By "Copyright 1949 Selznick Releasing Organization, Inc. Country of Origin U.S.A." - Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from the original image and lightly retouched to repair the torn upper-left corner., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=85714336
The Third Man - (1949)
This was an impromptu watch - a time-filler, but this second viewing of
The Third Man absolutely stole my attention. Every scene in it demands attentiveness - each one with clever little things going on in it. Whether it's visual, smart dialogue, a great twist in the story, that unusual zither score, the great performances - or usually
all of those things combined. It's the ultimate pleasure for a movie-lover, and so to hell with anything else I might like to do - I was glued to the screen. This time I had the StudioCanal Blu-Ray edition of it, and it looked fantastic. Despite it being a noir mystery, it's easy to follow with Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins finding clue after clue leading to the unravelling of the tangled web of deceit surrounding his black-market bad guy friend Harry Lime (a super Orson Welles, delivering a truly great performance) who is meant to be dead. The fascinating Italian actress Alida Valli rounds things out. There are only so many movies I can admit to loving in the real sense of the word "love" - and I think
The Third Man is one of those films.
10/10
By The cover art can or could be obtained from Inferno Distribution or Columbia Pictures., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26592242
The Experiment - (2010)
This is an American remake of the 2001 German film
Das Experiment - the one with a social experiment where participants are either prison guards or prisoners. Everyone on board is doing this for a $14,000 payday, and at first both guards and prisoners are having a good time - hardly adhering to the rules/punishment doctrine initially delivered. However, once a few too many rules are trampled on, and a guard humiliated, Michael Barris (Forest Whitaker) sets to establishing high ground and superiority. As prisoner resentment sets in, the guards start punishing them in ways that were at first not allowed, and suddenly hate, anger and violence erupts with deadly consequences. At one point I thought the whole idea behind the film was being abandoned, with the focus continually on a battle of wills between Barris and prisoner Travis Cacksmackberg (Adrien Brody) - but, almost like somebody realised this was happening, we snap back to the power dynamic as a whole. The ideas which were at first explored in the novel Black Box (by Mario Giordano) and then these films were ones based on the events that occurred during the Stanford prison experiment in 1971 - a 2015 docudrama also explored what went on there. How evolved are us humans really?
6/10
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100 Days in the Jungle - (2002)
Anyone who knows me well will know that I have a great need, from time to time, to watch movies about people stuck in the jungle. This one is a Canadian TV movie based on the true story of 8 oil pipe repair workers being kidnapped by rebel soldiers in Columbia and held for a $20 million ransom. They have to continually trek through the jungle while being fed meagre rations - but this film suffers from a real dearth of problems. No medical emergency, no spiders, no snakes, no jungle animals whatsoever, no escape attempt, nobody gets shot, nobody gets badly injured, nobody nearly dies - there's no terrible abuse. I mean, they do get sick, and treatment is harsh - but when you watch a movie called
100 Days in the Jungle, you don't really expect the film to feature that, and only that. Some of the performances were surprisingly good, and the location, costuming and make-up effects were well done for a TV film - the movie only really lacks more drama.
5/10