victims of war (Film: Frantz – Francois Ozon, 2016)

Posted on August 12, 2017 by admin

‘Frantz‘ is one of those films that follows you long after the screening is over. What I and maybe many other viewers of ‘s 2016 film  will remember years from now will be the silhouettes of the two principal heroes – the beautiful German young woman Anna (interpeted by ) whose lover, Frantz,  fell on the front two months before the end of the First World War and the out-of-world French young man Adrien Rivoire (actor ) who is also an ex-soldier, has met Anna’s lover some time in the past, and comes to put flowers on his empty grave and ease the grief of Anna and Frantz’s parents.  One may say that is a miscast, and maybe this is true, but he is a miscast not as an actor, but in the world his fate was to live in.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5029608/

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5029608/

 

Frantz himself gives the name of the film, as all characters are tormented by his absence, his falling in the war makes him the victim, but actually everybody in this film is a victim of the absurdity of the war. The film succeeds to present in a moving manner how destinies are cut short by war, and how difficult are healing, forgetting, forgiving. It also asks questions about the capability of humans to cope with the horrors of the past – can they do it while facing the truth which is sometimes more cruel than their imagination allows? Or maybe lies are allowed when they can help healing or avoid reopening fatal wounds?

Ozon’s film also carries an anti-war message. The heroes belong to the two sides of a war that created devastation for both nations. One may have been victor, the other defeated, but both countries are in ruins, millions of lives were lost, the survivors continue to carry the scars of the war traumas but also the germs of hate that will be at the root of the next war. The symmetry of scenes and situations may seem demonstrative, but it’s good to remember that blood, enmity and mistrust divided Europe no so long ago.

 

(video source Moviefone)

 

The film makes use of black and white for the majority of the time, with colors inserted in some key moments, without necessarily marking the borders between reality and imagination, past and present, truth or fiction. It was a very good idea in my opinion to avoid the trap of a happy ending and to leave more ambiguity in place, with a mysterious lesser known painting of Manet handling to the viewers the key to what may have happened next. Questions marks are relevant for both past and future.

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graphic novel on screen (Film: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – Mickey Rourke, 2014)

Posted on August 11, 2017 by admin

There are films based on graphic novels (comics books) heroes and action stories and the genre is flourishing making happy studios and fans of all ages. And there are the ‘Sin City’ films which are graphic novels on screens.  ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For‘ directed by (who also created the books that inspired them) and is only the second in this genre. I liked it. I will try to explain the reasons and the difference.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458481

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458481

 

The first thing to notice with ‘Sin City 2’ (as for the first one almost one decade earlier) is that it does not pretend to be anything else that it is. It is a comics story which is directly designed for the big screen rather than for the paper support of the graphic novels. The story (there are actually three almost independent story threads) is simple and relies mostly on action. No psychological or character development is to be expected from its heroes, they are from the first time they appear on screen until the moment they die or the end of the movie (what comes first) ‘The Drunken Righteous’, ‘The Dangerous Vamp’, ‘The Corrupt Senator’,’The Nice Face Gambler’, etc. The actors either wear masks () or they are their own masks (, , , , , ). Most of them create their own characters as graphical novel heroes. The only one who holds some mystery and hides – at least for some time – her real intentions is the character played by . All seem to enjoy themselves greatly to be in the film.

 

(video source Movieclips Trailers)

 

All this concept is supported by a superb cinematographic solution which places the actors on sets that seem to be drawn in comics style and uses mostly black-and-white with touches of selected colors as in the mid 20th century comics books combined with the cinema masterpieces of ‘film noir’ from the same period. The execution is perfect, and the action scenes not only support the stories but also create moments of aesthetic wonder and fit perfectly in the atmosphere. The concept and the execution make of ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For‘ a rare combination of good entertainment and stylish cinema.

 

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men at war (Film: Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Posted on August 10, 2017 by admin

I fail to join the chorus of praise from critics and many film fans for Dunkirk. I came with big expectation to this film, not only because I read the critics, but also because is a director whose work I enjoy, who tries and succeeds to surprise in most of his films, in very different genres. This is why Dunkirk, his tentative in the WWII films genre slightly disappointed me. To be clear, it’s a good film on any scale. It’s just not the best on Nolan’s scale, IMO. I really hope that the race to the Academy Awards is not over (as some predict) and better films will show up in the race for the small statues.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5013056/

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5013056/

 

