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TM2YC's 1001 Movies (Chronological up to page 25/post 481)

TM2YC

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I watched this recently last year and realized I had always confused it with "Fierce Creatures" (1997) :ROFLMAO:

Not a mistake I'd make unfortunately. I remember seeing that turkey in the cinema all too well! 🤮 (with my Python-fan family).

The problem is, it paints the victim as playing a part in "deserving" her fate, while making the murderers sympathetic.

The second part is certainly true to some extent but not the first. The film is careful to portray the working class mother/victim as desperately wanting to understand what is going wrong with her daughter and showing her love and affection right to the last scene in the cafe and completely undeserving of her fate. The cold, callous, loveless middle class parents (who seem to find having a daughter an irritating inconvenience) are portrayed as the "villains" to us the audience (if this film does have pure villains) but the two disillusion girls (mostly Parker) are shown to have it backwards in their warped perception of reality, idolising the more cultured/higher status parents and looking down on the lower status/simple parents, who actually do love them/her.

I wish that Walsh would've changed more of the names, locations, and other details and just made a fictional story inspired by this but which no one would connect with the actual Parker–Hulme murder case....

It's a movie, you can't (by definition) get every detail right in 2-hours but I think Jackson and Walsh made a lot of effort to get a lot of it right, while still telling a story their way.



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In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Director: Norman Jewison
Country: United States
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama

Given that this is a 55-year old film talking about racism in the US, I thought it might be a bit dated and/or simplistic but some films are "classics" for a reason. I knew within a few minutes that 'In the Heat of the Night' was one of those peerless classics. The fractious relationship between Sidney Poitier's (Sherlock Holmes level) big-city Homicide detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger's small-town, small-time, Police Chief Gillespie, is wonderfully nuanced and multi-layered. Both men have issues with controlling their anger but once Gillespie calms down, he's always prepared to admit Tibbs is damned right and to force himself to humbly ask for Tibbs' help with a case in which Gillespie is totally out of his depth. Both men have an excess of pride but Gillespie frequently swallows his. Like seemingly everyone in the town, he's prejudiced but he's at least trying to contain it. Virgil Tibbs is our brave, upright, proficient, inspiring hero but Steiger manages to keep the gum-chewing Gillespie somewhat sympathetic, from a character that could've been another straight villain in a lesser film. 'In the Heat of the Night' is also just a great murder mystery plot that had me guessing 'til the end.

 
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Great film, great actors. I watched it for the ump-teenth time a few nights ago.
 

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The cold, callous, loveless middle class parents (who seem to find having a daughter an irritating inconvenience) are portrayed as the "villains" to us the audience (if this film does have pure villains) but the two disillusion girls (mostly Parker) are show to have it backwards in their warped perception of reality
I'm gratified to hear it came across to you that way, but I think for most people (and the Letterboxd reviews I saw seem to back this) it comes down to "Why couldn't they just let them be gay!? Parents suck! Those times were so backward!" The romantic swells of the girls' burgeoning love story are embellished to such a great extent (both in dialogue and in visuals) that it really overshadows any nuance on the parental relationships.

It's a movie, you can't (by definition) get every detail right in 2-hours but I think Jackson and Walsh made a lot of effort to get a lot of it right, while still telling a story their way.
I would never ask for *every* detail to be right. I'm just talking about getting the fundamental truth right. Like that the girls weren't gay. It's funny, I just started listening to the Band of Brothers podcast (Veteran's Day just passed) and Tom Hanks talks about showing the initial footage to Dick Winters (played by Damien Lewis in the series). When Winters was less-than-pleased with the initial footage, Hanks immediately called him up for a sitdown to find out what the problem was. Then he went back to the other producers and editors, and passed down specific instructions for how to change how they were portraying the events. It turned out to be fixable with just a couple of small tweaks, ensuring that the soldiers felt capable and professional, but Hanks said "our mission was not to embellish, but to find out how to best portray the dramatization of these men's actions. If they felt our efforts at doing that had crossed the line, we had a responsibility to get it right." I only wish that all filmmakers felt that same responsibility. It bears out in the final product.
 

