1999: Il mio viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy)

Martin Scorsese's very entertaining tour through the history of Italian cinema up until the 1960s, featuring all the films you might expect in such a documentary. Though I wish he'd bashed a famous director's film from time to time rather than criticizing by omission (Le notti di Cabiria gets about a third of a sentence), one couldn't imagine a more affa- and knowledgeable tour guide than Scorsese. And those eyebrows! Those eyebrows do me every time. (7.5)

2002: The Mothman Prophecies

Basically, what happens in this film is that Richard Gere talks on the phone to an omnisicient moth that's up to no good. The movie doesn't seem as stupid as that sounds; rather, it's a decent thriller of the supernatural using standard noughties mainstream film aesthetics. The disappointing ending is less disappointing for it disappointingness being visible from half an hour away. Still a 6 overall, though.

If this film had been more successful, maybe we could have hoped for Mothman vs. Kraken, à la Alien vs. Predator. Alas, it's not to be.

1928: Steamboat Bill, jr.

Buster Keaton stars as the son of a steamboat captain in this loser-turned-hero story. The storm sequence is great, but it makes up only about a fourth of the film, and, let's face it, the rest is not that hot. (6.5)

1960: La dolce vita

Fellini's famous film, which I've finally seen, has not so much a plot as a series of scenes presenting the life of tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini and his estrangement from that life. Also portraying the life of the rich and famous in late 1950s/early 1960s Italy as vacuous in brilliant b/w pictures, La dolce vita may be seen as the more accessible, fun companion piece to Antonioni's "Incomunicabiliy Trilogy" and at almost three hours is not a minute too long. Just don't expect to see Anita Ekberg playing a major role. (8)

1961: La notte (The Night)

Of the three films in the unofficial "Incomunicabiliy Trilogy", the others being L'avventura and L'eclisse, this one - chronicling a night an estranged couple spend in part together, in part apart - is my favourite because it is the tightest in terms of "stuff happening on the screen". Put differently, as I think I have made clear in the reviews linked to above, the films, brilliant in visual terms, suffer from being too deliberately paced and offering to little in terms of plot developments in my book, and this problem is relatively small in La notte. (7) Now, an Ernest Lehmann screenplay directed by Antonioni, that would have been something.

2007: Disturbia

The film directed by one D.J. Caruso - no, I'm not making this up - is so close in its basic setup to Rear Window that some might say it faces copyright issues. Here it is a stereotypical male teenager that may not leave his house, his clownish mate and the dream girl who's just moved into the house next door spying on the neighbour who may or may not be hauling body parts around in his garage. The film does what it wants to do pretty well, but must stay within the self-chosen confines of its mediocricy, most clearly demonstrated by the almost constant playing of nondescript pop songs for no discernible reason. (6)

I'm generally a fan of the mainstream approach to film, but the more I watch, the more I'm coming to the conclusion that there are more great artsy films out there than great mainstream films, despite the preponderance of the latter.

1903: Alice in Wonderland

The fragment of the first-ever film version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (more info) is a bit weak in terms of overall narrative structure, the growth-shrink scene is too long and, worst of all, the cheshire cat is badly miscast! (5)

1959: Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) (Restored 107 min.s Version)

Though I realize it is set during Carnival, I still have a feeling that Rio in the late 1950s may not have been the magical place where everyone is always happy (except when throwing a mighty funk on jealousy grounds) and the samba is always playing (except when the bossa is playing). But who cares, it's not a documentary. As for the plot, Orfeu is set to marry Mina - but then Bambi-eyed Eurydice arrives from the countryside. O&E are soon getting it on, but Eurydice is being followed by someone who is either a bloke dressed up as death or Dr. D himself. Never mind the plot, though; the main actor here is the magical Rio described above, filmed in glorious Eastmancolor. (8)

1998: The General

Martin Cahill, the Irish gangster boss this John Boorman picture is about, is no Don Corleone, and The General is no Godfather. It is one of those colour-to-black-and-white jobs that usually go wrong, suffers from an awful soundtrack remindful of the early 1980s (saxophone!) and, like most biopics, lacks a decent narrative arc. Having said that, there's enough happening here to keep you decently entertained for two hours. (6)

1920: Convict 13

Buster Keaton finds himself in a convict's uniform, and soon he's in a prison and about to be hanged. Rioting and lots of standard silent comedy jokes, in particular people falling down. Not the reason Keaton's famous. (5.5)

1897: Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer

I like it! (7.5)

2009: District 9

In retrospect, it seems like a stroke of genius: Do a film basically using the aesthetics of the Bourne pictures, but

