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Northfork
By James Woods, Nick Nolte, Douglas Sebern, Claire Forlani, Duel Farnes
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To be honest, that statement is total speculation- all I know is that I made my husband watch it, and he found it excruciatingly slow, with "no payoff at the end". I assumed that most people would feel the same; the movie is only rated at 56% on rottentomatoes. For some reason, I love this movie. Its approach to death is a little different than any other movie I've seen; the humor is dry (although not always subtle and sometimes borderline cheesy); the landscapes are bleak but gorgeous and breathtaking. But, this movie is not "entertaining" in a summer-sequel-blockbuster-50-million-in-the-first-weekend kind of way. You could almost say it isn't entertaining for most of the time. But Roger Ebert agrees with me, (or I agree with him) and the last paragraph of his review is worded beautifully: '"Northfork" is not an entertaining film so much as an entrancing one. There were people at Sundance, racing from one indie hipness to another, who found it too slow. But the pace is well chosen for the tone, and the tone evokes the fable, and the fable is about the death of a town and of mankind's brief purchase on this barren plat of land, and it is unseemly to hurry a requiem. The film suggests that of the thousands who obeyed the call "Go West, young man!" some simply disappeared into the wilderness and were buried, as Northfork is about to be buried, beneath the emptiness of it all.' If you've seen it, tell me what you thought. If you want to see it, be prepared to be patient and just soak in the mood and the atmosphere of it. |
