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Reviews
Sincerely Yours (1955)
Not a great movie but lots of music
As a musician I'm nearly always disappointed by films which intend to show musical performances (one exception is the 1947 film CARNEGIE HALL, which is otherwise a poor film). Though I'm certainly not a Liberace fan, I was pleasantly surprised by not just the plentiful musical sequences but that they generally played full excerpts without unusual cuts. Even when there are cuts (as in, obviously, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1), the excerpts begin and end at totally appropriate moments. I gather that Liberace or his brother George (credited as a music director) had something to do with this.
Liberace can't really act (his face rarely shows any kind of emotion), but at least the film is not boring. It's fascinating to watch the color - you almost need sunglasses for those 1950s styles.
Talaye sorkh (2003)
An interesting view
This was a good film, certainly not a great one. Many scenes were way too static without any kind of narrative purpose for their being so.
I sense a lot separates me (and probably most Western viewers) and what's going on in the film--cultural differences. For example, I think I must be one of the few people to realize that the first family to which Hussein delivers a pizza is a Jewish family, celebrating Hanukkah. What is the filmmaker trying to show with this? Is it that Jews--like everyone else in Iran--are terrified of anyone visiting (atypical of practice, the menorah is not positioned in a window)? Or maybe that everyone else is unafraid, except for people like Jews?
Even more confusing to me was the house of the man with the rich family. Are we supposed to look down on them because they are so rich and live in the US? I gather that Hussein's jump into the pool was some attempt at an escape.
But then to go the robbery/murder/suicide....I don't understand the narrative connection or progression between the penultimate and final scenes.
A film worth seeing, but too oblique in what it's trying to convey.
The Believer (2001)
A film about Judaism
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD; DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM.
I'm addressing my comments mostly to the previous poster, FreeAll from Denmark. I agree that the film is not at all about Nazis vs. Jews. Rather it is entirely the realization of an internal debate within Judaism. Perhaps it was not stressed it enough, but the manner in which observant Jews perceive the world is through asking questions. In a very real sense, it is the questions one asks (rather than the manifold answers one can find) that represent engagement with the world around us.
In that sense, Danny is the archetypical Jew, because his engagement is excessive to a point where he does everything better than all around him: He questions more deeply, is more intelligent, he hates more virulently, he acts more openly, etc. He is constantly seeking to do more. (Perhaps this is what attracts Carla to him, since she is also constantly asking questions and seeking more. In that context, their sex is gratuitous.)
One of the scenes in which we see Danny going against this characteristic is the flashback scene of him (as a young boy) running away from his yeshiva, with the voice of his rebbe (teacher) calling him to come back. We see this scene a few times, showing us that this is one case where Danny did not try to probe, go deeper, or face the questions--which is just another way of facing who one is and what is one's place in this world. Avoiding engagement, he ran away.
Thus at the very last scene of the film (if one feels forced to take it literally, then it's presumably the last seconds of Danny's life), we see him finally answering his rebbe's call to come back. But he's not coming back to the rebbe, who he passes several times on the stairway. He's coming back to finally face and wrestle with God, or if you will, to finally face himself and his conflicts. To my mind, that the stairway is eternally ascending, is an indication of Danny's final engagement (read: acceptance) with who he is, for one's questioning of the world around them never ends.
As an observant Jew, and I've seen milder forms of people like Danny, both religious and non-religious. I enjoyed the film tremendously, and wept many times through it, not the least at the final scene. I commend Henry Bean for having the creative zeal to bring this story to the screen, for in a sense, the story is one that is really essential to understanding the conflicts that propel all peoples' lives.
The Gang's All Here (1943)
Worth watching for the dance sequences
There are films whose plots are much worse. At least this film has funny moments with Charlotte Greenwood and whenever Carmen Miranda is on the screen.
But this film is a showcase for the two sequences choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Much has been written about them, but watching them never ceases to stimulate and amaze my senses. Berkeley's sense of space is so elastic -- you feel as if he could pan and zoom through miles of space and fill it with people, trees, bananas, anything! I don't think any of his Warner Bros. films used the zoom camera with as much daring (supposedly Carmen Miranda almost got knocked off the painted donkey during rehearsals of "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat").
What is so special for me in these dance sequences is that the images and music are so well-constructed that you loose interest in following the plot and just revel and enjoy the images. People cease being human forms and become elements of color on a painted canvas, and then resume being human once again. It's all incredibly magical and more abstract than Berkeley had been or was able to achieve in the future. Stunning!
Studie Nr. 8 (1931)
Amazing, enthralling!
When most people think of films, they think of photography of recognizable images and form. This film is totally abstract -- it's all the negative images of chalk on paper (i.e. it appears as white lines and shapes among a black background). But it is simply an amazing and breath-taking excursion into a very different world of cinema, one that is totally guided by image, movement and sound (i.e. music). Fischinger's abstract vision is a continuously metamorphasizing into different shapes tightly coordinated to wonderful music. It must be seen to be believed!
Psycho (1998)
A true misunderstanding of why the original is so good.
The many nice additional touches are totally offset by a fundamental lack of knowledge of what makes the original film so good. Van Sant has no sense of what makes tension and no true grasp of how to use sound and music to aid the story. With the exception of Anne Heche, the entire film is miscast by characters who are inappropriate, unlikeable, and just plain ugly (both their physical appearances and narrative impressions).
At the very least it gives one the opportunity to realize how much of an excellent film the original PSYCHO (1960) remains and why it is part of the cultural canon of the 20th century.