[...]

!!!OFF!!!

I'm leaving for a week or something. You know, holiday. 

Mökki.

This one:

Stay tuned - see you soon.

10/10

Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

Very briefly about a very average documentary. Average in its way of showing a more and more average topic. About the massive transformation of a landscape, about the enormous-, even crazy architectural plans (the world's biggest dam on the Yangtze), about the exponential growing tendency of urbanization (Shanghai's terrible urban policy), about our energy footprints on the Earth's surface (the shipwrecked oil tankers at Bangladesh), ... about the unavoidable end of the world. Sorry, but I have to say it is already an average topic. You might be disappointed in me but I'm getting feel nothing special about this topic. I'm fed up how the American film directors and America itself are treating China. Because - of course - everything here is about China. About their terrible pollution, environmental politics, energy hunger, development spiral, and so on... Very traditional (average) story shown from a very traditional (average) point of view. As I said nothing's new. Like some broken recored.

But the biggest problem is not the average approach but something else.

Somebody should finally answer honestly the question: who made China as we can see now? Who is responsible for their "hunger"? Who showed them how to consume (we need a car, that's basic, but "Oh my God what will happen when all the Chinese wants a car too?")? It's kinda funny how the Western world is trying to plant some guilty feeling into China about their globalizational processes, about their sudden growth. Which is more funnier that everybody knows that these rhetorical techniques are based on our afraids on China's growing economical greatness and importance - which means their growing political influence. These are the real questions, not the didactical (average) pictures which are trying to emotionalize these absolute rational questions via showing some direct (average) parallels for example between the very rich and the very poor Chinese people.

These so called honest and brave documentaries usually forget to find answers to these questions in the background (I mean they even forget to try). They are satisfied with their surface pictures and cliché-dramaturgy. They are effective just like the director's, Jennifer Baichwal's pictures. This time a film about Edward Burtynsky, a photographer who "undercovered" the "truth", next time coming somebody else, and we will pucker our brows and give maximum points on the imdb just to compensate our own guilty feelings. 

I like the idea that we are frightened about the cheap Chinese products. "Made in China" is the devil itself. But we shouldn't forget that We, Europeans and Americans created the circumstances, we made the rules where China had only this chance to grow up next to us. We could label their country: "Made in Europe / USA." 

Somehow I liked the "sad" (average) but talkative pictures about the useless electronic devices which are poisoning the Chinese soil. A camera was panning on them where you could easily read on one of the wrecked panels: "Made in Holland." (see the picture) So, what we really talking about?

Average point for an average film.

5/10

Lora (2007)

Dr. bobbyperu is here:) As I planned, on Saturday I accomplished my PhD public examination, which was - of course - excellent:) The defending party ended with a "problematic" night and total hangover after it, maybe that explains my choice: I thought watching a Hungarian pop-movie is a good idea - half of my brain must be enough for that...

Gábor Herendi's Lora is a very mediocre film. That would be ok this time, really, but the biggest problem is that it wants to be more, and maybe among the contemporary Hungarian blockbusters (haha) it is even not the worst try. Anyway, it seemed as a good choice: I wanted an easier than an easy joint after the academic discussion. I thought I need something completely simple, linear and chronological, since my doctoral thesis was about the film theory of the narrative and cognitive non-linearity, and I have to admit in the last time I became more and more sick after even a single innocent flashback... And then Herendi is coming, and doesn't care with my narrative wishes (not to mention my terrible hangover), and delivers a parallel-non-linear-flashbackish-plot. 

So. what can I do, back to my topic and say like a robot: I believe that there are two reasons for the more and more trendy (and more and more complicated) non-linearity in films:

In a lucky case the non-linear form is in motivated relation with the story. Remember (!) Nolan's Memento? Following the inverse plot the viewer becomes as sick as Leonard, the protagonist with his anterograde amnesia. The same motivated relation is detectable in Attila Janisch well directed Másnap (After the Day Before) too, where we have some kind of unreliable narrator, and we see what he - suffering and struggling with his guilty feeling - wants to "show" for us from the "reality" as it "happened."

Another case when the tricky narrative syuzhet's non-linearity has nothing to do with the content. Usually there are weak stories behind these unmotivated narrative forms; what we see is like a compensation: the dim screenplay tries to come out of focus via the aestheticizing facade of the form.