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Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
Director: Paul Schrader
Country: United States / Japan
Length: 120 minutes
Type: Biopic, Drama

If you get easily bored by the more formulaic films of the biopic sub-genre, then Paul Schrader's 'Mishima' is at the other adventurous end of the spectrum. The "A Life in Four Chapters" subtitle implies pretentiousness but it never feels like that for a second. Schrader intercuts black & white flashbacks to Yukio Mishima's early life, with realistic looking modern footage of his final hours, and finally several deliberately artificial, theatrical performances of some his plays and books. It sounds complicated but Schrader cleverly chooses Mishima works/characters that inescapably mirror the direction of Mishima's own life. So even though Schrader is using different actors, playing characters with different names, you know immediately they are all Mishima in some strange indivisible way. Some of the visuals are the most beautiful and colourful things I've seen in a film. Philip Glass' score is hypnotic and beautiful. Mishima is portrayed as a mass of contradictions, leaving the viewer with space to ponder who he really was.




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The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
Director: Stephan Elliott
Country: Australia
Length: 103 minutes
Type: Road-Movie, Comedy, Drama, Romance

One of those films that I always knew I'd love but somehow it still took me 28-years to get around to seeing it. I wasn't expecting Terence Stamp to be the absolute star of this thing, given that it's already got Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving. Stamp languorously brushing his long blonde hair from his eyes was amusing every time, not least when he does it after decking a provincial homophobic bloke. That threatening incident on the drag queen's outback odyssey is far outweighed by our three heroes encountering unexpectedly kind, accepting and equally eccentric people.

 

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My Fair Lady (1964)
Director: George Cukor
Country: United States
Length: 170 minutes
Type: Musical

Having never listened to this musical before, I was surprised by how many songs that I'd taken for ancient folk standards, were newly written for this in 1956. Such as 'Wouldn't It Be Loverly?', 'With a Little Bit of Luck', 'I Could Have Danced All Night', 'On the Street Where You Live' and 'Get Me to the Church on Time', plus other familiar tunes like 'The Rain in Spain'. The music in this musical could hardly be bettered but I found it deeply lacking in bite and extremely dated, socially and politically. So 'My Fair Lady' is absolutely ripe for a remake. Keep all the classic songs but let's sharpen up the "class warfare" angles and let's have Professor Higgins get his comeuppance. He's jaw dropingly sexist, mildly racist, arrogant, selfish, entitled and generally an awful individual to the eyes and ears of most modern viewers. The film does offer him some miniscule muted criticism for his overall demeanour but it still ends with Eliza implied to be pliantly fetching him his slippers like an obedient dog. I wanted a 'Trading places' style ending where the high born wealthy b*stard gets brought low, by the same poverty stricken person he'd raised up from the street to use as his plaything. I couldn't believe Eliza didn't end up with the much nicer Freddy, played by young Jeremy Brett (Wow he looks dashing in his thirties! Two decades before he played Sherlock Holmes on ITV). He's at least the same age (actually a bit younger) than Audrey Hepburn, and not old enough to be her father like Rex Harrison's Higgins. The 8K 70mm restoration looks marvellous, allowing you to soak up all the rich detail of the William Morris style interior design.

 

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High Plains Drifter (1973)
Director: Clint Eastwood
Country: United States
Length: 105 minutes
Type: Western

Unfortunately you can't have those same chills down your spine a second time, from when you first suspected who the 'High Plains Drifter' really is (although there is still some audience debate) but fortunately this is still a very satisfying Western. When you know what it's all about from the start, you can take a grim delight from watching the mischievous ways in which the bad are punished and appreciate what a clever subversion this is of the iconic Clint Eastwood anti-hero.




