Films

Today's top films to see are - 

The Italian - A Russian film about a 6 year old orphan who is about to be adopted by an Italian couple but decides to run away in an attempt to find his real mother.

Cool Hand Luke - Paul Newman plays a guy who ends up in jail for cutting the heads off parking meters.  Shows his time working in chain gangs - great acting , great script, great photography.

This is England -  a 12 year boy in northern england in the early 80's joins a gang of skinheads after he is repeatedly picked on because of his trousers.  They are a friendly bunch to hang out with until the ringleader gets out of jail.  It's a pretty rough film, but so are the lives of many people.  It's based on the real experiences of the director.

Slumdog Millionaire - this really was worth all the awards it got - Jamil who grew up in the slums of India goes on "Who wants to be a millionaire" and does really well.  The movie tells the story of how he happened to know all the answers to the questions.  Great storytelling...  

I started working my way through Federico Fellini films after hearing an album by an Australian band called The Umbrellas who did a recording of arrangements of the music to Fellini films written by Nino Rota.  That was long sentence. Anyway I was loving the music so much and I have never seen a Fellini film before, so now i'm on way...

The first one i saw was La Strada.  This is about a young woman who is sold by her mother to a travelling entertainer to be his assistant.  Interesting story, good acting.

Then I tried watching 8 1/2, and unfortunately it didn't survive my 30 minute rule - that being, if i can't get into movie within 30 minutes, I give up, it's not worth wasting my time.  I know I am at risk of missing some good things by employing this rule, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.  So 8 1/2 was just way too abstract for me and subtitles were so hard to read I just couldn't get into it.  All the reviews go on about how much of a masterpiece this film is, but I guess I'm just not arty or intellectual enough for it.

Which leads me to the dud film of the week - "Dingo".  An Australian film with Colin Friels and Miles Davis about a young jazz trumpeter in outback WA who dreams of going to Paris to be a professional muso.  Sounds like the type of story I'd like, but the movie was just awful.  The acting was pathetic for a start.  The only reason it survived my 30 minute rule was because the music was so good.  So i stuck out the whole movie, being completely infuriated by it, but enjoying the music.  The first shot is Colin playing his trumpet and it was immediately obvious he was miming.  Pathetic.  If you are going to act in a role, make it look genuine.  (the guys who played the band memebers in "Control" were not musicains, but they learned to play their instruments so that they looked genuine - that's proper acting.  I'm not expecting colin to suddenly become a jazz trumpeter, but at least learn to blow it and learn to play something so that you look like you are actually blowing the thing).  Then Miles Davis' character does an impromptu concert on the tarmac of this outback town.  He's in a 6 piece band, and the soundtrack plays this piece which sounds like a 30 piece big band playing in a studio.  Pathetic.  How about making it sound like a 6 piece band playing outside to match the pictures?  What director would do that?  If you are so ignorant about music that you can't see a problem with this, then don't make a music film.  And, love you miles davis, but you really can't act.  If someone can't act, don't cast them in a film.