Barry Lyndon

Rating: 80%

(http://www.dvdfr.com)

Also Known As:

Year:

1975

Countries:

Predominant Genre:

Drama

Director:

Outstanding Performances:

Premiss:

Rogue wins the heart of a rich widow and assumes her dead husband’s aristocratic position.

Themes:

Alienation | Destiny | Emotional repression | Friendship | Loneliness | Political Correctness | Self-expression | Social class | White culture

Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:

Review Format:

Cinema

Excellent movie about an opportunist and adventurer who renounces love to marry for money.

Beautiful to look at, superbly acted and well scored, this film palls towards the end because it cannot find anything to match the brilliance of its first half. Like the central character, it eventually dissipates the wealth of the imagination behind the camera that made it.

The style is as stately as the music and becomes a character in its own right as it tells the picaresque story of a lowborn rogue who desires to become a gentleman – and succeeds.

Throughout there is ample ironic humor, as only Stanley Kubrick can mount it, with sly, satiric nods towards the essentially materialistic nature of the modern, Western world.

This is a movie to savor because of its flair and audacity. Still cutting edge cinema – even by today’s standards.

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Rating: 60%

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

Also Known As:

Year:

1994

Countries:

Predominant Genre:

Horror

Director:

Outstanding Performances:

Premiss:

Caucasians fantasize that they can both become god and, thereby, evade the travails of everyday life by simple wishful-thinking.

Themes:

Alienation | Christianity | Compassion | Destiny | Emotional repression | Loneliness | Personal change | Self-expression | Social class | White culture | White supremacy

Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:

Review Format:

DVD

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Suitably-melodramatic telling of the ramblings of teenaged author (Mary Shelley) that refuses to explore the issues it raises.

Despite much talk of moral consequences, these remain dramatically unexplored; leaving the audience with little more than entertaining superficiality and absurdly-overstated production design.

The real nonsense here is the White fantasy that they are able to become gods through their technical and scientific obsessions. Despite the fact that science and religion are often in conflict, White science is merely another means of trying to play god.

Given the oblique references to modern scientific achievements, one would have expected Whites to have been more honest about the limitations of the technology simultaneously being exalted and condemned here. The dearth of empathy Whites have for each other is reflected in a White culture that provides little emotional satisfaction for its adherents because of its belief that the soul has yet to be proven, empirically. This is shown here by characterization that never goes below the surface to have a good rummage in the many dark corners of the White psyche.

As the characters here run from emotional experience by so fearing loss that they crave immortality, so this film attempts to reanimate the dead tissue of a hoary old story whose narcissism is resolutely hidden. A fairly amusing and solipsistic waste of talented performers.

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Assassin (1993)

Rating: 40%

(www.moviescreenshots.blogspot.co.uk)

Also Known As:

Country:

Predominant Genre:

Action

Director:

Outstanding Performances:

Premiss:

A hardened female criminal’s consistent violence, even in police custody, ends in a staged death so that she can be trained as a phantom killer and subdued into obedience.

Themes:

Alienation | Compassion | Destiny | Emotional repression | Loneliness | Personal change | Self-expression | White culture | White supremacy

Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:

Review Format:

DVD

White Misogyny

Summary: Caucasian lust for violence.

Banal look at the fact Whites act their lives rather than living them and that it is very difficult to escape from the moral trap so created.

The absurd and consequenceless violence that pervades most of this movie remake of the much better La Femme Nikita is nothing more than a White attempt to appear to be agents in full command of their own lives; while the drama suggests their being locked into a political machine where savagery is the only currency.

This movie just does not understand its own source material (about the ways White males stereotype & objectify White females) and offers nothing else in its place to make it watchable.

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Otac na Sluzbenom Putu

Rating: 60%

(http://www.kustu.com)

Also Known As:

Year:

1985

Country:

Predominant Genre:

Drama

Director:

Outstanding Performances:

Premiss:

A careless remark about the newspaper cartoon is enough for Mesha to join many arrested unfortunates. His family is now forced to cope with the situation and wait for his release from prison.

Themes:

Alienation | Compassion | Destiny | Dialectical materialism | Emotional repression | Political Correctness | Self-expression | Totalitarianism

Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:

Review Format:

DVD

[When Father was Away on Business]

A critique of the former Communistic ways of the former Yugoslavia from the point of view of a child. This boy sees all in the adults’ behaviour and does not always understand what he sees. Yet, its effect on him is profound, as he becomes a somnambulist in search of escape from Dialectical materialism.

For having published a satirical cartoon of Karl Marx as a Stalinist, the eponymous father is jailed in a work camp for two years. Yet, this is never clearly stated on any indictment as if to say it aloud would be to reveal that Stalin was not a true Marxist but the demagogue he actually was.

The issues explored are the effects on his family of this father’s absence and the fact that his relatives are accomplices to his incarceration. Such a paranoid polity makes genuine human relationships impossible and none work here too well.

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Harumi NEMOTO (2007)

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.