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Looking For Richard * Al Pacino * 1996

Pacino as director? Well, he made a strange thing. He wanted to show why Americans have so much problems with Shakespeare and to try to change that. He asked people if they ever saw Shakespeare. Well, with films like “Prospero’s Books” by Peter Green, “Hamlet” with Mel Gibson, “Richard III” by Richard Loncraine who put the story in Nazi Germany, “Orlando” with Tilde Swinton and especially the wonderfull “Romeo + Juliet” with Leonardo DiCaprio, I suppose people who like the more serious films, will have seen some modern versions of the old plays (and there are many modern versions of “Othello”).

Still Pacino made a filmversion of the play “Richard III” and at the same time a documentary about the making of this film. In this documentary you see Pacino questioning people on the street about Shakespeare, his discussions with actors, scholars and other people about the play, the meaning of the text, the interpretation of it, etc. This makes “Looking For Richard” a strange watching experience. In a way “Richard III” is a bit clearer now. What characters are who and how are they related to eachother, what is the background of the story, etc., but on the other side, you get to see only fragments of the actual play, so you do not get into the actual story. In the line of interesting experiments with Shakespeare, this is surely not the most boring one, so should you get the change, just go and see it.

Lilja 4-Ever * Lucas Moodysson * 2002

The Dutch public channel Nederland 3 has an ‘Danish summer’. Two Danish films a week during the summer season. This is very nice, because they show some films that have been on my wish-list for a while. Unfortunately I already missed two of them while I saw others that I had already seen.
“Lilja 4-Ever”, I have known about this film 4-ever! It is a Danish film, but it mostly plays in Russia and it is spoken in Russian. I know only two of the films of Moodysson, but “Fucking Åmål” is in a few ways similar to this one. Lilja from the title is a 16 year old girl living in Russia. In the first scenes we see her mother take off to the USA and leave Lilja behind. She now has to rely totally on herself. Her aunt puts her in a crappy appartment, but since Lilja still goes to school, she has no money for the rent or food. This soon becomes a big problem. Together with her much younger only friend Volodya Lilja dreams of better times. This seems to happen when Lilja meets Andrei, but things do not turn out exactly as she hoped…
This film shows the desperate situation in a poor, annamed Russian small town in a rather confronting way. You can quickly see where things lead to, but I won’t give that away here. A fact remains that like “Fucking Åmål” again presents a confronting view on the hard life of a teenager and this time put things in a bigger perspective to at the same time put a serious worldwide problem to question. A good film, but definately not a nice watch! <15/8/05><3>

Lila Dit Ça * Ziad Doueri * 2004

Chima is a dreamy young man of Arabic origin with a Muslim background. He lives in a dreary suburb of the French city Marseille. He falls in love with Lila, a girl with a daring appearence and a dirty mouth and mind. Chima finds himself balancing between two extremes. His mother finds the girl improper (and her husband also ran off with a French woman), his friends first want to get to know her, but when they fail, they say Lila is a whore; but still Chima is attracted to the girl and struck by her frankness. Eventually things go expectedly wrong.

“Lila Says So” is a typical French drama about two youngsters discovering sexuality from completely different starting points. Nothing really happens and the film calmly flows towards a predictable end. Good acting, a simple but effective story. A nice film to see some time.

La Ley Del Deseo * Pedro Almodóvar * 1987

law of desire

The film director Pablo seduces young men of which two fall in love with him. Since Pablo is no man of relations, he keeps both of them at a distance, but one of the young men can’t stand the situation. Quite a dull homo-erotic film. I recently saw something similar, but in that case I turned it off after half an hour. This film of Almodóvar was not that bad, but still not too interesting either.

Levity * Ed Solomon * 2003

The director of the terrible “Bill and Ted” films made a nice drama with a bunch of famous actors. Billy Bob Thornton is Manuel Jordan, a man who spend 23 years in prison because he shot a man during the robery of a shop. Being released he searches for redemption. He comes back to the city where he used to live and finds himself running into the rotten spots of society. The film touches on several problems of our society without becoming to heavy or moralising. There is a disco where people use too much drugs. There are two gangs fighting eachother for nothing. A local ‘priest’ (a wonderfull part by Morgan Freeman) turns out to be a criminal. Then we have Jordan himself who tries to make sense of the world that he lives in and especially his feelings of guilt. The film may be a drama, but there is also room for humor, especially Thornton’s extreme ‘dryness’ is great. A very nice film.

