Reviews
Lola rennt (1998)
those pants
This very enjoyable movie has been analyzed to exhaustion by the above contributors, so I'll just make few comments, if you don't mind. Lola runs in desperation, but she is wearing the ungainliest of pants to do so. She is rather thick hipped for the task, and I don't think it's an accident that the actress who plays Lola really doesn't conform to the stereotype of a slim-hipped swift sylph outrunning fate. In the opening scene, Lola is thrust into a crisis (the one unvarying element of the plot). Her costume leaves her ill-equipped to surmount Manni's impending doom, yet she somehow slogs through it all. Two other cryptic elements that appear in each plot variation are the vicious dog and the its owner on the landing outside her apartment door, and the pane of plate glass being carried by the uniformed workmen across the street. Any interpretations?
The Fly (1986)
Metaphor of Technology
OK, think about it. You're using the latest advance in technology to transport information right now. Suppose somebody came up with a technological method tomorrow to transport any amount of matter from one place to another. Not two dimensional text or photos, but three dimensional objects. Food, clothing, machinery,even people, transported electronically. No more airlines, trucks, automotive industries, OPEC, Middle East crises, on and on. Hasn't the aim of technology (since Faraday) been to organize "essential" matter? Starting with manipulable electromagnetic waves to form impulses into telegraphic and then radio waves, technology has sought to shrink distance. Seth Brundle's (fictional) invention is the logical outcome of this quest. The joke to this theme is in the title. The "fly" is the proverbial fly in the ointment. The dark side of technology is it's capacity to inflict massive suffering on humanity, in the form of war machinery, totalitarian regimes, and biomedical disasters. The author of the original story, "The Fly", had a prescient understanding of the runaway obsession with technology we are now caught up in. How many dotcom commercials have you seen or heard lately? Get ready, the fly is about to hatch.
Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
BOOORRRRINNNGG!!!!!!
In the '50's, TV was wrecking the movie industry, so the studios fought back with gimmicks like 3-D and bloated studio set pieces like "Around The World In 80 Days." There is nothing to this vapid marathon of cameos and strenuous set designs in the way of emotional concern for the characters or a feeling of a time and place long gone. This film is unwatchable after an hour, but it won the Oscar for best picture anyway. Which goes to show that the Academy was rewarding mediocrity back then, as it does now. (Recent winners: Cher, Kim Basinger, Roberto Begnini.) Not that there weren't some great films in '56...Friendly Persuasion, Giant, Kiss Me Deadly, The Killing, Rebel Without a Cause, Baby Doll...but not this indigestible tripe.
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Movie gangsters
The first time I saw this "gangster" movie, I was amused by the argot strewn dialogue . Phrases like "What's the rumpus?" and "Always with the high hat" aren't heard in too many crime films, where verisimilitude is considered necessary for a "realistic" depiction of criminal enterprise. The setting seems to be some mythical second tier city with little connection to a larger crime syndicate, and the period seems to be perhaps the twenties, with some of the cops still wearing handlebar moustaches. If you've read anything about the Coen Bros., you know they grew up as film junkies, enamored of Hercules movies and Don Siegel style '50s B flicks. "Miller's Crossing" is a thesis movie, a comment on the remote, mythical world of film, with little regard for any kind of faithful depiction of American crime. In this regard, it has a lot in common with the works of Sergio Leone. The "Danny Boy" sequence is one of the few examples in recent memory of a scene in a movie that clobbers you with its greatness before you are told by some film critic that it is a valid "great scene."
