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那偶就把那篇全文贴上来吧,好在也不长:
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第一篇
Old West, down under
Heath Ledger as a legendary 19th-century Australian outlaw
NED KELLY With Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, Naomi Watts. Director: Gregor Jordan. At the Angelika (1:49). Rated R: Violence, brief nudity.
Legendary director John Ford would have approved of Gregor Jordan's Australian Western "Ned Kelly."
Ford's own Westerns are more or less defined by the last line in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," delivered by a newspaper reporter to a man whose life he is immortalizing:
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Though Ned Kelly was a real person and remains an enduring Australian folk hero, the movie prints the legend - along with a bunch of other embellishments.
The result is a handsome, action-packed biographical drama with a credibility gap wider than the screen.
"Ned Kelly" portrays its Jesse James-fashioned hero as a man driven to bad deeds by constables intent on the ruin of his tight-knit Irish-immigrant family.
That may be true, but before they went after his family, Kelly caught their attention as a common thief, sometime rustler and regular taunter of the law.
By the time he was through - at age 25, dangling from the end of a rope - he had robbed two banks and killed two lawmen and had the Victoria state government sweating a revolt among its immigrant population.
Jordan and screenwriter John McDonagh, adapting a Robert Drewe novel, cherry-pick Kelly's actual exploits and blend them with the conceits of the traditional Hollywood Western.
One of the movie's two action set pieces, the shootout between Kelly's small gang and a posse of constables, is virtually reenacted from historical accounts.
But the second - the climactic showdown between the Kelly gang and 50 lawmen - takes a spectacular true incident and turns it into smoldering blarney.
The reality is that Kelly, the equally famous Joe Byrne (Orlando Bloom) and two others faced their enemy wearing full-body boilerplate armor. Only their arms, hands and feet were exposed, though one of them died when a bullet slipped between plates and hit him in the groin.
The only casualty among the police was Superintendent Francis Hare, who was shot in the forearm.
Hare, played with grudging respect by Geoffrey Rush, suffers the same flesh wound in the movie, but his troops don't fare nearly as well.
The film's most egregious invention is Ned's affair with a proper married Englishwoman (Naomi Watts) and mother of two whose failure to provide him an alibi sets him on his fatal course.
Watts gives as good as she's got in this role, but she sure doesn't feel like history.
Ledger has a strong, stiff-backed presence as the stubborn Ned, a man given to voluminous speeches, and Bloom - Legolas in "The Lord of the Rings" - is a dashingly mischievous Joe Byrne.
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第二篇:
Plied with fiction and short on depth, the new biopic of legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly plays like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" without the excitement, charm and humor.
Bearded and brooding but otherwise uncharismatic, Heath Ledger stars as the folk-hero bushranger (Aussie for "cowboy"), who according to this film was an upstanding citizen of the Outback frontier until contemptible, crooked, downright sinister lawmen drove him to a life of crime by picking on his family.
They jailed his ma, molested his teenage sister, and falsely accused him and his brothers of horse rustling. They "started a war" against us, Kelly says in voice-over. "So I killed their coppers. I robbed their banks."
But apparently he did so only as a down-under Robin Hood, if you believe the scene in which Kelly demands one of his gang-member brothers give back a pocket watch during a hold-up, scolding that "if we act like common thieves, that's just what they'll call us."
Actually, Ledger's best moments are when he's railing against injustice. But if this film weren't based on fact, there would be little to hold one's interest. There's so little spark of life in the rote performances that even magnetic Orlando Bloom ("Pirates of the Caribbean," "Lord of the Rings"), playing Kelly's lieutenant Joe Byrne, seems gray and nondescript.
The same is true of Naomi Watts as a married Englishwoman with whom Kelly has an obligatory, incongruously modern (i.e. sexed-up), movie-shorthand romance, and of Geoffrey Rush, who has a strangely lackluster role as a tracker leading a phalanx of police in dogged pursuit of the Kelly Gang through the Australian wilds, even setting a forest on fire and poisoning a stream just to flush them out.
Directed by Gregor Jordan ("Buffalo Soldiers"), who does have an eye for beautiful vistas (or maybe that's just cinematographer Oliver Stapleton), "Ned Kelly" picks up a bit as it builds toward the showdown that made a legend of the man. The bandit's cleverness finally comes into play as the gang corrals all the civilians to safety (or so they think) at a remote outpost and sports homemade steel armor (helmets, chest and leg plates) to await a train full of cops for an all-night shoot-out. But coming in the last 10 minutes, it's not enough to save the film anymore than it's enough to save the Kelly boys from their fate.
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又仔细研读了一遍,感觉这两段话都是在评价他们的角色而不是他们的表演。There's so little spark of life in the rote performances that even magnetic Orlando Bloom ("Pirates of the Caribbean," "Lord of the Rings"), playing Kelly's lieutenant Joe Byrne, seems gray and nondescript.偶觉得意思是这样的:因为没什么表现机会,所以Joe这个角色即使是“magnetic”(偶也觉得这个词大致相对于富有吸引力的意思)的OB来演,也显得苍白无味。
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