Second viewing; first viewed on March 3, 1999
English title: Killed the Family and Went to the Movies
Several stories with a common theme of domestic violence. The central story is about two young middle-class women who are alone in a secluded mansion and talk about married life.
I still like the way this film plays with fragmentation and self-reference, and the use of the same actors in different but related roles; also, the use of songs in the soundtrack is daring and effective. I don't know if the film can be interpreted in one single way, but the Power theme seems to pervade all stories, and the underlying assumption seems to be foucauldian: the private sphere is subject to mechanisms of oppression which are analogous to the ones in the public sphere. I don't know why I couldn't relate in the same positive way with other films by this director. Perhaps it is a matter of giving them a second chance.
Rating: 72 (down from 86)
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Babettes gæstebud (1987)
Second viewing; first viewed on June 4, 1989
English title: Babette's Feast
Based on a short story by Karen Dinesen, first published in 1958
Two sisters living in a remote fishing village are discouraged from marrying by their possessive father. In their elder years, they take a French refugee woman as a servant.
On Wikipedia, it says that its diretor changed the setting from that of the story so it would not look too 'touristy'. I find that funny, because this is a film which I appreciated mostly as an aesthetical succession of images. There is hardly any imagination in the mise-en-scène, and the text itself I found somewhat poor, relying as it does on clichés about both Nordic people and French ones. Reportedly, this is Jorge Bergoglio's favorite movie. It figures that the Court Jester of the Catholic Church should choose a Protestant movie as his personal pick. It also makes sense that a film which celebrates the pleasures of the flesh, albeit not the sexual ones, should find resonance in someone who is forced into perpetual celibacy by his own faith. He probably was also moved by the film's refugees-as-vibrancy message. In Brazil, this film was a great success amid the middle class, probably because it is a womanly film.
Rating: 50 (down from 59)
English title: Babette's Feast
Based on a short story by Karen Dinesen, first published in 1958
Two sisters living in a remote fishing village are discouraged from marrying by their possessive father. In their elder years, they take a French refugee woman as a servant.
On Wikipedia, it says that its diretor changed the setting from that of the story so it would not look too 'touristy'. I find that funny, because this is a film which I appreciated mostly as an aesthetical succession of images. There is hardly any imagination in the mise-en-scène, and the text itself I found somewhat poor, relying as it does on clichés about both Nordic people and French ones. Reportedly, this is Jorge Bergoglio's favorite movie. It figures that the Court Jester of the Catholic Church should choose a Protestant movie as his personal pick. It also makes sense that a film which celebrates the pleasures of the flesh, albeit not the sexual ones, should find resonance in someone who is forced into perpetual celibacy by his own faith. He probably was also moved by the film's refugees-as-vibrancy message. In Brazil, this film was a great success amid the middle class, probably because it is a womanly film.
Rating: 50 (down from 59)
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973)
English title: The Legend of Paul and Paula
A working-class girl who has had a disastrous first relationship with a man falls in love with another who is already married, albeit unhappily so. They start seeing each other, but, despite their mutual affection, his lack of commitment poses problems.
Boring love story, allegedly Angela Kazmierczak's favorite movie. Some online reviews would have you think it is a very subversive film, but that is very far from being the truth; its characters, overall mood, and the reception it had bring to mind those verses from a Talking Heads song: "We don't want freedom. We don't want justice. We just want someone to love." It is my impression that, even for its time and place, the film's discourse is far from contestatory. For our time and place, it just reinforces the very conformist discourse of individualism which has been prevalent in our liberal society all through the duration of the closed regimes of Eastern Europe. The fact of the matter is that there really wasn't much of a difference between the two sides of the Cold War. The side that lost was seduced by images of a Paradise which was really a Hell which they are now experiencing, some of them under the fabulous leader mentioned in the beginning of this review.
Rating: 20
A working-class girl who has had a disastrous first relationship with a man falls in love with another who is already married, albeit unhappily so. They start seeing each other, but, despite their mutual affection, his lack of commitment poses problems.
