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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Love at Large by Elizabeth Angus Love at Large by Elizabeth Angus. Specs: 6-10’ tall x 4-6’ wide. Can be pruned to stay smaller. Performs best in zones 9-11, but can be used as annual color in colder climates. Full, direct sun. Minimum 5 hours a day. The vibrant pink Elizabeth Angus does well in all applications as responds well to pruning on trellis or as patio tree. However, this plant does equally as well when aggressively pruned bush or hanging basket as tends to trail its runners more readily than other varieties. If this variety is left to grow will reach 6-10 feet high and 4-6 feet wide with dense foliage and thorns that are not particularly large relative to other varieties. MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Love at Large’: Romantic, Woozy <i> Film Noir </i> from Rudolph. The writer-director Alan Rudolph is capable of creating self-enclosed universes that clock to the metronome of his own private dream-time. He has such an intuitive grasp of the more ethereal reaches of the film medium that his movies--at least his “personal” ones, like “Choose Me” and “Trouble in Mind” and “The Moderns"--appear to be unmediated registrations of his muse. For better and for worse, these movies are unmistakably his . Rudolph’s new film “Love at Large” (throughout San Diego County) exhibits many of his trademark virtues and faults. It has a wonderful premise but little “follow through.” The performers are fascinatingly cracked but, finally, wispy. The atmosphere, full of existential wheeziness and film noir shadowing, is overpoweringly inauthentic. “Love at Large” is, of course, authentic to Rudolph’s own vision, but it’s not a vision I particularly care for--or have been made to care for. There’s a self-indulgent languorousness to the worst of Rudolph that’s so woozy and chichi that it’s practically an affront. Still, you can’t dismiss Rudolph at his best, and about half of “Love at Large” is effective in ways that perhaps only he could have brought off. Harry Dobbs (Tom Berenger) is a scruffy, mediocre private detective hired by a sultry shady lady (Anne Archer) to tail her lover. He ends up mistakenly tailing another man (Ted Levine) who perfectly matches the lover’s ID and, in the process, discovers he’s being followed by another private eye, the equally inept Stella Wynkowski (Elizabeth Perkins), whom Harry’s volatile girlfriend (Ann Magnuson) has set upon him. The fascination of this premise is that the man Harry is following turns out to have a secret life. It’s as if Rudolph was saying that, chosen at random, anybody’s life is ultimately a mystery--a story. It’s a thematic variation on the famous opening shot in “Psycho,” with the camera randomly picking out a window in an apartment building, as if the lives of any of the apartment’s other inhabitants could yield up an equally curdling tale. The Chinese-box spy-within-spy scenario reinforces the movie’s free-floating ambiguousness. The world of “Love at Large,” a vaguely Pacific Northwest-like never-never land, is one in which you never know if you are the spy or the one being spied upon, or both. Rudolph chooses not to employ this plot for its melodramatic-existential charge. Its pulp possibilities are jettisoned in favor of something more vague and more weird, and more sentimental too. The movie turns into a fantasia on themes from film noir classics, and Rudolph applies to these themes his familiar high-art varnish. He locates the soft romantic heart in pulp crime fiction. Harry Dobbs--is his name a nod to Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs?--recognizes in Stella a soul mate. It’s not just that both spies are incompetent. On some wispy, preconscious level, they both understand the joke of their existence. They are detectives, hired to root out other people’s mysteries, who can’t divine the mysteries of their own lives. Rudolph is unusual among directors of such rarefied sensibility in that he has a genuine love of actors. Berenger is marvelously hangdog here, like a dreamier version of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.” Perkins has the ability to seem wised-up and dazed in the same moment, a requisite Rudolph combo. She’s charming. In cameos, Annette O’Toole and Kate Capshaw, as the mystery man’s women, are intense and striking, as if, at any moment, the film could run with their lives and we’d stay enthralled. By making explicit the romanticism in film noir , Rudolph, I think, devalues it. The ardor of the genre was always in the stylistics, the mood, much more than in the ostensible scenarios. The most romantic films noir often featured no love stories at all. The lovelorn confab