Dorathen
Better Late Then Never
Kailansorac
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
Grimossfer
Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
preppy-3
Story based on a classic Japanese novel but relocated to the UK for the movie. Widow Anne Osborne (Sarah Miles) lives in a beautiful ocean side town with teenage son Jonathan (Jonathan Kahn). One day a handsome young sailor (Kris Kristofferson) shows up and Anne falls in love. This causes issues with Jonathan and his band of sociopathic friends.It's well-directed with beautiful settings, a good script and good acting (especially by Miles) but it has issues. It's way too slowly-paced. It gets dull very quick and no amount of pretty scenery and good acting can liven it up. When you have nude love making and masturbation scenes and it's still dull something is seriously wrong. VERY morbid ending too. Worth a look but the slow pace makes it a chore to watch At times.
Sasha Ross
I will make my review very short and to the point.I enjoyed the story and small cast of characters. However, the movie was too predictable and completely void of character development. Two people meet, become lovers, deal with a troubled teen...end of story.Though the boy's mother was lonely after her husband passed way, I thought she was depicted as "too easy". After a single date, the sailor smiled at her ...cut to the sex scenes. This is not typical behavior for a woman who was presented as "fine English upper class", living in a mansion over looking the sea. If the movie had depicted her loneliness through a couple of masturbation/alone and crying scenes, it would have been more believable.However, the movie did a fine job focusing on how a third wheel can derail a relationships, how impressionable youth are, etc. It also did a good job of revealing what atrocities young boys are capable of, especially when trying to become a man in the eyes of his peers.Thirty more minutes of character development would have gone a long way. I'll give it a 2.5 out of 5.
happipuppi13
Another rarity from the library,that again,I've never heard of. So naturally I just had to see it. I'll warn those who haven't seen it,to not be taken in too much by the beautiful scenery shown at the beginning. Which makes it seem like this will be a real '70s touching love story with a happy ending. Now,Kris Kristofferson will more than likely never get a lifetime achievement award from the Academy,or for that matter even a best supporting Oscar. Here in "The Sailor.." (which should have been enough of a title)he's actually effective. He's not loud and abrasive here,like he was in "A Star Is Born" or "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore". His performance,while not overly spectacular is actually very evenly paced and quite thoughtful and even poetic. I've never heard of the other players in the film but Kris's love interest is quite a bold actress for the scenes of nudity she's given. As for her love scenes with Kristofferson,if the two characters weren't portraying being in love,I'd think less of them being pictured here. Personally,I find them in this context to be quite romantic.The boy peeping in on his mother and then the couple,is just a young boy satisfying his newborn curiosity. I'm certain the producers weren't going for an "Edipous and his mother" plot. Speaking of the boy,I wondered,"how can he let himself be friends with such a rotten kid"? How also could he and the others let themselves be bossed around,hit and abused by this kid,who needs at least 20 years of psycho-therapy? It's almost impossible to imagine what could screw a young kid like that up so badly that he hates basically everything and is practically a pint-sized Hitler?I have to say I was truly disappointed that the boy and his buddies didn't come to their senses and ditch him or take him on all at once or one at a time! Instead they blindly follow his lead to where they end up offing Kristofferson. What an incredible downer! I'm glad they didn't show a scene with the mother realizing her chance at new happiness had been taken away,that would have been too much to take.Seven stars for the love story,the innocence of the boy before he goes bad,the scenery and even Kristofferson's acting. 3 off for the morbidness that I feel had no place alongside the romantic storyline. Even if it was taken from the book. (END)
J B
The film can be faulted for at least appearing to give too much to the mother/sailor side of the conflict, an appealingly sexy but eventually unconvincing romantic fantasy. The boy Chief is the other distracting trap for the viewer - he's the embryo of a crypto-scientific nerd who has less in common with Nietzsche than with a certain type of sclerotic, egotistical academic you'll find slowly going berserk at a second rate college.Importantly, the Chief doesn't quite "get it" about his underrated disciple Jonathan and the Sailor. Jonathan is, or should be, the focus of the film because he is a more interestingly conflicted, assertive, and intellectually cogent character than any of the others - he is the Mishima surrogate, who tries to reconcile and meld the Chief's perfectionism with the sailor's fictional attraction. That requires canceling out the unacceptably artless "return" of the sailor, which is the "fall from grace." Restoring aesthetic grace to the Sailor is the shocking concluding project. Keep your mind's eye on Jonathan - even while heeding the siren calls of competing sex and death.The casting is very good. Miles has the dreamy look and self-deluding spunk of a romance novel heroine. Kristofferson always plays "himself" and in this film his noble antique head, wooden cowboy self-assurance, and gravel-voiced platitudes work perfectly to attract susceptible but discerning Jonathan in the first go around and disgust him in the second. The young actor Jonathan was a real find - able to play the submissive but also a live spark when called upon - his is the subtlest but most important role in the film.