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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 5, 2023 9:48:35 GMT
Romain Duris in The New Girlfriend (2014) - rewatchIf you know anything about me, you know.......I don't care..........about............punctuation........(um)...........and I invented that "liking your own post" thing (um, well I did).........and "representation" in movies is everything to me. Nah, I don't care about that last one much ..........and because I don't care much - that gets us to Romain Duris a very well known actor of some significant critical acclaim in France - that in the IMDB days I used to praise a lot as a kinetic heir to a DePac "type" - particularly in The Beat That My Heart Skipped - which I am pretty sure I mentioned on IMDB first - which is amazing because that was a long time ago and I'm only 14 now ..... ......and Duris is a real risk taker - to such an extent that he can baffle you / me.....and on some levels his career has disappointed me....... Duris will play a lot of different kinds of roles - including light romance and action .....he doesn't much chase acclaim ..........he's in a lot of stuff that you say "Why is he wasting his time?" ...........but nothing he had done prior to this quite prepares you for the cliff he could easily step off in The New Girlfriend where he tosses his "brand" (if he has one nowadays), and his screen masculinity waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay aside and utterly convinces in a genuinely perceptive, sensitive and not overplayed at all portrayal..........with no vanity - he gets his back waxed ffs....... The movie isn't great - but Duris always is - as both his male self and his female self .......he is so much better than the movie - it makes you question when you say that about other actors - ever...........and it makes you think that "represenatation" is utter bullshit when it comes to movie casting because so much of this works specifically because it is Duris - a very well known screen "straight" lead is playing David / Virginia.......some actors are just special .......Romain Duris is a special actor.......which makes judging him in general awfully difficult......... there's not many people that could play his wild filmography.....
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Post by stabcaesar on Apr 5, 2023 18:37:45 GMT
Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks in Sounder. I expected a middlebrow melodrama about a black family's suffering, but I was blindsided by how thoroughly soulful, earnest, and affecting it was.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 6, 2023 6:42:17 GMT
Claude Giraud in A King Without Distraction aka ‘Un roi sans divertissement’ 1963First time watch that is way out of its time period - about the military search for a killer and how that search begins to overshadow the hero and his own mindset.... Part Western - it looks like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Great Silence - part existential horror film..........and part psychological puzzle confusingly told but fascinating in how it's told.......this is unlike any French New Wave era film I've seen - yet is weirdly as "modern" as any .... The movie is gorgeous and Giraud as the lead - while not great exactly is quite good in a greatish role.......he has movie star looks and a deceptively relaxed manner where he is losing his mind in a way that is more gripping than if he was just a great actor losing his mind tbh
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 7, 2023 9:44:07 GMT
Steven Yeun in BeefI've only watched the first 2 episodes of Beef but that's enough for me to declare Steven Yeun as sensational in this role - and I have a whole lot to say about it already - though I'll be (sorta) brief: Yeun is creating one of the most identifiable characters I've seen acted in quite some time.......and I'd like to highlight one reason his acting is "better" than performances we routinely call "great" on MAR: Most people will praise a kind of acting that typically gives you "want you want" - ie if someone is playing a doctor, they act like how you think an a doctor will act ......well that acting is conformative and quite dull to me.......and Yeun does nothing like it here - rather he goes odd and contradictory: Yeun is a tragi-comic sad clown as Danny Cho (even his name is representative of a mundane commonness): almost hanging himself from a tree, then failing to purposely kill himself, cursing to himself in a way both funny / sad (no one in movies / TV lets curse words fly in a more convincing way than Yeun does - cursing is to Yuen is what Shakespeare is to Mark Rylance). Yeun wears the burden - the heavy burden of merely living - on his shoulders like a heavy black cloak of desperation.......he is so good in these 2 episodes he makes you envision how he would act with characters he hasn't "met" yet or may never meet - he may make Maria Bello's character laugh or run in fear ........Bello is doing a fairly hilarious Sigourney Weaver impression btw.........he may baffle several others who misread his barely making it for contentment....he may kill or be killed by several......he may be thankful for their kindness in accelerating his demise Yeun here is the exact opposite of his unforgettable turn in one of the great films of the MAR era Burning where Yuen was in utter control and exuded mannerisms that suggested control, and a placid yet hard to discern nature.......in Beef, Steven Yuen is so combustible you actually start to sweat for him.....
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Post by stabcaesar on Apr 8, 2023 18:53:23 GMT
Mr and Mrs Bridge or: If Movie Protagonist's Parents Were the Lead in Their Own Movie. Newman and especially Woodward were devastatingly authentic playing two characters who would be unbearably cartoonish in lesser hands. It's almost like watching a documentary. Blythe Danner was really strong too. I can't get over how much she used to look/sound like Gwyneth. Some of her scenes are beyond uncanny.
