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drama

Il Conformista * Bernardo Bertolucci * 1970

An old Italian film about the times that Hitler started to reign over Germany and Mussolini over Italy. The film is about an Italian secret agent who became a fascist at a quite early age. He marries a naive young woman in his aim to become ‘normal’. Their honeymoon is to Paris, but Marcello’s actual assignment is not pleasure, but the assassination of his old philosophy-teacher Quadri who fleed Italy when the fascists took over power. The professor’s wife is Anna Quadri old love who also enchants Giulia, Marcello’s wife. Eventually the killing of both the professor and his wife take place, Giulia finds out at around the end of the film the fascist regime falls and Marcello looses his conviction.
An old film, eh? Not too great.

La Classe De Neige * Claude Miller * 1998

“La Classe De Neige” (“snow class”) is a French film that is compared to the brilliant “The Butcher Boy” by Neil Jordan (1997). Indeed both films are about unwordly young boys living in a violent fantasy world. Where “The Butcher Boy” is a grim comedy “La Classe De Neige” is more of a drama.
Nicholas is a boy with an over protective father and will go to the mountains with his school class to sky. His father doesn’t trust the bus-driver and wants to bring Nicholas himself. The boy leaves his bag in his father’s car and shy as he is, he has to loan pyjamas from a class-mate. This is the wild Hodkann but different as they are, they become friends. Nicholas has frightening visions/dreams and a vivid imagination and just as his head must seem, it is hard to tell what is truely happening and what is only inside Nicholas’ head. All over the film suggestions are made about the boy’s father, but only at the very end you will get to know if Hodkann’s suspicions are correct.
All in all a nice movie, but I like “The Butcher Boy” better.

Charlotte Gray * Gillian Armstrong * 2001

Hm, Cate Blanchett even got me to watch a war-movie, a genre I am not fond off. I thought the story was different when I rented this film. Anyway, Charlotte Gray is a Brittish woman who used to study in Paris. In WWII her boyfriend -who is a pilot- goes down in France and Gray voluntarily leaves her own country to try to help to win the war as secret agent in France. Some not too sensational adventures take place. I think this film wants to show how a normal person tried to help in the war and did not come out too heroic. Not that this is a boring film by the way, but it is just a drama.

Breaking The Waves * Lars von Trier * 1996

A cheap DVD was made available just before “Dogville” came into the cinemas. “Breaking The Waves” is also a long film (158 min) and also divided in chapters. Also it is not too cheerfull and a bit too long.

Bess is a girl that is “not right in her head” who grew up in an extremely religious community in Scotland. She marries a ‘man of the world’ from an oil rig who gets paralysed after an accident. Bess’ faith in God (who she speaks with) and Jan (her husband) is tested.

Good acting, original story, but a bit too long.

Bound * Andy and Larry Wachowski * 1996

Shame on me! I hadn’t heard of this movie I believe until recently. It is made by the brother Wachowski who later made the brilliant sci-fi film The Matrix. Bound is very much different from that film though.

Bound is an intelligent thriller with a very good story. Often it is compared to Seven, The Usual Suspects, etc., but I don’t agree with people who say that. Where the other films make you wonder “whodunnit” until the end, in Bound this is obvious from the first second. Also Bound is just a story in one line with here and there a flashback, but nothing going back and forth to make you confused.
The story is about the beautiful ex-convict Corki (Gina Gershon) who is seduced by the also beautiful maffia wife Violet (Jennifer Tilly). Violet has grown tired from the violent maffia life and wants to get away. She seduces the just-out-of-jail Corky who got some plumbers-work in the appartment next door. The plan is to get the 2 million dollar that Violets husband Ceasar (Joe Pantoliano) has to give to the big boss Gino Marzzone (Richard Sarafian) and put the blame on someone else, being Marzzones son Johnnie (Christopher Maloni). Of course the plan doesn’t work out the way the women wanted, which makes the story turn and twist in unexpected directions.

All in all quite a nice film, but I don’t think it’s all that special.

