![]() ![]() Motivation, Inspiration, Mindfulness, Happiness, Religion, Spirituality, Christian Living, Stress Management Self-Help, Christian Personal Growth, Christian Self Help, Introduction: A guide to finding your focus. Recognizing where you are now will help you move forward. Overthinking things keeps you distracted. You know more about your true path in life than you think you do. You don’t have to chase every bolted horse. Introduction: What’s in it for me? A guide to finding your focus.ĭistraction gets in the way of joyful living. All those sources of distraction get in the way of what really matters – a life filled with joy, love, and intention. Worrying about what your colleagues think and what your neighbors have. By Sidney Lumet is a long day’s journey into the mind and morality of a great director-and a memorable chapter in the history of movies.Undistracted (2022) is a call to arms against one of the greatest forces stopping you from living your best life: distraction. This is what shines through in every frame. Almost every Lumet film from 12 Angry Men to Network is about the importance of fighting authority to preserve your own conscience. If there was one defining theme that united every Lumet film, it was the price paid by the children for the passions of the parents, and the corruption of the American spirit. For Dog Day Afternoon, he even insisted the actors wear their own clothes. Still, it’s a fascinating exploration of how a great mind worked by allowing the quality of his scripts to determine the style of each film-including not only the inner life but the camera, the clothes, the entire visual approach. This film is too long for a documentary, and only a true Sidney Lumet fan is likely to sit through nearly two hours of it undistracted. (He hammered the worst performance of Marlon Brando’s career out of the disastrous The Fugitive Kind, although he guided Paul Newman to greatness in The Verdict.) He was thrown out of the Actors Studio for questioning how the teachings of Lee Strasberg could prepare the members for tackling classics like Restoration comedy or Oscar Wilde, which probably explains why he never directed “Method” geniuses such as Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Montgomery Clift and Julie Harris. Unlike Elia Kazan, he got intimacy out of his actors without harvesting their neuroses. And along the way, he pulled amazing performances out of everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Tab Hunter, who gave his finest screen performance opposite Sophia Loren in That Kind of Woman (1959) under Lumet’s sensitive direction. He gives examples of how he enhanced and embraced every aspect of the city from the sleaze and the slums in The Pawnbroker to the grit of the theater world and the spectacular penthouses of Park Avenue in Stage Struck. He was never comfortable anyplace but New York, which is the reason why he never made a western. You see his early work in live television dramas such as “The Death of Socrates” on You Are There,come to know how the elements in his own deprived childhood informed his work in films and why he was drawn to works by Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.įrom the start, his career was equal parts brilliance and chutzpah, preparedness and luck (he didn’t even have to audition for Henry Fonda to direct his first movie, 12 Angry Men, in 1957 but got the job through his reputation). Yet he learned discipline and lack of self-indulgence by working as a child actor-qualities that became talisman to live by when movies eventually provided him with a bigger canvas to express his values. You get a candid discussion of Jewish poverty during the Depression years, when his father, Baruch Lumet, was an underpaid star in the Yiddish theater who instilled in Sidney a work ethic that never subsided and a sense of pride against overwhelming odds (bathing in the kitchen sink, sleeping in the same bed with his sister until he was 11, scraping together enough pennies to put potatoes on the table). The ensuing guilt that followed infused the morality that runs through his entire career. ![]() He felt a need to right a wrong by reporting the incident but failed through cowardice and fear for his own life. It opens with Lumet’s description of an event he witnessed during his military service, when a group of GIs gang-raped a young girl on a train during World War II. ![]()
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