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CarolAHall
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The Wings of the Dove (1997)
"Wings of the Dove" Film Review of another Henry James Story by C A Hall Spellbreaker Studios
I'm on a roll with Henry James stories that have been made into films, but I'm beginning to think Mr. James is a vampire, an undecided one. He places his deep and penetrating insight into rooms high and low, then watches the pulsing carotid artery of his various prey beat slowly. They are living human morsels and he is committed to draining their blood from them
slowly. But instead of flinging his entire self at his victim, per more recent permutations of the blood lusting sort, or ejecting a leaping succulent tongue out to ensnare and devour like a frog in a nature program with unbelievably quick reflexes, he approaches carefully, with all social graces intact and intelligence bright and cold, places his lips on his character's necks, allows his incisors to puncture and mark. Then undecided, he just hangs out there for an hour and a half. You can't hear him drinking, yet once again, so many elegantly dressed and ensconced individuals meet wily doom. The film starts as a forbidden love affair between two lovers whose rising social status is keeping them apart. Then a third character joins them, who knows nothing of their affair, a beautiful but tragically ill heiress. It is not social criticism that ultimately separates the lovers, but the mark of this woman whose real relationship to them both remains a mystery. Oh Henry James, what is wrong with you? Never love, sex, passion, or real compassion, but the dopplganger of these elements in a room full of ghosts and mirrors haunt your stories. A story is not a great story just because you write accurately about difficult hidden things. But this is worth seeing. Its just a horrible, terrible, very good, quite scathing film. Watch it and pray nothing of the sort ever happens to you.
Das schreckliche Mädchen (1990)
'THE NASTY GIRL' DIGS DEEP INTO POST WAR Germany Movie Review by C A Hall SPELLBREAKER STUDIOS
There are two films that should be seen back to back as examples of the Wise Fool. One is THE NASTY GIRL, the other; EUROPA (ZENTROPA, English title). Both take on collusion by the German people during and after World War II. Both are Miramax, Weinstein brothers films.
THE NASTY GIRL is hilarious and based on a true story. It illuminates an ordinary German small town. A very idealistic, intelligent, agreeable "good German girl" wins a school essay award. Acknowledged by family, teacher and the powerful, she tries to win another, but this time the topic is 'what did your German town do during the time period from 1939-1945?"
Dutifully, intelligently, without a single shred of awareness, she begins to dig into the myths of freedom fighters and the good German people in the town she loves. But as any archaeologist will tell you, don't dig if you're not ready to find dead bodies. The myths are all lies. Instead she's uncovering how those in power, in government and the church, colluded for money, power, property and status against their Jewish and Communist neighbors, even revealing her own collusions as a child with the myth of being a good person. Step by step, this great study of collusion, shows how the voice of history is silenced, even by "winning."
The most powerful image occurs when investigating and writing about these "nasty" elements surrounding her, she sees she is falling into a Joan of Arc role about to be burned at the stake, for which the religious element in her town will get their jollies. Even worse is the Victor role, where she vanquishes the lies and wins, only to be embalmed in the glamor of the powerful giving her another award, if only it will force her to shut up. Surprise ending, Does she fall for either of these scenarios? See it. See collusion the silent killer, dissected under a very powerful microscope. Then look around you with the tools you've been given.
