Purr-fect casting: is Orangey the most important movie cat ever?

A new retrospective celebrates the work of the cat credited with roles in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Comedy of Terrors and Rhubarb In the midst of Oscar season, it becomes evident just how much work it takes to win an Academy Award, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. Consider, however, that multiple actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s best actress nominees, won twice in the past decade.) Only a single cat, meanwhile, has twice won the Patsy – the Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. (The award, given by the American Humane Association, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangey, the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph cinema. Plenty of rep houses will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s around Valentine’s Day; the Metrograph is going deeper into the Orangey catalogue for a wider variety of titles and genres. Breakfast at Tiffany’s does offer Orangey his mo...

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers review – tense parable of troubled masculinity

A city slicker moves his family to Alabama in search of a wholesome life and sets off for a solo hunting trip. It’s not going to go well

Robert Machoian is an indie film-maker drawn to a certain type of troubled American masculinity: the type that’s never so toxic as when weak or insecure. His previous drama The Killing of Two Lovers was about male anger, and this tense, suspenseful new film has similar ideas: a Dostoevskian parable set over a single day in remote woodland, with a slow-moving simplicity that belies its storytelling ingenuity and force, and again featuring Machoian’s longtime collaborator, actor-producer Clayne Crawford. This actually looks as if it could have been conceived in the 1970s, with a hint of Boorman’s Deliverance: right down to the Burt Reynolds moustache that the male lead smugly sculpts for himself one morning in front of the shaving mirror, to his wife’s annoyance.

Crawford plays Joseph Chambers, a prosperous insurance salesman and Christian family man who has moved to rural Alabama with his wife Tess (Jordana Brewster) and their two boys, to find a more wholesome place away from the city for the children’s upbringing. But Joseph has got it into his head to have a day’s hunting on his own in some nearby woodland belonging to his friend Doug (Carl Kennedy), to learn some survival skills and generally prove his manhood. Tess, who grew up with a dad and brothers who hunted, and actually knows more about this kind of stuff than her naive city-slicker husband, is dead against him going on his own like this.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/9pwj2sv
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton