amateur review space

Amour (Directed by Michael Haneke)/2012 Amour for me isn’t about love, but our obsession with the concept of love that is to some extent a social construct related to a state of beauty, peace, and happiness.    The film shows how this concept fails to work in the relationship between the dying one and the carer when they are faced with the brutalities of the degradation of the human body. George and Anne are a retired couple in their 80s.   They live a relatively prosperous life after careers in classical music.   The film opens with their outing one night to a concert and George tells Anne that she looks pretty.   Anne is elegant and sophisticated: a delicate porcelain doll.   George is in awe of her beauty even after all these years and is still deeply in love with her.   The next morning, Anne fails to respond to anything for a few minutes; this is the beginning of the series of strokes that paralyses Anne bit by bit until she is rendered completely helpless like a new born bab

8 ½ (Directed by Federico Fellini)/1963 Only one character really matters in this film: Guido. Guido is a famous director and the film opens with him at a health retreat somewhere in Italy. He has dark rings under his eyes and everyone wants something from him. People want to know about or be in his next movie, his opinions on abstruse topics, his money, his love..... The first scene sees Guido in a dream sequence: trapped within a car and then at the mercy of people who control him. However, this movie is not solely about a man who is pushed around by the world. It displays how we all want people to be a certain way due to a range of unconscious desires and fears drilled into us through our unique upbringings and the experiences that follow, but how the world will not let us live out the fantasies we secretly desire. The film presents the role of film director as a metaphor for each of us. We are the central organising point of our subjectivity. We want people to play the role w

Short Cuts (Directed by Robert Altman)/1993 Watching Short Cuts makes you feel like a Buddha looking down into the petri dish of modern human existence: all squabbling over each other, each with their own fears, worries and weaknesses.   But it is not a bleak film as you may think it would be, rather its message seems to be that it is all part of course of human life. The time is late 80s in the LA.   The film opens with the city lights sprawling across the darkness with helicopters circling around spraying chemicals, as we find out, to deal with Medfly epidemic.   There is a panic in the air as people worry about Medflies and getting cancer from the sprayed chemicals.   People are having domestics, some look resigned and others are simply not affected by it at all. Short Cuts is about the lives of about 20 characters that are all related in some way.   Each has his/her own fears and desires, successes and failures.   They are all different: meek, aggressive, artistic, add

Badlands (Directed by Terrence Malick)/1973 Terrence Malick has an ability like almost no other director to make ordinary things beautiful. He sees something in nature that other people don’t and can capture it on film. His movies try to take the viewer into a mystical experience, where the shots and music have a meaning much greater than the story being told. The piece of art as a whole tends to rise above the story, which turns into a vehicle for the message: a message communicated through vision and sound rather than conceptual language. Badlands has some of Malick’s idiosyncratic abstract/mystical style, but the message is more about human behavior than some of his later films. It is an earlier Malick movie and is much more character driven (like Days of Heaven 1978). It is a story about a 15 year-old girl named Holly (Sissey Spacek) who enters a relationship with a man in his mid 20’s named Kit (Martin Sheen). Kit murders Holly’s father for preventing their relationship and

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Directed by Isao Takahata)/2013 Do not get me wrong, there is no doubt that this film is one of the most visually exquisite animation films I’ve seen in recent times.   I am however unsure about what the story was and the message it was trying to convey.   The story originated from the old Japanese folk story called The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.   As it is with any of these folk tales, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the story is original and which part of the story is a twist added by its creators of the film. The story of the film is about a bamboo cutter who discovers a light shining out of a bamboo shoot and discovers a thumb-sized princess inside it.   He understands it to be heaven that gave her to him and brings her home.   When she arrives home she turns into a baby and the bamboo cutter and his wife raise her.   The baby soon grows into a beautiful young woman.   The bamboo cutter finds gold and silk robes in the bamboo

Starred Up (Directed by David Mackenzie)/2014 Starred Up is a movie about the futility of the justice system. We send people to prison, they lose contact with their children, they become part of the prison-culture, their children are brought up without a parent, and the children join their parent(s) in prison. The cold emotional/psychological reality that prisoners inhabit is manifested by Starred Up’s cinematography and music. The lighting is dark and there is no music. The clothes are grey and the buildings bland. Viewers are forced into the sensory experience of what prison would feel like. Viewer sensory arousal comes due to the anger and hatred that prisoners express on a continuous basis: the sensations we are made to feel are not pleasurable, but exhilarating in a dangerous, chaotic way. The movie focuses on the movement of an angry British man named Eric Love (Jack O’Connell) from the youth ward into the adult prison. This is what the term Starred Up means. He clearly h