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Post by stabcaesar on Apr 9, 2023 16:39:57 GMT
These two are great in The Emigrants, but in The New Land they really, really, REALLY bring it home. Without a doubt one of the absolute greatest love stories in cinematic history. The love between Karl Oskar and Kristina runs deeper than ocean. The film is an instant favourite, and von Sydow and Ullmann immediately entered my top lead performances of all time. I am genuinely moved.
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Apr 10, 2023 0:16:31 GMT
Christopher Walken in The Comfort of Strangers. Equally unsettling and charming. Can see how one could be captivated enough by him to continue to go with him to these foreign locations. But at the same time there is always this creepiness lurking just under the surface.
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Post by stabcaesar on Apr 16, 2023 17:24:31 GMT
Norma Aleandro in The Official Story. A powerhouse performance if there ever is one.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 17, 2023 8:27:50 GMT
Angelica Huston in The Grifters - millionth rewatch Not only a dazzling performance - in 1990's best film (yeah, you heard me) but a performance that works against all logic - unlike in the (great) book - where you have to draw the visualization - in the movie Huston is such a contradiction of visual information she is simultaneously comical and horrifying ......a hairstyle that doesn't quite fit a woman of her age, or her clothes too ........there is a great visual cue after she sees her son and kisses him (a little too close, on the mouth) where she enters the room behind a door while talkong to him separated by another door and she gazes away from it - not towards him - onto something we can't see....... That "what does she see" quality is at the heart of Huston's ferocious characterization - and I like that word more than "performance" in this case .......where she constitutes a fake reality for us - she totally cons us - and besides all is ephemeral anyway - clothes, cigarettes (she should get an award for how she handles a cigarette here), money, relationships .........when the scene mentioned above resumes we see her eye was drawn to paintings he has in the room .........of sad clowns..... The irony of course is quite sad / funny if you know those paintings later on and in the scene where they come up again......watch her avert her eyes away from her son and .......onto something else
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Post by TylerDeneuve on Apr 18, 2023 17:37:34 GMT
pacinoyes - Excellent write-up re. Anjelica Huston - a chilling, bone-deep performance that should've handedly gotten her the Best Actress Oscar upgrade in 1990. Annette Bening is also one for the all time books here, don't you think?
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 18, 2023 18:39:47 GMT
pacinoyes - Excellent write-up re. Anjelica Huston - a chilling, bone-deep performance that should've handedly gotten her the Best Actress Oscar upgrade in 1990. Annette Bening is also one for the all time books here, don't you think? Anjelica Huston is really remarkable in how she plays the text because there are so many ways this can go wrong - it's set in the modern era, made by a Brit who hadn't done much in America (?) and it keeps a lot of the same dialog that makes it seem out of place with that language - but what is so fortunate about the movie is it was made in the era just before cell phones emered - which would have totally changed how effective it played as drama..........so it seems caught in this in-between world of language and crime and and aesthetics - different eras and romanticizing of the recent past......... Seeing Bening here I was actually reminded of Margot Robbie who I could see playing this part now .........Bening is extremely playful here - it's a wonderful quality especially with how threatening she could potentially be - and she has a nude scene that predates Robbie's WoWS scene too ....... Because of what happened with the J.T. Walsh character her playful manner is like a game to keep the madness away ......like all 3 characters have facades from the audience, the other characters and themselves......I'm not sure I can think of a film character as adorably cute, physically drop dead attractive and as dangerous as Bening is Her seduction scene with the landlord which I mostly thought was a nothing scene before really impressed me - sexy and wildly funny ........and comes at a spot in the movie where we actually don't know for sure that the character (or the actress) could handle this situation in this way ........and then we wonder what else could she do........
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Javi
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Post by Javi on Apr 18, 2023 21:42:21 GMT
Julie Christie, Don't Look Now (rewatch) - One of the few times Christie played a mother, and she doesn't even have one scene with her kids! (that's the Roeg magic for you). Christie never makes an actorly show of grief though her pain and anxiety are what reverberate the most afterwards. There's also the classic sex scene - the saddest sex scene ever filmed. And Christie dazzles as she, in turn, is dazzled by the opening of the occult - too easily, sensuously dazzled. All of this is perfect casting - Christie the epitome of the modern woman (as Sutherland of the 70s man) brutally unequipped for real tragedy and the finality of death. But the way Christie plays the scene in the old church where she lights the candles in nervous anticipation of prayer, or the way her face lights up in the children's hospital after her "conversion" evoke a vulnerability and eagerness that a lesser horror-movie director might've tried to work against - and that make us helpless. Christie gives off way too much radiance to be the standard horror heroine, and it's to Roeg's credit that she's never dimmed. But the price is that she exposes the phony, lesser parts of the movie for what they are, or at least that's what I felt this time. The movie remains a stone cold horror classic for its many resonances (not so much for the abritrariness of its effects), but Christie might be the one thing about it that goes beyond resonance - closer to us than the film's other elements but further away than we'd like. And in the face of the Christie magic what is a man to do but smile and mumble dumbly the way Sutherland does? (Salvation is out of the question anyway).