I think you know already where Lora belongs to. And then I still didn't say anything about the terrible acting (the American actress as Lora is ok, but hey, this dubbing is so brutally amateur!), the wannabe hits as a soundtrack (they are more songs for advertisements than for films), the disgusting product placement (typical illness within the genre in contemporary Hungarian films), the artificial dramatic turns and situations (for example: after the concert the interposing organizer) ...

To see soberly 2/10, yesterday:

4/10

Out of the Past (1947)

"- It's a small world.

- Yeah, ... or a big sign!"

My review won't take too much of your time. The day after tomorrow I'm going to defend my PhD thesis, and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was mentioned in my opponent's feedback. I suppose it is enough reason to write about it now:)

A stranger enters a small town. He is searching somebody, and seems this time he had luck, because one of the inhabitants he isn't a stranger. Jeff Bailey's (Robert Mitchum, one of the coolest guys from the 40s), a small town gas-pumper's hiding is over. His past, namely Mr Whit's (the perfectly mean Kirk Douglas) "long arms" catched him. Mr Whit, who has the phrase "I fire people but nobody quits me." It seems they had some dark business. And Jeff wasn't fired from that. Yet. The "generous" Mr Whit gives another chance to Jeff for redemption. The offer is unrejectable...

The story is classic noir: there are twists and turns, between them the femme fatale who handles the strings of the crime, and a good criminal who has to face with his mistake, with his past (Cronenberg's History of Violence pop up into my mind..). Most interesting is the way how the story told: Tourneur operates with a huge flashback to heightens his film's suspense and with this to delay the answers for the most important questions. Where does Jeff come from? What did he do?

Nothing special "just" a very amusing film from 1947. Mitchum, the screenplay and the perfectly directed plot makes the film well enough to watch (the latter feature made the film important for my defending..).

"A man – trying to run away from his past /

 a woman – trying to escape her future."

8/10

Avida (2006)

"I want to die, but shhh... right now I want to sleep."

Have you seen Aaltra? I did. That's why I started to search everywhere Avida, another crazy movie by Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine. It took a while, but finally I found it. And almost all my efforts paid off.

According to the "story" let me quote the laconic description from the imdb: "The kidnapping of a plump billionaire's dog [it's name is Avida] by a deaf-mute and two ketamine addicts goes wrong." The crazy story tells really about this, but unlike the Aaltra, here the story becomes secondary next to the crazyness. There are similarities too, like a "song-scene": an unbelievable Finnish karaoke-version of a well known song "Sunny" this time turns into an offbeat cacophonic synthetizer-performance. I wouldn't say that this one isn't as funny as Sunny:), but I suppose that the difference between the two songs depicts perfectly the difference between the two films. While the Aaltra's jokes never forget that they are part of a story (two crippled neighbours travelling with their wheelchairs from Belgium to Finland to claim for compensation from a tractor company Aaltra..), Avida is funny as hell too, but the jokes are embedded into a Buñuel-, Dali-, and Jodorowsky-like surrealistic, non-narrative dimension.

Apropos the jokes: You might find them rather disturbing - at least morally objectionable - but they are working unbelievable well (I really rarely burst into laughter during watching a movie, but what else you can do when you see those retards shooting each other with a narcotic ketamine-arrows used for elephants?). Somehow they are very "filmic": most of the time they are using very deliberately the tools of a film language, like playing with the frame, with the deep layers of the shot, with the (dis)orientational possibilities of the establishing shot, and so on. It looks like an amateur, low-budget experimental film, but the truth is that Avida is a well built professional job.

Have you seen playing petanque with plastic chairs? I don't think so. If you're interested in it, this is your movie. Aaltra was better for me (without knowing that this could have 9/10 easily), but if you would like to see a mixture of von Triers Idioterne and a bootleg by Jodorowsky and Buñuel, then you might feel lucky yourself to have these crazy guys (not only the director-duo, but in different roles such names like Claude Chabrol, Mathieu Kassovitz, Kati Outinen, etc.) who deliver such a fun.

WATCH the scene of the dog's kidnapping:)

8/10

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

"Bitter or sweet, most memories become precious as the years move on. This film is a memory – and I am grateful."

As the signature tells these lines are Mark Hellinger's words. But who is he? Good question, because Raoul Walsh didn't deal a card for him in his classic gangster masterpiece, The Roaring Twenties. Instead of taking part, Hellinger created the story, but he was more than a simple screenplay writer. He was one of the first Broadway columnists, a classic hard-drinking, hard-living theatre-journalist, with such a friends like Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and who knows who else. He was authentic.

