black-and-white movie (with occasional sepia tones or allowing the vegetation to adopt some of its green at times, in a way that might seem distracting on paper yet works in the film). The movie effectively blends abstract and naturalistic styles to create a dystopian yet historically credible portrait, and the editing of veteran Conrad Buff is in accord with that ambition and perhaps deserved an Oscar nomination as well. Emancipation is a real "man's" movie (and I do not mean that women cannot appreciate the film as well). It is unsentimental, unsparing, and gritty, with a great sense of natural terrain, environmental geography, and the spatial-temporal dynamics of a slave escape and subsequent chase. Indeed, the movie is quite atmospheric, reminiscent in that regard of the classic black-and-white chain-gang escape film The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958). By providing a large range of shots, Emancipation captures a sense of outdoor peril and unpredictability. Will Smith is effective in a tense portrayal of the protagonist, "Peter," whose eventual photograph helps to define our understanding of slavery's wickedness and malevolence. In keeping with the movie's overall manner, Smith's characterization is at once stylized and humanistic. He is, perhaps, inherently stiff as a dramatic actor—his generation's version of Charlton Heston, if that analogy makes any sense—but Smith is better and sharper here than in his Best Actor turn in King Richard.Either way, Smith is now deservedly toxic, a status that surely dimmed Emancipation's critical and commercial chances. (I would have liked to have seen it a second time, but it only lasted one week in two theaters in my area.) Early in the film, I briefly became distracted as my mind wandered back to his violent outburst at last year's Oscars, and that is the peril of what he did. But even with the toxic asset that is Will Smith, the man, Emancipation is lean, Gothic, and quite haunting, especially from a visual perspective.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2023 6:20:16 GMT
I'll see it at some point. And I'll be ready to dodge an oncoming slap through the TV screen. Alas ... see my experience.
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Post by politicidal on Feb 28, 2023 1:28:09 GMT
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Post by hi224 on Mar 3, 2023 0:54:40 GMT
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Post by politicidal on Mar 6, 2023 18:01:23 GMT
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Post by hi224 on Mar 7, 2023 16:49:45 GMT
Well he's very sobering as well.
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