An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Second viewing; first viewed between January, 1983 and December, 1986.

Two American guys are touring the English countryside when they are attacked by a werewolf. Their fates are different but equally ghastly.

I don't much see what the fuss is all about when it comes to this movie. It's moderately enjoyable but that's about all. If I can indulge in a bit of analysis, I would say that what strikes me as singular about it is that this is one of the forerunners of a new trend in what I would call evilless horror. Werewolf movies are ideally cut out for this kind of take because ever since the 40s they are somewhat unlike most horror movies in that the monster is also a victim. But this films takes it one step further by erasing all references to absolute evil as a source of the events; things just happen, and then it is an ethical problem of sorts for the afflicted protagonist. Vampires, on the other hand, were traditionally distinct from werewolves in that they were just pure evil, unworthy of sympathy -- well, until one day of course they were not.

Rating: 50 (down from 60)

Alexis Zorbas (1964)

Second viewing; first viewed on February 25, 1997.

English title: Zorba the Greek

An Englishman is traveling to Crete to take over a mine he has inherited. In the ship he meets a Greek old man who offers him his services.

Lately I don't know how to explain my feelings towards movies. It is certain that I deeply dislike most of them, and yet I enjoy them in a cynical, detached way. This is exactly what happened with this film. I basically despise anything that tells me to "enjoy life to the utmost" or that sort of thing. My response to that is: will I regret it if I don't? When?

Rating: 56 (down from 57)

My Man Godfrey (1936)

A rich young woman brings a homeless man to live with her family and persuades them to employ him as a butler.

The satire of rich people is purportedly the more serious aim of the film. The actual development of the plot has more silliness than seriousness, though. Neither the really serious bits nor the silly ones are devoid of amusement value, in my view. I think the crucial factor that makes the film work is its felicitous casting. The nice TV Guide review may be read here.

Rating: 55

Hombre (1967)

Third viewing; previously viewed on August 16, 2002, and, before that, between January 1983 and December 1986.

Based on a novel which is itself a reworking of Stagecoach, also a novel adaptation, which in turn was a reworking of the short story Boule de suif, by Guy de Maupassant, first published in 1880.

A stagecoach with a motley assembly of passengers is held up. One of the passengers, a half-breed, saves the day.

Not as remarkable as I thought previously, but still an engaging, well-made Western, albeit with an unmistakeable undercurrent of white guilt-tripping. One of its themes, perhaps the main one, is how social prejudices crumble under situations of distress in which the social outcast's skills become an essential tool of survival for a group of people. The problem is that the situation here feels a little more contrived than the previous avatars of 1939 and 1880, and the main character is obviously only a conceptual entity devoid of psychological verisimilitude.

Rating: 64 (down from 82)

Mary Poppins (1964)

Based on the novels Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back, by P.L. Travers, first published in 1934 and 1935, respectively.

The Banks family's last nanny quit and they're looking for a new one to take care of their two kids. Mary Poppins applies. She has eccentric methods and habits, such as flying.

Agreeable musical fantasy. The mood is light, the songs are nice, the choreography is interesting. The plot and characters include airhead suffragettes and cold capitalism, but the problems they cause are eventually solved by sheer goodwill.

Rating: 64

Rooster Cogburn (1975)

Marshal Cogburn from True Grit is reinstated and assigned the task of capturing a gang who stole nitroglycerin. A middle-aged woman whose husband was killed by that gang joins him, along with a young Native American.

Not a disagreeable watch, but hardly a memorable one. There are some well-filmed action sequences, but the dialog's triteness may get cringeworthy at times. There may be even a subjective discomfort for viewers who liked the first movie a lot as I did, a feel of desecration or something of the sort.

Watched it in pan-and-scan.

Rating: 37

Midnight Run (1988)

Second viewing; first viewed on October 27, 1991

A bounty hunter is hired by a bail bonds company to find a man and bring him to Los Angeles to serve time. The bail jumper is an accountant who stole money from his mafioso employer and gave it to charity.

Consistently entertaining comedy, whose limitations nevertheless became more apparent on this second viewing. The interesting thing about it is how it performs a balancing act between multiple -- and at times colliding -- ethics: of resourcefulness, of integrity, of flexibility. This is not always convincingly resolved.

Rating: 69 (down from 86)

Swamp Water (1941)

Drama concerning a community in Georgia, near a swamp. A man encounters a fugitive hiding in the swamp area and establishes a business partnership with him.

