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jonnajureen
Reviews
La otra conquista (1998)
Wonderful!
This is the story of the Spanish conquest and the high price that the Aztecs paid in being conquered by the Spaniards. It is a film that contains a historical event that is not widely known in many parts of the world. The Other Conquest give rise to something that long has been forgotten, twisted and retold and essentially something new! The director Salvador Carrasco speaks in many ways of the price the Aztecs paid, but also of the triumph of the human spirit, similar to the movie Go and See. This movie addresses an interesting subject that rarely has been featured on film and yet is an important part of history, interesting and wonderful production! Coming from someone that doesn't know a lot of the history of the Aztecs, I learned a lot and was inspired to seek deeper. The acting is superb! Action scenes that are almost impossible without computers were accomplished in this movie. They untrained eye may even assume that some parts of this movie were done with special effects, when in fact it was all in the careful filmography.
Dom za vesanje (1988)
Time of the Gypsies
This is a story told in magical realism about a group of gypsies' life in the splintered Yugoslavia. Pehran who possesses telekinetic powers, lives with his grandmother and his sister Danira. He wishes to get married to Azra but her mother won't allow him. When Perhan leaves to Ljubljana with his sister who must have an operation, Perhan is forced into the criminal world and goes to Milan without her, trying to earn capital so that he can build a house. Four years pass and Pehran finally returns home where he finds Azra pregnant with what he believes is another man's child. Azra on the other hand claims that the child is his. Perhan refuses to believe her and reject her in every way. When Azra give birth to the baby, she dies in childbirth. The movie doesn't explicitly suggest that the child is Perhan's, however, it seems to imply that this would be the case. Things such as the apples that were symbolically pointed out as a tie between Perhan and his grandmother in the beginning, now functions as a tie between the son and him. And maybe what is more important is that it doesn't really matter as this point. Perhan is suffering emotionally because of Azra's death and the many incidents that he has been through, and through his telekinetic powers he finally kills his uncle and short thereafter, he is killed himself. What's nice about this movie is that we can see beyond the surface of a people and their way of living. The story is absolutely wonderful, very humorous and at the same time incredibly tragic! It also has a very fine line between realism and fantasy leaning to magical realism. It has some radical transitions where we need to pay attention to what is going on. The progression of the story is very interesting. It starts out humorous and ends completely different, altering between realism and fantasy. In a way, the story itself at the end is back at square one which serves as a metaphor for that this story, which seems so unique probably been repeated generation through generation.
Fa yeung nin wah (2000)
In the Mood for Love
In the Mood for Love, is a story about two people that by an unusual incident finds an unexpected passion, and takes the chance to experience love, maybe for the first time in their life. They two are brought together by rather special circumstances, moving in to the same apartment house where they spend most of their time alone, waiting and dreaming about love. Without knowing exactly how it all started, but at the same time sensing that something is out of balance, they finds out that their spouses are having an affair with each other. While this is going on Mrs. Cheng and Mr. Chow tries to understand the situation and spend more and more time with each other. The movie has many long takes and slow motion pictures. Every scene of the movie is very stylized. In one scene the picture is covered with flowers; the lamp, the glass, the dress, the curtains, the earrings and even the outside on which Mrs. Chan is staring out in! This is a very beautiful scene, hard to miss and very hard to forget. The movements are often very precise accompanied with music and with slow motion scenes. Looking at this movie, one is stuck immediately with the contrasts of yarning and loving, the ambiguity, and the complexity of love itself. One may have expected that the two that meet would develop a very revengeful affair with each other knowing that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. So is not the case. Instead, they develop an honest and very true friendship that has nothing to do with giving back, neither one obliges a role of victims. What's also is interesting is that their spouses faces are not shown one single time in the movie, something that enhances the fact that their relationship is not based on being a fatal accident. There is a lot of attention paid to small details in this movie, for example are there subtitles that pass in front of our eyes. These have no largely significance for the movies narration; rather they fulfill a premise in the movie that also is stated in a key scene saying: "If you pay attention – you really see things". The soundtrack is wonderful and excellent assembles to the story. If you get the chance to experience passion in life- take it and do not feel sorry about it. It is a rare thing and more often, it slips you by chance.