I am lacking in this historical description the element of surprise and innovation that Nolan brought to films like Memento ,  Inception, The Prestige, or even Interstellar. What we get instead is an almost docu-drama approach to a historical event that is known well enough so that we need not too much background information and we can face the individual destinies of the heroes. I liked the fact that for most of the film Nolan and the authors of the script avoided the heroic or melodramatic approach and presented war as lived by the soldiers, a bloody chaos which found the young men unprepared not only from a military point of view but also from a personal perspective. War is not a collection of heroic deeds but also or mostly a fight for survival. The trap of melodrama is not completely avoided however, and a few scenes to the end seem to belong rather to another film. So does the character of the British navy commander played by – wasted talent. The other actors are less known and it’s better so, as most are supposed to be the anonymous soldiers who fought for their own lives, some of them with success, some with less luck. A special mention for the excellent musical and sound track which helps a lot the cinematography which is also impressive at many moments.

 

(video source Warner Bros. Pictures)

 

At the end of the movie, when some of the heroes make it alive to Britain, the film leaves the personal contexts of its heroes to refer to the political context of the day, which is for us now the historical context. The trains with the survivors just start to make their ways and the politicians already use the events to push ahead their agenda. Their is a gap between the mess that they just had survived, and the words that describe the facts in the newspapers and in the Parliament. It was a necessary gap, however. Big war stories are built of small personal stories, that sometimes include fear and mistakes. The evacuation at Dunkirk was one of the key moment of WWII. The avoided disaster on the beach at Dunkirk prepared the victory on the beaches of the Normandie in the summer of 1944. The saving of hundred of thousands of soldiers after the 1940 Allied defeat in Europe allowed for the men under arms to be spared the sufferings of being war prisoners,  allowed for regrouping of the forces, the defense of Britain and eventually the turn of fate and victory in the war. It was a key moment in the war. That was not enough to make of  Dunkirk a great movie.

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the enemy is not what we believed (Film: The Beguiled – Nicole Kidman, 2017)

Posted on August 8, 2017 by admin

Director has built a name of herself clearly distinct from the one of her illustrious father by describing the world of women, their fears and tragedies, their anxieties and ambiguities, their relation with the world of men and the results (in many cases tragic) of the clash of cultures between Venus and Mars. I expect any of her movies, wherever and whenever the story is set, to deal with these themes. The Beguiled is not exception to the rule, it even goes farther and digs deeper then her previous films.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5592248

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5592248

 

The movie is based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan which was already brought to screen in 1971 by with a cast that included and However, it’s not a remake but rather a different interpretation of the story, told from the point of view of the community of women gathered in a school for Southern girls in Virginia by the end of the Civil War, who save the life of a wounded Yankee soldier they find in the wood near the premises of the school. The whole story builds around the mixed feelings of distrust and human compassion, desire and sexual awakening, social and cultural differences between the wounded soldier () on one side, and the school principal (), her assistant () and the other girls on the other side. That was time of war and that was a war that changed America, in which social and class taboos were broken. The characters came to revelations not only about the nature of the enemy but also and most of all about themselves.

 

(video source Focus Features)

 

I liked the way the story was told and the characters developed, with the exception of the character played by who is supposed to play a key role in the change of pace and perspective in the middle of the action, but offers few arguments excepting her age and appearance. All the other actors – , , and especially give fine performances. Dunst especially grows into a fine actor undertaking more complex roles. The story building is carefully supported by actors work, by the sets (the mansion that hosts the school, the woods around with the nature threatening to take over the building same as the realities of the war threaten the close universe of the girls school), the background sounds of the war. The characters keep a useful dose of mystery for themselves, none of them is a saint or a full devil. They are human in extreme conditions, war made them political enemies, nature made them enemies in the war of sexes, but they find out that the enemy is not what they believed – for the good and for the worse. This story of reprieved passion that turns into historic thriller and horror works well under Coppola’s screen direction. Do we still need to remind which of the Coppolas?

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Holocaust – the story of the people who helped (Film: The Zookeeper’s Wife – Jessica Chastain, 2017)

Posted on August 7, 2017 by admin

It’s not easy to make a good fiction movie about the Holocaust. The story was told many times from different perspectives, it has a well known ending and a definite set of tragic victims and of evil characters. Although the number of movies made annually in the genre does not seem to decrease, there were just a few in the last decades that succeeded to present a fresh perspective, a complex approach and a human dimension that turns the historic tragedy into artistic thrill: ‘Life Is Beautiful‘, ‘Schindler’s List‘, ‘The Pianist‘, ‘Defiance‘. Unfortunately director ‘s ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife‘ is far from this league.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1730768

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1730768

 

The exemplary story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski is worth being told and was already described in books and history articles. Jan Zabinski was the director of the Warsaw Zoo which was famous in the years before WWII both as a place of entertainment as well as a place of research and preservation of rare species of animals. With the breaking of the war and the occupation of Poland, the zoo was closed, and some of the most precious animals transferred to Germany. Jan was a member of the Polish resistance and he engaged in a very risky activity of saving Jews out of the ghetto of Warsaw, hosting them in the zoo and in his home, procuring false identity papers and transferring them to safety. He did this at the high risk for his life and for the life of his family. Hundreds of people were saved by the couple. For their deeds Jan and Antonina were both awarded the titles of Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel.

