ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Forumrxes Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

tedg From time to time I come upon a film that is revolting, but that I am sure that could be recut from existing footage and made into a fine project. This is such a film. Changing just the score might tip it into tolerable. What's there now is a syrupy Hallmark violin jelly that swells when the composer thinks we should be following expected emotional urges.Superficially, this is a simple redemption story: an "old" man (at 47!) is tied to his mother and is reluctant to marry the long time love of his life. She is the war widow of his best friend. The crisis that makes things end happily (in that artificial cinematic notion of happiness) is his affair with a damaged 17 year old. She is a seductive student of his. He gets "carried away" with the girl, repents and then teaches his real love to do the same with him.At this level, we have little material on which to build a successful narrative. But it has Dennis Hopper in one of his strong acting periods. I watched this because he recently died, and I miss him.There is one device here that could never be made to work, and it seems to have come from the inept director. Hopper's character is a teacher in a one-room rural school, to be imminently closed. He is an uneducated man himself; but is a teacher because his long-time love is one and he has a bad leg leaving him unfit for farming.But he is a poetry enthusiast, knows the passion of a possible life and tries to pass it on to his students. This is crudely represented by his desire to play on the beach. He has a painting of a beach which the filmmaker uses as a visual representation of poetry and the urges it stirs. Being "carried away" in this sophomoric sense means being taken by passion to the beach, which (no fooling) happens at the end. Midway in the movie, the girl drops and breaks the painting. This never could have worked. It and the immature score work against the thing.But there are some powerful, key scenes. If the filmmaker (or his producers) wasn't working against himself these three scenes by themselves with Hopper could have made this memorable, penetrating. They all are rooted in the barn.We are introduced to Hopper's character as he awakes before dawn, leaves his bed and the house where his mother is dying. He goes to the barn. There he milks the cow, with whom, we discover, he is more emotionally open than to any person. This is the first of the three anchor barn scenes. It sticks because it is so early in the narrative and because Hopper makes it so.Later, the teen girl places her horse in that barn and the rutting begins. He naively believes it will stay in the barn, but of course it "gets out." We have some nudity from this lovely young girl, enough for it to register as a token of her openness. This is linked to the horse, which she rides for sexual pleasure. We see her nude on the horse. It is clumsily done, but we get the message that her sex in his world is her horse in his barn.The next anchor scene makes my heart ache. We have learned that the girl's father is a rough military type, at home killing things. We have seen the two men together, competitively hunting and we have had the pecking order established. We learn as Hopper's character does that the father is coming to get him for screwing his daughter.Now what happens works because of Hopper. He gets the hunting rifle that has been a treasured gift just received from the doctor who cared for the man's just deceased (a few days) mother. It is by way of a bereavement token. He goes to the barn, by now the well established space for his internal being. In the same loft where he lost himself in the girl's body, he takes up a sniper's position, intent on killing the Colonel by surprise. The emotion Hopper conveys is built on an entire life and we get it all.He spies a wolf, already discussed as impossible in that area — a noble animal, free. The man has a clean shot and chooses not to take it. Again, Hopper makes the soul fly. Then the scene is abruptly defused with deliberate, punctuating skill.The final anchor scene... the young girl shows up at the man's house. He has already conquered his passions and gently rejects her advances. She knows this and admits that she has set the barn on fire. Her horse runs from the barn ablaze and dies (thankfully offscreen, but the concept is revolting). The next morning we see Hopper walk out to the now smoldering barn just as his cow comes in from the field to be milked. The two ponder needs, the future and the ruins.Making a powerful narrative is in part an understanding of these key images and when to invest. Hopper did.The filmmaker is not so clean. He works in three other scenes associated with the women. Hopper's mature love (Amy Irving) in a nude coming out, the girl in a scene where she rewins him after a rough car ride and the dying mother coming clean about her desires for her son. Each of these had juice. But none of them really work because they had not had a place built for them in the narrative.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Steve Skafte Yesterday, I heard about the death of Dennis Hopper. I remembered buying a VHS copy of this film quite some time ago, but never watched it. Hearing it was one of his better roles, I thought it would be a suitable tribute to the man."Carried Away" is the sort of film loved above all others by a certain type of audience. There's guilt, tragedy, alienation, and most of all - sex. "Carried Away" is the sort of film that always feels like winter, even if made in the middle of summer. It probably takes place in the 1970s, though that's never specified. This is not normally the sort of film I like. But there's a number reasons why it is so good. Mainly, the actors. Dennis Hopper is every bit as impressive as he's ever been, playing a character of painful reality and depth. Hal Holbrook, Julie Harris, and Gary Busey are all quite welcome as well. Amy Locane is interesting, playing on a complex level of childishness and convincing sexuality.I got a lot of "Carried Away", because it has a lot put into it. The humanity is a basic thing, the details of ordinary actions, the observation of a slow day. In the end, the film is a little too hard and cold for its own good. It wants to make you feel cold in the summer, but that's just an illusion. Like black & white in colour. This could have been a bright, vivid film to even greater effect. But that's just a minor complaint.

Robert J. Maxwell The scattered farm houses and barns look bleak, like something out of Hawthorne. In this rural area of Michigan, Dennis Hopper is a teacher with a limp. Because the school is being incorporated by a town and Hopper has no credentials, he's losing his job, though he's been teaching there for years. He's having a more or less ritualized affair with the widow Amy Irving. They make love in the dark and never do anything new. He yearns to see the ocean. Hopper's mother, Julie Harris, is dying and is tended by the sensitive but unemotional family doctor, Hal Holbrook.Then a new family movies into the area. The father is a retired army major, Gary Busey, and he's a crack shot. His wife is referred to as an alcoholic but his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amy Locane, is a blond Viking knockout. She comes on to the hobbling Hopper in the hayloft. Oh, yummy, he says, leading with Hopper Junior, which is always a big mistake.Well, these farmhouses and auxiliary buildings aren't all THAT widespread and before you know it, Hopper may have enlivened his life with some sexual adventure, but the enterprise becomes common knowledge. Why, even her father, the marksman Busey, finds out about it -- and we know from earlier scenes that he likes to kill coyotes because they're treacherous and will sneak away with one of your chickens if you give them half a chance.So far, so dull, right? How many cheap movies have we seen about an innocent older man being seduced by some silky teen ager? Sometimes the film is called "Lolita," sometimes "Poison Ivy," and sometimes "The Crush." Add a stern father who is fond of guns and we can expect a shoot out at the end, adding formulaic violence to formulaic sex.In this instance, those assumptions are all wrong. It's a decent movie, even a good movie. The characters aren't nearly as stereotyped as one might think. Locane's temptress with her long and lustrous blond hair, always holding her shoulders back to emphasize her modest bosom, isn't a vicious psychotic, just an ordinary, rather empty-headed high school kid who has been sexually active for a while and manages to convince herself that she's going to marry her teacher.Amy Locane, alas, can't really act, but everyone else does a fine job. Julie Harris in particular, as Hopper's Norwegian mother dying of cancer, is superb. She doesn't have that much screen time but she makes the most of it, never whining, and making only one matter-of-fact speech about dying. The pain is "like having a baby every day." Hopper gets to strip naked and he's in good shape for a forty-seven year old, although, to be sure, his figure is nothing compared to Locane's. Amy Irving gets to strip too, and although she's no longer the svelte high-schooler of her earlier movies, she looks just fine.Not to suggest that EVERYBODY gets to strip. Gary Busey doesn't get to strip. His job is to pose the threat that hangs in the air around the guilt-ridden Dennis Hopper. Someone warns Hopper: "The major knows about it. He's coming to see you." The shaky Hopper hides in the barn with a hunting rifle and a pint of booze, waiting for Busey to arrive.Busey does arrive apace, but when Hopper calls to him from the loft and asks if he's armed, Busey's reply is that of a thoroughly civilized human being -- "Now why would I be armed?" And when they talk inside Hopper's house, Busey exhibits a good deal of carefully controlled common sense. I know my daughter, he says, "and I figure it was probably less than half your idea." Not at all what you'd expect in a trashy movie.I won't spell out any more of the plot, but I ought to mention the evocative location shooting by Declan Quinn and the production design by Peter Paul Raubertas. These skills are often overlooked but, when exercised with care, they contribute immeasurably to a movie's success. This was shot in Texas instead of Michigan but it doesn't matter. There are other felicities, some of them symbolic, some establishing continuity, that I'll skip because of considerations of space. (Eg., Hopper trying to play the Hungarian Dances on the piano and, though imperfect, improving a little with each try.) It's a deliberately paced movie about characters and their dreams and the extinction and fulfillment of those dreams. A nice job by all concerned, though I'm not sure everyone could muster the patience required of the viewer.

smatysia It's been interesting to watch Dennis Hopper grow up in films, from the skinny, scared kid in "The Sons of Katie Elder", to his iconic role as Billy in "Easy Rider", to the whacked-out journalist in "Apocalypse Now", to this thoroughly middle-aged character. Here, he is the ultimate grown-up, at least at first, who feels the need to go back to years past in the idea of love/sex with the young student. He nailed his part. Amy Irving nailed hers, too, though it was a bit of a smaller part. Amy Locane provided the eye candy, for us as well as for Joseph Svenden (Hopper). Harder to understand her character's (Catherine) motivations. I can see that the pickings were pretty slim in that time and place, but the 47-year-old semi-crippled more-or-less engaged teacher? This film is worth seeing, if you can take some fairly unsettling images (Hopper naked). Grade: B