FilmJerk Favorites

A group of unique directors and the essential works that you've got to see.

||| Sergio Leone |||
Sergio Leone

Leone’s career is remarkable in its unrelenting attention to both American culture and the American genre film, exploring the mythic America he created with each successive film examining the established characters in greater depth.

Only his second feature (a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo), Leone's landmark "spaghetti western" caused a revolution and features Clint Eastwood in his breakthrough role as "The Man With No Name". This classic brutal drama of feuding families wasn’t the first spaghetti Western, but it was far and away the most successful up to that time.

Plot is of minimal interest, but character is everything to Leone, who places immense meaning in the slightest flick of an eyelid, extensively using the extreme close-up on the eyes to reveal any feeling, as demonstrated by Clint, who squints his way through this slam-bang sequel to A Fistful of Dollars as a wandering gunslinger that must combine forces with his nemesis to track down a wanted killer.

The final chapter in the groundbreaking trilogy follows Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach as they form an uneasy alliance to find a stash of hidden gold. Leone focuses on his central theme as they find themselves facing greed, treachery, and murder, showing that the desire for wealth and power turns men into ruthless creatures who violate land and family and believe that a man’s death is less important than how he faces it.

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Introducing the Dwights

By BrianOrndorf

July 12th, 2007

"Introducing the Dwights" is a marvelous Australian family dramedy that occasionally creates the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in quarreling hell. That's both a compliment and criticism of this flawed, but admirable, drama, which asks the audience to be patient with characters that one would logically run away from screaming.

Introducing the Dwights

Jean (Brenda Blethyn) is a mother of two still trying to keep her dream of comedic performance alive in local casinos, while holding her family together with a dreary day job in a cafeteria. Tim (Kahn Chittenden) is her eldest; a young man who has fallen in love with a high-maintenance girl named Jill (Emma Booth). Finding unexpected love puts a strain on Tim’s relationship with both women in his life, revealing the caustic emotional limitations of his mother, and Jill’s demands on him for an environment change that’s long overdue.

Written by Keith Thompson, “Dwights” is your average, formulaic coming-of-age, overbearing-mother experience, complete with a skittish deflowering, hateful drunken episodes, and the healing power of classic rock. It’s to the writer’s credit that he is able to shape the characters as real as he does. He zeros in on their destructive insecurities and persuasive fears that anyone could easily relate to, and milks the conflicts for as long as the film will withstand. Since “Dwights” has little to nothing in the way of a plot, it relies solely on these complex emotions, leading the film to fascinating, thunderstruck moments of doubt and regret.

Director Cherie Nowlan also has great command of the cast; taking a wild assortment of personalities and making them feel like a family whole instead of a prickly assembly of clichés. Standouts include Chittenden and Booth, who maintain a curious authenticity to their diseased relationship, and Richard Wilson, playing Tim’s mentally-challenged brother Mark. Combining a healthy sense of humor with a frightening unpredictability to Mark’s daydreaming impulses, “Dwights” lightens up every moment the young actor is onscreen.

Shamefully, Nowlan loses complete control of the finale, detonating the burgeoning tension by having the family scream at each other for a good 20 minutes. Trust me, if the film stars Brenda Blethyn and the script calls for an argument, your best bet would be to run for the hills. The actress is in full Oscar-bating caterwaul mode here, single-handedly shredding the film with her tendency to blast her Blethyny voice to migraine status. What’s strange is how Nowlan doesn’t put a stop to any of this, seemingly comfortable that a needless and aggressive bout of catharsis is what the film was building to all along. The yelling matches are a wet blanket on a delicate, nuanced character study, and if you decided to leave the theater at the 80-minute mark, you’d be a smarter person than I.

My rating: B-