 

(video source Focus Features)

 

Antonina Zabinska wrote a diary which was forgotten for many decades and American writer Diane Ackerman published a book based on it.  Unfortunately, the fiction film while using some of the factual material in the book does not build a story compelling enough to sustain the story, does not add anything, but just simplifies and romanticizes to some extent the characters without adding any motivational dimension. The best part of the film is the one describing the almost idyllic animals environment in the Zoo facing the brutal realities of the breaking of the war. The most cruel scenes about the ravages of war actually feature the dead animals, while the horrors of the life in ghetto are rather suggested. The decisions of the couple lack motivation, we just need accept that they were wonderful people, we learn late and incidentally about their involvement with the Polish resistance, but on the other hand there is too much insistence in my opinion on the ambiguous relationship between Antonina (good acting by ) and the Hitler’s zoologist put in charge with the Zoo. ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife‘ turns an excellent page of history into just another Holocaust film, full of cliches and melodrama. The story and its heroes would have deserved a good documentary or a better fiction film.

 

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summer entertainment (Film: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – Luc Besson, 2017)

Posted on August 4, 2017 by admin

The first two minutes of ‘s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are one of the funniest introductions that I have seen on the big screen in the last few years. After the next 15 minutes I was starting to believe that I have made a bad decision about spending the coming two hours to watch a childish and soppy comics-inspired action film. What followed developed in one of the good entertainment films of this year, but one that not everybody will like, one that you need to be in the right mood to watch and enjoy. Even the comics-inspired films fans and fans of the series may be split.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2239822/

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2239822/

 

‘s source of inspiration is the comic book series “Valerian and Laureline” written by Pierre Christin and drawn artist by  (with the difference that the heroes of the comics travel in time and space, which does not happen in the film). Most of the movies Besson wrote, directed and/or produced in the last thirty years have three lead features. One is his attraction for teenage heroes (females in most cases) – this is present here as not  the lead heroes but many of the citizens of the world created by Besson seem to be hardly above today’s drinking age if at all. Maybe we are suggested that the world of the future may have found the magic elixir of youth. The other is unrestrained violence on screen, and from this point of view we are treated with a relatively soft version of Besson, with stylized fights at comics level. Last is the visual creativity. From this point of view Besson is at his best, or maybe simply reached the best until now in his career. Compare by example with War for the Planet of the Apes which I saw (and wrote about) last week. Same techniques of creating characters by computer effects enhancing actors are used, but what an explosion of fantasy we have here, conveying the idea of a infinitely diverse universe, a direct descendant from the one in the ‘Star Wars’ series (or maybe the same world of the future). This is combined with the exceptional architecture of the City of a Thousand Planets, whose areas and rooms change every few seconds into new spaces of exceptional colors and forms varieties. Cinematography, Production Design, Art Direction are all breath-taking.

 

(video source Movieclips Trailers)

 

Is the story childish? Maybe, but this is after all the screen variant of a comics series. It actually carries logic, but it’s comics logic, not philosophy. No need to talk in too many details about actor performances – young (a rising actor star whom I somehow missed until now) and do what they are supposed to do and look how they are supposed to look, and it does not matter too much that a fine actor like or a music legend like are present in roles of adults. It does matter however that pop idol joins the team and creates a stellar interstellar (!) dance and music number that is to be remembered. She is part of the fun of this summer action movie, set in a beautiful and dream-like version of the future. A film for young people of all ages.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is easy entertainment, but it is not cheap entertainment.

