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Reviews
Mare of Easttown (2021)
Scripting by numbers
How did they manage to stuff so many cliches and forced plot twists into just 7 episodes? If there was an award for that, this would be a shoe-in. Ms Winslet is fine, as always, but I don't feel she had much to do here; or maybe she did, but it couldn't compensate for the Screenwriting 1010 script. Very disappointed.
Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit (2016)
This is really good
Very thought-provoking and personal analysis on what Rome was and meant. This is Mary Beard's show: she's not just presenting it, and it shows in the joined-up thinking, sustained arguments and overall thesis. The antithesis of those annoying History Channel 'docs' that give you content by the teaspoon mixed in which visuals/filler by the bucketload, and from which anything that might be construed as an 'opinion' has been carefully sifted out.
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019)
Thought I'd watch 5 minutes before bed, watched to the end
This just blew me away. I watch films at home mostly now, which can lead to bad habits: file hopping in place of channel hopping, never settling in for the duration. But this grabbed me and wouldn't let me go like nothing else has for a couple of years (I think Toni Erdmann was the last one that just grabbed me by the scruff of my neck). I'll be watching it again tomorrow night.
It really is a masterpiece.
They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
WW1 helped put an end to Victorian jingoism: why has this film resurrected it?
The opinions we hear at the start of the film accurately reflect my understanding of how many people thought before the War: Britain was somehow 'special' and it was their 'duty' to fight for King and Country. You can see such attitudes expressed in the early works of the War Poets, for example.
But the experience of war quickly put paid to these views: British, German and French died the same, fought the same, despaired the same, went mad, got shell-shocked the same. There's nothing special about any nation when the shells start falling. And it's clear the soldiers quickly started to doubt why it was their duty to die for a King, a Country and an officer class that did little but despise them--hence the wave of revolutions that followed the war in many countries, the rise of the Labour Movement in the UK, the growth in trade-unionism and worker organization.
Where were the voices of the men who called the war into question? Obviously, the deserters and the mutineers weren't around to lend a sound-bite for the film...
I'd like to know when the sound recordings were made, though--I'd say perhaps during the next war, when patriotism and the rest of it came back into fashion.
So, while this film is a technical triumph, it is nonetheless a disgraceful resurrection of the sort of wrong-headed, God was an Englishman nonsense that the war it depicts largely put paid to.
Shame on the makers for feeding into such an unwelcome narrative.
Nonostante le apparenze... e purchè la nazione non lo sappia... all'onorevole piacciono le donne (1972)
A 48-year-old political satire (with a sexual theme) that's still funny and sexy!
This film is still hilarious and sexy as hell 48 years after it was made.
For an Italian political satire/titillation vehicle, that's a hell of an achievement!
A happy punter.