• with aliens
• use a nerd-turned-hero, i.e., a character the kinds of people who like this kind of movie can identify with better than with a brawny hunk such as Bourne or a million other action heroes

Laugh all the way to the bank. (6)

1922: Daydreams

In this 22-minute fragment of a short, Buster Keaton writes home misleading letters to his sweetheart - when he writes about his success on Wall Street, it means he's actually cleaning it, etc. More than most old comedies this one suffers from its visual jokes having become not simply commonplace, but cliché. Reasonably entertaining nonetheless. (6)

1962: L'eclisse ([The] Eclipse)

I recently complained that Antonioni's 1960 L'avventura, while visually brilliant, was too "deliberately paced and loosely plotted" for my taste, but compared to L'eclisse, released two years later and dealing with a woman who breaks up with her socialist fiancé and soon starts a relationship with a superficial and selfish stock-broker, it feels as though the earlier film was written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. In terms of visuals, Antonioni exchanges L'avventura's old churches and castles for modernist architecture, which, while meant to look cold, perhaps even dehumanizing, still makes for extremely attractive frames. Even so, I found much of the film to be a bit of a bore, but the ending must be one of the greatest in the history of cinema. How do we squeeze all that into a single mark? I'll go for a straight 6, but am not sure this is the right choice.

2006 (?): The Easter Bunny Hates You

I may or may not have seen this before, but anyway Drek points me to this near-masterpiece just in time. Judge for yourself . . .



. . . I'm giving it 7.5 points, which puts it slightly above Citizen Kane.

1997: Insomnia

A cop goes to northern Norway, where the sun never sets, to investigate the murder of a young woman. Not the most untroubled man to begin with, he can't sleep. Slow descent towards madness, morally questionable behaviour. Special mention for the camera work: To call the colouring pale would be an understatement; rather, there seems to be an abundance of light on the screen. Good, off-kilter neo-noir. Or blanche. Well, you get the idea. (7)

2009: Up (in 2-D)

The Pixar movie, about an old man who wants to fulfill his lifelong dream of going to South America by flying there using his house (with lots of helium balloons attached) only to find there's still a boy scout on the porch after he's left the ground, is visually attractive and generally done with the level of professionalism that one expects from Pixar, but suffers a bit from a slump in the middle. Better than Happy Feet or The Incredibles, but not as good as Madagascar or Ratatouille. (6.5)

2009: (500) Days of Summer

You know what? I totally understand what this guy is trying to say. But he's wrong. It's lovely, in an excrutiating way. (7.5)

The Best of March 2010

1. Targets (1968) - 7.5
2. Le Million (1931) - 7.5
   
3. Serpico (1973) - 7.5
   
4. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) - 7
5. Shutter Island (2010) - 7
   

Films Not Finished: March 2010

Silent Running, Smokin' Aces, Vargtimmen

1960: L'avventura

When a party of youngish rich Italians goes on a boating trip, one of them disappears. But Antonioni's film is no run-of-the-mill mystery; rather, after the initial events (the most entertaining part of the movie in my view), it turns into Scenes from a Relationship. I feel wholly ambivalent about the film: Visually, it is stunning; as a narrative, the deliberately paced and loosely plotted L'avventura is much less successful. Overall, a weak recommend (6.5).

1957: Les Espions

The director of a small psychiatric clinic in rural France accepts lots of money from someone claiming to represent the US secret service, and the next day lots of strangers have moved in, taking over the clinic uttering more or less vague threats about what will happen if he resists. It's a cool premise for a movie, but the lack of clarity about who is on whose side tends to create confusion rather than suspense or surprise. (6)

1917: His Wedding Night

It is not quite clear what the general idea was when this Fatty Arbuckle vehicle was conceived, although in the end Buster Keaton is kidnapped while drunk and wearing a dress. Features an illustration of discriminative pricing and mental rotation deficiencies on the part of the filmmakers or the targeted audience. (5)

1962: Vive le Tour

Louis Malle's eighteen-minute documentary explaining the Tour de France is not particularly interesting. (5.5)

1957: Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)

Fellini's (seminal?) take on the hooker with a heart topos, firmly in the neorealist tradition, is not a bad film at all, but somehow its famous magic managed to elude me. (6)

1917: The Rough House

A silent comic short featuring the usual silent comic short ado and the only film I can think of the trivia about which is more interesting than the film itself (6.0). From IMDb:

• Directorial debut of Buster Keaton.
• Buster Keaton hadn't yet solidified his "Great Stone Face" persona; he smiles, laughs, grimaces, and smirks.
• Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle performs a prototype of the "dancing dinner rolls" that Charles Chaplin used in The Gold Rush (1925). Until "The Rough House" - thought to be lost - was rediscovered, Chaplin was credited with creating the gag.