Boring love story, allegedly Angela Kazmierczak's favorite movie. Some online reviews would have you think it is a very subversive film, but that is very far from being the truth; its characters, overall mood, and the reception it had bring to mind those verses from a Talking Heads song: "We don't want freedom. We don't want justice. We just want someone to love." It is my impression that, even for its time and place, the film's discourse is far from contestatory. For our time and place, it just reinforces the very conformist discourse of individualism which has been prevalent in our liberal society all through the duration of the closed regimes of Eastern Europe. The fact of the matter is that there really wasn't much of a difference between the two sides of the Cold War. The side that lost was seduced by images of a Paradise which was really a Hell which they are now experiencing, some of them under the fabulous leader mentioned in the beginning of this review.
Rating: 20
Memórias de um Gigolô (1970)
English title: Memoirs of a Gigolo
Adventures of a man who spends his adolescence in a whorehouse, and falls in love with one of the girls, who has a relationship with a pimp.
Picaresque comedy with a very childish script. The author is of Italian stock, and I think it shows in the film's style, to which the diretor, born in that jolly peninsula, may have contributed. It is not badly filmed. The actors suit their respective roles fine, and perform professionally. The cinematography has nice colors and some of the locations are really photogenic. This is the kind of stuff that pleased audiences in the seventies in Brazil. They are probably just as undemanding today, but the films themselves have become quite unbearable, unlike this one, which has the bare minimum of goods to keep one from walking away.
Rating: 31
Adventures of a man who spends his adolescence in a whorehouse, and falls in love with one of the girls, who has a relationship with a pimp.
Picaresque comedy with a very childish script. The author is of Italian stock, and I think it shows in the film's style, to which the diretor, born in that jolly peninsula, may have contributed. It is not badly filmed. The actors suit their respective roles fine, and perform professionally. The cinematography has nice colors and some of the locations are really photogenic. This is the kind of stuff that pleased audiences in the seventies in Brazil. They are probably just as undemanding today, but the films themselves have become quite unbearable, unlike this one, which has the bare minimum of goods to keep one from walking away.
Rating: 31
Monday, February 15, 2016
O Ibraim do Subúrbio (1976)
Film in two segments: "Roy, o Gargalhador Profissional", about a professional cackler, and "O Ibraim do Subúrbio", about a poor tailor who lives in a fantasy world of wealth and social celebrity.
I wouldn't recommend this film, because the scripts of both segments leave a lot to be desired. But for gleaners like me, there may be some value in its commentary about the plight of the poor folks who work hard and at times don't even have a place to work. The phenomenon which Marx named 'false consciousness' is explored on the second segment. The first one, which shows a grimmer reality of struggle and borderline despair, is seasoned with cruel irony. One doesn't see much of this mood in films made in Europe or the U.S., probably because the people there do not experience this neglect by the powers that be. Even in Brazil, there are few filmmakers today who are into exposing social wounds. But the wounds are still there.
Rating: 31
I wouldn't recommend this film, because the scripts of both segments leave a lot to be desired. But for gleaners like me, there may be some value in its commentary about the plight of the poor folks who work hard and at times don't even have a place to work. The phenomenon which Marx named 'false consciousness' is explored on the second segment. The first one, which shows a grimmer reality of struggle and borderline despair, is seasoned with cruel irony. One doesn't see much of this mood in films made in Europe or the U.S., probably because the people there do not experience this neglect by the powers that be. Even in Brazil, there are few filmmakers today who are into exposing social wounds. But the wounds are still there.
Rating: 31
Monday, February 08, 2016
A Compadecida (1969)
English title: Our Lady of Compassion.
Based on the play O Auto da Compadecida, by Ariano Suassuna, written in 1955 and first staged in 1956.
Two small-town bakery employees, one a trickster and the other his simple-minded sidekick, go through several incidents as a gang of bandits raid the town in a murdering frenzy.