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
not much
Close your eyes when Judi Dench speaks and I think you'll hear strong echoes of Bette Davis. As in "The Private Lives Of Elizabeth and Essex" and "The Virgin Queen." Paltrow deserved the Oscar. The final scene in this movie hasn't been mentioned much in all the user comments I've read. It is a profound metaphor of art's relation to humanity. I think anyone with a literary bent could unleash a torrent of interpretative explication on it. So, here goes nothin'. The shipwreck is Death, the drowning victims are the innumerable generations of nobodies lost to History, and the survivor, Viola, is the Muse (Art), who, like her twin sister, Hope, [another survivor, trapped in the safety of Pandora's box,) crosses the barren wastes of chaos to the fertile forests of meaning and redemption. If you study the composition of the closing shot, you'll see that the credits{text, language,} are superimposed over the treeline in the middle ground, while the strolling figure of the Muse {Viola} traverses the barren sands {chaos}. If Shakespeare is considered as the great organizer of experience, then this scene invests his works with an organic fecundity that resonates throughout the ensuing historical attempts of war and capitalistic endeavors to stave off the inevitabile triumph of Thanantos. Marcuse and Norman Brown are revving in the soil right now, I'm sure...
Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)
Look For It
Yeah, I know, Scarlett O'Hara's favorite maxim. If by some weird set of circumstances this thoughtful little gem shows up on your TV after the latest infomercial, tape it, go to bed, and sometime when you're in the mood for some reflective film watching, shove it in the VCR maw. Steve Cochran plays a really dumb guy who gets entwined with Ruth Roman's cynical, smart loser dame through a series of preposterous events. If J. D. Salinger had written a crime film, it would have probably turned out like this. Why are films like this so hard to find? Other '50's obscurities worth checking out: Eight Iron Men; Kiss Me Deadly; Rogue River; Violent Saturday; Blood And Steel; Paratroop Command; Convicts Four (actually '62, but a great prison film.) I give up, nobody seems to remember anything about movies since 1980 anyway.
Cobra (1986)
Neo-Jacobite Polemic
Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous maxim, "The world is all that is the case" echoes like a Himalayan avalanche throughout this enraged paean to loss and justice. With a reticulated mandible declaring his Romanesque nihilism, Sylvester Stallone wanders like a hybrid of Diogenes and Camus through a landscape of indifferent carnage, shadowing a Nordic Eurydice for a chance at absolution. Killing is as bereft of moral resonance as a cow on its way to the Arc de Triomphe, and bullet wounds erupt like a tapestry of wanton abstract expressionist canvases gone homicidal. A cinematic tabula rasa would provide an anodyne therapy for this trip. Or, as Chester Conklin once expounded, "I stink, therefore I'm ham."
C'est arrivé près de chez vous (1992)
confused
The opening scene of the killer garroting a woman on a train sure got my attention. I guess this is supposed to be a satire on cinematic violence/voyeurism, but this ironic attitude towards violent death is starting to spill over into real life. Moral novacaine. Burn the damn thing...
The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)
Lost Classic
I saw this one when I was 12, at a theatre that was condemned two months later, and even then the connection wasn't lost on me. This was a film that came out around the time of the famous Topps bubble gum cards "Mars Attacks", and Herschel Gordon Lewis' "Blood Feast." Back then (1963) graphic gore wasn't too common, and the Legion Of Decency still had a lot of clout over young Catholic midwest minds. "Brain" was a black and white preview of the drug drenched hell soon to engulf America, with the mad scientists' Dwight Frye-like assistant getting his arm torn off by the monster locked in a closet, and staggering along a wall, leaving a bloodsmeared trail behind him. The monster was incredible! He wore a white Oxford businessman's shirt, he was bald, with one eye about four inches higher than the other, and I'll never forget the scene when he ripped the mad scientists' tonsils out of his throat, and held the quivering gelatinous mess up to the camera. I've looked for it on TV, but haven't found it yet. A forgotten classic of '60's trash.
Captains Courageous (1937)
What about Tracy?
So who cares about Freddie Bartholemew? I can't think of another actor who can deliver a line with the sly irony Spencer Tracy uses to disarm the "upperclass" (no class) little punk he picks up in the sea. Tracy's Manoel is the voice of working class common sense that has been lost in today's Wall Street smothered Al Bundy idiot characters we get in the movies and TV. While I'm ranting about Tracy, if you want to know what GREAT acting is, watch the courtroom scenes between he and Frederic March in "Inherit The Wind."