Movie Masterworks

“Thus Barry fell into the very worst of courses and company. And was soon very far advanced in the science of every kind of misconduct.”

Synopsis: How does an Irish lad without prospects become part of 18th-century English nobility? For Barry Lyndon (Ryan O’Neal) the answer is: any way he can! His climb to wealth and privilege is the enthralling focus of this sumptuous Stanely Kubrick version of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel.

For this ravishing, slyly satiric winner of 4 Academy Awards®, Kubrick found inspiration in the works of the era’s painters. Costumes and sets were crafted in the era’s designs and pioneering lenses were developed to shoot interiors and exteriors in natural light. The result? ‘Barry Lyndon’ endures as a cutting-edge movie that brings a historical period to vivid screen life like no other film before or since.

Critique: Barry Lyndon is a masterpiece of a director whose films are all extraordinary; it marks a new conception of the art of film. Although based on a novel, it is entirely cinematic, offering an endlessly suggestive vision of reality which is irreducible to verbal formulations. Each shot and cut tells us more than any verbal formulations (including this one) can convey. Like its hero, it seems at first uncomplicated; but it maintains a dream-like coherence and ambiguity throughout, succeeding as a story, spectacle, historical reconstruction, psychological allegory and vision of Western man. And it is about the act of viewing. It betters our ability to watch, and betters us. In an age less interested in ugliness, seen by the viewers Kubrick has helped to create, its greatness will be recognized and its reputation righted.

-Excerpt from Barry Lyndon Reconsidered by Mark Crispin Miller
© 1976 The Georgia Review Volume XXX, Number 4. All Rights Reserved

My thoughts: Barry Lyndon is the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen. It’s as if each frame of film can serve as the composition for an impressionist’s oil painting. But this is art come to life! The costumes, lighting and cinematography are so exquisite, it’s like peering through a window directly into the mid 1700’s.

“Ben: You can never, never ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?”
“Sera: I do. I really do.”

Synopsis: Best Actor Oscar® winner Nicolas Cage and Best Actress Nominee Elisabeth Shue set the screen ablaze in this profoundly moving love story. Nominated for two additional Academy Awards® - Best Director and Best Screenplay - this emotionally charged powerhouse of a film graced over 100 “10 Best Lists,” including Roger Ebert’s number one Movie of the Year. Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a career alcoholic who has hit rock bottom. Trashing all personal and professional ties to his L.A. existence, he sets off for the lights of Vegas on a mission: to drink himself to death. There he meets Sera (Shue), a beautiful, seen-it-all hooker. From the moment Ben and Sera connect, they form a unique bond based upon unconditional acceptance and mutual respect that will change each of them forever. In the words of David Thompson of ‘Los Angeles Magazine’, ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ is “a masterpiece”.

Critique: Imbued with all the emotional acuity of a beautifully composed suicide note, “Leaving Las Vegas” is a difficult movie to watch. It hurts and it numbs and it courts heartbreak. There’s nothing conventionally entertaining in this small character study, nothing that redeems the ruined love of its two archetypal characters — the drunk and the whore. Any break in the bleakness is undermined by the inevitability of dissipation and doom; the abject yet certain knowledge that no one can save he who will not be saved.

Nicolas Cage plays the terminal alcoholic Ben Sanderson as a man who has come to the end of the world yet insists on dangling his feet in the abyss. By turns comic and boorish, shattered and sweet, Cage swims through the movie with a liberating disengagement. As the other half of the subterranean couple, the girl-next-doorish Elisabeth Shue works against type. Shue manages a daring, surprisingly tough performance that nearly equals Cage’s — albeit in a much less flashy role. She comes across as cool and dangerous.

Mike Figgis, the English director who also wrote the script and score for the movie, gives us a lurid, jittery, hand-held look at this dolorous couple and the color-soaked city that contains them. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a brilliantly realized tone poem. It is a cauterizing movie — it burns like bourbon splashed on an exposed heart.

-by Philip Martin

My thoughts: What makes Leaving Las Vegas so powerful is the connection between outcasts Ben and Sera. All they have is each other. It’s a movie about love and despair in their tragic relationship. I became involved. As Leaving Las Vegas came to it’s inevitable conclusion, I realized this movie was an experience that would stay with me for a long long time.

“We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed, but sometimes we are. That’s all.”

Synopsis: Unlike most “message” films which date themselves almost immediately, Lewis Milestone’s low-key unpolished and deeply-felt screen adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque anti-war novel has lost little of its original impact. Years after its release it was still being banned in countries mobilizing for war. The plot follows a group of young German recruits in World War I through their passage from idealism to disillusionment. As the central character Paul Baumer (Lew Ayers) declares, “We live in the trenches and we fight. We try not to be killed - that’s all.” ‘All Quiet’ is an anthology of now famous scenes: Ayres trapped in a shell crater with a man he has killed; the first meeting of the recruits and the veterans; infantrymen being mowed down to machine-gun visual rhythms; a moonlight swim with French farm girls; Ayre’s pacifist speech to his astonished schoolmates; and the final shot of the soldier’s hand reaching for a fatal butterfly.