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 19, 2023 11:26:37 GMT
Vanessa Redgrave & Franco Nero in A Quiet Place in the Country (1968)I had never seen this - it's directed by Elio Petri who directed one of my favorite movies ( Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion).....it stars an actress I have routinely called maybe the most naturally gifted of any English speaking one ever.......it is - at least on some level a "horror" film which I love - though it's not really scary at all ........it is rather satirical, pitch black funny - with some genuinely upsetting images crosscut into a kind of jarring series of montages. The sort of movie that will remind you of mother!.....but also Argento in its eye popping colors, Polanski's The Tenant ........The great opening credits hint at the paintings as used in Last Tango in Paris.......... The Conformist and a famous sequence in 1900 in how it interrupts time - with wild shifts of scene logic of among other things, identity, gender, macabre violence ........where Bertolucci does this elegantly .....Petri does it in a Pop way - and thematically it suggests Antonioni..... Blood does not look like "real" blood at all but maybe cherry soda, violence and acting is in some ways comic book like or at least seemingy unnatural........the acting seems "off" and almost dream-like and often it is meant to evoke exactly that with jump edits accentuating the jagged movement of dreams rather than them as smooth or fluid........the music score by Morricone no less (!) is either awful or inspiredly playful / brilliant........and loud About an artist (Nero) who can no longer create Art unless he leaves the city - he is aided (so to speak) by his partner (Redgrave) in a move out of the city and out of his mind........Redgrave as a stand in for the money machine (or "Captialism") - and later more clearly the conduit of Fascism (or um, "Fascism") - will give our artist whatever he "needs".......and whatever Nero needs are creativity defeating - and only result in nightmares at first and ghosts of the "real" past later........dismemberment (not kidding), lots of blood.........color coded hints of satire........ and grisly literal Death or symbolic Death........ The movie puts you through several kinds of torture - what is "really" happening......and more importantly "why?".......this movie must have seemed a trainwreck in 1968 but now it seems like a smart trainwrech that is utterly fascinating - to discuss if not watch........Nero does what few actors do - he willfully embarrasses himself for his director .........he appears - in the 1st scene as a weak baby (in a diaper).......later when he is given what he really wants "candy and porn" for his compromised Art - which he doesn't really understand now anyway ...........he is rather a satiated baby again. A bad movie? Maybe (definitely some would say) but I'm not so sure..........it has much brilliance and challenging ideas in it but not in ways that pay off - you can love this and still feel it's not worth it because it works artistically without working as Art......... but it depends where your head-space is at when you see it........it is not an easy film to get at all, it's also pretentious af and not in a way that you will easily be able to grasp....... Redgrave / Nero were a real life couple which makes you think of other films starring irl couples .......Redgrave is genuinely willing to show her body in any way she is asked and that doesn't just include sexually - it includes more clearly horrifying ones too..... Earlier I mentioned Nero as a baby .........well in that scene Redgrave starts by controlling him as sexualized "mother" listing all the ridiculous things she bought with money from his Art - that will either baffle you or you'll find perveresely funny.......Nero also needs money for the day .....she offers "10".......he negotiates and asks for "30"......you think they may settle on "20"......... He actually gets "10"
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 23, 2023 6:28:28 GMT
John Cassavetes - in You've Got To Have Luck - Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1956) - rewatch
I've said before I prefer Cassavetes as an actor to his directing - and I like him a whole lot as a director.........to me he's the most underrated character actor ever in Hollywood and if you have had the pleasure of watching him in his 1950s roles he seems as "post-Brando" as any young actor.........physically he's rather beautiful - and there is something broken about him that even when he's "playing nice" it seems a con........but when he's playing dark it can also seem a con........he possesses an uncommon sweetness that has somehow soured Cassavetes used that moden quality to great effect in his later TV series Johnny Staccato and here he essentially plays a dangerous man - a criminal - lying to himself about who he one day could be.......opposite a fine Marisa Pavan he is a couple of times at least shockingly realistic - when he slaps her.........it's noticeably aggressive Cassavetes is also - like Bogart in The Petrified Forest and Desperate Hours - in what is essentially a constricted indoor piece he kind of is like a bolt of lightning (for 1956 anyway) across the frame........he never tries to be cool - he rather is desperate and in his desperation there's a kinetic charge infused in the drama:..........Racing towards a dead end........ This quality is in every great Cassavetes performance where the most common things : smoking, drinking coffee, looking at himself in a mirror seem a few mere seconds away from something explosive or more often something that turns inwards on him instead........ Finally, the way Casssavetes plays it (though probably not the written intent) has a psychological point too within this piece - he is quite representative of a man who can't "really see" the woman directly in front of him ........he romanticizes her to his downfall .........she (ironically) does not have the same problem........he makes his villain rather sad, complex in contradictory ways, arrogant ........anything but "simple"