This is one of those movies of which it is customary to say that Geography is the main character. Location shooting is the film's main asset. It tells a very melodramatic yet sufficiently entertaining story. The theme of miscarriage of justice is handled fairly; the death penalty is correctly seen as hazardous yet still profitable. Its risk of sacrificing good people is worth taking, since without it those people would still be harmed by bad people, and with it there is a good chance of getting rid of most of those bad people.

Rating: 54

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Second viewing; first viewed on August 22, 1992

In a small Central European country several English people are at an inn waiting for the train which will take them back home. An elderly lady befriends a young woman and they sit together on the train. After a while the old lady disappears and all except the young woman claim to have no recollection of ever having seen her.

Intelligent mystery story with plenty of humor and a bit of suspense in the final section.

Rating: 73 (up from 50)

A grande cidade (1966)

Second viewing; first viewed on February 21, 1988

English title: The Big City

A young woman from poor Northeastern Brazil arrives in Rio de Janeiro in search of her fiancé who had left earlier and had promised to send for her but never did. In the big city she is befriended by a man who makes a living out of petty thefts and odd jobs. He finds her a place to live with a construction worker who is also a migrant from the Northeast. She learns that her fiancé is now a big criminal wanted by the police.

An examination of the plight of the migrant. Both imagery and dialog are strongly stylized away from realism, with moderately interesting results. A similarity in style with Italian Westerns is detectable in the form. The good camerawork and overall command of the technique is impressive for a Brazilian movie, but the script leaves something to be desired.

Rating: 51 (down from 60)

Mitt liv som hund (1985)

Second viewing; first viewed on February 18, 1989.

English title: My Life as a Dog

Ingemar is a Swedish boy whose father is allegedly away on business somewhere in South America. He has a brother with whom he is always fighting, and a mother who is a bookworm and has a serious debilitating illness. When the burden of raising two kids on her own becomes too much for her, the boys are sent each to a different relative. Ingemar gets to live with a very nice uncle and his wife, along with a couple of elders (the uncle's parents, perhaps). On his new hometown, he makes many new acquaintances, most notable among whom a tomboy who likes him and is good at soccer and boxing.

While I may have been too severe with this film on my first viewing, I still do not get exactly what is so special about it. The situations and characters are obviously conventional, even in their occasional attempted unconventionality. I had a less excrutiating time on this second viewing, and acknowledge that the film, within its limits, is well-made and well-acted. For those interested, it offers a glimpse at Nordic people's sense of humor and sense of pathos, or what they were like in the early 1980s anyway. Given that most of the Western world liked the film, one may conclude that there is a vast receptivity for this kind of humor and pathos outside its country of origin. As a final note, I was curious about the historical circumstances, if any, which the presence of a Greek family in a Swedish house was supposed to mirror.

Rating: 41 (up from 28)

O canto da saudade (1952)

The action is set in a farm, and in its adjacent little town. The farm's foreman, named Juvenal, has a daughter, named Maria Fausta, who is loved by a farm employee named Galdino, who plays the accordion as a hobby. She, however, does not love him back and is having a secret affair with another man, named João do Carmo. When Juvenal finds out about his daughter's affair and forbids her from continuing with it, she disappears from the farm. A subplot has the farm's owner, "Colonel" Januário, running for town's mayor.

Not altogether uninteresting little drama with some musical interludes. At times the filmmaker lets himself be carried away from realism into the display of aesthetically appealing images. The acting is mostly amateurish, but the diretor keeps it serviceable; his own performance in one of the main roles, on the other hand, is good. The political subplot is a fine register of Brazil's political culture of the period.

Rating: 33

True Grit (1969)

Second viewing; first viewed between 1983 and 1986.

A teenage girl hires a Deputy Marshal who is famous for his efficiency and ruthlessness to hunt down her father's murderer.

Excellent western, with unforgettable characters and an almost non-stop brilliancy in the dialog. The concept of justice is very dear to Civilization, and resonates even deeper in the hearts of those of us who see the world crumbling down today through all forms of relativization and distortion of that concept.

Rating: 72 (up fom 55)

Network (1976)

Second viewing; first viewed before January 1987, and probably not earlier than January 1983.

A deranged TV news anchor is exploited by his employers with unpredictable consequences.

