Change Your Image
gl03
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971)
Pedestrian Shakespeare, no Throne of Blood
Shakespeare's eternal verse and some great looking landscapes are redeeming features of this movie, as are a few memorable shots, most notably the 'mirror scene'.
The rest feels oddly unimaginative and mundane, which is all the more puzzling as Kurosawa's masterful Throne Of Blood predates this by more than a decade - a lean, mean killing machine of a Shakespeare adaptation that imbues every scene with foreboding, suspense, purpose, and consequence.
All of these qualities are missing from Polanki's Macbeth - the supernatural isn't particularly eerie, its character's motivations remain obscure, and the lengthy action scenes are often more often comical than dramatic. Kurosawa manages to set up a concise clockwork of human drama with just a few lines of dialogue between the key players. In 30min less than Polanski he makes harsh but effective choices as to what to show and what not to show on the screen. Polanski on the other hand ambles through the script like a school play director who relishes in literal staging of his source material rather than in focussed and purposeful direction.
Granted, Polanski chooses to work largely within the constraints of Shakespeare's original text, and Jon Finch is definitely no Mifune. Yet, if you decide to film one of history's greatest plays right after one of history's greatest directors you better bring something extraordinary to the table.
Cartas da Guerra (2016)
War from a distance
Director Ivo Ferreira has chosen António Lobo Antunes' letters from the front lines as the narrative backbone of his film about the Angolan War of Independence. Antunes' letters are juxtaposed as near constant voice overs against an impressionistic backdrop of episodes from the war, with only a few scenes of actual dialogue scattered in between. It's a technique which essentially fragments the film into two disjointed layers that rarely connect.
Antunes' letters are for the most part yearning vows of love, while the film depicts the boredom and cruelty of men at war. In a questionable reversal of roles, Antunes' letters are read mostly by a gentle female voice, presumably his wife's, who otherwise has no voice of her own. We see her in a few abstract scenes, yet she remains a ghost, a projection of the author's longing, rather than becoming a character of her own, despite her constant presence as a narrator. This further serves to distance the viewer's perspective, even more so as the loosely connected episodes told on the visual level refuse to develop the characters they depict, or (with one exception) present the protagonists with meaningful moral choices.
Cartas da Guerra is undoubtedly visually striking, filmed in high-contrast black and white, and if Portuguese is your native language, it might be easier to connect its aural and visual levels (as opposed to reading through endless lovelorn monologues in two-language subtitles). In the end though, I doubt that it salvages a movie that's at best an interesting narrative experiment, at worst a structural failure on a topic that deserved better.
Ip Man (2008)
Nationalistic Propaganda Flick
Interesting to see this to be the highest rated martial arts movie on IMDb, which I assume is on the strength of Donnie Yen's performance and the film's overall high production values. Sadly both are wasted on a simplistic good-vs-evil script, which has more in common with Rocky IV than my mental image of Yip Man's life.
The film strikes a similar sour note with me as did Zhang Yimou's Hero, instrumentalizing great film making to rouse nationalistic emotions. If this were a B movie i'd thoroughly enjoy it, but as a high budget blockbuster I'll hold it to higher standards. Ultimately this is a disservice to Yip Man's legacy as well.
Watch this for the martial arts, which are great, but for a more subtle depiction of Japan's occupation of China, look elsewhere.
Obitaemyy ostrov (2008)
Not a Bad Strugatzky Adaptation
First things first: Make sure to see this in the 227min original (two-part) version. The international (one-part) release is a hack job with many crucial scenes missing, and a new cartoon title sequence that doesn't quite fit the mood.
The movie's greatest asset is certainly the Strugatzky brothers' nuanced story about a planet corrupt to the bone and the hero's moral imperative to intervene. The story is largely treated with respect, and while I can relate to some of the criticism aimed at the movie - there are some continuity issues, the casting might not suit everyone's taste, as won't the Matrix-style kung fu - this is a well-realised sci-fi flick that's worth watching for the strength of its story alone.
Yes, Tarkovsky would have made this a different movie, and I'm surely going to watch Aleksey German's 'Hard To Be A God', but I for one didn't mind this movie's bubblegum aesthetics while pondering existential moral dilemmas.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
pathetic.
The movie starts off in blazing hell, 15 minutes of stahlgewitter, men screaming, scattered and dying in a visual assault of maimed bodies and detached limbs. Without a doubt one of the most shocking and memorable depictions of war ever shot. Unfortunately the movie takes a big dip from that point on. Instead of showing us the absurdities of war, something the plot could well have brought across, Spielberg laborously evolves the movie around trusted values like male comradeship, loyalty and heroic patriotism, blasting the genre of the american war movie 30 years into the past. Combined with the effort of Hollywood's most pretentious actor, Tom Hanks, and a criminally tacky score makes this one of the most pathetic war movies ever made.
Terrence Malik's "Thin Red Line", which it incidently sunk at the box offices, shows what this movie could - should have been.
Wild Side (1995)
get the director's cut!
I had a chance to see this movie as a 111 min director's cut and hear cutter Frank Mazzola commenting on it, explaining how this movie was taken away from him and Donald Cammel.
While not exactly strong on the plot side, the version I saw featured some excellent emotional acting and a great cutting effort, with lots of unsettling jumps on the timeline (Mazzola's Trademark). Unfortunately I can see how this movie can easily be streamlined into a mediocre softporn by an ignorant production company, which is exactly what eventually happened.
Anyone who is familiar with the works of Donald Cammel ('Performance' etc.) should not be fooled by the (terrible I'm sure) release version and try to get their hands on the directors cut!