如题所述
第1个回答 2006-10-26
In the prologue to Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, black sisters Celie and Nettie play patty-cake in a field of blue-pink flowers. Celie is pregnant with her second illegitimate child, and when she has the baby, her father cruelly whisks it away to a new home, as he did her firstborn. Later, her father disposes of Celie, too, giving her to Albert (Danny Glover), a vicious stranger on horseback in need of a wife. Concerned with more than just lonely Celie (Whoopi Goldberg as an adult) summoning the confidence to defy Albert (less through her own sexual awakening, as in The Color Purple's source material, than through a cultivated sisterhood with the women in her orbit), the picture examines a generation of emancipated African-American men who, poisoned by the slave mentality, treat their women as Cinderellas in a misguided salvo to independence.
It presents a quagmire to say that Spielberg has no business directing a film about The Black Experience, because in so doing, you are arguing that The Black Experience is singular and sub-rosa, which strikes me as racist in ways that even hiring an Aryan screenwriter (Menno Meyjes) to adapt Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple does not approach. On the other hand, Spielberg can be so all-inclusive as to flatter a white audience for finding The Color Purple as catholic as it is: Caucasians are rarely seen in the film, and with racism never part of the text or subtext outside a sequence that explicitly addresses the issue, this starts to feel like denial.
What Spielberg brought to the film, first and foremost, is visual sweep that feels astoundingly epic considering The Color Purple's TV-friendly aspect ratio of 1.85:1. While Allen Daviau's cinematography borders on precious, with many shots, as cynics were quick to point out, evoking a Mr. Bluebird-on-my-shoulder day, there was nothing to be gained from taking an opposite approach; the film's picturesque qualities stand against the grim lives led by its characters to suggest something true of the balance of human experience. At first I was going to pair up The Color Purple in a review with Spielberg-idol John Ford's frothy The Quiet Man, which is beautifully and similarly photographed, until I realized that I risked trivializing the former with such a coupling.
The picture doesn't lack for levity, though. In fact, the execution of some of The Color Purple's lighter moments provides the tidiest ammunition against Spielberg. You worry, in scenes like the one in which Albert ineptly prepares a meal, that Spielberg's education in black cinema stops at "Tom & Jerry" cartoons: wanting the oven hotter, Albert retrieves a tin can marked "Kerosene" in letters big and comical, and Spielberg cuts to an empty chair that Celie has fled with split-second timing, the subsequent fireball supplying a sound effect akin to Tom or Jerry bolting from the room. The bit is funny, cute, and, complete with low, headless-mammy angles, perhaps too reverent of the rolling-pin era in pre-Sidney Poitier entertainment.
Still, The Color Purple is unquestionably a work of heart and soul dazzlingly performed by Spielberg's tightest ensemble since Jaws. The film's final gestures of redemption on Albert's behalf bring to mind another Ford picture, The Searchers, and if that ultimately makes The Color Purple as much a paean to the cinematic past as to a black experience, at least it lends the film a sense of history you risk losing in translating Walker's archaic first-person prose for Hollywood.
I wish I could muster the same enthusiasm for Kasi Lemmons' hyphenate debut, Eve's Bayou. Her follow-up effort, The Caveman's Valentine, was/is an unsung gem, but as it trades on a fascination with superhero archetypes (starring Samuel L. Jackson, it could be a movie within M. Night Shyamalan's Jackson starrer Unbreakable), it wasn't treated with the critical or popular respect of Eve's Bayou, a coming-of-age film set in the 1960s that concerns the weathered storms of an idyllic childhood.
Sharing her name with the titular bayou, a plot of land in rural Louisiana that, legend has it, was bequeathed to the black community in gratitude of slaves who nursed Jean-Louis Baptiste back to health, pre-teen mischief-maker Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) prefers her smooth-talking dad, Dr. Louis Batiste (Jackson), to the rest of her otherwise distaff household. But one night during a soirée at the Batistes, Eve catches daddy in a compromising position with a lady not her mother; Louis talks Eve down from a subsequent panic attack (an innovative choice for the child's reaction on Lemmons' part) in a scene rich, like so many in the latter half of Eve's Bayou, with Freudian overtones. Louis addresses his daughter as though she's the wronged wife: his patronizing gestures of solace constitute an apology in doublspeak--he is sorry for being indiscreet rather than for his indiscretion.