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The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Director: Clint Eastwood
Country: United States
Length: 135 minutes
Type: Western

From the early scenes, I thought this was another one of those weird Hollywood movies that seems intent on reigniting the American Civil War, by portraying all the Union characters as brutal, treacherous, sadistic and downright evil, from the Senate and Generals down, while showing the Confederate peoples as noble men of the soil who just want to live in peace. But that's just a traumatic instigation for the titular Josey Wales (played by Director Clint Eastwood) to go on an odyssey across America, away from civilisation and backwards in time, through the painful history of the country's birth. As he tries to evade capture, he encounters characters that represent "the trail of tears", the perilous wagon train journeys, the pilgrims, and the silver/gold rush boom & bust. He leads them on their own pilgrimage to the promised land and to the healing and forgiveness of historical wounds. It's not just thematically strong, it's also an action packed Western, with enough humour to rival most comedies. Clint has a running gag of spitting huge gobs of brown spit onto the ground in a way that unmistakably says "f*ck that". The dialogue is full of hard bitten period dialogue like "I feel as pert as a ruttin' buck" and describing a rain storm as "A real frog strangler". The friendship and witty banter that emerges between Clint and Chief Dan George's character is wonderful. I'll be watching this again.

 

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Lone Star (1996)
Director: John Sayles
Country: United States
Length: 135 minutes
Type: Noir, Mystery, Western, Drama

Neo-noir modern Western ‘Lone Star’, with it’s Tex-Mex border town immigration politics, school board textbook censorship battles, debates about controversial pieces of patriotic American history and it’s main subject of police brutality, feels remarkably current for a 26-year old film. It’s also a terrific murder mystery, ensemble character study and subversive romance. The in-camera transitions forward and backward in time are genius. The only nitpicks I had with this masterpiece was that Matthew McConaughey is barely in it (via a couple of flashbacks) despite most of the film being about his character and the scene with Frances McDormand seemed a tad indulgent.

The trailer probably has 95% of the total footage of McConaughey in it:


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The last film up to and including 1961 in the list, on to 1962 and beyond...

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La Notte (1961)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: Italy
Length: 122 minutes
Type: Drama

Another Michelangelo Antonioni film full of beautiful, stylish cinematography, understated performances by incredible actors like Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti, wearing immaculately tailored Italian suits/dresses, driving sexy Italian sports cars, drinking to excess and musing on life and death. Once again I didn't really care about any of it though.

 
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The first pair of four films William Hurt has in the 1001 list, across just 6-years...

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Body Heat (1981)
Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Country: United States
Length: 113 minutes
Type: Neo-Noir, Erotic-Thriller

Given the title and steamy promotional materials I thought this would be more erotic, than thriller but it's more of a classic Film Noir. William Hurt plays the usual Noir anti-hero, easily ensnared in the web of Femme-Fatale Kathleen Turner, by his own lust and greed. Their relationship is well played by both actors but it's an old genre cliche (which Turner herself would play for laughs in 'The Man with Two Brains') but Writer/Director Lawrence Kasdan keeps things fresh with a streak of humour. Featuring punchline foreshadowing of the anti-hero's fate and a highly amusing supporting character played by Ted Danson. I was a little disappointed by the decision to have one more, obvious "on the nose" scene, after the deliciously perfect implication of the year-book ending. More evidence that The Ladd Company only made good films for the too brief 3-year period they were in business.

This is a freakin' weird trailer:




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The Big Chill (1983)
Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Country: United States
Length: 105 minutes
Type: Comedy-Drama

Writer/Director Lawrence Kasdan's follow up to 'Body Heat' is very different but also has William Hurt in a central part. Tom Berenger is in a lighter role than I've seen him do before, Kevin Kline does quiet and understated (a few years before being "the most" in 'A Fish Called Wanda') and Jeff Goldblum is his usual, unusual self. It's all very well acted and the characters are well drawn but I couldn't not feel that this was a film specifically made by the 60s generation who'd gotten older, about the 60s generation who'd gotten older, for the 60s generation who'd gotten older. Sit your parents down in front of 'The Big Chill' and I'm sure they'll be laughing and crying along with whichever character they most identify with. I just enjoyed it as a well crafted time capsule of an era of American culture. Plus the 1960s jukebox soundtrack is all killer, no filler. I was a bit distracted as a modern day viewer by the fact that most of the music was by brilliant black artists but all of the ensemble cast who are grooving to it are white. It would seem bizarre to do this kind of script about former 60s college radicals today, without having at least one character that reflected the era of Malcolm X and Dr. King.