Deadwood (Created by David Milch)/2004-2006 Deadwood is a misunderstood show. It is the brilliant, precocious bad-boy of the HBO catalogue. Deadwood ran for only three seasons and was shunned by people who failed to see past the surface-level whirlwind of swear words. One can watch Deadwood without grasping what is being said due to the deep philosophical reflections hiding behind what appears to be simple and crude language. The language is symbolic of the show. At first one might assume Deadwood is a brutally violent western show: a show for people that like violence and swearing. However, as it progresses we realise that Deadwood is a genuine presentation of the better and worse sides of humanity, and a compelling thought experiment of what humans become in times of lawlessness and desperation. Deadwood is a violent mess of a town existing outside any kind of government control. Its time period pre-dates the existence of the United States of America. As the show  proceeds   De

Paths of Glory (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)/1957 My love for Stanley Kubrick’s movies developed through exposure to his most crafted, aesthetic works: in particular, Barry Lyndon and 2001 Space Odyssey. These movies showcased Kubrick’s amazing eye for detail and his ability to weave music into elegant cinematography to create something uniquely beautiful.  Paths of Glory is one of Kubrick’s lesser known movies. It's not as crafted as his later movies and is more concerned with making a moral statement than creating something aesthetically perfect. However, the battle scenes that occur show glimpses of later Kubrick: meticulously crafted scenes that use music to create an enhanced emotional response. The movie is set during the First World War and follows a group of French soldiers that are sent on a suicidal mission to take a key tactical position held by the Germans called the ‘Ant Hill’. The mission is conducted less to advance the French troop’s position than

Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov) (Written by Stacy Schiff)/1999 This book is a biography of an enigmatic woman who dedicated her life to literature.   The amount of research that went into this book is phenomenal; the author carefully weaved together sources from articles, books, anecdotes, and official documents to create a magnificent work that Véra would have approved.   Despite multiple and often contradictory materials, the book reads almost like fiction and not like a historical book that can quite often be intensive.   You get a sense that each sentence would have been considered and pored over just as the Nabokovs had done with their work. There is a better-known book about the Nabokovs called “Letters to  Véra ”, which is about the couple’s love affair before they became famous.   This book, by contrast, is not a love story but a story of a partnership dedicated to creation of quality literature that lasts for over 50 years across 3 continents and two major world events: the

Being There (directed by Hal Ashby)/1979 I had seen glimpses of Peter Seller’s talent in Lolita and Dr Strangelove, yet I didn't realise the extent of it until I watched Being There. Sellers plays a middle-aged man called Chance. He has lived his whole life in an older man’s house, working as a gardener and watching television. When the previous owner of the house dies, Chance is made to move out and begins an aimless wander into the outside word. From Chance's first interaction with people, he is revealed as not having a personality. He has spent his whole life socializing with a television, and his mind has turned into one. He simply expresses what he hears, with the messages not being mixed with other ideas or reshaped by emotion. He does not have human emotion: emotion blended and shaped by ideas and desires. While he has a kind of fear, it comes across as the fear of a deer in the wild, rather than a human responding to a situation based on past experiences and f

Ida (directed by Pawel Pawlikowski )/2013 Ida is a film about the dichotomy between the reality of human existence and the social norms and expectations that reality laughs in the face of. It is shot in black and white, again symbolising duality, yet the overall texture of the film is thick soft grey; scenes always look either foggy or cloudy as if to also say that that is the final outcome of our existence: a grey river that flows by nonchalantly. Ida is a girl who grew up in a convent as an orphan in post WWII Poland.  The film opens with the montage sequence of her going about her chores at the convent.  It all seems very peaceful, quiet and…boring. Before she takes her final vows to become a nun, the head nun tells her to go visit her aunty (her sole surviving family member) and stay as long as she needs to.  Ida is reluctant but she is made to go. The initial impression of the aunty, Wanda, is that she is a “woman of ill repute”.  She's in her dressing gown smoking

Foxcatcher (Directed by Bennett Miller)/2014 Some reviewers have claimed that Foxcatcher is at essence a movie about repressed homosexual tension. To me, this is an instance of the projection of an individual’s own concerns and ideological framework onto a movie. In response, you may ask why any interpretation that I develop is in anyway different: surely I have my own dogmas and conceptual constructs that get in the way of an “objective viewing”. Such an objection would have some truth to it, but I won't be willing to concede the post-modern notion that there is no objective truth to any piece of art as all artists and their supporters have intentions. If interpretation was merely projection, then I cannot see how any kind of discussion could take place about a piece of art: regardless of the question of whether it is good or bad, there must be some objectivity to what it is. Foxcatcher is a movie about power. The movie nearly explodes with tension: a tension between indiv