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Caché
- The title means "Hidden", and contains many levels of meaning in the film, which more like literature than any that I can remember seeing.
As such, it deserves the thought and analysis that serious literature demands.
There is much that's seemingly mundane, small gestures and incidents matter, but nothing is neatly tied together like a mystery.
Even the ending under the final credits is ambiguous, leaving more questions than answers, and one has to be alert to see what's happening in a static shot without the filmmaker guiding the eye.
Seen January 2006.
My highest rating: 10 of 10.
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Caché - The title means "Hidden", and contains many levels of meaning in the film, which more like literature than any that I can remember seeing. As such, it deserves the thought and analysis that serious literature demands. There is much that's seemingly mundane, small gestures and incidents matter, but nothing is neatly tied together like a mystery. Even the ending under the final credits is ambiguous, leaving more questions than answers, and one has to be alert to see what's happening in a static shot without the filmmaker guiding the eye. Seen January 2006. My highest rating: 10 of 10.
The Triplets of Belleville - Catching up on a film long on the must-see list, now on DVD. Animated, and wonderfully put together. The characters are unique individuals: Bruno, the god, is the essence of dogness, driven to bark at all moving things; the bicyclist is all calves, thighs and nose. Is the language French or English? It doesn't matter.
A Very Long Engagement (Dec. 2004) - A complex and engaging story, not always easy to follow, but well-constructed. The scenes of trench warfare in WWI are superbly filmed and represent the horrors of war so much better than the standard heroic films. Highly recommended.
Sideways Nov. 2004) - Two buddies, very different and both highly flawed in their own ways, go off for together for a week before one of them is to marry. The failed writer is heavily into wine, expecially pinot noir, and leads their trip into California's Santa Barbara County. The other is most interested in bedding women before his marriage, with some painful and some hilarious consequences. Well-played and believable, even when the writer seems oblivious to sensuous wine talk from his date for the evening.
It was a pleasure to hear some of my favorite wineries for pinot noir mentioned and their labels displayed.
The Door in the Floor (July 2004) - A writer of childrens' books hires an aspiring student-writer for the summer. The cloud of a car accident that killed two teenage sons hangs heavy over the family, now consisting of the author, his wife, and a young girl. He and his wife are separating.
In the interplay between the author and the student, the film does offer some interesting insights into writing. There is also the fulfillment of every adolescent boy's fantasy of sexual initiation by a mature, understanding woman. Otherwise, it's the kind of film where people will talk more about the acting and character portrayal than the content.
Fahrenheit 9/11 (July 2004) - Michael Moore's film is a passionately biased one, over-reaching at points, serving well-known facts at others, and offering some devastating new examples of the Bush administration as a national disaster. Unfortunately, it will probably preach almost only to the converted. We saw it as part of a knowledgeable and liberal audience.
Goodbye, Lenin! - The story line concerns a woman with two children, a dedicated socialist in the DDR, who has a heart attack just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then remains in a coma for eight months. When she awakes again, the doctor advises that, with her fragile health, she must be spred any shock. The grown children, especially the son, decide to keep the news of the opening of the DDR from her, and seek to recreate the environment around her at home just as she knew it. A friend who is an aspiring film producer is a great help to the son. It all leads to comedy as well some serious moments, as well as some thoughtfulness for the viewer.
The film may have more meaning for me, knowing the circumstances and having relatives from the former DDR, than for other viewers. When we saw it, we seemed to be the only ones in the theater reacting to the comic parts. At two hours, the film would have profited from a bit of tightening and trimming. In German, with English sub-titles with decent translation.
Gloomy Sunday - More of a movie than a film, in German with English subtitles. The scene is a restaurant before, during and after WW II. A love triangle develops between a stunningly beautiful woman who is the hostess at the restaurant, the restaurateur who is almost impossibly kind and understanding, and an ascetic-looking, tortured pianist/composer. The latter writes a bleak song that becomes very popular and, alas, motivates many suicides. There is also a German who falls in love with the young woman, later returns as an SS officer, and yet later comes back to the restaurant as a highly successful businessman to celebrate his 80th birthday. A plot twist at the end ties some loose ends together.
The photography is very good, the characters are two-and-a-half-dimensional, and the song is played far too much. Maybe that's what drove some to suicide.