 

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Director: Milos Forman
Country: United States
Length: 133 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama

Although this is based on a stage play and mostly confined to one location, Milos Forman never makes it feel like a play, like so many other play-to-screen adaptations. Jack Nicholson delivers a lot of the dramatic fireworks but it's Louise Fletcher who dominates the movie. She radiates pure evil, out from under a placid, blank expression. This definitely plays differently on your second viewing because you can't quite laugh and cheer along with McMurphy's rebellious antics like you did the first time because before you probably didn't realise (like him) how much danger he's in. The second time you know Nurse Ratched is essentially capable of committing torture and cold blooded murder and she wouldn't loose a wink of sleep, so you're thinking "No, no, McMurphy, don't do it!". This time I could see plot parallel's with 'The Shawshank Redemption' but with a very different finale. You can apply lots of meanings to 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's message, political oppression, religious dogma, intellectual freedom, the Vietnam war, or as a critique of the entire concept of an organised power structure... it can be whatever you want it to be, or just a very funny and very powerful drama about this one institution.

I didn't know that Kirk Douglas had been trying to make this for 10-years, before his son Michael produced it. As good as Forman's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is, I'm filmically salivating at the idea of Kirk Douglas playing the R.P. McMurphy role, in an oldskool Noir back & white version, with maybe Billy Wilder directing!


Is this the greatest awards acceptance speech ever? From the set of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest':

 

mnkykungfu

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Neo-noir modern Western ‘Lone Star’, with it’s Tex-Mex border town immigration politics, school board textbook censorship battles, debates about controversial pieces of patriotic American history and it’s main subject of police brutality, feels remarkably current for a 26-year old film.
....or the current state of the US feels remarkably regressive....
 

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Body Heat (1981)
Given the title and steamy promotional materials I thought this would be more erotic, than thriller but it's more of a classic Film Noir.
The extended/deleted scenes add a bit more sexiness. There's a fanedit here with them.

The Big Chill (1983)
I couldn't not feel that this was a film specifically made by the 60s generation who'd gotten older, about the 60s generation who'd gotten older, for the 60s generation who'd gotten older.
My mom frickin' LOVES this film, though I think a lot of that was just the soundtrack and that she grew up in Michigan. I very much agree with your statement, BUT when I watched this for the first time last year, I was so damn grateful. I have watched all kinds of films about the counter-culture revolution, and not one of them gave me sufficient insight into what happened... where did these hippies go? Did they ALL sell out? Did they stop fighting for change? Did they achieve what they wanted? Become terrorists?
Different movies have given one individual story or another, but I never really felt I had a handle on how all the massive movements from 1969 in the US ended up with what we got in the '80s. This film was the missing link for me, showing the journey of each of the characters, each one essentially representing a different kind of person and a different path at that time. It's subtle, but I found it very compelling. This immediately went on my Thanksgiving rewatch list.
(Plus, it's some people's favorite Kevin Costner role. heh)
 

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Is this the greatest awards acceptance speech ever? From the set of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest':

That is pretty excellent. At first I thought Nicholson had been nominated against himself! God, The Last Detail and Chinatown in the same year, can you believe it? It's like Coppola with Godfather II and The Conversation. Anyway, I didn't know you could win the award for basically having the best Year, without choosing a particular performance!
 