Rowell in Dr. Hugo
DR. HUGO *** (out of four)
A dry run of the housecall sequence in Eve's Bayou, Kasi Lemmons' delightful, if prosaic, comedy short Dr. Hugo casts the underemployed Vondie Curtis-Hall as a physician curing conveniently bed-ridden wives of their loneliness. According to Lemmons' commentary with Cotty Chub, Curtis-Hall, and Amy Vincent, this sexy little movie sparked Samuel L. Jackson to claim Curtis-Hall's role for his own in the feature-length reimagining right about the time that Dr. Hugo's patient (Victoria Rowell) dropped 'trou. The 20-minute Dr. Hugo is presented in 1.85:1 non-anamorphic widescreen on the Lions Gate Signature Series edition of Eve's Bayou.-BC
But a movie needs more than psychosexual profundities. Eve's Bayou is cinematically amateurish and unfocused, violating its heroine's point of view (the adult Eve narrates the film, defining it as a reminiscence with her opening line, "The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old") with encounters and flashbacks to which she is not and could not have been privy and cutting to too many gritty black-and-white asides besides, an effect intended to underline exposition that only demonstrates Lemmons' storytelling incertitude. Additionally, the picture ends on an unearned note of haunted ambiguity: instead of showing us, in a fashion that would give rise to polarized assessments organically, a pivotal incident involving Louis and Eve's older sister that informs the final third of Eve's Bayou, we watch it play out in a variety--three, to be precise--of emotional configurations (the Rashomon trope), resulting in contrived pathos. Its depiction of a pre-civil rights black neighbourhood marked by affluence notwithstanding, Eve's Bayou is hardly revolutionary.
One of the earliest titles to be released on video in the letterbox format, The Color Purple has always looked fine at home but never as lovely as it does on Warner's new Two-Disc Special Edition. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer--it's apparently the same one used for a 1997 DVD release of the film--has not only aged well, it should also continue to age well; I defy anyone to date The Color Purple on the basis of the DVD's source print alone. (If we can convince Universal to re-author 1941, there will be no such thing as an unappealing Spielberg DVD.) Remixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital, the film's soundtrack here is pleasing to the ears though inconspicuous--Spielberg saved the fireworks for his next picture, Empire of the Sun.
Laurent Bouzereau (who else?) was responsible for The Color Purple's supplements, and while they are dense with clip filler, in fairness, the four featurettes on the second platter of this set contain remarkable content. In the deceptively christened "Conversations with the Ancestors: The Color Purple From Book to Screen" (27 mins.), author Alice Walker articulates the seeds of her book ("I had two grandparents who, when they were younger, were really horrible people"), and among other topics, she discusses her stab at a screenplay adaptation (retitled Watch for Me in the Sunset by the author, it impressed Spielberg but she ultimately withdrew the script from consideration). Spielberg admirably goes down the list of criticisms against his interpretation of the novel--he's more self-aware than you think, and he gets the last laugh, in a sense, when he points out that The Color Purple grossed a hundred simoleons at the box office even though he committed sins X, Y, and Z.
The next two docs, "A Collaboration of Spirits: Casting and Acting The Color Purple" (29 mins.) and "Cultivating a Classic: The Making of The Color Purple" (22 mins.), were very obviously one program divided in two to keep the SAG dogs at bay. (The Screen Actor's Guild began hitting studios with fees last year for talent appearing in DVD making-of material running longer than thirty minutes to the second.) Oprah Winfrey, whatever off-camera personality she once had clearly absorbed by the artificiality of daytime television, nonetheless contributes great, cherished production anecdotes. How she wound up with the role of Sofia is indeed the stuff of hymns.
Here (in "Cultivating a Classic" specifically), Spielberg recounts Goldberg's screen test, which doubled as a trial run of his original idea to shoot The Color Purple in black-and-white using cinematographer Gordon Willis; E.T. cameraman Daviau soon became available and devised ingenious lighting schemes for photographing (in colour) a multiplicity of African-American skin tones within a master without reducing any of the faces to "eyes and teeth." The lone dud featurette is "The Color Purple: The Musical" (7 mins.), another misnomer of sorts. Producer Quincy Jones and co. reflect on the period songs written for the film--The Color Purple ain't comin' to Broadway anytime soon, in other words. Animated galleries of behind-the-scenes stills and cast photos round out Disc Two and the distinguished package itself.
This piece refers to the 119-minute director's cut of Eve's Bayou found on a Signature Series DVD from Lions Gate. (The theatrical version is 110 minutes in length.) The character of "Uncle Tommy" (the closing titles were not updated to credit the man who plays him), a cerebral palsy sufferer residing in Eve's manse, is the most noteworthy restoration to the film; for a complete guide to alterations, either of Lemmons' thorough commentaries is the best reference.
Actors Jackson, Smollett, Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, and Vondie Curtis-Hall (Lemmons' real-life spouse) join Lemmons for one yak-track, producer Cotty Chub, editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, and director of photography Amy Vincent for another. Although participants in both yak-tracks tend to collapse into fits of group giggles, everything from the film's mirror imagery to performance motivations receives mention. Lemmons' short Dr. Hugo (see above sidebar), a trailer for Eve's Bayou, and an Easter Egg link to a commercial for Monster's Ball complete the disc. The audio-visual presentation of Eve's Bayou itself is average: the 16x9-enhanced 1.85:1 image improves upon that of Trimark's non-anamorphic DVD, issued in the late-'90s, but it isn't on a par with many of Lions Gate's recent stellar transfers. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix rumbles the room intermittently.-Bill Chambers
朋友,这是我转载的一篇,告诉你网址,要找英文影评以后就找准这个网站哟.
