Movies, Drama
Clint Eastwood is now 78 years old. He has directed 29 movies. Some of them are very good (e.g. Letters from Iwo Jima) some of the very bad (e.g. Bridges of Madison County). He works quickly. Yet in contrast to Woody Allen who also makes one film a year, Eastwood is not repeating himself. The reason for this is simple: unlike Allen he does not write his own scripts. When Eastwood secures a good script as in the case of Gran Torino he makes great films. Gran Torino is takes place in a decaying working class neighborhood in Michigan. Whites are moving out and relatively poor immigrants move in. Putting it mildly, Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) is not happy about this development. But after his wife dies, his anti-foreigner sentiments are challenged by the charms of the two teenage kids of the Vietnamese family that has moved in next door to him. Now you are treated to a wonderful story. I don’t want to give it away. Go see the film.Gran Torino
Movies, Phantasy
Zack Efron is beautiful and fun to watch. Matthew Perry is a letdown. But 17 Again has a few good lines. Bride Wars is a real chick flick. Men will not understand what the whole thing is about. Hildegard, a film about the first part of the career of post-WW II actress and singer Hildegard Knef, is not nearly is good as La Vie en Rose, the film about the life of Edid Piaff that I reviewed in an earlier entry.Briefly Noted: 17 Again, Bride Wars & Hildegard
Movies, Drama
Sean Penn is perhaps my favorite living male actor. I see films merely because he is in them. Milk, the interesting real life story of the first openly gay public official in the United States proved that even the most talented actor cannot portray every character. Despite all of his amazing talents, the task of playing a gay man lies beyond Penn’s skills. This is crystal clear at the end of film when we see a snipped of the real Harvey Milk for a mere 30 seconds: Here it becomes painfully apparent that Penn comes no where close to capturing the real Harvey Milk. Penn’s failure is a stark reminder that we all may misjudge the range of our abilities. While the film does a good job in telling the basic facts about the life of Milk, it does not illuminate at all the motive that led, Dan White, a fellow member of the city council kill Milk and the Major Moscone. The ending credits refer to a documentary called the “Life and Times of Harvey Milk.”Milk
Movies, Phantasy
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Hollywood at its best. The film lifts a simple idea from a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into first-class entertainment that touches on deep emotions of the human condition: being in love, getting older, and dying. Hollywood works its magic by hiring great writers (Eric Roth and Robin Swicord) who take Fitzgerald’s plot line of a baby boy who is born old and gets younger and put together a narrative that is much grander than the original short story. Add to this a competent director (David Fincher), two of today’s biggest stars in the leading roles (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), and a team of splendid set and make-up designers. Voila, you have all the elements of a great movie. The only weakness in this production is the editor: The film could have been half an hour shorter. But the production is so good that you can even forgive this weakness.The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Movies, Drama
In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer’s union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff. The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to the beginning of the group in the late 1960s and tells the story of the group largely from the imagined perspective of the terrorists. Breloer’s Todesspiel (Death Game) was compelling because he helped you understand why the terrorist acted the way they did and why the state reacted the way it did. Breloer interviewed the families of the terrorists and victims, as well as the politicians who tried to defend the state against the terrorist group that tried to bring the state to its knees and overthrow capitalist institutions in the name preventing another social injustice on the scale of Nazi Germany.The Baader Meinhoff Complex
Movies, Drama
The opening scene at the CERN physics laboratory where an experiment to create anti-matter (The God particle) takes place is visually stunning. Rome and its Catholic rituals provide a beautiful backdrop for the film. The next two hours, however, are a wild car chase through Rome that I found pretty annoying after a while. The last 25 minutes bring an unexpected turn of events that left me moderately satisfied with the film.Angels and Demons
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