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Magnolia (1999)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Country: United States
Length: 188 minutes
Type: Drama

I watched this a few times when it came out (and spent even more time listening to the Aimee Mann soundtrack) but I'd forgotten it was 3-hours long, until I hit the play button again (old PAL speed-up shaving off 7.5-minutes not withstanding. Then I soon realised why I didn't remember this being long, as it moves along like a whippet! Jumping in and out of it's multiple, intertwined, Robert Altman-esque plot threads, before you could ever get tired off any character, or scene. I enjoyed the oddball romance between John C. Reilly and Melora Walters the most but everyone is great.




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The Conformist (1970)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Country: Italy
Length: 108 minutes
Type: Political, Drama

'The Conformist' is an odd phycological drama, a sort of Italian mafia style film, plus a political thriller and is often quite surreal. The icy woodland assassination sequence is unexpectedly shocking. Director Bernardo Bertolucci and Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro create some dramatic compositions of their characters, against the stark, cold, marble of Mussolini-era Roman architecture. I enjoyed watching Gastone Moschin, best known as Don Fanucci in 'The Godfather Part II' in something else. You can see the stylistic influence on that film and others like 'Miller's Crossing'.


^ I love the Grindhouse narration on this old trailer!
 

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In the Mood for Love (2000)
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Country: Hong Kong
Length: 98 minutes
Type: Romance, Drama

After really not liking Wong Kar-wai's 'Happy Together', I relieved to find that I adored his follow up 'In the Mood for Love'. It's a lot like the famous 1945 David Lean film 'Brief Encounter' but better. There is so much style but it only serves the substance of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung's subtle performances, externally reserved but brimming with contained desire. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle makes every shot an exquisite composition of colour and light and Michael Galasso's score is deeply powerful and romantic. The beauty of Cheung's patterned dresses and Leung's sharp 60s suits are enough to sustain 98-minutes on their own. I already want to watch this again. Naturally I made sure to view the gorgeous, warm 2012 Criterion blu-ray transfer, not the catastrophic green tinted new Criterion 4K "remaster".


 

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Terms of Endearment (1983)
Director: James L. Brooks
Country: United States
Length: 132 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama

When I was about 20-minutes into this, I wasn't looking forward to sitting through the rest because I (mistakenly) thought I could see exactly where this domestic story was going to go. By the end, I was wishing there were 20-minutes more that I could spend with the characters. Across 30-years we see the lives of Shirley MacLaine and her daughter Debra Winger, full of ups, downs and arguments but many of them are forgotten by the end, just the way they can be in life. Like John Lennon sang in 'Beautiful Boy' "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". Most of the characters have personality problems that they struggle with but they work at it. MacLaine's Oscar winning performance is all over the map, from cold to caring, from erratic to dependable but it all feels so true. I was thinking "Gee this feels kind of like the brilliant 'As Good as It Gets' from the 90s" and not just because it stars Jack Nicholson. It was only afterwards that I realised it was written and directed by the same guy, James L. Brooks. You'll either be laughing, or crying (or both at the same time) but you'll feel something.




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Prizzi's Honor (1985)
Director: John Huston
Country: United States
Length: 129 minutes
Type: Comedy, Crime, Romance

At first I wasn't sure if this was a violent 'The Godfather'-style crime drama, a cynical black comedy, a warm romance, or a zany farce. By the end I still wasn't sure but I enjoyed myself anyway. The premise, two mob assassins fall instantly in love, then get paid to kill each other, sounds like an 80s action flick but 'Prizzi's Honor' isn't that, it's slower paced and more about character. Major spoilers follow... I didn't like the down ending. You're conditioned to want a happy one but they could've gone for something in-between, sort of like 'Romeo and Juliet' where they kill each other but lie together in death, or like 'The Killer' where they die crawling towards each other and almost but not quite connect. Something grandly tragic. Jack Nicholson deciding to coldly kill the love of his life (played by Kathleen Turner) in the last act, would be less surprising if he hadn't spent the whole preceding movie deciding not to kill her, whenever she repeatedly gave him reasons to do so.