It presents a quagmire to say that Spielberg has no business directing a film about The Black Experience, because in so doing, you are arguing that The Black Experience is singular and sub-rosa, which strikes me as racist in ways that even hiring an Aryan screenwriter (Menno Meyjes) to adapt Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple does not approach. On the other hand, Spielberg can be so all-inclusive as to flatter a white audience for finding The Color Purple as catholic as it is: Caucasians are rarely seen in the film, and with racism never part of the text or subtext outside a sequence that explicitly addresses the issue, this starts to feel like denial.
What Spielberg brought to the film, first and foremost, is visual sweep that feels astoundingly epic considering The Color Purple's TV-friendly aspect ratio of 1.85:1. While Allen Daviau's cinematography borders on precious, with many shots, as cynics were quick to point out, evoking a Mr. Bluebird-on-my-shoulder day, there was nothing to be gained from taking an opposite approach; the film's picturesque qualities stand against the grim lives led by its characters to suggest something true of the balance of human experience. At first I was going to pair up The Color Purple in a review with Spielberg-idol John Ford's frothy The Quiet Man, which is beautifully and similarly photographed, until I realized that I risked trivializing the former with such a coupling.
The picture doesn't lack for levity, though. In fact, the execution of some of The Color Purple's lighter moments provides the tidiest ammunition against Spielberg. You worry, in scenes like the one in which Albert ineptly prepares a meal, that Spielberg's education in black cinema stops at "Tom & Jerry" cartoons: wanting the oven hotter, Albert retrieves a tin can marked "Kerosene" in letters big and comical, and Spielberg cuts to an empty chair that Celie has fled with split-second timing, the subsequent fireball supplying a sound effect akin to Tom or Jerry bolting from the room. The bit is funny, cute, and, complete with low, headless-mammy angles, perhaps too reverent of the rolling-pin era in pre-Sidney Poitier entertainment.
Still, The Color Purple is unquestionably a work of heart and soul dazzlingly performed by Spielberg's tightest ensemble since Jaws. The film's final gestures of redemption on Albert's behalf bring to mind another Ford picture, The Searchers, and if that ultimately makes The Color Purple as much a paean to the cinematic past as to a black experience, at least it lends the film a sense of history you risk losing in translating Walker's archaic first-person prose for Hollywood.
I wish I could muster the same enthusiasm for Kasi Lemmons' hyphenate debut, Eve's Bayou. Her follow-up effort, The Caveman's Valentine, was/is an unsung gem, but as it trades on a fascination with superhero archetypes (starring Samuel L. Jackson, it could be a movie within M. Night Shyamalan's Jackson starrer Unbreakable), it wasn't treated with the critical or popular respect of Eve's Bayou, a coming-of-age film set in the 1960s that concerns the weathered storms of an idyllic childhood.
Sharing her name with the titular bayou, a plot of land in rural Louisiana that, legend has it, was bequeathed to the black community in gratitude of slaves who nursed Jean-Louis Baptiste back to health, pre-teen mischief-maker Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) prefers her smooth-talking dad, Dr. Louis Batiste (Jackson), to the rest of her otherwise distaff household. But one night during a soirée at the Batistes, Eve catches daddy in a compromising position with a lady not her mother; Louis talks Eve down from a subsequent panic attack (an innovative choice for the child's reaction on Lemmons' part) in a scene rich, like so many in the latter half of Eve's Bayou, with Freudian overtones. Louis addresses his daughter as though she's the wronged wife: his patronizing gestures of solace constitute an apology in doublspeak--he is sorry for being indiscreet rather than for his indiscretion.
Rowell in Dr. Hugo
DR. HUGO *** (out of four)
A dry run of the housecall sequence in Eve's Bayou, Kasi Lemmons' delightful, if prosaic, comedy short Dr. Hugo casts the underemployed Vondie Curtis-Hall as a physician curing conveniently bed-ridden wives of their loneliness. According to Lemmons' commentary with Cotty Chub, Curtis-Hall, and Amy Vincent, this sexy little movie sparked Samuel L. Jackson to claim Curtis-Hall's role for his own in the feature-length reimagining right about the time that Dr. Hugo's patient (Victoria Rowell) dropped 'trou. The 20-minute Dr. Hugo is presented in 1.85:1 non-anamorphic widescreen on the Lions Gate Signature Series edition of Eve's Bayou.-BC
But a movie needs more than psychosexual profundities. Eve's Bayou is cinematically amateurish and unfocused, violating its heroine's point of view (the adult Eve narrates the film, defining it as a reminiscence with her opening line, "The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old") with encounters and flashbacks to which she is not and could not have been privy and cutting to too many gritty black-and-white asides besides, an effect intended to underline exposition that only demonstrates Lemmons' storytelling incertitude. Additionally, the picture ends on an unearned note of haunted ambiguity: instead of showing us, in a fashion that would give rise to polarized assessments organically, a pivotal incident involving Louis and Eve's older sister that informs the final third of Eve's Bayou, we watch it play out in a variety--three, to be precise--of emotional configurations (the Rashomon trope), resulting in contrived pathos. Its depiction of a pre-civil rights black neighbourhood marked by affluence notwithstanding, Eve's Bayou is hardly revolutionary.
