Paper Moon (1973)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
During the Great Depression, a con man finds himself saddled with a young girl who may or may not be his daughter, and the two forge an unlikely partnership.
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What critics compared Paper Moon to
Laszlo Kovacs's black-and-white photography doesn't recall some nice little studio picture but "The Grapes of Wrath" with its gigantic, sorrowful landscapes.
The two kinds of Depression-era movies we remember best are the ones that ignored the Depression altogether and the ones like “ The Grapes of Wrath ” that took it as a subject.
It’s this father-son dynamic that drives the story and gives the movie its heart, with Hugh Jackman and Dakota Goyo striking up some great onscreen chemistry reminiscent of similar dramas like “Paper Moon” and “The Champ.”
Or maybe it is more like Paper Moon minus the Depression but with the addition of robots.
Based very loosely on a short story by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson , Real Steel in fact comes closer to road-bonding movies featuring children and hesitant papas: Paper Moon or Over the Top, say.
Someone referred to this film as an “arthouse Paper Moon ,” but unlike Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, Mescal and Corio’s performances mainly rest on their ability to play off one another through their candid moments, whether teasing, a deep conversation, or lathering sunscreen or mud on one another.
With its gorgeous wheat-toned landscapes and its salutary nods to pictures such as “The Searchers,” “True Grit” and “Paper Moon,” “News of the World” finds its maker navigating the conventions of the western and the road movie with relative ease.
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Unlike other films about confidence men such as “The Sting” or “Paper Moon”, the humor in “American Hustle” is conceptual rather than so old-fashioned as to rest on witty dialogue or farcical situations.
Her daughter is Moonee, played by Brooklynn Prince in one of the most stunningly assured screen debuts since Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon.”
Whether sitting on the Magic Castle’s picnic tables eating waffles smuggled out of the local diner by a friend or “Paper Moon“-ing their way around the more affluent hotels nearby peddling knock-off perfume, it’s gorgeous to see a mother-child relationship in which they both get such a conspiratorial kick out of each other.
It also allows for comedy in the interaction among Logan, Charles and the little girl, Laura, a la "Paper Moon."
And that’s precisely the problem with Safe: Yakin hasn’t bothered to write or direct a single scene that brings real risk or emotion to the situation, or to persuade us that Luke and Mei are as fun a pair of rascals as, say, Ryan and Tatum O’Neil in Paper Moon.
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It's a fairy tale this country of over-workers rarely tires of revisiting, whether "the art of the steal" (the name of one of Abagnale's books) is worked by an escape artist like perennial bank robber Willy Sutton or in effervescent amusements like "Paper Moon" and "The Sting."
He has a likable quality that serves the film well, but Moretz steals every scene she’s in as the toughest movie kid since Tatum O’Neal took up smoking in Paper Moon .