Botched theatrical adaptation, with no sense of narrative and poorly designed cinematic sequences. It has a lot of competent artists working in it, as cenographer, cinematographer, etc., and that shows, but a good crew a good film does not make; it takes a good screenplay and a competent diretor, both of which seem to be missing here. The storyline could be divided into two sections, the first of which is a picaresque sequence of events, and the second of which invokes the supernatural to convey a socially-updated re-reading of Christianity, with a preachy undertone to it. The Internet Movie Database hilariously merges two people into a single entity under the name George Jonas. One is this film's diretor, who was a Hungarian-born man established in Brazil in the celluloid processing business and later as a producer of TV advertising. The other is his much more famous namesake, who was also Hungarian-born but established himself in Canada as a journalist.
Some internet links about the Brazilian guy: on his book of memoirs and on his death.
Rating: 32
Based on the play O Auto da Compadecida, by Ariano Suassuna, written in 1955 and first staged in 1956.
Two small-town bakery employees, one a trickster and the other his simple-minded sidekick, go through several incidents as a gang of bandits raid the town in a murdering frenzy.
Botched theatrical adaptation, with no sense of narrative and poorly designed cinematic sequences. It has a lot of competent artists working in it, as cenographer, cinematographer, etc., and that shows, but a good crew a good film does not make; it takes a good screenplay and a competent diretor, both of which seem to be missing here. The storyline could be divided into two sections, the first of which is a picaresque sequence of events, and the second of which invokes the supernatural to convey a socially-updated re-reading of Christianity, with a preachy undertone to it. The Internet Movie Database hilariously merges two people into a single entity under the name George Jonas. One is this film's diretor, who was a Hungarian-born man established in Brazil in the celluloid processing business and later as a producer of TV advertising. The other is his much more famous namesake, who was also Hungarian-born but established himself in Canada as a journalist.
Some internet links about the Brazilian guy: on his book of memoirs and on his death.
Rating: 32
Monday, February 01, 2016
White Dog (1982)
Second viewing; first viewed on October 31, 1997.
Based on the story (or, according to some sources, on the novel) by Romain Gary, first published in 1970.
A young actress finds a stray dog and adopts it. After some time, she finds out it has been trained to attack blacks.
As I watched this, it increasingly puzzled me that I was so overwhelmed by it on my first viewing. Unfortunately, I have no way of getting back for a few instants to my previous self so I can understand what it was that blew me away then. I can more or less hypothesize that it had to do with the careful building up of suspense and atmosphere, attributes which so many critics have pointed out, and I still now acknowledge. Sadly, I suspect it also had to do with allegorical interpretations which critics also came up with, and to which I no longer subscribe. Although the storyline has the potential elements for that, they are too vaguely sketched (e.g., one cannot really know why the dog behaves in the specific way it does in the end, or what this could mean allegorically). But this is not why I cooled down about it; the fact is, this is only a slightly above average suspenser, with some dullness in the midsection, and a problematic plot weakness relating to the dog trainer's poorly explained motivation to persist in his course of action. However, if you are dead set on making this into a parable of sorts, I think you may view it as a moral tale about the dangers of doggedness.
Rating: 66 (down from 84)
Based on the story (or, according to some sources, on the novel) by Romain Gary, first published in 1970.
A young actress finds a stray dog and adopts it. After some time, she finds out it has been trained to attack blacks.
As I watched this, it increasingly puzzled me that I was so overwhelmed by it on my first viewing. Unfortunately, I have no way of getting back for a few instants to my previous self so I can understand what it was that blew me away then. I can more or less hypothesize that it had to do with the careful building up of suspense and atmosphere, attributes which so many critics have pointed out, and I still now acknowledge. Sadly, I suspect it also had to do with allegorical interpretations which critics also came up with, and to which I no longer subscribe. Although the storyline has the potential elements for that, they are too vaguely sketched (e.g., one cannot really know why the dog behaves in the specific way it does in the end, or what this could mean allegorically). But this is not why I cooled down about it; the fact is, this is only a slightly above average suspenser, with some dullness in the midsection, and a problematic plot weakness relating to the dog trainer's poorly explained motivation to persist in his course of action. However, if you are dead set on making this into a parable of sorts, I think you may view it as a moral tale about the dangers of doggedness.
Rating: 66 (down from 84)
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