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Reviews
Hot Fuzz (2007)
really not that good actually
It's a little suspicious that the first few comments on IMDb about this film tend to be bad or mediocre, but that bad comments have since been swamped by thousands of not just good, but ecstatic ones.
I very much wonder if the production companies publicity machine is at work here. Or maybe there are just a lot of people out there who are happy to see a British comedy that recycles enough Hollywoodisms to be familiar enough for them to process without doing any work at all. Fair enough, why not. I'm all for supporting local talent. But at the end of the day, let's not pretend it's anywhere near as funny as it out to be, anywhere near as funny as the American action comedies it's based on and which it spoofs.
The jokes are clichéd, the one liners are tired, the renderings of British stereotypes are nowhere near as incisive or memorable as even a show like, say, little Britain, let alone the Office or Baron-Cohen's stuff. Even by British standards, the comedy isn't that hot, the plotting is weak, and the slippage between action and comedy at which the original American films excel is sloppily executed. With low expectations, you can definitely enjoy this film, it's funny in parts and it is after all great to see home-grown jokes with recognisable home-grown characters. But don't get your hopes up.
Ex Memoria (2006)
wow, a short that's actually good
I caught this at Edinburgh festival and had liked the director's previous film Song Of Songs. Not sure why he's doing a short after a feature, but whatever. I actually preferred this to the feature in many ways, it knew exactly what it was and how it wanted to do it.
The lead actress Sara K playing an old woman with dementia was just superb. The whole film is shot in long, 3 or 4 minute takes that keep her face in the frame throughout the shot while moving along, with other action swimming in and out of focus in the back of shot. So it's a tour de force performance from her and the visuals are virtuouso too, very liquid. The effect is a kind of total immersion in the momentary experience of an old woman in a old people's home. She's haunted by bits of her memory that keep coming back to her.
It's funny at times, unsettling at others. INteresting. Ought to be longer!
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
well, maybe
Let me say first that I love existential movies with endless takes about people doing not much. I love it when filmmakers dare to use boredom as part of their expressive armoury.
Then let me say that I didn't think this film was really so great as an example of that kind of film-making.
I wanted more Americana from it's Americana. I wanted the nothingness of the performances, of the storyline, of the landscape, to hit me harder at the end of the film. But they didn't.
Maybe it was just an off day. So I waited a week to see if I'd think about the film again, which is what usually happens with say a good Bresson or Antonioni or whatever. Nada.
Sorry I hate to go against all these other comments but perhaps i'm just not in love enough with the road. not this road, anyway.
4 (2004)
thank god it exists...
thank god ilya K made this film, even though it doesn't add up to anywhere near as much as it could have.
This is in many ways a very talented first-time directors art-house showcase film, pinching ideas willy nilly (not least from a certain Russian photographer) and rubbing the audience's face relentlessly, and to some degree a little unnecessarily, in his inventiveness. If it was calculated to make him the darling of festivals, which I'm sure was hardly the main point, it worked.
Does it hide its shock tactics structural weaknesses (the second half is a real, repetitive mess) behind notions of the auteur, of interpretive demands that must be made on an audience, on "social comment", and the usual avant=gardist stuff? Yeah, it does. That doesn't mean it's worthless. You just wish that Ilya K and Sorokin, apparently a great novelist, had thought a little more about cinematic narrative forms and what you can do with them.
That said, it's an unforgettable, beautiful mess of an artwork.
The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
enjoyable
Enjoyable self-explanatory film that surfs a tone between ribald new-school US sex comedy and 70s influenced, humanist US indy character study.
There's an interesting article by the filmmakers, who include the lead actor Mr Carrell, in a magazine for screenwriters i saw online. It talks about how they wanted precisely to work that line between those newer more slapstick, ribald films but underpin it with a human story influenced by Hal Ashby and the like... deadpan and concerned ultimately with empathy for characters rather than mockery of them. Well, they more or less pull it off. The script slackens at times and is weakened by the fact that he's not that unlikely to 'get laid' from the off, but then, that's partly their decision not to make him unbelievably weird and geeky.
As a friend said, though, "you can;t imagine a film about a female 40 year old virgin taking the same tone." perhaps she's right. Male sexual inadequacy is amusingly commercial, female undesirability is a whole different kettle of fish.... debate.
Soy Cuba (1964)
A piece of lost time
It's hard to watch this film without asking yourself tough questions about the possible relationships of art and propaganda. The film is so utterly beautiful that it genuinely moves the soul, and yet so dunder-headedly transparent an attempt to propagate a problematic political position that you are often either bored stiff or laughing your head off.
The "I am Spartacus" scene and other scenes reminded me of Ken Loach's Wind THat Shakes The Barley, I'm sure he saw this. That film is another film which attempts to show only one side of a political conflict, and though it's much more successful at convincingly involving the audience, that only makes one all the more suspicious of it.
In the end what I drew from I Am Cuba is a blast of an almost science-fictional era that brought this visually stunning collaboration between two utterly disparate nations - cuba and USSR. And an overwhelming feeling of lost nostalgia for a time I wasn't part of, for a dream - communism - that had nothing to do with me.
Whatever else that dream brought, part of it was this troublingly naive yet ultimately touching desire to save people from injustice. For people, read here attractive, docile young Cuban women....! (This film is not a feminist tract! )
Professione: reporter (1975)
both a great film and a curio
i saw this on the recent re-release on BFI and had been waiting several years to catch up with it. It's a wonderful film, magisterial in its vision for sure, but whether it all adds up in the end to the desired existential effect, I wasn't convinced. It's kind of almost-second-rate antonioni, though it isn't third rate by any means.
What I mean by this is that I felt like the film was groping a little bit for it's existential 'hit'; it covers similar ground to previous antiononi masterpieces - an aimless, meandering quest that the protagonist is only vaguely committed to, waywardness of desire and identity, a listless love affair, beautiful people skimming the surface of life, all adding up to the unbearable lightness of being in modern times. Perhaps it was Nicholson, who at times felt miscast, like he didn't know quite what he's there for, even though he claims it;s his favourite work. Schneider likewise I felt wasn't quite sure what was up, though of course that was half the point, but still...
If you like Antonioni you have to see it, but for me it didn't quite manage to transcend in the way his other works can. The cinematography of fantastically dated European and African locations is worth the admission alone...
Song of Songs (2005)
Haunting compelling and different
A tale of a devout religious girl and her estranged, angry brother who gets into a somewhat incestuous clinch with her, this isn't a film that's too heavy on story. It's more about atmosphere and little details of life. The setting is London orthodox Judaism and its painted as a dry world full of absence and mysterious symbol. It's a dark brooding and intense film - perhaps to a fault - that doesn't give the audience easy answers. At times the claustrophobia of its religious setting is overwhelming, even suffocating. Though there are a few lighter moments and some amusing satire of a closed community.
The portrait of its troubled lead characters almost depends more on the dark, grainy texture of this atmosphere than their actual psychology, which is far from being fully explained. At times the film almost seems to delight in not letting the audience in to its mysteries , the mysteries of the lead characters. But perhaps this is the point. It reminds us that some things remain mysteries; that what we call knowledge is often just arrogance and vanity.
It's abetted by striking, intensely compelling performances from leads Natalie Press and Joel Chalfen. They work well together and as brother and sister seem to inhabit their own private world that we can't quite penetrate.
A perhaps flawed but haunting film that raises questions about transgressive psychology, religion and violence but doesn't necessarily answer them - i think i'll remember it.