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Reviews
The Naked Face (1984)
Rod Steiger, Man of Integrity
The naked face is a remarkable film experience. It's not a good film but I recommend it anyway. It's worth seeing the way you see Dracula for Bela Lugosi a performance so filled with conviction that questions of good and bad become meaningless. Saying that Bela Lugosi is campy and over the top is making the assumption that he was trying for something else and landed where he did by accident. No one else in the film other than Dwight Frye as Renfield can even keep up with him. Frye's performance seems far more calculated but he seems to understand that this film is meant to be spooky and fun and that no one is going to stop him from doing exactly what he chooses. He's like the guy in the summer stock theater whose a little bit better than everyone else and inspires the other actors with admiration and envy. Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye know that you've paid money to see them and they are determined to give you what you paid for. Lugosi/Dracula's victims could be moving or charming, the heroes could be dashing and silly, van helsing might be sage and warm and kind but they're not. The brides are creepy and the servants are ridiculous but the rest the living dead of actors. The crazy energy of Lugosi and Dwight Frye seem to sap the rest of the cast of theirs. The Naked Face is like that. It could have been directed by Tod Browning of Dracula fame. It's outdoors but stagey. The incidents in the film are outrageous and unconvincing but no more so than the everyday details. And every actor in the film walks through it like they're on Quaaludes except one. It isn't Roger Moore whose famous for not bringing much energy to wheat he does on screen. He fits into this film as if it were his home. The 007 films are so busy so full of incident and energy this film is like a fish bowl or a gerbil cage everyone is asleep or wandering aimlessly. It isn't Elliot Gould who also fits into the dullness of this film so well he's like a stripe on a dull pattern of wall paper. Why was he put into a film like MASH or it's hard to think of another film of his with much going for it when this is where he has always belonged. Art Carney, Anne Archer, David Hedison all like fish circling around a fish bowl or blobs in a lava lamp we watch them in a stupor. There is one performance that stands out one Lugosi, one Dwight Frye in a crowd David Manners and Everett Van Sloans. It's no surprise who it is, it's Rod Steiger. I want to be clear his performance is not good. He yells and whispers through the whole film like proto Nicholas Cage. He screams at the other actors, bullies them and worries over the turns in the plot as if they mattered to him personally. At times it seems like he's trying to wake the other actors up, trying to rouse them after they fallen asleep or lost interest. There is a crazy wonderful integrity to his performance that goes beyond questions of good or bad. He knows we're out there watching and he wants to give us something. His performance is a critique of dull bad acting. He seems to be seeing if you're going to be bad, if there is no way to be good than go big, don't go down without a fight, struggle against the awfulness. Laurence Olivier and some other highly skilled actors used to get through films like this by underplaying intentionally and quietly kidding and burlesquing the whole enterprise. Steigers performance critiques their approach and calls them cowards. He keeps laying on the energy cowing the other actors until it is not their characters that appeared embarrassed and intimidated but the actors themselves. Rod Steiger shows a crazed integrity. It's possibly the same integrity that allowed him to give so many fine even great performances. Cut loose from quality, artistry even competence, what else could he do?.
Righteous Kill (2008)
silly, tired with the kind of bad acting that passes for good acting.
I enjoyed this film for all the wrong reasons. Pacino and DeNiro are both awful. They give the kind smug, self-impressed performances that fawning producers and directors allow them to get away with time and time again. DeNiro in particular looks tired and bored throughout. He gets stiffer and sleepier with each movie. Someday he will play someone who spends an entire film in a coma and win another Oscar. His last good performance was in Goodfellas almost twenty years ago. His last effective one was in Jackie Brown where his lack of enthusiasm and energy seemed to be part of the joke. Watching these guys perform is like watching Jerry Lewis on the labor day telethon. Its awful but somehow you can't look away.
The story line is ridiculous, obvious but also overly complicated. You can't guess who the killer is but you also don't care before too long. It's told in flashback as DeNiro appears to be confessing to a set of serial killings, so we know he didn't do it. Everyone else seems as or more disturbed as he is, so its a wide open field of suspects. You continue to watch because you want to know how gullible the director and writer think their audience is. Spoiler Alert: They think you're really stupid and will believe anything they throw at you.
The dialogue moves between sub-Tarantino cultural references (there's a conversation about a cartoon character that's especially silly coming from the above actors)and sub-Mamet obscenity strewn nonsense. There's also a subplot between DeNiro and Carla Gugino's characters that plays like a geriatric version of Basic Instinct. If that's your idea of a good time. Personally I kind of liked it.
Donnie Wahlberg gives the best performance in the film. He's the only one who underplays and its refreshing with all the scenery chewing. 50 cent also has real star power. That's about the only good news. Unless like me you decided to turn the bad news into good news and enjoy the movie inspite of itself.