Critique: All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous anti-war film ever made. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, it focuses on a group of German teenagers who excitedly sign up to fight for their country in World War One after hearing their teacher speak enthusiastically for the cause. The boys’ enthusiasm however soon vanishes when they come face to face with the reality of warfare. Bombings, gas attacks and hand-to-hand combat destroy any romantic views that might linger in their minds. On the Western front, death is almost obligatory.

An acknowledged masterwork, this film has over the years retained almost all of its potency. It works particularly well on the human level, transcending cultures and generations with its all-powerful pacifist message. Lewis Milestone’s direction is very effective and the photography is simply unforgettable. The battle scenes are gruesomely realistic; nothing is glossed over.

A profoundly moving picture, All Quiet is required viewing for every single human being, especially those who still cling to the belief: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. Sweet! and decorous!)

Edinburgh University Film Society
Review by Stephen Townsend
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93

My thoughts: I watched this movie again soon after my brother went to fight in Iraq. It prompted me to ask myself, “Should I really support a war that could kill my brother, and will kill many others, for the sake of imperialism? The message of this movie is still as relevant today as it was in 1930. Sadly, it just proves we haven’t learned anything since.

“I’m not asking much. Only to live a quiet life together.”

Synopsis: If To Live’s title, as Roger Ebert says, “conceals a universe,” then watching this engrossing, exhilarating and extravagant film surely reveals one. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival, this epic film from China’s most renowned director Zhang Yimou (Oscar® nominee for ‘Ju Dou’ and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’), unveils a world worthy of “a Chinese Gone With the Wind” (The New York Observer)! Set against four decades of Chinese political turmoil, ‘To Live’ follows the lives of one couple, Fugui and Jiazhen (Ge You and Gong Li), as they struggle to survive their own changing station within the upheaval. As the years go by, bringing bizarre twists, tragic losses…and profound hope, Fugui and his family persevere, striving to reach a calm within the storm so they can do the one thing they’ve always wanted to do: To Live.

Critique: “I believe that for a long time now Chinese films have been too abstract, conceptual, gimmicky. They don’t relate at all to the lives of ordinary Chinese people. I’m certain that most audiences will like this film. We haven’t gone overboard on the tragic elements, but rather have focused on the minute, amusing details in the life of a nobody. There are tears and laughter, one following the other in a gentle rhythm like the breath of a bellows.”

- Zhang Yimou, director of To Live

A script of such power demands actors of range and depth, which both Gong Li and Ge You are. Their total immersion into character is utterly convincing, bringing forth joy, laughter, understanding, humility and unbearable agony. There is also a real spark between Li and You, a sense of actual love - it’s impossible to understate the excellence of their performances. Huozhe is an extremely emotional picture but it’s the roles which bring tears, so devastating are the tribulations which weigh on them. For completion, the other players are fine, the sets and locations fitting and the sparse score appropriate. Huozhe indicates just what cinema is all about and why I love it so.

-Damian Cannon Copyright © Movie Reviews UK 1997

My thoughts: It’s been said life is a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs. Huozhe (To Live) mirrors this. During the quiet moments between the peaks and valleys it’s nice just to take a moment to contemplate. Near the end of the movie there is peace.

“Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within you, for those of you who know no tomorrow.”

Synopsis: Considered by some to be Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievement, ‘Ikiru’ presents the director at his most compassionate — affirming life through an exploration of a man’s death. Takashi Shimura portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer forced to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days. Told in two parts, Ikiru offers Watanabe’s quest in the present, and then through a series of flashbacks. The result is a multifaceted look at a life through a prism of perspectives, resulting in a full portrait of a man who lacked understanding from others in life.

Critique: “Sometimes I think of my death,” Kurosawa has written: “I think of ceasing to be . . . and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” The story of a man who knows he is going to die, the film is a search for affirmation. The affirmation is found in the moral message of the film, which, in turn, is contained in the title: Ikiru is the intransitive verb meaning “to live.” This is the affirmation: existence is enough. But the art of simple existence is one of the most difficult to master. When one lives, one must live entirely––and that is the lesson learned by Kanji Watanabe, the petty official whose life and death give the meaning to the film.

Personally (as I have indicated) I think it means that man is alone, responsible for himself, and responsible to the choice that forever renews itself. This interpretation has never been better put than by Richard Brown, when he wrote:

“Ikiru is a cinematic expression of modern existentialist thought. It consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when everything is said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task that to him is meaningful. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.”

-Excerpted from Donald Richie’s The Films of Akira Kurosawa, ©1996 University of California Press.

My thoughts: I can identify with Kanji Watanabe. What gives meaning to someones life? I hope, before the end comes, I can leave the world feeling that I’ve contributed to people’s lives. This movie, more than any other, can change your life.

“I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought, Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.”

Synopsis: Legendary director Ingmar Bergman creates a testament to the strength of the soul - and a film of absolute power. Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Agnes, torch red by cancer, transcends the pettiness of her sisters’ concerns to remember moments of being - moments that Bergman, with the help of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, translates into pictures of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.