Dans la maison (2012)
"IN THE HOUSE' movie review C A Hall Spellbreaker Studios
This film is a Chinese box. Reality inside fiction. Fiction inside fantasy. Fantasy inside wish. A story nested inside many others, all "In the House". A boy writes for his frustrated teacher about his real life
supposedly. The teacher makes the boy a protégé, but critiques his story, which is the boy's real life
maybe. Soon the teacher, his wife, and the audience are caught up. Are we voyeurs to the boys real life, stalking real people, or just watching fictionalized people in a story? What happens when the watchers become characters in the story? When we see a scene with the boy's real father, is it true? Or just a form of escape? What I love is that I don't believe the boy is a real stalker, or voyeur, not really. He's a Houdini escape artist, using art and the mind to escape his real world, and create another. Its just it may
be very dangerous how he's doing it, because he's using his fantasy and the fantasies of others, to escape his own reality and using real lives to do so
sort of. So he's dangerous, but in your heart can you forgive him? Or are you being duped? He's a very clever kid. In a way he makes the lives of others more real to themselves, for which there are consequences. A middle class mother Esther, who the boy inappropriately woos, falls right back in using a child to escape her boring life. The teacher's wife Jeanne escapes her unreal life when the boy tells her a secret
maybe. The people in real lives that his fiction illuminates are changed forever. What I really respect about this film, is that the boy sees the people in the lives he wants, more clearly than they see themselves. They feel his clarity as an invasion, or criticism. But really it is a begrudging acceptance that no matter how stupid or vacuous their concerns, their lives hold the key to his escape. As an artist he needs to be able to describe his own real life. But he's too young for that, he needs his imagination to escape first. Then later, he can return
to somewhere, a home 'inside the house' where he is respected, cared for, wanted. First you have to imagine it possible. Reality is a burden if you can't escape it.
Fanny (2013)
Thank You Mr. Auteuil, for "FANNY" a review by C A Hall
We owe Daniel Auteuil a great debt for Adapting, Directing and Acting in this little gem of a film. The story is simple. Two kids come of age in a fishing village in France, they play at love and marriage, mistaking it for a game. Then the boy leaves to follow his dream of adventure at sea, not knowing he is abandoning FANNY, pregnant with his child. Thus ensues a series of events which include: uproar in the families and the lives of friends of families, honor, duty, the foolishness of youth, the heavy wisdom of age, and customs now long gone. But these issues are still so much with us. When I go to the gym, I'm forced to glance at "Murray" the American talk show, where a bunch of screaming me-me's deal with the exact same issues: love lost and fathers found. But never with the beauty, gracefulness, depth and humanity involved in Auteuil's film. The grief of abandoned love, a child without a father or a name, the histories of they who came before who struggled with the same issues, all are revealed. The film is so full of the dreams and hopes of parents and children, that when Eros comes to take his arrows back, no one has won at the game of love at all. Only a giving remains. Auteuil took his time to tell this story, so we feel every move like the ocean of the heart. I thank him.
Malèna (2000)
Malena Reviewed by C A Hall, Spellbreaker Studios
What ending would you choose for this film? Should the audience stone to death Sicilian women? Filled with jealousy, religious hypocrisy, demonology, and the original scapegoating myth institutionalized, these women are ready to kill life and beauty to protect themselves from the truth. And what is the truth they so abhor? Puberty! The shocking moment made by everyone, when they discover the universe exploding between their thighs! Alas! Not a single adult in this mythical town in Sicily appears to recall the full force of this primal condition.
Instead they suffer the conformity, denial, rejection, or substitution of this astonishing discovery. They make leaders, wars, schools, religions, cultures and of course children. They entrench insidious traditions and dangerous rituals. All of which floats by Amoruso Renato, our puberty struck hero, like an aria from a great opera, out the window, above the ornate stone buildings, across romantic plazas, over the endless azure Mediterranean and into the ever golden Sicilian sky. No one is spared his scrutiny, not the cowardly men with their machismo, nor the vicious women with their "virtue". Why? This boy is watching and he is awake.
It seems the only memory of puberty still living in his Sicilian town, circa 1940, as World War II erupts, is the perfume of a lovely woman: "Malena". Malena, a mystery woman walks through town, not only awakening the desire of our young Romeo, but also that of his entire group of friends, who agree to include him in a very special "men's club" dedicated to their lust and her adoration, even though he is only twelve years old and still wearing short pants.
But Renato's awakening is filled with consternation and loss. Malena is the object of all the unmet desires, fantasies, lusts and jealousies of his entire town. What can he do? She's the epicenter of gossip. She incites the memory of the original discovery and embodies the danger of all its possibilities. Her existence calls into question the dead ends chosen by most of the populace. No one but Renato seems concerned that no man will hire her as she's a danger to his wife, nor any woman sell her food in the market, because she's a persona non grata.
