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Post by stephen on Jan 2, 2018 18:51:27 GMT
This one's for you, pacinoyes. Everyone here knows I’m the biggest champion of Harry Dean Stanton to ever walk these parts. He was always my choice for the honorary Oscar and every year the Academy snubbed him, it was a blow. The man was not just the king of character actors; he made a strong play for being one of the best natural performers cinema ever had to offer.
So when it was announced that John Carroll Lynch (another stalwart character actor) decided to pay homage to the big man by giving him the lead role in a film tailor-made to Stanton’s strengths (namely, by being the coolest motherfucker in the room), I was absolutely stoked. Maybe the Academy would make up for their constant deflections of recognition of Stanton’s talents by granting him that long-overdue acting nomination. But then Magnolia snapped it up, and my hopes were dashed. And then the man himself took his final bow in September, ending my hopes at him finally being rewarded for a seven-decade career of greatness.
After seeing Lucky, it’s all the more criminal that Stanton isn’t just being talked about as a contender, but as our frontrunner. The film is so easygoing and relaxed that it almost feels like a documentary chronicling a random week of Stanton’s life. It feels like a beautiful companion piece to The Straight Story, and not simply because of Stanton and David Lynch’s involvement. But where the Farnsworth film relied on nostalgia and regret, Lucky is about the laissez-faire acceptance that, at the end of all things, all you can do is smile and light up. And there isn’t a better person to deliver such a message unto the masses as Harry Dean Stanton.
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AKenjiB
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Post by AKenjiB on Jan 4, 2018 18:21:33 GMT
Agreed. Lovely film and probably my favorite performance from Stanton since Paris, Texas. The character is obviously at least partially based on himself (WWII veteran, atheist etc.) that I also sometimes felt like I was just watching Stanton himself but that’s certainly not a bad thing because I was so immersed in his story. Really wonderful character study and I hope John Carroll Lynch keeps directing movies. A perfect sendoff for Stanton. R.I.P.
Also, the subplot with David Lynch’s missing turtle was pretty great.
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Deleted
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Lucky.
Jan 4, 2018 18:23:21 GMT
Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2018 18:23:21 GMT
Can't wait to see it
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 4, 2018 18:29:09 GMT
One thing I'd mention about the performance is it very much depends on what you like to see too - do you like performances where actors transform into a character? Well, sometimes I do but usually I like when the actor is meeting the character halfway and both are informed by each other - a meeting of the two.
That's what Stanton did here and the immense joy in his performance - how he smiles (at crucial points) or makes eye contact in the diner or communicates what being in the war was like. At the beginning of this movie he was fine and almost imperceptibly the performance became great at some point......I didn't "see" it. I can't point to the scene where it became great........it just was.
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Lucky.
Jan 4, 2018 18:33:27 GMT
Post by stephen on Jan 4, 2018 18:33:27 GMT
One thing I'd mention about the performance is it very much depends on what you like to see too - do you like performances where actors transform into a character? Well, sometimes I do but usually I like when the actor is meeting the character halfway and both are informed by each other - a meeting of the two. That's what Stanton did here and the immense joy in his performance - how he smiles (at crucial points) or makes eye contact in the diner or communicates what being in the war was like. At the beginning of this movie he was fine and almost imperceptibly the performance became great at some point......I didn't "see" it. I can't point to the scene where it became great........it just was. Indeed. There are a lot of great roles where I look at the part and think of what other actors could've done with them, and how they would've been better or worse. But Lucky is such a singular character that it's hard to disassociate it from Harry Dean; he is Lucky from the ground-up. I'd be very curious to know about the writing process of this film, if the screenwriters had ever met Stanton before putting the script together. The scene where he and Skerritt trade war stories (one of Skerritt's best scenes ever, in my opinion) is very reminiscent of the heartbreaking tête-à-tête between Richard Farnsworth and Wiley Harker in The Straight Story, which is in my book the most poignantly acted scene of the entire 1990s. The film really does feel like the spiritual successor to that film, even if it does hit a lot of similar beats. I don't know if I've ever heard your thoughts on that film and Farnsworth's work in it, and I'd be very curious to know your thoughts.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 4, 2018 19:02:01 GMT
I like The Straight Story and Farnsworth very much - easily top 10 of 1999 - and that was a great year. Farnsworth would be my number 2 that year. It's a source of wry amusement to me that David Lynch, the man who has provided us with some of the scariest, most unsettling images in film history made the the greatest G rated film at least of modern times. Lucky does find a way to link itself to both Paris, Texas (in the setting especially) and The Straight Story, that and the appearance of Lynch makes it all the more poignant and lyrical. In fact, the Lynch character is pivotal to the feel of it because at one point seeming quite foolish unleashes that great speech on why the tortoise is important and all of those things coalesce very quickly - humor, sadness, death, loneliness, perseverance, life are all tied together quite profoundly. That speech is very much an equivalent to the Stuhlberg speech everyone raves in CMBYN but no one mentions it because well, you know, it's about a tortoise - but no in its own way it really is beautiful.
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