Change Your Image
mick-30
Reviews
La vita è bella (1997)
Slight and forgettable.
Life is Beautiful made no noticeable impression on me. There were some well-rendered moments, but on the whole I found it to be a shabby movie. It's a hell of a lot better than most movies that get made, but that isn't really saying much.
Begnini certainly has some kind of endearing quality about him, but it's not enough to carry a movie, especially one so slightly composed and predictably directed. Indeed, that was the glossiest concentration camp I've ever seen onscreen, but aside from all of that, the part that seems to have most of an effect on the people I've talked to about this flick -- the story and characters -- were not enough of a presence to make any kind of stamp on my mind. This movie relies entirely too much on the work of other movies and on the memory of its audience. If you don't have the camp from Schindler's List or a lifetime of history lessons in mind while watching this flick, you'd have no idea what Roberto is hiding from the boy. There is that pile of bodies and that offscreen shooting, but they inspire nothing. They have no visceral power. That shot of the piled bodies only gets something across because it's expected in a Holocaust movie, not because it is a powerful image. You know what it is because Amon Goeth set fire to such a thing in Schindler's List. Taken by itself, the movie doesn't stand up insofar as it doesn't directly relate its characters to any real atrocity. It relies too heavily on the predjudices of the audience to carry its message across. I tried watching it from the perspective of a child, and I suppose it would have been a little better from a child's POV, but the thing is, a child doesn't have the knowledge of what Begnini is going out of his way not to show. It's a harmless movie that defangs its subject matter while standing up for something that is easy to stand up for. Thinking about this movie afterwards, I went from merely annoyed to just plain mad. What annoyed me about it was how the subsidiary characters were such cardboard mock-ups of human beings. The German doctor who really only cares about solving riddles, the brother that phones his lines in and then disappears, the good wife who shows up at the camp so Roberto can play that record for her, the other prisoners, and all the others that escape me at the moment, are merely foils for Roberto's pranks or the movie's message. This movie is accoladed in the way it is because it says that the Holocaust is bad. And these accolades come despite the shabbiness of its construction. Schindler's List says essentially the same thing, but that movie achieves greatness because of the sheer power of its imagery, the indelible humanity of its characters (on both sides), and the personal conviction behind it. Begnini remade an old Jerry Lewis movie. I went in looking for a great movie because I was told by many people that it was great, but that is not what I saw.
Badlands (1973)
Gorgeous and resonant
Badlands is one of those films that really can't be compared to anything else. Other films seem so mortal and thoughtless when held against what this film seeks to do with the medium. It is, like Days of Heaven and Thin Red Line, an utterly unique confluence of story, picture, and sound, one that plays each element off the next to a mysterious and mind-blowing effect.
Malick taps into the deepest and most resonant strains of the American character with Kit Caruthers: the lonesome, violent, yet extremely likeable fellow who will never be as big as the land, who will never get any closer to those Montana mountains. Holly's voice-over seemingly belongs in another movie; her disembodied narration deepens the mystique of the characters and their journey even though she can't possibly be describing the same things we are seeing. Most voice-overs usually pinch-hit for real storytelling and are there to just fill in the blanks the pictures are leaving out. Malick uses it to express the distance between people and their actions and to make islands out of his characters.
The film is endlessly beautiful. There is the land, so wide and promising yet so insurmountable. There is the treehouse, the fantastic land set up against the rest of civilization. There are those distant thunderstorms, those city lights, that old boxcar on the plains . . . these images defy the words that would dare to describe what exists within the frame. These images start to show us just how much there is in this land and country that will remain forever unspoken. What a wonder this must have been on the big screen.
Happiness (1998)
A lightless world.
Happiness summarizes almost everything wrong with independent films these days. It is a sensationalistic bottom dweller, so smug and self-confident as it fires point-blank salvo after salvo at the broadest barnside in the world: The American Dream. Solondz manages to create his own special brand of irony that is entirely devoid of subtlety or wit. All he's left with is meanness, a meanness that doesn't connect to life in any constructive or thoughtful way. But the thing that truly makes this film unwatchable is the pace. Each scene is played out just like the next, as disappointments and bad decisions and empty pronouncements all build to an incredibly predictable conclusion where each character resorts to internalizing their psychoses and remains right where they were at the beginning. There is no intriguing dramatic progress in any of the storylines or insight given into these pseudo-characters, all because of Solondz' refusal to let any light or sensitivity into their world.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The best film anyone has done in years and years.
Though The Thin Red Line has some serious narrative faults, it is one of the greatest movies of the past decade. A few years from now when the critics won't be thinking about Private Ryan so much, they'll maybe let this film happen to them the way it is intended to. Malick is unparalleled in using film images as poetry, as metaphor, as suggestion . . . and his is a subtle art that is lost on many people. Though Malick relies heavily on voice-overs, it is imperative to WATCH his films to understand what is happening and where the characters are. During Malick's insufferable absence from the film scene, audiences (and a hell of a lot of critics) have been conditioned to watch movies on TV screens, a change in viewing habits that has proved to be more deleterious to the quality of American films than anything else ever has. One of the most obvious problems this has created is the way widescreens have been wasted on films that are really designed to be cropped for TV screen aspect -- the very language of film, the picture, has been limited. But The Thin Red Line is almost defiant in its magnificent use of widescreen; in its use of pictures to tell stories (not A story), to create atmospheres and environments, to let the characters roam about the frame; and its general use of the ambience of a movie theater to create a sensation that is bigger than any of us. And yet, for such a giant movie, it is so introverted and intimate that its power will creep up on you and stick to you like nothing else, as long as you just let the film happen to you. See it on the big screen, as it will make no sense when the video companies chop the sides off the picture so you can watch it on your 20" TVs with those two ineffectual, tinny speakers squawking out Zimmer's sublime score.
Affliction (1997)
Great performances, even greater screenplay.
Affliction boasts sterling set of performances from Nolte, Spacek, and of course, the utterly terrifying James Coburn. But Paul Schrader's screenplay and direction are also very strong elements. The screenplay is particularly notable for creating vivid characters and a strong storyline, which has been hard to find in Hollywood for years and is increasingly scarce in the indie world, as well.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
F this movie.
Pulp Fiction is one of the worst blights on American Cinema anyone could conceive of. Tarantino's enthusiasm for the awful films he loves to rehash is amusing, and his dialogue snappy and funny, but he is not a great filmmaker and his films are not great films. Him and his films get by on retro-mania, smugness, and arrogance, and will date as horribly as his source material has. Tarantino is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with indie filmmaking in the nineties, and nineties youth culture in general. Cinema, and the world, could have done without him.
Where the Rivers Flow North (1993)
A magnificently textured and sublimely performed portrait of rural life in 1920's Vermont.
Jay Craven's criminally ignored film is a sober breath of fresh air in the generally narcissistic and derivative world of independent film. First off, the photography is pure aesthetic pleasure, capturing all of the gloomy beauty of Northern New England in late autumn (Cinematographer Paul Ryan did 2nd Unit on Malick's Days of Heaven). Second, the performances are uniformly excellent - Rip Torn's Noel Lourdes is irascibly charming and Tantoo Cardinal's Bangor is at once sensitive and exuberant, to say nothing of a fine supporting cast. Overall though, it is a tribute to the narrative strength of the film that the story maintains a strong and lively pace while still unfolding in its own time, and the film comes to a conclusion, natural and genuine, that nevertheless does not seem expected. This is one of the rare cells of dignity in the independent film world, a film that explores a small piece of the intersection between humans and history.