Critique: The human journey is toward death. As God’s presence dissolved, the human person had to look elsewhere for some meaning in human existence, some hope to cling to in the face of death. Art offers hints of explanations, but without God’s animating presence and the superstructure of meaning that religion once provided for the artist, art’s “answers” can never be adequate. The only hope we have, according to Bergman, is human love. There is no heavenly hope. To make loving contact with one other human being or perhaps with many others is the only salvation available to us.

-Robert Lauder: In God, Death, Art and Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman

My thoughts: Cries and Whispers is a devastatingly cathartic film. This movie made me more cognizant of my relationships with those who are close to me. In the end, those are the relationships that delineate people who live rich lives from those living in a wasteland.

“Madonna, help me to change my life. Bestow your grace on me too. Make me change my life.”

Synopsis: Giulietta Masina won Best Actress at Cannes as the title character of one of Fellini’s most haunting films. Oscar® winner for Best Foreign Language Film, ‘Nights of Cabria’ (’Le Notti di Cabiria’) is the tragic story of a naive prostitute searching for true love in the seediest sections of Rome. Criterion proudly presents the restored director’s cut in a breathtaking new transfer.

Critique: The positive nature of Cabiria is so noble and wonderful. Cabiria offers herself to the lowest bidder and hears truth in lies. Though she is a prostitute, her basic instinct is to search for happiness as best she can, as one who has not been dealt a good hand. She wants to change, but she has been typecast in life as a loser. Yet she is a loser who always goes on to look again for some happiness.Cabiria is a victim, and any of us can be a victim at one time or another. Cabiria is, however, more of a victim personality than most. Yet even so, there is also the survivor in her. This film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene in which the story reaches a conclusion so definitive that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.

-Federico FelliniExcerpted from I, Fellini (1995) by Charlotte Chandler.Excerpted from I, Fellini (1995) by Charlotte Chandler.

My thoughts: I can’t help but root for Cabiria. Beneath a veneer of bravodo is a warm hearted human being who is completely vulnerable. Deeper still, is a person of great strength. Whenever I feel life has me on the ropes I remember the character Cabiria at the end of the this film for inspiration.

“Take care of your parents while they are alive. You cannot help them from beyond the grave.”

Synopsis: Yasujiro Ozu’s ‘TOKYO STORY’ follows an aging couple, Tomi and Sukichi, on their journey from their rural village to visit their two married children in bustling, post-war Tokyo. Their reception is disappointing: too busy to entertain them, their children send them off to a health spa. After Tomi falls ill she and Sukichi return home, while the children, grief-stricken, hasten to be with her. From a simple tale unfolds one of the greatest of all Japanese films. Starring Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, the film reprises one of the director’s favorite themes — that of generational conflict — in a way that is quintessentially Japanese and yet universal in its appeal.

Critique: Beneath the placid surfaces of Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema lies a persistent and despondent acknowledgment of life’s brutal brevity. Children grow up quickly, moving out of the house and starting families of their own, while the grandparents are left helplessly pondering their mortality in the vibrantly youthful personage of their grandchildren. As a result, these characters lead lives not in the pursuit of happiness, but simply in a flurry of activity designed to stave off thoughts of dying until the tyranny of old age makes it absolutely unavoidable. But while Ozu’s cinema doesn’t necessarily brim with reassuring themes, it is supremely life affirming for its brilliantly minimalist craft and gentle humanism. Comprising mostly static set-ups that highlight the director’s mastery of composition, Ozu’s films make up for their dearth of action with a wealth of subtext hidden in the silences. These are works that defy authoritative interpretation because they attain resonance through the outside emotional baggage brought to them by the viewer. Though his films are famously daunting for their long stretches of inaction, they are boring only to those who have never felt. In Ozu’s world, it is the audience’s point of view that is of primary importance, not the filmmaker’s, which is why his masterpiece, Tokyo Story (1953), is often hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. At the peak of his empathic powers, Ozu says more about life in that one movie than most artists can hope to articulate in their entire career.

—Clarence Beaks

My thoughts: After watching Tokyo Story, I called my parents just to hear their voices and talk about the weather. It was one of the last times I was able to speak to my mother for she passed away a few months later.

Not a movie related post today. I just wanted to wish my friend Roxy, a speedy recovery from her chemotherapy sessions. Roxy is a joker and likes to keep people laughing at the hospital in Florida where she is being treated for breast cancer. She loves horses and even tamed a horse named Gus. Me, ROS and all the people here at Wrigley Field are pulling for you Roxy! Please get well soon

Defining Extremes: The Modern Chasm of Film Appreciation.
by Gary W. Tooze - DVDBeaver
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Lost in Translation: Great films, bad box office. In the era of globalization, why can’t foreign movies catch a break? It doesn’t help that the Academy, which has mediocre taste, just nominated five films that won’t rock your world view.
by David Ansen and Ramin Setoodeh - Newsweek
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Iran ‘crackdown on foreign films’: Iran’s authorities have banned imported films promoting secularism, feminism, unethical behaviour, drug abuse, violence or alcoholism, reports say.
by Pam O’Toole - BBC News
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In the Picturehouse: Berney on the Foreign-Film Struggle
Posted by stvanairsdale - The Reeler
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