Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Supplementary 5 for week beginning 14/10/2012


Fellini's Roma: Again, my Fellini fandom rests easiest with his unfashionable 70s output. Big, vulgar and colourful as a nouveau riche living room, they are also funny and often surprisingly beautiful. See also Amarcord.









Eraserhead: Nothing has ever come closer to the space between waking and dreaming life than this. Only like anything else that copied it.






Ginger Snaps: Gamechanging reinterpretation of the werewolf myth involves mensturation and the force of youth rather than just lump it all into sexual repression (which is dealt with but in a way characteristic of this clever film). Winning dialogue falls efforlessly somewhere between Heathers and Joss Whedon.Two sisters, caught between their new-age mother, indifferent father and the big bad straightness of high school, meet the werewolf that has been savaging the local pets. But is that an entirely  ... bad thing?

Seek the se and pre quels if you wish but you won't find there what you find here.


The Eye: Pang brothers retake on The Sixth Sense outdoes the original (this never happens in the reverse, when US versions of Asian movies appear), baypassing the BIG TWIST and looking into something even more troubling. At first I was annoyed by what I thought was a big Hollywood ending but now it seems to fit well.




The Offence: Sean Connery bargained with Universal to back a film he wanted to do if they wanted another Bond film with him. Actually, there were two but Polanski beat him to McBeth. The Offence is a mean as mustard story of a detective at critical mass who committs an atrocity during an investigation. The question here is whether police work, all that tough stuff we shy of doing ourselves, brutalises good people or attracts brutes to it. The undeclared centrepiece of the film is a double play of a series of ghastly memories from his career. The first play is images that he cannot get out of his head as he drives home and the second is his verbal revisit to his wife who has insisted on hearing him tell her what's wrong. His account, only ever vocal and quiet, approaches domestic violence. Occasionally stagey, The Offence remains one of Connery's finest hours and an intriguing outing for director Sidney Lumet.

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