As some people have noticed, this derives in part from Meet John Doe. Most critics have lauded this film highly. A minority didn't like it, the most notable among them being Dale Thomajan ("Cinema as hysteria") and Pauline Kael (excerpts of hers and of others may be found on Wikipedia). Both its lovers and its haters make valid points, I think. This is a film with many good ideas which were poorly materialized. The fact is, the film is extremely odd in tone. The sense of humor is heavily satirical, yet the film's mood is predominantly that of a serious drama. Furthermore, there is the facile recourse to a mad central character, from whom anything may be expected, and whose behavior obeys neither the laws of logic nor the existing psychiatric classifications. I do not believe films like this have a significant influence on solving the ills they point to, some of which are imaginary anyway. Thus, at least they should try to please viewers, to achieve which a better thought-out script would be required. As it is, it stands dangerously close to its own object of critique.

Rating: 50 (down from 67)

Assassination (1987)

After a series of assassination attempts against the first lady, she and the head of security in charge of her go on a trip incognito. In the meantime the other security team members try to find out who is responsible for the attempts.

Routine thriller with some atypical plot elements.

Rating: 32

Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (1976)

Second viewing; first viewed between 1983 and 1986.

English alternate titles: Down and Dirty; Ugly, Dirty and Bad.

The daily activities of a large family living under the same roof in a slum. The head of the family is a rude and avaricious man who has received a considerable sum of money from the State after having burned his own left eye with whitewash. He keeps the bundle of notes with him or hidden and lives in a perpetual state of fear of being robbed of it.

Nearly perfect black comedy describing urban life at its bottom layer. The principle of the movie is precisely this simplification, so to speak, of the constraints involved in human interactions. It is an old story: economic progress does not necessarily bring civilization; it's quite the contrary, actually, for those who live at the margins of the economy. I found the film less shocking than on my first watching, but on the other hand perhaps now I had a sharper eye for its artistic perfections.

Rating: 90 (down from 100)

Crônica da cidade amada (1965)

Second viewing; first viewed on April 23, 1990.

Omnibus with eleven segments adapted from short literary texts, with the aim of jointly providing a panoramic and humorous view of social, cultural and natural aspects of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Quite well-made by Brazilian standards, and featuring interesting takes on Rio's quirks. It suffers a bit from not being able to fully translate the literary element to the cinematic one. While it is far from a masterpiece, it is just as far from being the painful nullity that I perceived it to be on my first viewing. What was painful, however, was the laterally cropped version that I saw on TV, which I hesitate to call "pan-and-scan" as it leaves characters out of the frame with an annoying frequency.

Note: all evidences point to IMDB being in error while assigning 1964 as the year of release.

Rating: 51 (up from 21)

Enemy of the State (1998)

Second viewing; first viewed (in dubbed form) on September 20, 2001.

The murder of a politician who won't vote for a bill who allows wiretapping of common citizens is accidentally filmed, and the recording ends up in possession of a lawyer who is then chased by the criminals.

Thrilling and topical fiction on the subject of State surveillance and control. I do not have more to say about it. Christopher Mulrooney has some well-written considerations about it which may be read here.

Rating: 62 (unchanged).

Thunderheart (1992)

Two FBI agents go into a Native-American reservation to solve a murder. They suspect an activist is the culprit. The younger agent, who is part Native-American, uncovers a plot of corruption encompassing an ecological crime.

From The Flaming Star to Thunderheart, mixed-race is synonymous to mixed-up when it involves Native-American ancestry. This, for reasons one may speculate about, seems to not apply to African-Americans, for whom apparently the 'one drop of blood' rule settles also the self-identity issue.  Anyway, this is an eminently watchable thriller-cum-pamphlet and has stunning landscape as an additional charmer. Critics predominantly like subversive stuff, but some of them realize that leftist-liberal fiction tends to be the most formulaic, due to the imperative of delivering a message. Yet others have grown insensitive to anything other than social issues that affect people as atomized individuals (those issues being mostly of a sexual nature).

Rating: 50

É fogo na roupa! (1952)

Spoilers herein. In a posh lakeside hotel, a Symposium of Wives for Conjugal Happiness is taking place. The hotel manager intends to hire a Polish pianist, aiming to please one of the guests, a French countess. An employee of the radio station where said pianist works manages to intercept the hotel manager's telephone call, and schemes to pass up his pianist friend as the famous one. The countess takes a liking to him, and so the fraud is successful. Meanwhile, some male guests place a hairdresser in drag as a spy in the Wives' Symposium meeting. There is also a plot by some Japanese men to steal the Countess' necklace.

Musical comedy which is sort of a Marx Brothers movie without the Marx Brothers. It is poor in every aspect, but I reckon there will be something for people who take an interest in Brazilian music and popular culture of the fifties.

Rating: 31