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Post by stabcaesar on Apr 23, 2023 7:03:55 GMT
The movie is incredibly ironic given current events, but Samoilova is sublime.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 24, 2023 10:04:54 GMT
Geoffrey Rush in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) - rewatchRush is in some ways an underrated actor - which sounds ridiculous to say - since has a lot of awards - not just 1 of 3 living men with the Triple Crown - but 1 of only 2 men - ever - to win "The Double Triple Crown - Big 6" (Globe, SAG, BAFTA, Tony, Emmy, Oscar) - he's won 10 total to Pacino's 12......this was Rush's Emmy: But he's underrated because people often consider him a somewhat easy to read OTT actor - yet when he gets a role that matches his usual florid technique the result can be rather spectacular - and he is here. Not merely playing Sellers beautifully off camera - but recreating his movie roles and physicality too............. opposite a cast of big names that are really enabling his great work even more and in great deference to him (Emily Watson, Stanley Tucci, Charlize Theron, John Lithgow).......and Rush is also acting out other roles (his depiction of his mother is particularly odd and inspired). The film is so-so...........but there is no need to equivocate on the performance - it's dazzling - and it is also one of the best performances of an actor playing an actor..........Sellers was very much a man who suppressed him own personality or didn't have one in some ways (and what he had wasn't great to say the least)......and his roles filled in for that .........he's excited to play Being There because it in effect is a blank slate............Kubrick (Stanley Tucci) pitches him Dr. Strangelove with "you can destroy the world Peter"..........and he destroys his own several times over A very wise recreation of a great actor by a great actor .........there's humor and deep sorrow here and Rush finds that intersecting point.......you think he knows Sellers and what drove him and destroyed so much in his life more than the writer.........now that maybe isn't true but the actor here is acting as the driving narrative force..........that's how impressive Rush is - he so embodies Sellers you feel his behavior isn't being conceptualized until he acts it........ With Charlze Theron as Britt Eklund:
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 27, 2023 6:48:22 GMT
Jodie Comer - on Broadway - in Prima Facie (2023)Even better when you see it in person than the filmed record of it by National Theatre Live which the camera - incredibly - actually under-represents the jaw dropping physicality and endurance needed to pull this off - in this way....... How she can keep this in her head and act it out so sharply - and with a flowing arc - so that it is not just one note and a screech-a-thon - is a technical tour de force all by itself. Amazing performance....
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Apr 27, 2023 7:18:29 GMT
Jodie Comer - on Broadway - in Prima Facie (2023)Even better when you see it in person than the filmed record of it by National Theatre Live which the camera - incredibly - actually under-represents the jaw dropping physicality and endurance needed to pull this off - in this way....... How she can keep this in her head and act it out so sharply - and with a flowing arc - so that it is not just one note and a screech-a-thon - is a technical tour de force all by itself. Amazing performance.... When you go to shows, do you stage door after? Or is that not really your scene?
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 27, 2023 7:52:12 GMT
Jodie Comer - on Broadway - in Prima Facie (2023)Even better when you see it in person than the filmed record of it by National Theatre Live which the camera - incredibly - actually under-represents the jaw dropping physicality and endurance needed to pull this off - in this way....... How she can keep this in her head and act it out so sharply - and with a flowing arc - so that it is not just one note and a screech-a-thon - is a technical tour de force all by itself. Amazing performance.... When you go to shows, do you stage door after? Or is that not really your scene? When I was younger I would sometimes....... depending if I had to catch a train or not and how much of an issue getting out of NYC was - not to get an autograph or anything but just to sort of watch the excitement of the post-show crowd and hang out .......
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Apr 29, 2023 16:52:12 GMT
Michael Redgrave - The Browning Version (1951) Goes from unlikeable stuck-up to heartbreaking -> to pathetic at moments to making you root for him -> while mostly keeping one straight face. The smallest changes he did to his voice and manner of speaking had mighty impact when I look back on it. Will never forget him...
