Review of Bringing Out the Dead (1999) by Tom B — 28 Jun 2010
We take a three stage journey through the underworld. Cinema makes everything beautiful. This cinema aches with beauty. The light illuminates all the dark places with beauty. The ugliness throbs with beauty.
Charon is the boatman who takes us on the journey, the mythic figure with the flashing eyes. He has a job. Not all mythic figures have jobs. Charon's job is to ferry us between worlds. This is work ethic as mythic journey, the job as myth.
We can struggle to seek out a dramatic story but the story here is always the same, to cross the river from here to there, where everyone goes, always one turn of the head away, around every corner. A filmed Beautiful about the beauty of living and dying, humor and horror, a time capsule of an era forever preserved, an open heart.
It seems in its own quiet way like everyone's finest moment. Or perhaps that's every moment, and this is only a few of them strung together in a web of narrative, or symbol, for a few minutes, a couple of hours of fine moments.
It seems to resist words and wants to be music, Orpheus in love, this response, because sometimes the feelings that come through, the film emotions, are real and binding, shared heaven in the night, shared vision, unified field of feeling.
And this after all is the journey we all take, every one, sooner or later, in feathered glory or in dust.
This review of Bringing Out the Dead (1999) was written by Tom B on 28 Jun 2010.
Bringing Out the Dead has generally received positive reviews.
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