All insist her virtue is compromised. She's forced to go to court to protect herself, then becomes the mark of her lawyer, who wants his payment in more than a pound of flesh. Malena is not the first woman to consider marrying a buffoon, hoping it will protect her, but even that is denied. The lawyer is under the control of his mother who refuses the object of her son's rape, the protection of his name in marriage. All doors close upon her. The war progresses. Finally she falls to the degradation projected upon her. She sells her flesh for food. Then falls further
This is not a coming of age story, nor a memory film, filled with longing and regret which smacks of the great fish story, about the one which got away. Nor is it a morality play about Sicily, full of life and beauty but suffering from a blood curse long before the fascist period descends. Malena flies above and beyond these genres to scenes which reveal the human soul. Who is brave enough to look their own desire in the face? Where is the dignity allowed a person desecrated by scapegoating? Who is courageous enough to remember their own lack of courage? There is a triple surprise ending, not to be revealed, which proves it is a true tragedy/ comedy. No matter. See it. Re-see it. It is great film!
El perfecto desconocido (2011)
"The Perfect Stranger" falls into a small town Abyss
This is a sneaky film, it sneaks up on you slowly, decisively and then drops you into an abyss. A small Spanish town, all but abandoned, is filled with dangerous potholes that swallow up wandering tourists. Suddenly there is a new visitor.
Each townsperson projects all of their hopes, dreams, needs and fears on him, even though he can't speak Spanish, which is the cause of many a humorous exchange. Maybe he'll reopen the long abandoned store he's living in and fulfill everyone's needs. The townspeople make a list.
A youth, oppressed by his family, escapes to paint the newbie's abode. His good Christian mother, projects on this visitor a sex "perp" identity, trying to enchain her son in his role as a useless child, who must suffer forever her cruel and perpetual "protection".
A young girl trying to escape her father's descent into prostitution and drink, constantly criticizes the visitor. But as he can't understand her language, only her desperate straits, so he offers her a safe place to sleep, and food, thereby upsetting her world through simple kindness.
The middle aged town gossip comes filled with information, but the visitor cannot understand her. Still, she uses his attention to plot her next move in her quest to become a mother, using indiscriminately the only men left in town willing or able for such hijinks.
All of these stories finally intersect revealing why the visitor has come and why he never leaves. Without giving anything further away, all that remains is the truth, that children may be used as a form of continuance by any town anywhere. But more importantly that their survival as realized human beings depends on real parenting, decided not by blood ties or genetics, but by heart.
Adams æbler (2005)
Adams Apples
Mix a Neo Nazi in "recovery", a country priest fighting Satan, a religious terrorist out his country of approved homophobic origins, an obese recovering alcoholic, a medical doctor all snarky science and bellicose cruelty, and a pregnant woman who may be giving birth to a genetically "problematic" child and what do you get: ADAMS APPLES.
Every single person in the film is confronting a force field of GOOD vs EVIL from their own point of view, as black comedy. There's the apple tree from Eden's garden filled with worms, fire, lightening, destruction and an apple pie. If only Adam the Neo Nazi can complete his task of recovery and make one.
I laughed out loud so many times wondering how these actors could deliver their lines deadpan!! It was like being in an AA meeting with the Borgia. But the biggest surprise of the whole story, amongst many, is that Adam, the Neo Nazi, begins to look like the most sane person in the group. The film is ripped from todays headlines but was made in 2005. Make it a companion piece to "Dogville" to get the down home version of the same issues, or "The Northerners" to get the Dutch version.
I give it my highest rating for satire in an age that has lost the ability to appreciate the tongue in cheek, cheek of it all. Aren't you glad we're just film fanatics, instead of any of the other life forms now growing on the planet. Be proud of yourself be very, very proud.