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Post by stabcaesar on May 1, 2023 10:06:47 GMT
The only time he's ever approached great in my book. It's all downhill from here. Depp on the other hand is painfully wooden. I probably would've liked the film better if a better actor had been cast.
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Post by stabcaesar on May 2, 2023 18:05:59 GMT
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on May 3, 2023 12:04:27 GMT
Al Pacino (and Sean Penn and Penelope Ann Miller) - Carlito's Way (1993) Finally the Pacinoyes' avatar is out of my way! I should really single out DePalma (the star of his own movies eventually) here since how well he operates these three... How the relationship between Pacino and Penn is framed at first (after the court room, Pac almost flirts with him in disregard to the chicks right there ) to how things look unbalanced from the boat onward. How Pacino goes to finish the rising mob star in the back alley and changes his mind and camera follows him either way... it's a feast of such details and like any good DePalma it leaves you excited about what you just sat through. I hadn't heard a Pacino narration before (has he got more?). Could've just closed my eyes listening to him and get the gist of Carlito's state (or how he reflects on the happenings), that's the amount of emotion he puts into his 40s-hardboiled-style line reading, like he's a bedtime storyteller at the same time. Carlito owns every interaction be it kicking Viggo Mortenson's ass or leaving the cops who are pressuring him to testify against Penn more mad than before, yet look how he turns to a child, throwing his hand to a teasing Ann Miller from behind the door... his co-stars respond to his energy with very good work as well. Whatever the decisions they've made (Penn had some idea about his eventual make-up they say), you believe everything that's going on between them. The politics of masculinity, the pretense, the romance...
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Post by pacinoyes on May 5, 2023 18:21:07 GMT
Alain Delon in Purple Noon (1960) - rewatch
In some ways a performance which creates a kind of semiotic shorthand relationship with the audience - and as such is quite a breakthrough for one that is 60+ years old: Very rarely do male actors get the chance to get credit for using their looks in a movie.........actresses get credit for it all the time but for men it's considered posturing and cheap. Delon - in this proto-Chabrol classic (co-written by his screenwriter pal Paul Gégauff) is physically beautiful in ways that suggest complex behaviors and his looks play on a dual level to an audience: How can someone this beautiful and seductive be this ugly and scheming? Delon - in effect - is playing an homme fatale and his look and presence in overtly cinematic - a story told in pictures that could be conveyed in still frames. Almost every behavior by him in Purple Noon is accompanied by some sort of vanity impulse that then illuminates his character to us - the way he sips beverages, and smokes - the way he puts on smiles and poses. Matt Damon in the remake had a keen sense of common desperation - he was fine - but Delon has something far better and more elusive - ruthless entitlement. Why shouldn't he assume another's identity? In Delon's performance it seems not quite sad or desperate but rather thrillingly "right"...........even better (and better looking) than the real thing....... His looks - and his use of his looks - dovetails with the look of the movie (also stunning)..........easy, as a given, dazzling and perception altering. Delon dominates this movie in a way very few movie stars would have in 1960 - he is both active and elusive within it.......a beautiful phantom. Of the darker events in the movie he is somehow removed from it all anyway .........even the movie's ending, which we know won't end well for him - doesn't play out on-screen: so you can romanticize and fantasize about that too. The last time we see Delon's Tom Ripley - louche, beyond relaxed, sucking down a drink like a reptile or a vampire........... and smiling that particular smile while blissfully unaware.......he is somehow removed from even his own fate....... Not only is Alain Delon the best Tom Ripley........Tom Ripley is a great movie character because he was fortunate enough to be embodied by Alain Delon..........some guys have all the luck, I swear.........
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Post by pacinoyes on May 8, 2023 7:48:46 GMT
Cate Blanchett and Harriet Walter in Documentary Now! Episode "Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport" (2022) (Re-watch) "When my Thomas came back from the war, he was a totally different man. He was two stone lighter, half a foot taller, his red hair had turned jet black, and he didn’t speak a word of English.” Deadpan absurdist comedy played to perfection in a parody of the documentary "Three Salons at the Seaside" (1994) which this kind of reminds you of those slice of life British comedies like Life Is Sweet or The Snapper.........where you laugh not only because it's funny in situation and dialog but on a whole other level at the exact right comic tone being captured by the performers. Not only that but easily rewatchable at ~ 22 minutes .........and genuinely lovely and sweet and done with great care and attention to detail........a must watch for Blanchetterheads (since she's a hairdresser - oh nevermind)
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