11 minut (2015)

English title: 11 Minutes

Several characters' lives are depicted during the same 11-second period. The longest-lasting plotline is that of an actress who goes to an audition with a director, and his jealous husband who follows her. Others include a hot dog vendor, a couple in a hotel room, a thief, a sketch artist, a motorcycle courier, a young woman with a dog, some nuns, a woman in labor, a team of paramedics, and maybe others I forget.

It has a type of film structure which was somewhat in fashion in the nineties and early aughts, that of multiples plots which intersect. Critics correctly pointed out the structural similarity with a related genre, that of the fatal synchronicity -- of the Fatal Destination franchise. Here, however, it's not done in a thriller style. There is no steadily mounting tension; instead, there is an ominous feel which derives from the stories themselves and is accentuated by a celestial phenomenon which goes unexplained. It is not a particularly remarkable movie, but I found the situations and dialogue mildly interesting. I still do not fathom why a character who is described by reviewers as a window cleaner uses a blowtorch to perform his job.

Rating: 50

Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964)

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a former Confederate soldier returns to his hometown to find that his property has been confiscated and his former girlfriend is now married to another man who fought for the North. He accidentally kills the new owner of his former house. The townspeople agree to send for a gunfighter to kill him.

It seems that this film eschews realism in a deliberate way for characters and situations which put in evidence some historical themes which in turn have lingering social repercussions in America to the days in which the film was released. The result is not especially insightful or entertaining, but has some degree of dramatic density which makes it watchable.

Rating: 40

Antoine et Colette (1962)

English title: Antoine and Colette (originally a segment of Love at Twenty)

Young man is lovestruck by a young woman he spots at a concert. He moves across the street from her to be nearer her.

Fairly good short, which was shown on the cable channel I subscribe to without the remaining segments which comprise L'amour à vingt ans. The author remarked on an interview that its moral lesson is that wanting too much may cause one to lose even the little one has, but viewers are free to think differently about life, and still enjoy the movie.

I could not decide to rate this movie, because of its short length, and also because it was originally part of a multi-segment movie.

In Harm's Way (1965)

The film follows the military developments in the Pacific during and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The central character is a ship captain who, after a suspension, is reinstated and leads an operation to take back some islands who were controlled by the Japanese. Concurrently with the military action, we follow the private lives of some of the characters. The protagonist gets involved with a nurse, and meets his son, from whom he had been estranged. There is also the ship's executive officer, who has problems with alcohol, and an unfaithful wife. He later gets involved with a younger woman.

Entertaining war drama, which manages a nice balance between military action and personal drama. It is interesting also that the operations are all fictitious, but reportedly give a good idea of what the Pacific war was like in that period and region. While not a groundbreaking or impacting work, it is not as bad as some reviewers have said it is. One of the critics of the time put it in her worst-of-year list, ranked second.

Rating: 57

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

In a small town, a woman whose daughter was raped and murdered puts billboards on the roadside near the town, questioning the police chief about the unsolved crime.

Drama with touches of humor. The dialogue at times lacks a more serious consideration of psychology or social context. There is a distinctly sophomoric quality to the script in general. The low point is possibly when a character's letter teaches an ex-policeman to cast aside hate, and embrace love instead. High philosophy indeed. The plot does not seem to be interested in exciting developments or surprises, and the film is poor also as a mere social chronicle.

Rating: 33

Sayonara (1957)

A U.S. Air Force pilot who is fighting in the Korean war gets assigned to a desk job in Japan, where his girlfriend is living with her parents. He takes another sentimental turn, however, courting, and then having a relationship with a Japanese theatrical performer.

It is difficult for me to decide what was more aggravating: this film or the recent reception it got. As a matter of fact, whenever I read the word 'racism' I know I am in for some serious stomach discomfort. We are definitely living in the planet of the Parrobots -- a word of my own coinage that designates a blend of a parrot and a robot. I honestly do not think there is any racism in the historical events which provide the context of this film's plot. But, of course, racism is a word that is used more and more loosely with each passing day. And, I am forced to say, that trend began around the time this film was made. Another interesting aspect is how 'love' is such a useful concept when people want to tell lies, and how those same people tear that concept apart when they want to tell a different sort of lies. Getting back to the film, part of it is a legitimate dramatization of the real problem of loneliness that afflicted many soldiers. and how some post-war regulations put some of them in a rather sad situation. Unfortunately, this is merely an instrument to highlight the drama of a war hero who has a beautiful American girlfriend and, implausibly enough, ditches her for a Japanese woman. To compound the implausibility, this prompts the American girlfriend to befriend a Japanese male performer and delve into Japanese culture. In short, it is a feast of international exchange, with a tragedy thrown in for good measure. Anyway, movies are prisoners of history, albeit in dissimulated ways, and it is never too much to remind one that the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam in 1957 and there was the Voting Act that same year. People like to be preached at, as long they are entertained in the process. And if you still think the main character is incomprehensible, there is always Poe's The Imp of the Perverse to provide some clarification.