 

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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Director: Chantal Akerman
Country: Belgium
Length: 201 minutes
Type: Drama, Experimental

I've had this on my long watchlist for some time but unfortunately I'm finally watching it in the context of it just being declared the official "Greatest film of all time" in the new once-a-decade BFI/Sight and Sound magazine poll. Only someone living a miserable, joyless, dead, emotionless life (or a pretentious film critic) would consider this their most enjoyable cinematic experience, or the highest pinnacle of what is possible in the cinematic art form. I didn't personally think 'Citizen Kane', or 'Vertigo' were the best films ever either (just very, very good) but I wouldn't think somebody who did rate them that highly was wrong. I didn't dislike 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' though, it's impressively engaging for a film this long with this little happening in it (at least in conventional film terms).

This is a rare instance when I'd actually recommend having the plot spoiled (which is what happened to me) because then you at least know that the over three hours of intentional boredom which you're being subjected to are slowly building up to something and that the monotony and repetition do have a narrative, emotional and even political significance. If you go in not knowing that something is actually go to happen by the end, you might get very frustrated and simply switch it off. Director Chantal Akerman cleverly expands the runtime, while constricting the viewer's focus, forcing us to minutely observe the details of Jeanne Dielman's daily routine and thus appreciate the subtle shifts in her mood when those same tasks are repeated. Her joylessly mixing and pounding meatloaf, in real time, again and again, does convey her feelings successfully and in a very real, documentary like way, plus her dropping a pair of shoes, instead of previously placing them down, illustrates her internal anger. There are moments of humour and absurdity to savour, like Jeanne crossing her legs for a brief moment of private pleasure when she drinks coffee, the son only wanting to talk at bedtime, the kettle boiling at precisely the right moment in her morning routine, or the unseen lady at the door droning on. Some of the film actually made me feel a bit inadequate about my own daily behaviours and that I need to make it a new year's resolution to become more obsessive and regimented. I don't think that was the intended message, we're supposed to think this is bad, not some kind of model for the way one's domestic life should be organised.

 
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Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Director: James Foley
Country: United States
Length: 100 minutes
Type: Drama

Great performances I was expecting, given the cast, but I was not expecting this to have bold Giallo coloured lighting and generally beautiful cinematography. The acting is terrific from everybody but Jack Lemmon is my pick, he spits out the acid lines like the rest of the salesmen but he also portrays a deep pitiable sadness. The only problem I had with the drama was that this feels like we are seeing a random snapshot of these character's awful lives, the day after/before might be worse, or might be better, with no particular beginning or ending to the story.

 

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Beau Travail (1999)
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
Length: 90 minutes
Type: Drama

I'm not familiar with the 'Billy Budd' source, beyond it being the title of a 1994 Morrissey song, so I don't know how far Claire Denis diverges from the book. She does at least shift the setting from 18th century Naval Britain, to the French Foreign Legion in modern day Djibouti. Denis keeps dialogue and plot to a bare minimum, instead spending about 75% of the runtime on hypnotic footage of the soldiers' repetitive, rhythmic training regimes. But then there is a frequent exposition voice-over to try and explain the meaning of what you are seeing. I didn't dislike 'Beau Travail', or feel bored but I'm sure this could've been cut down to a short film but keeping all of the surprising dance finale.

 

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L'Argent (1983)
Director: Robert Bresson
Country: France
Length: 83 minutes
Type: Drama

I've yet to find a Robert Bresson film I haven't loved. Despite the cast being made up entirely of, what I assume to be, non actors, who predictably cannot act at all, it somehow worked. It's as if their blank non-expressions convey an overall sense of powerful mundane documentary reality, that talented players could not. There is also a kind of engrossing dramatic alchemy in the way Bresson constructs and edits the film. Focusing not on the internal emotions of the characters (because they exhibit few of those) but instead pointing his camera at external objects and sounds that are effected by the emotions. For example, he shows us a bowl spilling liquid, when it's holder is slapped hard in the face, making it strangely more shocking. The ending choice is perhaps a bit hysterical after the subtle build up that precedes it.


 
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