Constant seeker of the sublime.
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Show Boat 1936
Five stars for the "Ol' Man River" sequence: a great song, beautifully performed by Paul Robeson, and passionately visualized by director James Whale (his direction of the whole film is pretty terrific, but this is the clear highlight, to my mind).
Zero stars for Irene Dunne in blackface.
The average of those would be 2.5 stars. But more often than not I tend to give extra points for audacity, so I give Show Boat an extra half a star forβ¦
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Texasville 1990
My rating, by the way, is based on watching a rip of the Director's Cut laserdisc, of which I dug its sustained melancholic vibe. Perhaps one day I'll catch up with the theatrical version and see how that fares for me by comparison. Either way, RIP Peter Bogdanovich.