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A movie and book review blog

  • Reading films, watching books,....
  • Mind candy in the dark
  • All the books left to read...

Sep 28, 2004

The Seductor

A Spanish movie about a teenager falling in love with his beautiful and married next door neighbor who is almost as old as his mother. Suburbs look the same everywhere, cool young things drive Vespinos and teenage agony is the same anywhere on the globe.

Sep 26, 2004

Metropolis

Man, oh man oh man!!! I mean Ger"man". The art of perfection has always evaded me, so when I see a practioner of this high art succeed they always command my complete respect as do the makers of this 1927 German silent sci-fi flick.

Metropolis tells the story of a future metropolis where the ruler class reside in fantastic architectural masterpieces above the earth enjoying the fruits of labor of the worker class who live in subterranean caves under the ground and who report daily to ten hours of intense manual labor for their rulers. The story is not much of a crowd puller, but the technical perfection of this Fritz Lang classic which was shot 80 years ago is beyond words. The special effects in the movie are so convincing, you wonder how they could have made it possible such a long time ago with equipments that lacked any sophistication to do it.

As a student of architecture few years back, we had used a lot of graphics from metropolis as a background for our posters, pamphlets etc without knowing about the source where it came from. The architectural eye of the movie makers, constructing a future city is a point to be applauded. After watching the Metropolis, the making of the film(bonus materials) is worth a watch to know how the German film makers made the impossible possible within their limited technical resources. There is definitely a lot of science behind this science-fiction film.

Sep 24, 2004

Shame

My first Ingmar Bergman ever. This is also the first time I have come face to face the great acting persona of Liv Ullman.

Shame, although a war film or more correctly a film set during the war, is more of a character study than a war movie. It follows the life of a couple played Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow eeking out a living in a farm on an island in Sweden. Shot in B/W this film follows the fate of these two people, carrying the burden of their tribulations and personal mishaps in a time of great turmoil.

Sep 22, 2004

Por La Libre or Dust to Dust as it English title is, is a colorful, youthful Mexican movie which centers around the death of a patriarch and his subsequent change in to dust(via an incinerator). So the urn containing his ashes is the protangonist in the movie, along with two young men who are cousins and are the grand children of the deceased person.

After watching this movie I have a very serious question to ask all the border crossing Mexicans, Mexico is very beautiful, its freeways can compete with any in the developed world and Acapulco kicks ass and still you want to stich yourself in to dashboards and illegaly transport yourself to the US? Why? Unemployment?

The movie is youthful in spirit, the two young actors really fit in to their roles and it doesn't try to teach the next important lesson of life. The photography and colors are cool, corruption exists everywhere and old benzes live long.

Sep 2, 2004

Super Size Me

A documentary with the sole aim of exposing the evils of fast food culture to the American public by Morgan Spurlock, who undergoes the dangerous experiment of intense "fast-foodization" himself.

As a part of this expose, Spurlock eats at McDonalds, 3 times a day for a month and nothing else - all the food he ever consumed during this month came from McDonalds all over the United States. He started off as a healthy young man, with his blood sugar, pressure, cholestrol in their healthiest of ranges and in just a matter of a month, he gains almost 30 pounds, his liver is poisoned(similar to liver poisoning by years of alcohol use) and has an addiction to fast food charecterised by cravings, high heart rate, pressure on chest, decreased libido and a lot other harmful vital signs.

In addition to Morgan's own adventure, during the course of the documentary we see how the American school system feeds its children almost totally on fast foods and sugar, how "super-sizing" became an everyday phenomenon and how less, the doctors themselves know about the effects of fast food.

The documentary doesn't imply we need to embark on an all-out war against fast food. But its always advisable to watch what you eat, after all you have only just one body and moderation is the key.

Sep 1, 2004

Juan Jose Campanella's, Son of the Bride is one of the near perfect achievements in film making I have seen in a long while. The story, the dialog, the camera, the acting, the editing, everything is perfect, there are no loose ends - a beautiful film, I think I should buy the DVD.

The story takes place in modern Argentina, where the the protagonist - aka the son of the bride is a restaurant owner, there are too many appointments and conversations crowding his life but somewhere along the way a heart attack makes a guest appearance. The story goes on from there. Cannot call it much of a story, but all I can say is it didn't even register in my mind while I was watching the film. The love between his father and his mother(an Alzheiemer patient) is touching, so is the poem his li'l daughter writes. When you dissect the movie the events it build upon seems trifling, but watch in its entirety - you have a gem in world cinema.
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