One of the earliest titles to be released on video in the letterbox format, The Color Purple has always looked fine at home but never as lovely as it does on Warner's new Two-Disc Special Edition. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer--it's apparently the same one used for a 1997 DVD release of the film--has not only aged well, it should also continue to age well; I defy anyone to date The Color Purple on the basis of the DVD's source print alone. (If we can convince Universal to re-author 1941, there will be no such thing as an unappealing Spielberg DVD.) Remixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital, the film's soundtrack here is pleasing to the ears though inconspicuous--Spielberg saved the fireworks for his next picture, Empire of the Sun.
Laurent Bouzereau (who else?) was responsible for The Color Purple's supplements, and while they are dense with clip filler, in fairness, the four featurettes on the second platter of this set contain remarkable content. In the deceptively christened "Conversations with the Ancestors: The Color Purple From Book to Screen" (27 mins.), author Alice Walker articulates the seeds of her book ("I had two grandparents who, when they were younger, were really horrible people"), and among other topics, she discusses her stab at a screenplay adaptation (retitled Watch for Me in the Sunset by the author, it impressed Spielberg but she ultimately withdrew the script from consideration). Spielberg admirably goes down the list of criticisms against his interpretation of the novel--he's more self-aware than you think, and he gets the last laugh, in a sense, when he points out that The Color Purple grossed a hundred simoleons at the box office even though he committed sins X, Y, and Z.
The next two docs, "A Collaboration of Spirits: Casting and Acting The Color Purple" (29 mins.) and "Cultivating a Classic: The Making of The Color Purple" (22 mins.), were very obviously one program divided in two to keep the SAG dogs at bay. (The Screen Actor's Guild began hitting studios with fees last year for talent appearing in DVD making-of material running longer than thirty minutes to the second.) Oprah Winfrey, whatever off-camera personality she once had clearly absorbed by the artificiality of daytime television, nonetheless contributes great, cherished production anecdotes. How she wound up with the role of Sofia is indeed the stuff of hymns.
Here (in "Cultivating a Classic" specifically), Spielberg recounts Goldberg's screen test, which doubled as a trial run of his original idea to shoot The Color Purple in black-and-white using cinematographer Gordon Willis; E.T. cameraman Daviau soon became available and devised ingenious lighting schemes for photographing (in colour) a multiplicity of African-American skin tones within a master without reducing any of the faces to "eyes and teeth." The lone dud featurette is "The Color Purple: The Musical" (7 mins.), another misnomer of sorts. Producer Quincy Jones and co. reflect on the period songs written for the film--The Color Purple ain't comin' to Broadway anytime soon, in other words. Animated galleries of behind-the-scenes stills and cast photos round out Disc Two and the distinguished package itself.
This piece refers to the 119-minute director's cut of Eve's Bayou found on a Signature Series DVD from Lions Gate. (The theatrical version is 110 minutes in length.) The character of "Uncle Tommy" (the closing titles were not updated to credit the man who plays him), a cerebral palsy sufferer residing in Eve's manse, is the most noteworthy restoration to the film; for a complete guide to alterations, either of Lemmons' thorough commentaries is the best reference.
Actors Jackson, Smollett, Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, and Vondie Curtis-Hall (Lemmons' real-life spouse) join Lemmons for one yak-track, producer Cotty Chub, editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, and director of photography Amy Vincent for another. Although participants in both yak-tracks tend to collapse into fits of group giggles, everything from the film's mirror imagery to performance motivations receives mention. Lemmons' short Dr. Hugo (see above sidebar), a trailer for Eve's Bayou, and an Easter Egg link to a commercial for Monster's Ball complete the disc. The audio-visual presentation of Eve's Bayou itself is average: the 16x9-enhanced 1.85:1 image improves upon that of Trimark's non-anamorphic DVD, issued in the late-'90s, but it isn't on a par with many of Lions Gate's recent stellar transfers. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix rumbles the room intermittently.-Bill Chambers
朋友,这是我转载的一篇,告诉你网址,要找英文影评以后就找准这个网站哟.