Rating: 38

Westward Ho the Wagons! (1956)

In 19th-century America, a group of settlers crosses Indian territory bound for Oregon. They first meet the fierce Pawnee, who attack them; after fleeing them, they encounter the somewhat friendlier Sioux. The main character is a self-taught physician who saves the day when the Sioux chief's son falls ill.

Western intended for family audiences. A few songs are thrown in, for good measure, or bad, depending on one's taste. It is nothing to write home about, but I found it both credible and exciting, to a moderate degree. Anyway, it is good to still have the opportunity to watch a movie which is not ashamed to depict whites as smart and proficient (though not all of them). It was also amusing to learn that the actor who played the Sioux medicine man was actually of Southern Italian ethnicity. The film was shot in 2.35 CinemaScope, but I watched a 1.33 version. To be frank, the frame did not look crammed or incomplete in the least. Maybe the shots were conceived having the Disneyland version which would air a few years later in mind.

Rating: 51

The Robe (1953)

A Roman tribune is assigned to Palestine, where he is put in charge of the crucifixion of Jesus. The contact with Jesus' robe has some debilitating effects on the tribune.

This is a very ridiculous film, with some interesting location work (in Spain, apparently, among other places in the U.S.). It, and of course its source novel before it, seems to be a variation on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and also on The Cloak, a short story by Robert Bloch about a man who unwittingly buys Count Dracula's cloak. Conrad's novel is about colonialism and madness, and The Robe is what a humorous version of that story would be, if there was any voluntary humor in it. As it turns out, this is a work of involuntary comicity, not without some residual entertainment value. According to the Internet Movie Database, two versions were made, with aspect ratios 1.33 and 2.55, respectively, but the version I saw fitted exactly a 1.78 aspect ratio television set.

Rating: 33

White Christmas (1954)

Two ex-comrades-in-arms team up as a song and dance duo. They meet two sisters who are also performers and become romantically entangled with them. The sisters have an assignment at a hotel, and are followed by the guys, who find out the hotel owner happens to be their former commanding general.

The script is absolutely dreadful. We are supposed to believe retired generals have a harder time than the discharged rank and file. As for the central romantic misunderstanding, it is very contrived and implausible, and the male protagonist never even gets to know what happened, and doesn't seem to care either. The film looks gorgeous in every aspect -- cinematography, costumes, dances, you name it. If you think you can focus on its aesthetics and not care too much about what is going on with the characters, you may enjoy this film quite a bit. I found I could not.

Rating: 34

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Second viewing; first viewed between 1983 and 1986.

Couple with children moves to a house where a man killed his family. Strange occurrences inside the house disturb the newly moved family.

I decided to revisit this film because I had given it such a low rating and afterwards saw some favorable comments about it. Indeed, it is not as bad as I had considered it to be. But it is not much better, either. It displays enough technical proficiency as to be watchable, I have to give it that. But somehow I did not get overly excited by its tricks. I was, on the other hand, intrigued by its reception. Some people have converged, according to Wikipedia, on an interpretation of the troubles of the protagonist as being of a financial kind. Well, that is funny, because one could point one's hermeneutical compass on several different directions other than this. The fact is that the film has no concern over consistency or even logic, and ends up being a cinematical Rorschach test. It is better enjoyed as a merely mechanical device for atmosphere and shocks, and the characters' predicaments turn out to be more annoying than frightening from a viewer's perspective. Brolin's performance stands out among the fine cast.

Rating: 32 (up from 15)

Lifeboat (1944)

During World War II, several British and American passengers of a ship get stranded on a lifeboat in the ocean after their ship is torpedoed by a German submarine, which was also destroyed in the process. One of the survivors of the U-Boat is rescued by them.

