E la Nave Va [And the Ship Sails On] (1983)

Rating: 60%



(www.movie-roulette.com)

An old director's film that shows how easy it is to decline into formalism as one's cinematic career declines. This movie celebrates its own style to the extent of reveling in the process of moviemaking rather than the art of storytelling.

Allegedly a comedy, this concerns passengers aboard a luxury ocean liner in the Mediterranean whose genteel, affected and superficial lifestyle is about to come up slap bang against the realities of the Great War. It picks up Serbian refugees and pretty soon an Austro-Hungarian battleship looms on the horizon to demand they be handed over.

The style is as theatrical and as melodramatic as the characterization - with classical opera arias to sweeten the pill. The first half's weak comedy is forgotten when the film gets serious in the second, just enough to save it from terminal lassitude.

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Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Pixar Short Film Collection: Volume 1 (2007)

Rating: 80%


(Image: http://en.wikipedia.org)

Watching these in chronological order - as they are presented on the disc - one sees a clear and mathematical technical progression that is quite staggering. Although the earlier animations possess more human qualities, despite their technical primitivism, the latter cartoons reveal a technical prowess, matched with storytelling skills, that are second-to-none - certainly much better than Dreamworks or Disney. The tale never wags-the-storytelling-dog so that each never becomes merely a means of demonstrating a technical effects

The problem here however is that the stories are never fully developed beyond mere whimsy and never fully exploit the medium of the short story. This betrays the fact that the filmmakers were obviously bursting, instead, to make feature-length movies, for which these are little more than dry runs.

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Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu (2001)

Rating: 80%

(http://screenville.blogspot.co.uk)

[Warm Water Under a Red Bridge]

Water symbolizes the main theme running through this comic story of rampant female desire. Water is in everything here and is seen as the motivating principle of life in a living parable of yin and yang.

The living embodiment of this water principle is woman, as such, and two of the women here, in particular. The younger woman produces copious amounts of the stuff during lovemaking, which flows into the nearby river; attracting the fish and making the local anglers happy. This suggests that the creator is female; explaining the great number of fish the trawlermen land. Fishermen are seen as superior to salarymen.

Being about making hay while the sun shines, this film suffers from a certain emotional coldness in the execution that doesn't enamor us to the central characters – only the strange, magical realist world they inhabit.

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Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Terry Jones’ Barbarians (2007)

80%

A book imbued with an historians' hatred for the Catholic Church's falsifying so much of history. The true barbarians – the Romans – became a beacon of civilization while the truly civilized – Goths & Vandals – were traduced as savages and destroyers.

Terry Jones has no time for Roman Catholicism (especially the absurdity of Original Sin) and demonstrates that it is the last vestige of the Roman Empire – intolerant, brutish and deeply political. They Christianized this empire to destroy its paganism and replace it with their own vision of all powerful rule.

This accessible tome is often sarcastically and ironically funny in successfully giving the lie to the idea that Rome was the light. Especially since it lacked a culture more profound that genocide against the recalcitrant and blood soaked entertainments for the masses.

Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.