It is Casino, though, which exhibits the director’s most audacious narration: it is divided among the main actors and heard almost continuously throughout this three-hour phantasmagoria. Martin Scorsese is a master of voiceover, using it to plunge us into the mind of a sociopath (Taxi Driver, The Irishman) or to evoke a richness of perspective, such as in Goodfellas, one of the few movies in this male genre to pass voiceover duties from a gangster (Ray Liotta) to his wife (Lorraine Bracco). Sharon Stone and Robert De Niro in Casino. Breaking off from a voiceover steeped in emotional contemplation, she passes a window display and wonders: “Ooh, I wonder if they have that in my size.” Central to the film’s success is her ebullient narration, which unpicks the script’s teen-speak terminology, but is always prone to distraction. Clueless (1995)Īmy Heckerling’s update of Jane Austen’s Emma comes with Rodeo Drive shopping bags full of charm, most of it radiating from its star, Alicia Silverstone. Robert Downey Jr announces his function at the start of this riotous comic thriller (“I’ll be your narrator”), instantly pulls rank (“I don’t see another goddam narrator, so pipe down”), chastises himself (“Damn, I forgot something, this is bad narrating”), orders extras out of the way of the camera (“Scat!”) and even criticises the film itself (“That was a terrible scene”). Vanessa Redgrave replaced Scofield, who died in 2008, for the 2010 Robinson in Ruins. In his playful narration, Scofield muses on the exploits of an unseen explorer-flâneur named Robinson and does so again in the 1997 sequel, Robinson in Space. Paul Scofield’s film appearances were few and far between, but his mellifluous tones enrich Patrick Keiller’s witty quasi-documentary, in which a stationary camera surveys the capital in the aftermath of the 1992 general election. A sobering example of how voiceover can complicate what we see. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)Īlfonso Cuarón’s road movie, co-written with his brother Carlos, is lent a harsh edge by the dispassionate narrator (Daniel Giménez Cacho, recently seen in the title role in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama), who interrupts the oversexed young heroes to place their lives in a socio-political context. “This match is like one of my films,” Porumboiu sighs. All we see is the original, grainy TV broadcast while father and son banter in real time. The director Corneliu Porumboiu (The Whistlers) and his father, Adrian Porumboiu, watch a soccer match that Porumboiu Snr refereed in 1988. Nor is Waldo, who puts a queer slant on this seamy noir. “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died,” purrs the newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) at the start of Otto Preminger’s film, killing off the title character when we have barely taken our seats. Either unavailable to record it or in conflict with the director Francis Ford Coppola (depending on whom you ask), Sheen was replaced by his own brother, Joe Estevez, who also served as his onscreen surrogate in some scenes. John Milius wrote the screenplay, but it was the war correspondent Michael Herr who provided the narration for Martin Sheen to deliver. He is no less carnivorous here as the theatre critic Addison DeWitt. It is fitting that many viewers seeing All About Eve for the first time will shudder at the sound of its narrator, the silk-tongued George Sanders, who later provided the voice of Shere Khan in Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book. Photograph: Fox/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock 17. Anne Baxter as the duplicitous Eve and George Sanders as the theatre critic and narrator in All About Eve.
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