Elf - Yes, I really did see it. Good fun family fare, for small kids with enough for adults to laugh too. Amazingly, it avoids being treacly. It may become a holiday classic.
Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are among us) - A 1946 black-and-white film on a post-war theme, quite an achievement in itself. The action takes place in bombed-out Berlin, among the actual ruins and dilapidated houses that still stood. The film draws on a heritage of German film-making, expressionist influences are clear as well as almost direct references to Fritz Lang's "M".
There are faults to find - for example, messages are often delivered in an obvious, heavy-handed way. The heroine, Hildegard Knef, is photographed like a film star - she returns from a concentration camp none the worse for wear; when she's cleaning a run-down, decrepit apartment, there's not even a smudge on her face.
The overall theme, of the characters' history in the war, and their post-war reaction, is very important, and gives the film its weight. We have a former doctor who, while in the army, was witness to an atrocity committed against civilians, and is no longer able to function as a doctor. He meets his former commander who ordered the atrocity, and who is now running a successful factory, having brushed aside his past.
Es gibt ein ausgezeichnetes
Filmheft
das den Film ausführlich beschreibt (benötigt Registrierung).
Mystic River - Quite a good film and, being set in Boston, of some local interest to us. A story of three men and their families, unable to escape their background and living by the code of the neighborhood. One is trapped by his childhood trauma; another is a tough, small-time criminal who can kill and steal but looks out for his own; the third is a detective with blunted emotions. A local crime draws them together and apart. There is a vivid contrast between one wife who supports her husband no matter what, and another who does not, violating the neighborhood code and leading him to his eventual fate.
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Lost in Translation
- This film was hyped so much before release and during early reviews that I worried about how good it would really be.
In short, it's worth seeing and highly recommended.
It captures well the dislocation of a sleep-deprived Westerner in the visually and aurally noisy, completely foreign culture of Tokyo.
I can personally vouch for the truth of that feeling of being on the moon there.
The main character, an over-the-hill movie star shooting a Suntory commercial, meets up with a young girl, also from the West, neglected by her husband.
Marvelously, nothing is consummated between them except shared times, some experiences and even lots of silence.
Believably, the presumably worldly movie star seems to revert to a tongue-tied schoolboy.
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The Secret Life of Dentists - An intriguing title, and sure enough, the main characters, husband and wife, are both dentists, and in the same office, too. The husband is the logical, unemotional sort (is that characteristic of dentists, with their precision work?); his alter ego gets a workout hypothesizing about his wife's infidelity. The film is an exercise in non-communication between the two, but that's so excessive that it eventually lacks reality. I'm not sure that seeing the entire film is worth the few nuggets of wisdom in it.
Blue Car - The story of a teen-age girl with a difficult home life but a talent for poetry, a teacher who sees her potential and mentors her. There is a poetry contest in Florida - he yields to temptation and his weakness; she discovers his intellectual dishonesty. The film shows that it's still possible to construct a fine, meaningful drama from human strengths and flaws, rather than contorted plot lines, unreal characters and special effects. Highly recommended.
Nowhere in Africa - Based on the actual experiences and book "Nirgenwo in Afrika" by Stephanie Zweig. A young girl and her mother, part of an assimilated Jewish family, leave Germany in 1938 to join the father who had already departed for Kenya earlier. More at Nowhere in Africa
My Big Fat Greek Wedding Finally caught up with this surprisingly successful film on Pay-per-View. Although it deals with the humor and chaos of excessive ethnic pride, it has the rare sense to stay away from over-exaggeration, pratfalls and easy laughs. It helps to be familiar with a loud and boisterous ethnic culture. Recommended.
The Hours - A superb weave of three separate stories, of three lives at different times, with Virginia Woolf and "Mrs. Dalloway" as the common thread. More at The Hours
Adaptation - A Hollywood screenwriter experiences writer's block while dealing with an unusual script, so he writes himself into it. Should we be interested in his problem? More at Adaptation
In short, fractured reality and time were done much better in "Memento" and "Mulholland Drive". Not recommended.
About Schmidt - It's a story about a very ordinary middle-American man in a mid-Western city just after retirement from a lifetime position in an insurance company. What could be so interesting about a character like this, to an older or to a younger audience? More at About Schmidt
Highly recommended.