De Legende Van De Bokkerijders * Karst van der Meulen * 1994

When I got these TV-series on DVD, I thought that it was one of these old Dutch series now available on DVD. This Dutch/Flemish series even look old, but they seem to be of 1994, Van de Meulen’s last work even. The series give an over-romantisized vision on the famous “Bokkerijders” (in nowadays spelling this would be “Bokkenrijders” btw.) gang. “Bokkerijders” literary means “goat riders”. Like in the famous song “Goat-riders in the sky”, this devilish gang would fly through the nightly sky on their goats. Myths were spun around the theme, giving the goat-riders many elements of the “wild hunt” in which Odin/Wodan leads his army of the dead through the sky in certain times of the year. In fact the “Bokkerijders” were a violent criminal gang (or gangs) that ravaged the Dutch province of Limburg (and Noord-Brabant and a part of Flanders according to some) in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The trials are quite well recorded and the criminal acts documented (usually violent robs of churches and farms). The “Bokkerijders” supposedly swore on “the dead hand” and they had a pact with the devil, they appeared out of nothing and disappeared into thin air. That is why ‘the devil thing’ I suppose. The “Bokkerijders” already got romantisized elements during the Romantic period and more so in more recent times. To speak with the Dutch scholar of folklore Gerard Rooijakkers, the bad elements in our folklore that we cannot get rid off, are romantisized and re-used to make them harmless. The violent gang of the “Bokkerijders”, became fighters for the weak and poor and against suppression of the Austrian leaders and the Church. This is the version that you will get in these series. Amusing, not boring, another well- produced Dutch series about the Middle Ages and in this case, adding to the mystifying or a dark element of our past.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen * Stephen Norrington * 2003

Contrary to what I thought, this film has nothing to do with the famous BBC series “The League Of Gentlemen” (which I never saw…). As a matter of fact, the film is supposedly based on a comic, so in this regard it set a trend. The film is some kind of Indiana Jones struggle of good against evil with characters from English literature. The stages often come too obviously out of a computer, is this done on purpose or wasn’t there enough money to make things look better? Oh well, the story is thin and predicatable, the action and special effects poor. Not boring, but nothing special either.

Lad De Små Børn * Paprika Steen * 2004

aftermath

Another film in the Danish summer series of the Dutch public television. This is a hard film to review, because the essential ingredient is something that you are left to guess for in the beginning. It becomes clear rather soon, but I wouldn’t want to give it away aforehand. The film begins with scenes of people who on first sight have nothing to do with eachother. Obviously something terrible has happened to some of them. The film tells the story of these two people process the events and how people in their neighbourhood stand in the situation. This isn’t a particularly joyfull film, but quite a nice one to see some time. -14/8/05-

Kunpan * Tanit Jitnokul * 2002

According to the back of the box this is the Tai reaction to “Gladiator” and the film has “massive battle scenes”, but that was not the reason for me picking it out. Also I doubt that people who like “Gladiator” will automatically like this film. It is far too strange! The film is about a young man whose father was executed after failing to bring an order of the king to a proper end. The boy gets an aduction and follows his father as a leader in the army. He is ordered to knock down a rebelion, succeeds and gets all the glory. Before, he had married a beautiful girl, but a rival marries her in the time that he is away. Coming back, the frustrated Kaew (who has received the name “Kunpan” for his deeds) looses his mind over this fact and turns to black magic. This eventually helps him to become a good man again.

The film is largely a drama where two lovers can’t reach eachother, later do, but loose eachother again. Then jalousy and revenge arise. Here and there there are indeed battle-scenes showing the great leadership of Kaew and his father and at the end Kaew’s son, but don’t hire this film for these few short scenes alone! Then there are very strange and sometimes dark scenes about rituals and magical actions and you get to see how magic was used in battles.

A strange mix of different genres, not totally convincing, but surely not disapointing. Spoken in Tai by the way.

Der Krieger Und Die Kaiserin * Tom Tykwer * 2000

What a strange translation of the title in the international version. “Der Krieger Under Die Kaiserin” means “the warrior and the empress” but the English version is called “The Princess And The Warrior”. Anyway, this is the film that Tom Tykwer made after his wonderfull “Lola Rennt” (Lola Runs).

“Der Krieger…” is a fairytale-like film in which Simone/Sissi (Franka Potente) is run over by a truck caused by the chasing of the criminal Bodo (Benno Fürmann). ‘Accidentally’ the two ‘meet’ under the truck, Bodo saves Sissi’s life and disappears. Sissi turns out to be born in a mental-institution and became assistant. She can’t get over the idea that the meeting wasn’t accidental and she goes to look for Bodo. At first he doesn’t want to see her, but in the end all turns out fine, however also this is relative.

Obviously the idea behind the film is “nothing happens without a reason”. “Der Krieger…” is very slow, totally unlike “Lola Rennt” but charming and beautiful.