1939: Midnight

Co-written by Billy Wilder, of Menschen am Sonntag fame, this movie gives us an American gold-digger stranding pennyless in a magical Paris where everyone loves speaking English, and soon attracts the interest of a variety of men, some rich, some less so. Mistaken identities, confusion. Typical, and good, example of the screwball comedy. (7)

1983: Sans soleil

Situated on the border between fictional and nonfictional film, Chris Marker's second-best known film features a woman reading the letters sent to her by a cameraman who travels the world, while we see the footage he has shot. The somewhat experimental book of moving pictures emphasizes the strangeness of foreign continents, or at least that's what I felt it's doing. (7)

1917: The Butcher Boy

Buster Keaton debuts in a minor role while Fatty and Slim, rivals for the heart of the same girl, both cross-dress to sneak into her school. Features a dog, lots of violence, and an attempted kidnapping. (6.5)

2006: Children of Men

In 2027, everyone in the world is infertile (everyone?) and Britain has closed its borders, trying to stem a tide of illegal immigrants who want to come despite England looking like a shithole - apparently the rest of the world is even worse off, the film's a bit vague on this. The screenwriters, keeping the basic dystopian setup, but substantially altering the plot of the novel the book is based on, remembered that in a screenplay the main characters need a task and came up with the lamest one in the book: the characters have to get from A to B, despite obstacles. It takes a lot of hard work to make that interesting, and this film doesn't deliver. Also, pretty much all of the film is shot in a grey-green-blue shade, which is a bit like someone shouting "DYSTOPIA!" in your face for two hours. On the plus side: Michael Caine sporting really long grey hair. (5.5)

As for dystopian Britain, didn't Mark E. Smith remark something to the effect that if you want to see humanity at its worst, you should go to central Manchester around closing time? Now, there's an idea for a film for you: Showdown at the taxi stand.

1931: Le Million

Michel, a poor painter, has won a million in the lottery, but to collect his winnings, he needs the ticket, which is in his jacket, which his financé gives to a man who is fleeing from the police, who sells it to an opeara singer, and so on and so forth: Soon, it seems, tout Paris is chasing the jacket, and director René Clair makes this comic musical a charming little film not dissimilar to the best-know Marx Brothers movies. It starts with a great tracking shot over the roofs of Paris, which are obviously models and look all the better for it, and Le Million is a genuinely early sound film in that Clair, much like Fritz Lang in M, leaves the dialogue unheard when he doesn't need it and seems more conscious of the way sound can be used to great effect than the directors of most contemporary films. Somewhat famous is the fade-in of the roar of a sports stadium crowd when a variety of men fights over the jacket in a rugby-like manner; and when Michel's friend Prosper hears his conscience, it is a whole choir singing to him from the off. Is there a social psychological theory in there? I say yes. (7.5)

Link: Matthew Dessem's essay on the film. Contains lots of spoilers, but they don't really spoil. It's not exactly a mystery, you know.

1935: Bride of Frankenstein

While I found the original Frankenstein charmingly silly, the sequel is more charmlessly stupid in my book - there are even little people in bottles. There are also bad technical glitches. (5)

1973: Serpico

The film starring Al Pacino as the cop who won't take bribes, which is not making him particularly popular with his colleagues, is shot in the same generic 1970s New York cop movie style you'll also find in French Connection and Prince of the City, for example. Entertaining throughout, gripping for about three fifths. (7.5)

1930: Zemlja (Earth)

The film about conflicts between the old and the new in a farmer's village during the early days of the Soviet Union is not particularly exciting in terms of storytelling, but succeeds as moving pictures. The photography of nature is often lauded, yet I found the harvest scene, as rhythmic as an Eisenstein battle sequence, to be the highlight. (7)

1967: Point Blank

The plot about a man who wants his share of the money back from his partners in crime after escaping from Alcatraz has two feet planted firmly on "not a masterpiece" ground, and the film doesn't win the Sergej M. Eisenstein Award for Outstanding Achievements in Editing either. What makes this film worth a look is the lush late-60s interior decoration of the appartments most of the film is set in. I'm not being cynical here: The interior decoration is a marvel to behold. (6)

1968: Targets

Peter Bogdanovich's debut as a film director is visibly low-budget and self-consciously camp. The parallel stories about an aging horror star - played by Boris Karloff - who's tired of acting and a detached young man who turns into a killer really shines when it cuts down on the talking, primarily in the two extended shooting scenes. As a whole, it gives you a real sense of time and place. Great final shot. (7.5)

