Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
I thought this was an enjoyable film with a lot of positives, the two performances were really strong and there is a sincerity about the film which I think is important to the story. The film opts to tell the story without any distractions with production design, and the photography is nice and pretty like paintings, but at the same time it felt quite straightforward to me and I was left wanting more. Some more thoughts
here.
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, 2019)
I've talked about this on here a bit already, as it's something I enjoyed a lot. Very vibrant and fresh, it embraces its wackiness and confidently mixes different genres in a way that's very entertaining. It works on both as an immediate story of revenge and as a great parable for the world and some of the dangers we face. Some more thoughts
here.
The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
MUBI have recently put up several films from Joseph Losey, a director who I was previously unaware of but someone who I would now consider myself a big fan of. This was my first foray into his filmmaking and what a great film it is! What stands out is the cinematography of the film and how Losey switches between different spaces in the house, using depth of focus, reflections in mirrors and other objects to really build a strong sense of spatiality within the main house and create a load of tension between the main characters.
The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)
I can appreciate that some people might find this type of film to be overwraught and I can see why when you compare it to modern films, the acting is very cinematic and direct, the costumes and sets are very colourful and elaborate, everything is taken up a notch to tell the story in an epic way. Nowadays a lot of what the film uses would be replaced by more modern technology. But I love this type of film. Loved the performances, loved the story, everything about the direction, and the design is just perfect. It's a long film but I was never bored. I must check out more from DeMille because it seems he knew how to make movies.
Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967)
My second Joseph Losey film and another great one! It shares a lot of what I enjoyed in
The Servant, especially the cinematography which I thought was brilliant. It's slightly different in how it captures the characters and uses space more sparsely with cleaner, crisp colours but it's just as effective in how it portrays the complex emotions between the characters. Once again it's a fascinating character study, to me, this is about the emotions we feel and hide beneath the surface, our primal instincts, and how our interactions as humans are pretty much one big facade and a lot of that is to do with societal pressures and expectations.
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)
I noticed that my housemate had a DVD of this sitting on a shelf in our living room so I decided to finally give it a watch. It's a well constructed and enjoyable film, perhaps slightly derivative in its style but the main performances make the story interesting enough and help ask the questions that the film wants to ask - examining the troubled relationships between disillusioned youth and authority, something quite universal across different societies.
Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)
Everyone has been watching this so I jumped on the bandwagon too. I thought it was a decent film, I liked how the film keeps up a consistent feel throughout. The cinematography feels crisp and aids the mood, and the editing between different parts of the country helps the film convey a message of interconnectedness. It is definitely very impressive in how much about the current Covid-19 situation that this film gets right. I can't say that it did much for me beyond this, with such a sprawling cast I never found myself particularly caring for any of the characters or what was happening.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011)
I remember there being a lot of hype about this film when it came out, and I read that Obama visited the Sushi Bar with Abe when he went to Japan, but apart from some appetising shots of the sushi I didn't find much interesting about this documentary. It is pretty straightforward, and tells the tale of a man who is quite stubborn and at times patronising. What I would have liked to have seen is for the documentary to ask him questions, to investigate his behaviour and decisions rather than just accept them as being part of a strong work ethic.
The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004)
I have really come to dislike this type of film which I see as part of a category called "cinematic suffering". All this film wanted to seem to do was to creep us out and make us feel uneasy, and part of the problem I have with this is that it does so by making the visual style of the film really dark, full of blacks, and to show use gruesome things. In my eyes these are now too often subtitutes for proper construction of a film. Maybe I have watched too many films now but I also worked out what was going on pretty early on, in the way it structures its narrative it felt like it was trying to emulate Lynch and
Mulholland Drive.
Big Night (Stanley Tucci & Campbell Scott, 1996)
After the misery of
The Machinist I wanted something light and easy to watch, and this looked appropriate to me. It was pretty much what I expected with some really strong enjoyable writing and performances from the characters. I don't think it did anything very impressive beyond that, in cinematic terms, it is pretty forgettable, but it does build up good camaraderie between the characters that kept me interested.
Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005)
I really disliked
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (another example of cinematic suffering) which I also watched recently so was a bit sceptical going into this, but I was really impressed. I think I actually prefer this to
Oldboy too which I also recently rewatched with my brother. Visually this film is really impressive, and within this trilogy Chan-wook seems to refine his style to be more crisp and exciting each time. The combination of the music, the cutting between different time periods, this felt much closer to his best film
The Handmaiden.
A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)
I am a fan of John Cleese and Monty Python but I largely found the humour in this film to be irritating, especially Michael Palin's character. Every scene seemed to go one for far too long, and no attention was really paid to anything from a visual perspective to make the film interesting beyond its jokes.
L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
A really interesting and quite startling film from Antonioni. What I loved about this is how the story slowly builds, and we take ordinary people and situations and through the repetition of images and sequences within the film the atmosphere begins to change into something quite unnerving. He creates suspense in a way that few other directors seem to be capable of, or would even dare to try. With every shot, I felt like I was being pulled in closer to this enigmatic piece of work, and the ending really capped it off beautifully in a strange and startling way.