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Lucky Number Slevin (2006)
A delightful cat's cradle of a movie
Everything is connected, what more can I say? Pay close attention and watch the Kansas City Shuffle take shape, twisted thread by twisted thread.
This is a movie buff's, cult sort of movie, not an ordinary Joe's six-pack and bag of chips sort. The sets are ugly. They have found some of the world's most horrifying wallpapers and room dividers for a thank-God-never-was sort of 70's yuck! feeling. I think the set designer should get a prize for extravagant awfulness. Excellent actors who bring warmth and depth to precisely limited roles. The dialogue is laden with clues and irony. "It's what they called back then a drugstore handicap." Whole movie right there, but you won't notice until 3 am in the morning of the night you watched it. The sort of movie you watch a second, third and fourth time with increasing pleasure as you see how it all fits together.
Alpeis (2011)
Think Guenirca, not Saving Private Ryan
What happens when people insist on controlling one another? When they see the other only in terms of roles and obligations, not as individuals? When the primary interaction between those with power in relationships and those without is that the powerful take what they want, insist on conventional behavior from others and deny the weaker ones their desires and opportunities. When those denied must submit or die? What are the effects of even small acts of kindness? What is the effect of really seeing the other. Satisfying individual needs? This movie aims directly at the intellect and the gut, using a strikingly unusual metaphor as storyline. If you read the other reviews, you'll see it leaves many disappointed, irritated and confused. If you love patterns and puzzles you may enjoy this. Eventually. During the movie I was repeatedly briefly enraged, mostly just puzzled. Immediately after watching it, I wondered why the director thought he was entitled to waste 90 minutes of his viewer's lives with such coldness, sterility and artifice. By the time I woke up the next morning, the pieces began to fall into place. The actions and interactions of the gymnast and trainer during the first and last scenes, and the reason that the two scenes differ, encapsulate everything. After a lot of thought and piecing together, I see the movie as a brilliant piece of art. Unpleasantly, disturbingly, heart-rendingly brilliant.
To Die For (1995)
well-made cardboard cutouts- awful movie
The protagonist is completely unmotivated- she is merely pure evil. Her victim-lover is given nothing more than stupidity and the simplest base sexual desire as his motives.
It is based on a novel based on a real story. The reality was tragedy- for the young man used, for the woman who for whatever reasons in her life arrived at the moment where she decided to kill by proxy and manipulate. We are given no understanding, no exploration. We are given toying around with cinematic method, pretty pictures, excellent acting by Kidman and Phoenix.
But that is not enough when dealing with issues that deep. Sorry. The movie absolutely sucks for me because of its disrespectful treatment of its characters. Their humanity, their frailties and failures are reduced to sneered-at, pitiful cardboard cutouts.
Bah.
Boogie Nights (1997)
if it weren't soft porn it would a made-for-prime time TV movie.
Made me feel like a sucker. All those good reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, and such a boring, nondescript, stupid movie. Now when I think of it, I think of Maverick. Probably the combination of the fancy house, Burt Reynold's dark hair and average good looks, and the sweet charms of lovable Julian Moore.
What I expected- some sort of exploration of what it is really like to be required to perform sexually in front of a production crew. What is it like to be a wealthy well-known but despised outcast? What consequences for personal relationships come with the territory? These things are hinted at, but either just glanced over or dealt with according to stereotype.
Bored!!!
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Has everything- philosophical depth, suspense, film-craft. It's a 10.
A whole lot of people die in this film, and they are not the weightless, clean, entertainment deaths of your average adventure, action or crime flick.
They are real-world deaths. Pointless, tragic, bloody and disgusting. Meaningless beyond being a reflection of the constraints and conditions we humans create in some places, in interaction with the wide span of human personalities that must live in them. To put that better- deaths that occur, just like in the real world, because some few people see killing as the answer to business competition or emotional dissent and the wealthier society around them finds it unnecessary or even undesirable to stop the killing since it is happening to "worthless" people in the slums, or as in this case, the specially constructed residential area for the dislocated poor.
But the movie is fantastic. Those dead people, before they die, they live vibrant, meaningful, realistically textured lives. The film is gorgeously shot. The script and story structure are the work of skilled craftsmen and left nothing to desire for me. It seems to me to be a brilliant study of humanity and society, and every bit as hopeful as hopeless. That pulls it up into great art.
This is one of the very few movies in the world that I look forward to watching again for the sheer pleasure of watching it unfold, even though I know what it's about, where it's going and where it will arrive.
A classic.
Malèna (2000)
Immediate pain, postponed delight
Perhaps gender and culture determines how I experienced the film, but I found it rich, beautiful to look at, funny, superficial at times, disturbing, obviously artificial, even unbelievable at moments, at others emotionally true. But when the movie was over, I was asking myself why in the world I had watched it. It seemed incoherent and painful. This reaction lasted about 24 hours.
I had to vote twice on this film, my first soon after watching rating was a 6 because my emotional reaction to the woman's fate overwhelmed everything else. As I found myself talking about the movie to family and friends,I discovered a great deal to talk and think about and describe. And in the process stepped back from individual fates, and finally attended to the description of small town society with peculiarly Italian quirks the movie actually aims at.
So now I give it a 7. And it seems to me that if I were to watch it again, I might give it an 8 or a 9. But probably not, because of the unevenness. It was as if the movie makers couldn't decide if they wanted to make a comedy of norms or a weighty social criticism.
Maybe it could be characterized as not immediately accessible. For me, at least. Well worth watching, though, if you like to think about your film viewing experiences.