Blog

How does one puzzle out the value of a $1.8M western-horror film that BOTH shows the limitations of its budget and transcends them with powerful storytelling? But then again, the low budget may be the foundation of the entire effect.

The movie works, in part, because its production tensions translate well to the narrative tensions.

No budget for horses. . .well have some antagonists steal the horses. No budget for special effects? Well. . .muster what budget there is for a few money shots that will turn the audience's stomach. No budget for complicated camera moves ? Well. . .keep the shots workmanlike but effective. Lean into the story, acting, and sound design to carry the load like a group of pack mules who can still cross the desert.

You get the idea. These filmmakers found workarounds.

BONE TOMAHAWK is a movie this writer had been hearing about for years (it was made in 2015) but only just got around to seeing.

It is well worth the watch for those who can tolerate extreme violence and complexity of tone.

The story feels like the bastard child of…

You can find out more about this famous wonderful international film festival for movie lovers by visiting: https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/ospitalita/

The city of Bologna is famous for many reasons. Its food scene ranks among the highest in the world (it’s the home of ragu, tortellini in brado, and many other dishes that make the mouth water). One can argue it’s the first of its kind: the college town, as the University of Bologna is the oldest college on record in Europe. It’s the home of Giorgio Morandi, the incredible still life artist — the great filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — and the list of things that make Bologna special goes on and on.

Yet something you may not know about Bologna is a magnificent annual event titled: IL CINEMA RITROVATO — a film festival designed for cinephiles. Organized by the Cineteca Bologna, along with many sponsors, the festival programs approximately 480 screenings of rare hidden gems and beloved classics in only two weeks. World-class filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders, Marco Bellochio, Damien Chazelle, Alexander Payne, Darren Aronofsky, and Alice Rohrwacher — just to name several that came this year — attended and introduced either…

This blog is part 3 of a three part series on Italian moviemaker Roberto Rosselini’s famous World War II trilogy-Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).

It should not be a shock that Germany Year Zero is the most brutal Rossellini movie of his War World II trilogy.

Despite having watching a woman gunned down in the street, a man tortured to death, and a priest executed in Rome, Open City, despite having seen two budding lovers killed and then entire families executed in Paisan, the experience of watching the brutal, unsentimental Germany Year Zero still grabs you.

Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero follows young German boy, Edmund, as he wanders a bombed out post World War II Berlin, trying to find ways to help his struggling family. As so many similar families struggle in the immediate aftermath of the war. Edmund’s father is sick and ailing in bed. His older brother, Karl-Heinz, a German soldier, hides from the police and refuses to help the family for fear of being arrested. His sister Eva flirts with the boundaries of being a call girl, escort, girlfriend to get money, cigarettes, resources for the family.

The movie continues Rossellini’s commitment to showing things movies were not supposed to show. The five or six families…

This blog is part 2 of a three part series on Italian moviemaker Roberto Rosselini’s famous World War II trilogy-Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).

Paisan continues the bold and shocking rhythms of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. That is to say the movie is at turns humanist, observant, romantic, serene, funny, brutal, violent, unbearable. Like Jean Renoir in France, Rossellini is a gambler of tone. He seems to understand intrinsically, as Renoir did, that life is NOT one genre. One emotion. One “vibe”. It is instead a horrific sublime cacaphony.

Again co-written by a young Federico Fellini, Paisan is a natural progression, sequel to Rome, Open City. Where the first movie…

The most startling part of watching Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City about the famed Eternal City under the World War II Nazi occupation is that it has lost NONE of its power.

A famed masterwork of the Italian neo-realist post World War II genre, Rome, Open City tells the story of resistance fighter Giorgio and his attempts to evade capture by the Nazis. Giorgi’s life intersects with that of his friend Francisco about to marry a vibrant good hearted widow, Pina, and Don Pietro, the Catholic priest who will marry Francisco and Pina the next day.

Like so many great works, the movie…

The great American movie is made more often by accident than intention. So many creative people want to get at the heart of what makes their country their country. But sometimes you want a thing too bad. Too much. And it comes out overambitious and undercooked. Overwrought and underthought.

But every now and then, a movie swings for the fences, to hit that “what does it mean to be ________” home run and connects with the ball.

Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July stars Tom Cruise as real-life Vietnam veteran turned Vietnam protestor Ron Kovic. And it connects with the ball. It launches the ball past the outfielders beyond the bleachers.

This isn’t a perfect movie. Stone’s…

Have you ever caught up with a movie you had meant to see for years (maybe even. . .gulp. . .decades) and realized, watching, it was the missing link to an entire sub-genre of movies you HAD seen?

Such was the case for this writer after finally watching Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 cinematic frontier crossing The Color of Pomegranates.

A movie “about” 18th century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, it really is more like an epic poetic ode. Busting at the seams with mind-exploding, eye melting, irreducible imagery, The Color of Pomegranates defies easy explanation. The experience of watching it is really what it’s about. Not the story. Not the content. Not the message.

The disorientation it creates puts you into a kind of fugue state. And that seems to be the point.

Once you see The Color of Pomegranates, you understand where movies like…

It’s always a joy to discover an early work by a director and find all the elements of their mature style are nascent and blooming.

Better yet, it’s an unexpected delight when the moviemaker somehow applies their sensibility to something that shouldn’t work for them but does.

Like when French master moviemaker Jean Renoir makes 1931’s On Purge Bebe (Baby’s Laxative in English).

You might scratch your head to wonder what it’s like to watch 52 minutes of toilet humor Jean Renoir style.

And you would be forgiven if you couldn’t quite wrap your head around how the moviemaker behind Grand Illusion, one of the most profound movies on human nature, class, nations, could also be the moviemaker behind a 52 minute broad comedy about how a bourgeois Mom and Dad fight over who’s going to give their bratty eight year old son a laxative because he hasn’t had a bowel movement all morning.

But when you get right down to it. . .both stories are part of a continuum of societal human behavior.

And we haven’t even gotten to the big reveal that…

Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK about New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s real life decision to try to prosecute local businessman Clay Shaw for being an accomplice to a vast conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy is ONE of the great American cinematic works of the 1990’s.

The conundrum. . .the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (one of the quotable lines from the movie voiced by Joe Pesci’s alleged co-conspirator David Ferrie) is that the movie somehow achieves its aim while itself being as factually flawed and manipulative as the supposed cover-up it rails against.

Maybe put another way: JFK is a consummate work of cinematic art that raises vital, important questions about lies sold to the American public while at the same time itself not playing straight with the facts.

This has often been at the heart of the debate of how narrative fiction moviemaking…

This writer is confounded that he didn’t know about the existence of famed Polish filmmaker Kieslowski’s feature Blind Chance until “chancing” upon it on the Criterion Channel.

Kieslowski is a personal favorite moviemaker. His 1989 masterwork The Decalogue (ten one hour movies each dealing with one of the biblical commandments, taking place in 1980’s Warsaw, made for Polish television) is one of THE great cinematic works. And works like his Three Colors trilogy: Blue, White, Red, and his features The Double Life of Veronique and Camera Buff are all incredible and nourishing.

So how did I have no idea about Blind Chance which serves as a Rosetta Stone for all the thematics of Kieslowski’s final, mature period of moviemaking (he was a documentary moviemaker largely until the 1980’s)?

Do you ever feel sometimes like you ARE…