![]() It’s a fixer-upper with great bones, and Catherine is just the one to renovate it (which she does, with supreme taste). To make the move, Catherine is forced to put her own career as an art restorer on hold, which she does with a quiet regret that becomes more tangible when they tour the old farmhouse George has his heart set on buying. It’s a ghost story, set in 1980, starring Amanda Seyfried and James Norton as Catherine and George Claire, a couple with a young daughter who move from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where George has just gotten his Ph.D in art history from Columbia, to the Hudson Valley, where he lands a job as a professor at Saginaw, a small private college distinguished mostly by its bucolic setting. I’m always hoping it will, and their latest film, “Things Heard & Seen” (it drops April 29 on Netflix), offers their usual tease of look-we’re-honest-commercial-filmmakers-trying-to-aim-high. ![]() Yet lightning has never struck again for them. The odd thing is that their earnest empathy and craft is always on display they have an instinct for pace, for camera angles, for how to seek out three dimensions in places where too many filmmakers settle for two. In the years since, however, nothing they’ve done (“The Nanny Diaries,” “10,000 Saints”) has come within miles of living up to the promise of that landmark film. ![]() The movie was an audacious triumph (it racked up awards, including a National Society of Film Critics nod for best movie of the year), and going forward one wanted, and expected, more great things from Pulcini and Berman. It was 18 years ago - how time flies in the indie world - that the married directing team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman brought us “American Splendor,” an achingly humane, scabrously funny, miraculously playful and inventive lower-depths comedy based on the life and work of the lumpen verité comic-book diarist Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti in a performance of irascible brilliance. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |