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The Neon Bible [VHS] [1995]
 
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The Neon Bible [VHS] [1995]

VHS ~ Jacob Tierney
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Actors: Jacob Tierney, Drake Bell, Gena Rowlands, Diana Scarwid, Denis Leary
  • Directors: Terence Davies
  • Writers: Terence Davies, John Kennedy Toole
  • Producers: Elizabeth Karlsen, Mike Lowrie, Nik Powell, Olivia Stewart, Stephen Woolley
  • Format: PAL
  • Language English
  • Classification: 15
  • Studio: Artificial Eye
  • VHS Release Date: 1 April 1996
  • Run Time: 89 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00004CRYK
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 20,659 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Written--or so it's said--when its precocious author was just 16, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible is an obsessive, dreamlike account of a sensitive lad growing up isolated and bemused during World War II in a small isolated township in the Bible Belt of the American South. Terence Davies, who knows all about lonely childhoods, brings his innate sense of time and place to bear on creating this claustrophobic, inwardly-turned community where prejudice keeps beady-eyed watch and the least hint of deviation from the norm arouse fierce hostility. A fine director of children, Davies draws painfully felt performances from the two boys who play his young hero at 10 and 15 years old. As the lost, increasingly deranged mother, Diana Scarwid now and then veers too close to melodrama, but the film's almost stolen by Gena Rowlands as Aunt Mae, a faded but still glamorous night-club singer. And as always with Davies, there are those moments of sheer visual magic, poetic and all-but indefinable, where the camera tracks into a shadowed doorway or a shaft of light, and the evocative music on the soundtrack captures the essence of a fleeting but overwhelming emotion. --Philip Kemp

Synopsis

A drama based on the John Kennedy Toole novel which follows the life of a young boy growing up in the Bible Belt of America's Deep South in the 1940's.

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, 18 Aug 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Neon Bible [DVD] [1995] [US Import] (DVD)
Davies regards 'The Neon Bible' as a failure. It is certainly a transitional work between the previous 'autobiographical' films and the later 'The House of Mirth' but it must be regarded as an outstanding film. What makes 'The Neon Bible' distinctive is not just the usual canon of Davies tricks which carry over from 'Distant Voices, Still Lives', 'The Long Day Closes' (and to a certain extent 'Death and Transfiguration') but the newer ingedients which he adds - the long camera pans and scene disolves are here rendered visually stunning with the use of colours against the more traditional Davies blacks. Rowlands is wonderful, as are all the cast, and Davies knows exactly how to get the best from his actors.

Britain has few great film directors and we are a country who, much like the USA, is mediocre in the cinema. In the late 1980s Godard stated that he thought all British cinema in that decade was rubbish with one exception: 'Distant Voices, Still Lives'. He may have been a bit harsh. But 'The Neon Bible' can stand alongside that masterpiece as a film worthy of the term 'great'.

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful film, 15 Mar 2000
By Ben Elliss (Reading, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
'The Neon Bible' was one of the two novels completed by author John Kennedy Toole before he took his own life (the other is the brilliant and as-yet-unfilmed 'Confederacy of Dunces'). It's been transferred to the cinema very effectively by the English director Terence Davis, and the finished product looks like the sort of film Edward Hopper would have made if he hadn't been a painter. The Bible of the title is a reference to the oppressive force of evangelical religion in the American South. The story follows David (Jacob Tierney), a sensitive young boy in an dysfunctional family with a violent father (Dennis Leary). Choked by religion and cruelty, David's story unfolds as a sad tragedy. The cinematography of this film is beautiful, and it definitely deserves five stars.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Atmospheric film of America's poor south, 3 May 2007
By Sally Wilton "Sally" (Bournemouth UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: The Neon Bible [DVD] [1995] [US Import] (DVD)
I loved this throughout. Beautifully filmed with excellent acting. The unbelievably brilliant child actor in the first part of the film plays his part so movingly it would be hard not to shed a few tears. Bullied by his rather macho father he grows close to his glamorous aunt, a former nightclub singer and becomes aware of his feminine side. The whole film is really a study of close family relationships in a harsh environment touched too by events inlcluding the 2nd world war and mental illness.
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