Film Reviews by IM

The film is large and aspires to "epic" effect, but it's viewed with in a small square frame.

The story of the femme fatal stuck in an exotic location seemed cliched (how about Michael

York in "Cabaret" (based on Christopher isherwood as a naive English writer stranded in berlin with Sally Bowles and the Nazis

and that has a much stronger impact.

I'm afraid I didn't make it to the end, so I do'nt know how useful this is to you!

Gave up on it after about 40 minutes, rightly or wrongly! I found the renering of period and place and situation inresting at first but not gripping enough. The lighting is overwhelmingly dark!

This crazy, brilliant film is so early yet so typical of Almadovar's constant style and themes.

His latest Films refer back to this beginning - Pain and Glory is about an older film maker

and his past loves and works - The Human Voice is a return to Cocteau's play about a woman

abandoned by her boyfriend.

40 years since Law of Desire, but same preoccupations.

The there's Antonio Banderas who is a constant muse and a preoccupation with how life imitates and initiates art.

Appearances are always deceptive.

Trust is precious and can lead to your undoing. It's fraught with risk...

The past never goes away...however hard you try to move on and not look back - like Orpheus...

You're always in a show, but you never quite know who's watching!

These seem to me what this film is about.

It's very contrived. The autobiography issue seems to virtually disappear. The insight that the characters and we the audience

are supposed to derive from the plot aren't apparent, at least to me. Some touching performances. Is the Deneuve actress supposed to stand for "the Artistic Temperament"

-i.e. monstrously ego driven? That is a cliche in itself!

Penny Woolcock tries to make both, and for me it didn't quite work.

That said, it was an interesting week to learn about the Arab-Israeli conflict,

(mid-May '21) what with rockets pouring out of Gaza and many dead.

Opera is such an "unnatural" way of presenting ideas and situations that all the

"verismo" of traditional favourites such as "Cavaleria Rusticana" is left way behind

here by voiceovers and reportage life Jon Snow reporting a la Channel 4 News!

Then we have poor John Adams wrestling with Alice Goodman's weighty text with its

long long choruses and the captain's personal confessions to camera.

Of course it was a real attempt to make opera relevant to our time and, since it was created

way back in 1985, it's a shame in a way that today it's more relevant than ever!

The film seeks to explore the fact of gay anonymous cruising: loneliness and obsession, arousing hostility yet curiously matter-of-fact in its negotiations!

The dangers of this world are obvious when a murder is committed. Frank, our little hero actually witnesses this, yet he is in denial.

The cruising it seems must go on.

Here the film loses its way for me.

The police inspector who comes to investigate is as superficial as the other people in the plot. He seeks to solve the crime by cruising around the cruisers, alone and resorting to a strange sociological approach to detection!

After a kind of denouement the finale is bleaker than bleak. Was the murderer apprehended? Was Franks killed? Intiguing, maybe, but the ending seems very unsatisfying.

Perhaps it does say something about human relationships. The "fat ugly guy" is the true friend and Frank senses this. The sex bomb is evasive and manipulative.

He's the one not worth knowing. He's the one that destroys lives. Sure this contains sex and how men obtain it from each other in a quick fix. But, of course, the danger really comes when more is wanted, when people need to feel love and the all the joys it brings...

Old-fashioned , of course. The busy soundtrack bubbles on like a Pathe newsreel,

The story is like a curious variation on Brecht's "Threepenny Opera". Poor Arletty!

What does she want? What accounts for her magic spell over men?

Why do these men want to accuse her of theft - even murder?

I wonder if after the paiteb curtain is lowered on her trumdling carriage at the end,

if she's going to be accused of finishing off "son ami", the rich count (like the watch and the debt collector!

It's the intimate scenes that really resonate; evn more that the torrents of colourful extras who team along

the "Boulevard du Crime" at the start and end.

People watch this film again and again. I suppose the French see it as an amazing triumph of creativity as the Nazis

tried to subjugate and enslave the land of liberte, egalite and fraternite... See it at least once!!!

Not a good watch if you believe in relationships! Clementine is a nightmare' her motivations seems selfish and vindictive. The roller coaster time reversals and simultaneous memory reversals made me feel dizzy. Poor Joel...No thanks but brilliant acting from both leads. Couldn't watch to the end, I'm afraid...

Well, it's sumptuously beautiful to look at - and it's in BLACK and WHITE, for goodness sake! Lots of light and shade. The main man is a film auteur like Fellini, trying to start on his next project.

It's very middle class, "glamourous" and very Italian. Everyone who is anyone wears Armmani or some haute couture get up. Men have "mistresses", whatever that was about, so Guido's got his Harvey Weinstein side but he's too nice to appear to take advantage. His wife is strong enough to at least make him feel bad about spending time with Claudia Cardinale and then having the cheek to invite her out to join him on the set! The women confronting each other when sitting at nearby tables in a cafe outside is vey amusing. Squirm, Guido, squirm!

Lots of the characters are women, past and present in Guido's life. There are also a few intellectuals holding forth, such as you'd never see in movie today (too highbrow)! I found the most moving scene early in the movie, with his late mum and dad. You can tell Guido asks his buttoned up, suited-and-booted pa things he never said when his dad was living. They have a chat, and then the old man goes back down into his grave. Some of the memories are of Guido's schooldays in a catholic boys school. A wild woman on the beach gives the kids a thrilling scary show and then the priests tell the boys off. At the end it's music that triumphs. There's a kind of parade of the characters in Guido's life led by some musicians (including a very confident boy flautist!) who lead them all laughing around the set in a sort of dance hall number by the musical chameleon Nino Rota. Maybe it's abaught how an artist gets and develops the ideas for a work of art?