 You can read the story of this film's reception on Wikipedia (here's the link). In short, critics Bosley Crowther and Dorothy Thompson, and others who go unnamed, pointed out that the film was actually pro-Nazi propaganda. The film's director gave a half-assed defense statement, which was followed by a moronic one by his lead actress. In the context of the plot, the German character is the one with a solid reasoning, and without him the allies would all perish were it not for a deus ex machina event. The argument saying that this is supposed to awaken the allies to their disunion is ridiculous. How is that cohesion to be achieved? The film does not say. The point that one should not trust a Nazi is such a trivial one -- considering you are a war enemy of the Nazis -- that it is hard to believe they would make a movie to demonstrate that. The film has an ambiguous take on democracy: the Nazis were bad because they were not democratic (never mind the fact that Hitler came to power by popular vote), but this is also depicted as a strength. From a factual perspective this is even more problematic, since England and America did not win the war by themselves. There was a hugely significant contribution by the USSR, which was never democratic in the commonly accepted sense of the word (and, in my opinion, in any sense one could imagine). Anyway, in the scope of the film's allegory, there is no room for discussing the spaces and subspaces of democracy. A military environment is not supposed to be democratic; any person of minimal intelligence should know that. It is the military organization as a whole who is or is not subordinated to a democratic power. But the major point perhaps is that the proposed allegory is a problematic one to begin with. People in general are not confined with their enemies in a restricted location in a real war.

Rating: 38

Le souffle au coeur (1971)

Second viewing; first viewed, with cuts, on November 12, 1989.

English title: Murmur of the Heart

A few days (or is it months?) in the life of a 14-year-old boy. His somewhat brutish older brothers, his somewhat distant, unloving, father, his warm, but somewhat irresponsible mother, a health problem, books, a younger boy who seems to be a kindred spirit, a visit to the brothel, some days at a camp, some days at a hotel convalescing. His parents have steady lovers. Sex with his mother.

I had to watch this because I was curious about what I had missed on my first viewing -- it had cuts imposed by the Brazilian governmental censorship (censorship was no longer active in 1989, but the copy was from that earlier period). As it turns out, I don't quite remember what the cuts were, and in fact very little of the film as a whole stuck on my memory. But I remember having liked it more upon my previous viewing than I liked it now. It's a succession of quite banal events, wrapped up by a shocking last section. It is all played up in a light tone, however, and I guess that makes it a comedy of sorts. It is an odd combination of true-to-life chronicle and more, say, imaginative, elements. Perhaps it says more about 1971, the year in which  it was released, than about 1954, the year in which it is set.

Rating: 52 (down from 65)

A New Kind of Love (1963)

A newspaper columnist meets a fashion designer in a plane to Paris. In that city, he mistakes her for a prostitute.

The two main characters are a man who devotes too much time to women, and a woman who devotes too little time to men. It's sort of a romantic comedy, but with the mellowness which is usual in this genre being replaced by comicity. Perhaps I should write that as 'attempted comicity', as it is not sure to make one laugh. It is not a very likeable movie, because the screenplay poses problems to itself which are not easy to solve in an elegant manner, but at the very least it sustains a coherent line of analysis of two types of characters: the womanizer and the masculine woman. In real life, these types tend to go on being like that all their lives and usually find, each of them, a niche of their own. In the movie, however, they fall in love with each other and reform their characters. It is a new kind of moralism.

Rating: 42

Morituri (1965)

World War II, 1942. A German engineer living in India is blackmailed into assuming the identity of an SS officer and embarking on a German ship which is transporting rubber from Japan to France. The allies plan to intercept that ship and the engineer's mission is to prevent it from being scuttled by the ship's captain when that interception occurs.

This is a very tense film which adopts the point of view of an impostor. His efforts at not being unmasked and simultaneously accomplishing a difficult task are at the center of the movie. The situation in the ship is unstable even without his presence, and he must use that instability in his favor. There is a fascinating power play amongst the various persons in the ship that makes it a metonimic model of a larger community -- say, a nation. The film puts in evidence how a foreign entity -- in this case, the protagonist -- with a blending capability and a survival agenda may be dangerous to the existence and goals of a community. The author or authors seem to have taken into their hands a mission that is, in itself, just as challenging as that of the protagonist: to rebuke Adolf Hitler's considerations on the question "Is this a German?". They even have added a Jewish woman into the narrative, perhaps for illustrative purposes. The initial dialogue held in an Indian house is essential for the full understanding of the film: the protagonist has evaded war, loves "art" and considers himself a pacifist. As it turns out, he becomes an example of the famous saying by Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Of course, a fictional narrative is necessarily a partial view of any problem, but the effort is commendable anyway.

Rating: 60