02-25-2014, 03:39 PM
|
#19
|
Timed Out - TOS Drama
How Do You Identify?: ..
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: ..
Posts: 3,471
Thanks: 292
Thanked 2,647 Times in 1,293 Posts
Rep Power: 0
|
Nebraska
Nebraska
is shot on location in the fields and on the back roads of the state where I lived for more than 30 years. The scenery is all too familiar to me, though the writers have added the fictional town of Hawthorne which doesn't exist.
Da D's
Is Nebraska my kind of movie because I lived there? Or because it felt as though I'd flown back? Not at all. I've mentioned that I've had steady diet, all year, of films that either depict depression, dysfuntion, dispair, dissolution or danger. Well, Nebraska is just plain dull and drab. But the film has a redeeming quality in Dern—Bruce Dern— who plays a booze-addled drunk in search of his jackpot winnings in...Nebraska.
The Academy hasn't awarded Bruce Dern an Oscar for his lifetime achievements. And he hasn't been nominated since 1979 for Coming Home. I think it's time because of his longevity and his performance , and he is my second choice for Best Actor.
I grew up watching Bruce Dern. And, if you're my age, you'll remember him as a psychopath, sociopath, criminal or just plain dirty as dirty gets in more memorable films such as Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, The Cowboys, Black Sunday, Marnie by Alfred Hitchcock, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and Diggstown, to name a few. He is a character actor in the ranks of nasty guys Jack Palance, and psycho Richard Widmark in his early years. Nobody played 'em better. I think Dern deserves consideration coming onto the screen in his late 70s in a leading role. When I watched him, I wondered if director Alexander Payne literally pulled him out of retirement in a wheel chair. A far departure from his early years.
June Squibb
Nebraska is drab with exaggerated caricatures of hicks in the sticks.(Stacy Keach, who I hardly recognized, cast as one of them.) I didn't know any people as dull when I lived in Nebraska and it grated on my nerves to watch this slow, slanted movie about uninteresting people, shot in black and white.
On the flip side...
the super nice thing about Nebraska is that it features senior citizens by the dozens and the best is 85 year-old Oscar-nominated supporting actress June Squibb. She is a scene stealer as Dern's feisty wife, and she is my second choice for the supporting actress Oscar. I have never seen anyone as natural in a role since Shirley Booth's Oscar, Tony and Golden Globe-winning role as Lola Delaney in Come Back Little Sheba. There is no camera in front of June Squibb...
Just my take on Nebraska. Have fun at the movies.
|
|
|