Short reviews
Hello! Welcome back and sorry not sorry about the Quintet review, a post that received hundreds of comments far and wide, the verdict of which may be summarised as “you have produced a disastrously clotted gabble of half-formed ideas.” But I still like it. Here now are some reviews of films I don’t feel strongly enough about to write full posts on. Norma Rae (1979) : This is really the epitome of the well-told take-it-seriously life-in-America film. People, me, talk about “70s films” but really there’s early 70s and there’s late 70s – this is a late 70s classic, so it has sentimental scenes, clunky bits, a couple of moments of over-acting but it is mostly persuasively acted, strongly directed, and builds to some real intensity. Exquisitely Tasteful-Hollywood work gives us the vitality and the flinching tameness of Tasteful-Hollywood at its best – lots of over-crafted dialogue and calibrated emotional arcs so we can suck our middle class thumbs happily. But it is also a very satis