Bom Yeoreum Gaeul Gyeoul Geurigo Bom * Ki-Duk Kim * 2003

spring, summer, fall, winter… and spring>

This is the second film of Ki-Duk Kim that I see and comes closer to what I expected when I bought “Seom”. “Spring, Summer…” is about a monk who lives on an artificial island in a lake (again!) with his pupil. He teaches his pupil the lessons of life. When a sick girl of the pupil’s age comes to the monk to be cured from her illness, the pupil and her fall in love and the pupil eventually follows her to ‘the world of men’ only to return disappointed. “Spring, Summer…” is a very slow film with beautifull images and (Buddist) lessons for life. This is a very ‘spiritual’ film shot in a ‘meditative’ style. Some aspects of “Seom” come back in this film, but not the ‘gory parts’! A very nice watch, available on DVD for a very nice price.

The Belly Of An Architect * Peter Greenaway * 1987

For a Greenaway film, this one is very ‘normal’. The film has a story which is shown chronologically, there are no stretched scenes with repetative music, no picture-in-picture or strange montage, no explicit nudity or absurd sexual moral (only a wife cheating). Fortunatly it does have a Greenaway atmosphere, but not too much. I think this is a Greenaway for a larger audience.
Stourley Kracklite is an American architect whose lifework is an exibition about an obscure but influential French architect. The final stage of the work is the preparation of the actual exhibition in Rome, but this soon proves to be Kracklite’s end. His wife leaves him, he gets very sick and looses control over the exhibition.
“The belly of an architect” is a nice film which is completely covered by the title. Nice, but for Greenaway standards maybe too normal and average …?

Anna and the King * Andy Tennant * 1999

I remember that when this film played in the cinemas, I was in doubt whether or not to see it. Jody Foster usually is alright, but she didn’t make me watch “Panic Room”. I like historical films, but the critics probably kept me out of the cinema-rooms. Now it was on TV, so…

Not a very original story! An Eastern king wants his son to get a Western education, so Foster leaves her Brittish colony in India with her son for Bangkok to teach the Kings son. Of course things don’t go too easily, especially when political affairs interfere with the relationship. So the result is a historical drama that is certainly not boring, but also not too exciting.

Amores Perros * Alejandro González Iñárritu * 2000

A long and rather complex Mexican drama. “Amores Perros” tells different stories, but has one central point: a terrible car-accident with which every person in the film has something to do in one way or another. Two and a half hours is not too long, but it could have been less. A nice film with different sides of Mexican life.

American History X * Tony Kaye * 1998

I had wanted to see this film for some time, but it took a while because it didn’t really have much ‘priority’. Eventually I did see it.

As most of you probably know, this film is about a family with a skinhead oldest son (Derek) with heavy influence on his younger brother (Danny). Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) is a very intelligent boy who developes very rascistic ideas under influence of his father who is a a firefighter. When his father got shot during work, Derek flips out and becomes a skinhead. Under presure of a man named Alexander Cameron (Stacy Keach) Derek starts a skinhead gang as he as charismatic intelligencer gets a group of “frustrated and impressionable kids” together. The group developes a liking for nazi symbology and the rooms of the kids and the tattoos they get are in that very vein.
Somewhere in the film, the younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) tells his older brother something after there was a big fight on the table with the new friend of the mother. Derek shoots and kills the black man who either shot his father (or Derek accuses him of that) or who tried to shoot Derek himself, I didn’t really get that. Anyway, Derek is immediately arrested and has to spend three years in jail where he undergoes a 180 degree change.
The film is told in flashbacks from the time on that Danny wrote an essay about “Mein Kampf” on the day that Derek is released from jail. The flashbacks are in black and white, the ‘normal’ scenes in colour. Danny gets a choice from the charismatic, black principal (Sweeny (Avery Brooks)) of his school: either getting kicked off school or write an essay about how his brother ended up in jail. What Danny didn’t know was that Sweeny and Derek had met several times in jail and that Derek had turned around in ideology.
What Derek didn’t know was that he reached some kind of cult-status while being in jail for what he has done. Getting out he tries to ‘save’ his brother, himself and his family.

The film depicts things totally black and white. In the suburbs where the Vinyards live are black gangs and white gangs, the white gangs seem to be all skinheads. Also in jail the white men are full of tattoos of swasticas and without hair. On the other hand, the film does show quite well how youngsters get these ideas, they are “frustrated and impressionable” and they need only one person with a quick tongue to tell them what to think and to do.
The film is too moralising and there is a way too thick sauce of over-emotional finger-pointing over it. What is rather ‘unamerican’ is that there is no happy end and the end is even open.

All in all a not too great film, but rather amusing.