2010: Shutter Island

The first half or so of Scorsese's film about two agents investigating on a kind of Alcatraz for the criminally insane has an extremely well-crafted plot, but the ending is extremely poor - indeed, my enjoyment of the film was heightened because I discounted early hints about the ending thinking that they couldn't possibly go for something that lame. Also, Scorsese generally doesn't seem at the top of his game, the music's poor and the back projections' quality made me wonder whether they were intended as a deliberate hommage to Hitchcock. Having said all that, of course if Martin Scorsese directs a thriller based on a Dennis Lehane book it's going to be a good film. (7)

1965: Pierrot le Fou

Godard's film about the joys of being a left-wing terrorist is a bit hard to review on purely aesthetic grounds, especially if you keep thinking to yourself: "I bet Baader and Meinhof loved this one." I'll give it a shot, though: Great colours, but the "let's have many scenes that don't advance the plot" strategy is a risky one; here it works somewhat. (6)

2005: Batman Begins

Does what it says on the label - childhood and death of parents, education, development of gadgets, etc. - in a thoroughly professional/predictable way. Too long, although not by as much as The Dark Knight, the visual acumen of which it lacks. I haven't used my stopwatch, but got the impression this might well win a competition for similarity of scenes' length in blockbuster movies. (6.5)

2002: The Transporter

The action film about a man that sells his driving services to illegal enterprises and has his otherwise simple and quiet life disrupted when one of the packages he's hired to transport turns out to be an attractive girl is photographed like an expensive commercial, scored like a cheap one and not quite as bad as that sounds. (5.5)

2005: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Best of the Noughties: Lists and Suggestions #10)

Call me daft, but maybe the plot of this crime comedy was a little too clever for me: I found it hard to follow. Never mind that, though, because with Robert Downey jr., fast-paced, witty dialogue and a corpse being peed on, it works well enough on a minute-by-minute basis, though it's not quite The Last Boy Scout. (7)

2007: Youth without Youth

Francis Ford Coppola's film about a language genius, his doppelgänger and lots of mirrors, raked in less than three million dollars worldwide, at least if you want to believe the standard source. That's surprising for a film by such an famous director. Until you see the film: It's artsy, disjointed and whacky. It does have really good cinematography and Bruno Ganz, but for a film about human consciousness, as which Coppola sees it, it's surprisingly unilluminating about that topic. Recommended for fans of teeth falling out. (4.5)

1972: The Candidate

Nothing much is to be said about the film starring Robert Redford as an idealistic Democratic politician trying to stay honest despite running for senate: A very decent showing all around. (6.5)

1995: To Die For

With a few small changes in the script and a few major changes in style, the film featuring Nicole Kidman as a superficial bitch determined to make it on television could have been a neo-noir; as it is, it's more of a media/American dream satire that's visually unappealing in a 1980s way - and I don't just mean Nicole Kidman's makeup. (6)

2004: La Mala Educación (Bad Education)

Almodóvar's intricately related partial stories have exploitative priests, football, exortion galore, good cinematography, anal sex, theft, a boy singing "Moon River" in Spanish and much, much more. It's all very cleverly constructed, but either Almodóvar doesn't really care about his characters or it's just that his sensibilities and mine are too far apart. (6)

1963: The Haunting

If you're a woman in her twenties still living with you're mother, then you're in trouble - or at least that's what horror films shot around 1960 would have you believe. As though trying to provide an example for the how-not-to box in the textbook, The Haunting uses voiceover to present us with the clichéd thoughts of such a spinster who is participating with two other subjects and a researcher interested in paranormal phenomena to spend some time in an allegedly haunted house. Today the film takes its entertainment value more from its quaíntness than from any shock value it might once have had, but the b/w photography is among the best examples of its kind. (6.5)

2009: An Education

Nick Hornby's script, set in 1961 England, about a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and her petty bourgeois parents falling for a rich, good-looking and cultured man in his late twenties (I think) is somewhat predictable, as are the characters, but makes up for it with humour, a sense of place and time and an excellent performance by Carey Mulligan in the female lead, so I can recommend it overall. (7)

1985: Jagged Edge

Lame female midlife crisis/courtroom drama from the pen of Joe Eszterhas, who later gave us the not dissimilar Basic Instinct. Features good-looking horses and bad-looking haircuts. (5)

The Best of February 2010

1. La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) - 9
2. Obsession (1976) - 8
   
3. Phantom of the Paradise (1974) - 7.5
4. High and Low (1963) - 7.5
   
5. Sherlock Holmes (2009) - 7.5

Films Not Finished: February 2010

Amsterdamned, Höstsonaten, One Fine Day, Solyaris