"In this film, the characters are composites of people I knew, and the situations are those that actually occured."

And Walsh, my favourite gangster film director (with the unbeateable White Heat, exactly ten years after this) delivers the reality what Hellinger imagined, more precisely what he lived through. In the first minutes the wheel of time counts back twenty years from 1938. We found ourselves in a not so shiny April in France. During the WWI our protagonists meet in a bombshell in the middle of a war scene. They are Lloyd the heart of oak lawyer, George the savage guy from a "saloon business" (Bogie again, again, again, and again), and there is Eddie Bartlett, a simple guy from one of the garages of New York (Cagney is perfect as usual). 1919. The war is over, and our heroes return home, to find again their dropped lifes. But when the new decade, the roaring twenties start, they have to continue their well-known game, "the struggle for survive." Unemployment, taxes on the ceiling, prohibition, regression. The almost forgotten veterans are not as welcomed as they thought (familiar?). Everybody needs to find his new role in the changed circumstances, so their lifes starts from different tracks, but in such a perfect screenplay like this we can bet that they will cross each other's paths pretty soon. More than they ever wanted...

The 'roaring twenties' is rather a phrase than a reference to this classic piece to describe the exceptionally hectic decade. There are better and worse explanation about its cultural-, economic-, crime- and politics related historical moment, but if you are tired to study those, this film is a really good choice to seize all its knowledge embedded into a flawless story (Walsh carefully builds the history in the background).

As I said only the screenplay would deserve already 10 out of 10. Cagney's play (he is THE gangster) is the cherry on the top (is it possible that he is a mixture of Robbie Williams and Malcolm McDowell?:)!

!!!SPOILER!!!

Did you realize that in the 30's films Cagney always kills Bogart?

Hellinger had right: "This film is a memory – and I am grateful." Me too!

10/10

Chinatown (1974)

"You're dumber than you think I think you are."

There are thousand definitions of being classic, but for me definitely is the case when I have time to time the feeling to rewatch the same film. Polanski's Chinatown is one of them. A true neo noir masterpiece. Why 'neo' is this noir? I could find thousand reasons, just think on its brave colours (a colorful noir? Yes!), its sexual taboos (hmm, maybe I won't spoil..), its femme fatale's human touch (which makes her story even more tragic). On the other hand it follows all the real noirs' rules with its slow ventillators, venetian blinds, complicated / layered storyline, dense cigarette smoke, sweating foreheads, heroes with accused past, soft hats and white rounded car tyres, where the sneaking in score of Jerry Goldsmith during the credits makes you goose bumps already (It would deserve a separate essay how the tone and the variations of the main theme of the music is changing along our way descending the deepest darkness of the story).

We are somewhere in the 1930's Los Angeles. Jake Gittes, a Marlow-type private eye, who changed a big part from his ancestor's cynism for some blasé attribute (I told you, it's 'neo' already, right after the fatal Vietnam war mixed with Gittes' diegetic dark secret back to his past in Chinatown...) has a new case: Mrs. Mulwray hires him to check her husband who in her opinion is having a lover. An important detail: Mr. Mulwray is a chief engineer of a huge L.A. project "Water and Power." The Alto Vallejo plan is about to solve the water problem of the city ("to keep the desert out from the streets and not on the top of them"). Simple case for the coony Gittes (he defines this extra of his as a "finesse"), he has the next days already compromitted pictures from the "couple" (even the newspaper gets them somehow...:). But the happines doesn't last too long: the next day Mrs. Mulwray is waiting for Gittis at his office with her lawyer. I mean the the never seen before, real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway).

And we are only at the very beginning of it – after some murders happen Gittes gets another assignment, even from the real Evelyn Cross Mulwray. One more character needs to be introduced namely Evelyn's father, Mulwray's business partner in planning, Noah Cross (played by unbelievable complex John Huston, exactly, the film director), who is most likely behind all the mysterious and more and more deadly actions. He gives another assignment for the getting confused but more and more motivated (and involved) Gittes. And I didn't mentioned Polanski's cameo as a "midget" with a knife. Hilariously dangerous with his childish face...

"- May I speak frankly, Mrs. Mulwray?"

- You may if you can, Mr. Gittes."