 

 

 

 

 

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old school cinema (Film: Obsession – Brian De Palma, 1976)

Posted on August 1, 2017 by admin

They do not make films like this one any longer. Usually this sentence when found in the review of a movie is supposed to be appreciative. Not in the case of ‘s Obsession. The film is made in 1976,the year Hitchcock was making his last movie, and owes a lot to the style of story building and telling, and to the cinematographic tricks of the master. One thing is however missing – the element of novelty and permanent search that was characteristic to Hitchcock, which made each of his movie different from the previous. Obsession is a film a la Hitchcock without the surprises. Even worse, without the humor.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074991

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074991

 

The idea is interesting and ‘Obsession‘ may have been one of the first to use it. A rich man’s wife and girl are kidnapped and a fat ransom is demanded. The man (acted by ) decides to call the police, and the story turns into a tragedy when the car with the kidnappers, the wife and the girl explodes in the events following the police action. The hero is overwhelmed by remorse and guilt for his decision to turn to the police rather than just pay the ransom. 16 years later, in the same place where he first met his wife, he meets a young woman with a striking resemblance. He falls for her, and ends by asking her into marriage. Actually, here are some of the good moments of the film. Is he really in love or is the guilt driving his actions? Is he attracted by the young girl  or by the memory of the deceased wife (double role for )? Can the past be really fixed that easy?

 

(video source Arrow Video)

 

All is almost fine with the questions, the problem is with the answers and the way these are given. The way the conflict is solved is predictable in the big lines. There are some surprises at the very ending, they do not change to much of the essence of the story, and make the final scenes very hard to sustain in facts and in the psychology of the characters. In order to present the facts in the past, director uses a technique inside the flash-backs which I did not like too much, probably because it was not built well visually (cannot tell more, would be too much of a spoiler). Techniques from Hitchcock’s films are reused intensively, especially the musical score, but they seem already out of fashion already for the mid-70s. So is the style of acting, especially of the lead character acted by . On the other hand watching is a real pleasure, it is her that maestro Hitchcock would have loved to include in the cast of one of his movies.

‘Obsession‘ fails in my opinion and to my taste first of all because it tries to explain too much. I think that explaining less and trusting the cinema viewers to fill in the missing details would have been better.

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La Grande Nostalgie (Film: La Grande Vadrouille – Louis de Funes, Bourvil, 1966)

Posted on July 29, 2017 by admin

Comedies age. All things age actually, films included, comedies included. Seeing 50 years later a film that you remember having laughed at until falling under the chair (this is a Romanian expression, I hope it’s clear what it means) is risky. The experience was interesting and surely much different.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060474/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060474/

 

Filmed in 1966, a little more than 20 years after the end of WWII, ‘s La Grande Vadrouille represents a certain step in the evolution of the French (and not only French) films about the war that devastated Europe and the whole world. Taking distance and starting to allow ridicule replace at least in part hate and contempt for the German former enemies was not a completely new thing, I can remember ‘s Babette Goes to War which preceded it with seven years. Yet, in this story about three British airmen parachuted in occupied Paris and saved by a band of French civilians including a famous music conductor (), a humble paint-man () and a blue-eyed blonde puppeteer () the enemies are still all bad and stupid. It will take a time for the ‘good German’ to show up in war movies and even more time for the cinematographic acknowledgment of the collaboration with the occupiers. Meantime all French are good guys. Or good girls. Or good nuns.

 

(video source StudiocanalUK)

 

The film enjoyed huge success, it was actually from its release until 2008 the most successful French film of all times. I remember having seen it in the late 60s in Romania, and I read about film fans from China for example enjoying it as a huge success after the end of the Cultural Revolution. To a large extent the success is due to the presence on screen of the two greatest comedy actors of the French cinema at that time – and . Both were huge stars and had brought them together on screen in a previous film, and now wrote the scenario of La Grande Vadrouille especially for them. Most of the time they are together on screen and the comic qualities of the two enhance each other, the chemistry between them is obvious and so is the pleasure of acting. Years have passed and I did not fall under the chair any longer, laughs turned into smiles and nostalgia, and I can also see the naivety of the script and the schematic story line – but it’s certainly mostly me.  The two are again together in my mind, at least for the next 50 years.

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when memories change us (Film: The Sense of an Ending – Ristesh Batra, 2017)

Posted on July 29, 2017 by admin

‘The Sense of an Ending‘ is quite a demanding film. Its target audience is the mature + age, those who have in their minds and souls enough memories that have had the time to be forgotten or intentionally buried. It also demands some patience, as its characters, as many, probably most people in life, do not reveal themselves immediately and are neither exuberant, not very empathetic. It takes time to discover the human motivations of many of us, it takes cinematographic time to discover characters like the one of Tony Webster, the quasi-retired owner of a small shop of vintage cameras in London, who once aspired to become a poet. But then, in cinema as in life, you may be highly rewarded.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4827986/

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4827986/

 