Idi i smotri (1985)
Go and See
This is a war movie without battles yet probably the visually strongest and most interesting movie ever told about the Second World War. The movie too making you aware of that the Holocaust was not the whole story about World War II. Watching this movie, you certainly will use all of your five senses! The movie starts with a very powerful scene where Florya is taken away to a camp in a Belarussian village to serve in the war. Florya is naively excited about going out in the war but as the story progress he comes to understand that war is not at all heroic, neither about glory, but about suffering and death. When Florya comes to the camp as a "new comer" he is humiliated by that he cannot go out in the war and needs to leave his shoes to someone that needs them better. After the soldiers left the camp, he walks into the wood and cries, and meets Glasha who just been left by her boyfriend that is going out in the war. Glosha is as heartbroken as Florya is and in this emotionally loaded scene, Glosha says "I want to Love" I want to have babies" , which are words that capture something that many people probably lost- their hopes and wishes about life and love. Right after they meet, a bomb falls over them. They survive but stick together as long as possible. The morning after, they go home to Florya to find that his sisters and his mother have been killed along with hundreds of other people of the village, lying in a stack just outside his house. It is a horrible scene, hard to stop think about even after the movie is over. Florya not only grows up emotionally but is aging several years in a two days time! The gun that he so proudly carried in the beginning hasn't been used a single time, except in the very last sequence of the film where he founds a portrait of Hitler in the ruins of the village. Here, a montage like scene is tracing back the most significant events of the Second World War, all the way back to when Hitler was an infant in his mother's lap. This is a very memorable scene and the fact that Florya doesn't shoot may have multiple interpretations, especially since the time is meant for us to reflect over this ourselves. However, seeing this scene, you instantly thinking back to the scene in where hundreds of people were locked in a building and killed but a comment from a soldiers says: "Those without children can leave", "It all starts when you are a child", may suggest that Florya's choose to not kill the infant Hitler which would essentially go against such a revelation.
El espíritu de la colmena (1973)
Visually beautiful story seen through the eyes of a child
The Spirit of the Beehive is set in 1940, right after the civil war of Spain. It is a beautifully story seen trough a young girl's eyes. The main character of the movie is Ana, who lives with her father who spends most of his time writing about his beehives and her mother who is writing love letters to a distant lover and Ana's older sister Isabel, all of them living in their own isolated world. One evening, Ana and Isabel goes to the movie theater to see the Frankenstein. While most of the children are terrified by the story, Ana finds it fascinating and is excited by the darker sides of life. At home the same night, Ana asks her sister Isabel why Frankenstein killed the girl. Isabel answers that he didn't really kill her and that everything in the movies is fake. Frankenstein is like a spirit and if she closes her eyes and calls him, he might show up. This has a profound impact on Ana and the story of Frankenstein also come to function as the movies' nave. Isabel takes her to an abandoned building where she says that Frankenstein lives. Day after day, she comes back alone in hope to see him. One day, a soldier escapes from a train and finds the building. Ana finds him and brings him food and warm clothes. Just a couple of days later, the soldier is found and killed. When Ana goes back to the building, she finds only the blood and understands that he has been killed. Here, Ana's world comes into its own and when Ana is wandering the woods at night an inner journey is taking place as well. That night, she doesn't return home. She meets Frankenstein when sitting by a river, just like the scene from the Frankenstein movie in the beginning. Even though the movie is set in the context of Franco's regime, this aspect seems isolated from the story, which is solely a reality told through a child's world, questioning what is right and what is wrong and maybe more important; what is reality. Visually it is beautiful. After returning home the night Ana was found in the woods, she is traumatized and doesn't speak about her experience. In the end, she goes to the window and again whispering to the spirit: "It's me Ana".
Yuki yukite, shingun (1987)
The Emperor's Naked Army marches on
This documentary tells the story of Kenzo Okusaki, a hugely out of the norm, 62 year old man from Japan, that decides to spend all of his time and energy investigating what happened to several of the soldiers in his unit that were executed and cannibalized 23 days after the war was over in New Guinea. Denied by both government and the people involved, Kenzo, 40 years after returning from New Guinea makes this into his one cause, wanting to bring justice to a concealed part of history. In doing so, he shun no means. From the opening scene, we follow Kenzo in his green wagon, beginning with conducting a public memorial service to console the victims who perished for the emperor Hirohito during the Pacific War. He continues his journey with abruptly visit people involved investigating the mysterious death of the soldiers. If they refuse to speak, Kenzo threatens to beat them up- and he means it! Violence is something he means, can be justified if the result is good. All of them tell a different story witch make it a bit hard to understand what really happened but also shows the complexity of truth and memory. In the end, Kenzo opens fire and an Ex-officers son is seriously wounded. Kenzo is arrested for attempted murder and spends the last years of his life in prison in Hiroshima. Kenzo ultimately holds the emperor Hirohito responsible for the deaths of the soldiers. However, by making people recognize the crime and bring it up to the surface, he hopes to be able to prevent war and contribute to a better future and a more responsible mankind. Regardless if he achieves justice, Kenzo's story has been told, a story that probably never would have been told, acknowledged and talked about today. That Kenzo would be a better human being than all of the rest, may in the beginning have sounded as a naively thing to say about yourself, but in the end- he may have a point.