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DVD Before Sunset
In 1994, director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) made Before Sunrise, a gorgeous poem of a movie about two strangers (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) wandering around Vienna, talking, and falling in love. Ten years later, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have returned with Before Sunset, which reunites the same characters after Hawke has written a book about that night. Delpy appears at the final book reading of his European tour; they have less than two hours before Hawke has to catch a flight to New York...and in that time, they walk around Paris, talk, and fall in love all over again. It sounds simple, perhaps dull, but it's written with such skill and care and acted with such richness that it's a miracle of filmmaking. On its own, Before Sunset is moving and wonderful; seen right after Before Sunrise, it will break your heart. --Bret Fetzer
With an Academy Award Nomination for Best Screenplay, BEFORE SUNSET deserved a look. A sequel to the stylistically similar BEFORE SUNRISE, it is a chamber film that gives two performers 80 minutes to talk about a plethora of topics.
While the topics sometimes feel forced, the film is extremely thought provoking and challenging. Although I personally disagree with most of the characters logic - its very left coast intelligentsia - I appreciate the `matured' outlook of the characters since their previous meeting nine years earlier.
Some call the film a romance. If so, it is definitely a new type of romance. Both characters are in an uncomfortable place in life, one definitely inappropriate for a romance to occur. All they seem to have in common is a shared political stance and the memory of a train ride years earlier. Romance is quickly cut down to a ridiculous pastime. I found the film a terrible date movie as it tarnishes many of the emotions that a young couple is most likely dealing with...
Like the film, the DVD is very sparse. The film is only 80 minutes.
Most Amazon reviewers seem to give the film glowing reception. But, I hope that readers are a bit more discriminating when reading them as the film is a very different beast than the reviews can make you expect.
Perfect performances!
I had no idea until I was writing this, that what I was watching was a sequel. No idea at all.
So, that being said...I am basing my review solely on what I saw.
If you can't handle an entire movie of what basically amounts to dialogue...then skip this.
However...if you can, then Before Sunset is practically perfect in every way.
This is a mature, honest, "god, I wish this was happening to me" kind of movie.
You will feel like you know them, you will wish they were you, you will miss them once it's over.
Lovely!
The Magic of Words to Deepen Intimacy
"Before Sunset" is one of the most unabashedly romantic films I have ever seen.
Even in our age of full disclosure and no privacy there remain moments that this viewer, anyway, has never seen captured on film before.
"Before Sunset" captures some of those moments.
Two adult characters converse. Watching them, you wonder -- and you know that these two characters are wondering the same thing -- where will this conversation go? Is it just an exchange of banal, prepackaged rants and scripts? But, the two characters keep talking, keep talking past rough moments, and awkward discomfort, and strange anecdotes.
After a while of this, they come to say shockingly open and intimate things to each other.
Before you realize that you've been swept off your feet, the conversation has become as intimate as the best sexual act could be.
These two characters are using mere words to reveal hopes, and pains, and vulnerabilities, that we usually sweep from our consciousness, because the world has no room for them ... except during magical moments such as those dramatized in this film.
There was one aspect of "Before Sunset" that didn't work for me. Ethan Hawke, especially, gives a poignantly visual performance. He says things with his eyes and face that he does not convey in words.
Otherwise, though, this film is not visual enough to be fully satisfying as a film. Its charms and power are almost all verbal, all in the script. That being the case, "Before Sunset" would perhaps have been better as a radio play.
The director cheats his audience; he doesn't care about using his camera to allow his audience to view Hawke, Delpy, their powerful and magic interaction, or Paris in a new and high impact way.
But that's a minor complaint. "Before Sunset" swept this viewer off her feet. Days after viewing it, I'm still under its spell. It's appropriate that we understand spells as being cast, primarily, with words, with language. What language does here is truly magic.
Screenwriters rarely develop a distinctive voice that can be recognized from movie to movie, but the ornate imagination of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) has made him a unique and much-needed cinematic presence. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a guy decides to have the memories of his ex-girlfriend erased after she's had him erased from her own memory--but midway through the procedure, he changes his mind and struggles to hang on to their experiences together. In other hands, the premise of memory-erasing would become a trashy science-fiction thriller; Kaufman, along with director Michel Gondry, spins this idea into a funny, sad, structurally complex, and simply enthralling love story that juggles morality, identity, and heartbreak with... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Michel Gondry DVD Release Date: Released the 28 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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With Sideways, Paul Giamatti (American Splendor, Storytelling) has become an unlikely but engaging romantic lead. Struggling novelist and wine connoisseur Miles (Giamatti) takes his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church, Wings) on a wine-tasting tour of California vineyards for a kind of extended bachelor party. Almost immediately, Jack's insatiable need to sow some wild oats before his marriage leads them into double-dates with a rambunctious wine pourer (Sandra Oh, Under the Tuscan Sun) and a recently divorced waitress (Virginia Madsen, The Hot Spot)--and Miles discovers a little hope that he hasn't let himself feel in a long time. Sideways is a modest but finely tuned film; with gentle compassion, it explores the failures, struggles, and... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Alexander Payne DVD Release Date: Released the 05 April 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Four extremely beautiful people do extremely horrible things to one another in Closer, Mike Nichols' pungent adaptation of Patrick Marber's play that easily marks the Oscar-winning director's best work in years. Anna (Julia Roberts) is a photographer who specializes in portraits of strangers; Dan (Jude Law) is an obituary writer struggling to become a novelist; Alice (Natalie Portman) is an American stripper freshly arrived in London after a bad relationship; and Larry (Clive Owen) is a dermatologist who finds love under the most unlikely of circumstances. When their paths cross it's a dizzying supernova of emotions, as Nichols and Marber adroitly construct various scenes out of their lives that pair them again and again in various permutations of passion, heartbreak, anger,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Mike Nichols DVD Release Date: Released the 29 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Zach Braff (from the TV show Scrubs) stars in his writing/directing debut, Garden State--normally a doomed act of hubris, but Braff pulls it off with unassuming charm. An emotionally numb actor in L.A., Andrew (Braff) comes back to New Jersey after nine years away for his mother's funeral. Andrew avoids his bitter father (Ian Holm, The Sweet Hereafter) and joins old friends (including the superb Peter Sarsgaard, Boys Don't Cry) in a round of parties. Along the way he meets a girl (Natalie Portman, Beautiful Girls) with demons of her own; bit by bit the two offer each other a little healing. Plotwise, Garden State is familiar stuff, a cross between The Graduate and a Meg Ryan movie, but Braff has an eye for goofy but resonant visual images,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Natalie Portman - Peter Sarsgaard DVD Release Date: Released the 28 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Jamie Foxx's uncannily accurate performance isn't the only good thing about Ray. Riding high on a wave of Oscar buzz, Foxx proved himself worthy of all the hype by portraying blind R&B legend Ray Charles in a warts-and-all performance that Charles approved shortly before his death in June 2004. Despite a few dramatic embellishments of actual incidents (such as the suggestion that the accidental drowning of Charles's younger brother caused all the inner demons that Charles would battle into adulthood), the film does a remarkable job of summarizing Charles's strengths as a musical innovator and his weaknesses as a philandering heroin addict who recorded some of his best songs while flying high as a kite. Foxx seems to be channeling Charles himself, and as he did with the life of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jamie Foxx - Kerry Washington - Regina King Director(s): Taylor Hackford DVD Release Date: Released the 01 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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