The story, inspired by the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by , puts on screen a slow build-up of the young days of the main hero, who suddenly receives a small heritage from the mother of his ex-girlfriend, probably the great unfulfilled love of his university years. The almost forgotten affair with a girl named Veronica from presumably a higher class family is discovered by viewers and re-discovered by Tony, as his memories come back, some of them extracted with difficulty, exposed because of the need to share and despite the will to leave some of them forgotten. Actions in the past have had unknown consequences on the lives of other. Veronica was some kind of a mystery for the young man, maybe because of the class differences, maybe because men never fully understand women, or maybe because some dark family secrets that are never fully revealed and do not become more evident even after 40 or more years. The ambiguity of the details is part of the reason I liked the story, as in life out of books and screens not everything can and will be explained. However, the pieces of the puzzle come together and build for the hero and for the viewers an alternate, even if partial, version of the past. The final moral of the story is that changing the past can change the present or even the future. We are not only what we wish to be, we are also what our memories determine to make of us.

 

(video source StudiocanalUK)

 

The British style of living and being, its discretion and understatements fit so well this story. Director is only at his second big screens film. I hear that his debut in India with ‘The Lunchbox‘ was kind of a sensation. He succeeds to lead with skill his wonderful team of actors, plays well the card of ambiguity, and seems to understand to details the soul and dilemmas of the characters. Attention however, it’s also a personal story, so what we see on screen is always what the hero, Tony Webster sees, what we know is what he can and in some cases chooses to remember. is a wonderful actor and succeeds with talent and discretion in the lead role, even avoiding from us to become to engaged with him until he deserves it. I can be only sorry that spends so little time on screen in this film, she is an artist I love and respect. Keeping the mystery around her character is however what was required by the script and needed here. The only more severe fault that I could find is that the younger actors playing the decades back flashback episodes do not resemble in physiognomies or characters their older selves. I could not recognize at all ones in the others. This gap left apart, ‘The Sense of an Ending‘ provided me with one of the most sensible and thoughts-provoking cinema experiences lately.

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‘Bad Planet’ (Film: War for the Planet of Apes – Matt Reeves, 2017)

Posted on July 28, 2017 by admin

‘Planet of the Apes’ generated by now enough big screen and TV series film to be considered a genre or at least a sub-genre by itself. While the original series was playing more in the post-apocalyptic stories space with the original movie one of the strong head of series creation, the more recent remake started as a sci-fi thriller. The second and now third film in the series see the two themes converge as enough bad things happened on Planet Earth for mankind to become again endangered species. Actually both apes and humans seem to be endangered in this latest and the two species are caught in a deadly war that may prove to be fatal to both.

 

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3450958/

source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3450958/

 

The premises of the story are similar with the majority of the other films in the series. Humans have made enough fatal mistakes and their psychological, biological, but especially character problems make of them inferior (on the moral if not also on the intelligence scales) to the apes. On the ruins of what was once our civilizations gangs of human survivors and herds of ape survivors fight for their own existence and between them. It’s not a modern war, it’s more like tribal fights.  Which is no less cruel or spectacular in cinematographic terms.

 

(video source 20th Century Fox)

 

When this new series started and I saw the first film (I think that I missed the second) I appreciated the technical performance of making of each one of the apes a character of its own using computer graphics enhancement, but the story seemed thin and conventional. This third film has the same problems, actually it got worse. Visuals are impressing but the story got not only conventional but full of cliches. It’s a deja-vu post-apocalyptic story with religious and moralistic tones, and having it spoken 80% of the time by apes does not make it smarter. Some of the choices of director also seemed to me uninspired. Some of the apes talk a sign language, other a primitive form of the language of the enemy (English, of course). Arms are an odd mix of modern weaponry, tribal bow and arrows and beginning of the 20th century guns. etc. It’s difficult to talk too much about acting, as playing the human model for the apes computer image requires special skills – I assume they are OK as the effect is fine, but it’s not a novelty any longer and the film relies too much on those. So I assume is a fine actor but I need to see more of him, while does what we expect from him in the human bad guy role.

The ending of the original Planet of the Apes was mind-blowing, one of the most memorable final scenes in the history of cinema. What we have in War for the Planet of the Apes is so far from that. The action twist and the meaningful reflection on the future of mankind that were turning the original into a great movie was replaced by a so expected and conventional image with moralistic and religious pretensions. This says almost all about the failure of this film. Faithful fans (and I am among them) will go and see this film. Many will be disappointed, as it is heavy of staff we have already seen so many times. Good cinematography and special effects are also repetitive and cannot save it. One of the characters is called Bad Ape and repeats his name many times in the movie. He may have said ‘Bad Planet’ as well.

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