Of course I won't forget to emphasize Jack Nicholson's figure as Gittes. But I have to say if I would write here a whole litany about his greatness it wouldn't be enough to express his qualities. Some might say that this is his career's main character, which according to his Jack Torrance or McMurphy is rather a brave statement, but I'm not sure if it isn't true.

If we are really talking about a classic film historical masterwork (as we are doing), there must be thousand small stories, gossips, legends around its cultic presence. Next to those I'd like to add my small proud-detail which was mentioned among the extras of the DVD: the novel's and the film's title as Chinatown comes from a Hungarian fellow who was working there and told stories about its strange world to the writer of the original story (Robert Towne).

To make it simple all the enthusiastic gibberish above: Perfect and obligatory.

10/10

I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us) (1943)

"Mommy, are you crying?

- No, why would I be?"

The drama of Vittorio de Sica's neorealistic (master)piece isn't "strong" enough if you compare it with some contemporary attitudinizing Hollywood or even European films. That's why my discreet brackets around the 'masterpiece': if you aren't interested in film history, more precise history of film style, or if you can't enjoy a simple nice story anymore, then change DVD immediately and watch those wannabes like Haggis' Crash or Jieho Lee's The Air I Breathe (here is my not so fawning opinion about the latter one).

This time the adjective 'simple' is a definite compliment. I felt something similar during watching PTA's sober There Will Be Blood - of course its simplicity is completely different, and according to 2007, but the way how their directors touched the different topics and styles is talking about some remote affinity. With even a microscopic amount of irony or cynicism you can easily identify this simplicity with sentimentalistic banality, and probably in some extent you have right (btw after all what you would expect from a European movie from 1943? Check your history books, now). Just sometimes, for your own sake, it is not worth to have right.

The beautifully simple story is about a family, or even more, the Family from some peaceful times. But if just there isn't a war to ruin the harmony, there are adults. Family members. In de Sica's film there is Nina, the beautiful mother, who struggles with her feelings between her family and a young lover, Roberto. Finally she makes a decision and leaves her family. The husband is left alone with his sensitive small child, Pricó (he must be a psychic relative of Rossellini's blond boy, Edmund from Germania Anno Zero). But what is more terrible? To leave them or to try coming back to your left family? The question contains the tragic, especially if Nina can't hide from her smouldering feelings, and when the children are not only looking at our directions but watching us...

Thanks to the Criterion Collection for the restaurated version (2000). Maybe without their quality contribution we wouldn't have a chance to see (recognise for a second) the last scene's literally carried out metaphor about the dissaffected, "cold" relationship between mother and child. Moreover, the icecold blew of Nina is more than an embodied metaphor; it is a perfect proof against those film historians who take too seriously the realistic film language/style of the Italian Neorealism.

8/10 

The Sniper (1952)

Let's start with a longer citation from the very beginning of the story - just because I haven't got too much to tell about this rather simple thriller from 1952.

"High among police problems is that of the sex criminal, responsible last year alone for offenses which victimized 31.175 women. Adequate and understanding laws do not exist. Law enforcement is helpless. Here, in terms of one case, is the story of a man whose enemy was womankind."

This offical-like depressive statement leads in Edward Dmytryck's film about a helpless man who starts to shoot women with his sniper gun. I could say that's all, because the story is so banal and actually doesn't happen anything more. Maybe one thing needs to be mentioned, his motivation which connects to the quotation above: he has built up hatred against women piece by piece, from which the story doesn't show too much. Mr. Miller is a deeply frustrated, misantrophe person already in a beginning who knows that he needs help (see other suffering, self-blaming serial killers like Spike Lee's almost perfect Summer of Sam (1999) or Fincher's perfect Zodiac (2007). The latter one's "zodiac" created puzzles in order to help the police to catch him - while Miller desperately honest with his letter: "Find me and stop me. I'm going to do it again."). Tragically his warning shouts don't reach his psychiatrist but turn into real gunshots. And he is unbelievable, I mean deadly accurate...

If you want to spend a simple but valuable 87 minutes I can recommend it, but I would say maybe it's better to watch - even if you've seen already - Dmytryck's timeless noir classic (again), Murder, My Sweet from 1944. The Sniper is nothing else as a straight thriller made sensitive for temporary social problems (the last frame's teardrop undoubtedly opens the individual tragedy to collective social dimension) of its age.

7/10