between Harry and Stella seems facetious, particularly since it’s tricked up with inexplicably wacky touches: Harry speaks in a comically gruff voice, like a Sunday-morning TV cartoon character; Stella is given to reading, on the sly, trashy how-to love manuals. It’s cornball mysticism, and ultimately at the service of an ah-sweet-mystery-of-love message. When Anne Archer’s character belts out a bluesy version of “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” the luscious camera moves are at the service of a mock-satiric conception. We’re cued to respond to the passion, the “truth,” of her words even as we’re meant to laugh. Is there any other film maker who can combine in such hefty quantity stylistic sophistication and adolescent mooniness? An Orion Pictures Corp. release. Producer David Blocker. Director/screenplay Alan Rudolph. Cinematography Elliot Davis. Music Mark Isham. Production design Steven Legler. Costumes Ingrid Ferrin. With Tom Berenger, Anne Archer, Elizabeth Perkins, Kate Capshaw, Annette O’Toole, Ted Levine, Ann Magnuson. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes. MPAA-rated: R (under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian.) A Case for Elizabeth Perkins : Film: The actress tackles the role of a detective searching for romance in ‘Love at Large.’ Even now, four years after her film debut as Demi Moore’s caustic, unstylish friend in “About Last Night . ,” Elizabeth Perkins can walk into producers’ offices and still notice looks of surprise. “You can tell they’re thinking, ‘She’s much more, uh, attractive than we thought she was going to be.’ ” Perkins smiles mischievously. “There’s this little side of me that wants to say, ‘It’s called acting. It’s what I do for a living.’ ” In “Love at Large,” Perkins is acting the part of a woman shielding her insecurities behind the tough-guy facade of a detective. On her first job, she is shadowing a man (Tom Berenger) who happens to be another detective shadowing someone else. Alan Rudolph, the writer-director of “Love at Large,” said he found in Perkins an actress for all ages. “Elizabeth could have been a movie star in the ‘40s,” Rudolph said. “They had faces then. So does Elizabeth. She brings a sexy, quirky vulnerability to the screen.” Speaking animatedly during an interview in her publicist’s office, the chain-smoking, 29-year-old actress--Tom Hanks’ co-star in “Big"--displays yet another Elizabeth Perkins. This one is chatty, bemused, extremely articulate in discussing both her films and her career. Except for the occasional pause to light a cigarette, the words come in a steady wave. When she first read Rudolph’s script, she felt, “My God, this guy knows me.” As it happens, he did; Rudolph and Perkins are old friends. But after a couple of days of shooting in Portland, Ore., she said Rudolph stopped a scene and told her, “Elizabeth, I’m just looking for you.” “He really demanded that I use most of my personal experiences and personality. That’s a very uncomfortable thing for an actor to do. Like going on ‘The Today Show,’ you’re completely exposed without the protection of a character to hide behind.” Like Rudolph’s “Choose Me” and “Trouble in Mind,” “Love at Large” is a stylized meditation on romance set in a mythic urban landscape. Everyone, in a sense, is a detective; everyone is trying to track down true love. “Stella is a searcher, somebody who is continually looking for that light at the end of the tunnel or that person who’s going to be the consummation of love in her life,” Perkins said. “I think that’s why Alan chose for his two leads to be detectives. Both are looking for something they’re lacking in their lives. I think I can relate to that . I’m constantly looking for explanations or some other meaning to life. Or at least something new.” That search began in the perfect atmosphere. She grew up in an isolated environment on a 600-acre farm in southern Vermont. “That played an enormous part in my becoming an actress. Any child that isolated will develop an overactive imagination. I used to be absolutely fascinated when I was around people.” After high school, Perkins moved to Chicago and was there during that city’s theatrical explosion of the late ‘70s. She attended the Goodman Theater School and performed locally. Then one day she impulsively moved to New York. Within two weeks she landed a part in the touring company of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and later played the role on Broadway. Then came “About Last Night . " the movie adaptation of David Mamet’s 1972 play about the Chicago singles scene, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.” Her character, Joan Gunther, was a plain, tasteless woman embittered by male exploitation and rejection.