"They say Pat Garrett is got your number"

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID

Year: 1973
Country: United States
Language: English
Number: 577
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Starring: James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Katy Jurado

Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is an amazingly lyrical and melancholy western. It's one of many goodbye letter to the western genre, which was declining throughout the 70s. This was Peckinpah's last western film, before he went into an even greater depression. This picture is his tombstone, his legacy and his goodbye. For those of you who don't know the story about Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. It's based on real events and is probably the most famous western tale of them all. It takes place in New Mexico in the early 1880s. It's about two best friends, Pat (James Coburn) and Billy (Kris Kristofferson) both outlaws. But one day a twist of fate occurs when Pat is elected Sheriff of Lincoln County. He's first assignment is to catch Billy the Kid, dead or alive. How will he find the strength to kill his best friend? How could he sell himself to the greater capitalistic powers?

Even though the actors in the film is way older than the characters they portraying where in real life. In reality Billy the Kid was only 21 at the time of his death. He is played by the 37-years-old Krisrofferson. And Pat Garrett who was just 30 at that time, is portrayed by 45-years-old Coburn with gray hair. Probably is the whole cast least over 35. Why did Peckinpah cast such an old cast. I tell you why. Because of the time this movie is made in the 70s where the western genre was nearly extinct and it began to be old. The movie portrays a society where the old outlaw west is declining. but there still some old foxes who tries to hold on to the past (Peckinpah was one of them). What better way of showing this then show old people who have lived the life and thinks it's time to grow up. And who in our society is still children? Rock singers. Like most rappers today is fit to play any form of gangsters, is rock singers the most suited to play outlaws because of their hate towards the society and their short but troubled journey through life.



Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid feels very authentically inset of characters of the old west, the locations, the sets, the landscape and the fading wallpapers. You can almost feel the dust coming at you, just like in The Wild Bunch. There also a lot of the good all western character actors, such as Katy Jurado, Chill Wills, R.G. Armstrong, Slim Pickens, L.Q. Jones and Harry Dean Stanton. Their present makes this a secure film. I feel happy, all saying a last farewell, and one by one is taken down in western style.

I know that I defended Kristofferson's performance, but Bob Dylan's by the way is far more difficult. He playing one of Billy's closest outlaw friends who goes under the named Alias, alias anything you like. This is a pretty unstable performance by Dylan. He has no spirit in his voice, he doesn't try to act. Today this could might as well been a Razzie award worthy performance. But I can give one good argument of why I think this is a good performance. It's simple, he is a character without no spirit. He used to be a black smith and when he finally saw Billy escaping from prison Alias decides he should escape from his boring life as well. He was in reality a shy person that never stood up for anything until that moment. And don't tell me shy people doesn't exist. So why not expose them to the pictures? It takes time of a shy person to shake of his shyness.

I almost forget the main character in this film. James Coburn as Pat Garrett is simply his best performance in his entire career. His character goes through a rough transformation from being a free outlaw to become the law which is cold and inhuman. His transformation starts when he decides to grow his famous mustache. He begin as a healthy man, always happy. But as the pressure on catching Billy grows stronger, makes him want to forget the whole state of mind by drinking his problem away. One scene that is interesting is when Pat walks into a bar and force every one in the bar to act violent toward each other as they use to before. There's no problem for Pat to catch the Kid, but for how long can he postpone his destiny. The ending is just so emotional loaded and I can't remember the last time I was so moved by a film.

My conclusion about Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is that it's a very emotional touching film. I've seen it four times. This film has a strange grip upon me. I just coming back to it at one point or the other. It's not a perfect film, mostly because of the poor construction and the terrible acting by Bob Dylan. But I actually look at it different and finds more new interesting details every time I watch it. It's my Citizen Kane. I categorize as one of my favorite movies of all time, or rather more of a love hate relationship. sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it, but I can't live without it. But the soundtrack by Bob Dylan is quiet good and brings the perfect melancholy to this film, It's from this movie the famous rock anthem "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" first appears.

Grade: B+


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"Bridge Over Troubled Water"

THE CRANES ARE FLYING

Original Title: Летят журавли (Letyat zhuravli)
Year: 1957
Country: Soviet Union
Language: Russian
Number: 326
Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
Starring: Tatiana Samoilova, Aleksey Batalov, Aleksandr Shvorin, Vasili Merkuryev


Joseph Stalin's terror regime put an end to all creative groundbreaking movie making in the Soviet Union. All the films was purely propaganda, that only showed Lenin and Stalin's greatness, and during World War II this was used to sends millions of troops to the front, even more brutal than the Tsar Nicholas III did in the previous war. It was first after Stalin's death and Khrushchev's famous speech which criticized the Stalinism that the Russian cinema started to grown once more. And the subject that was brought up was the over twenty million soldiers and civilian that was killed during the war. This brought many director to make anti-war films, so that the soviet people finally got to morn over their loved ones.

The first film to do so was Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying in 1957. It tells the story about a young couple, who's barely in their twenties. Veronika and Boris are made for each other. But the war burst out, and Boris is enlisted, and have no time to say goodbye to his girlfriend. While he is away, his cousin Mark falls for Veronika, and since Boris is away she thinks it's her duty to marry Mark, because she hasn't heard from Boris and even assume the worst, and through the whole war she thinks of nothing but her lost love of her life Boris, whom no one knows is alive or dead. She volunteers as a nurse in Siberia, in hopes to find Boris among the wounded.

The Cranes are Flying isn't that we can call an original film in sense of plot, compared to the Americans they are twenty-thirty years behind. But the cinematography and use of hand-held camera is so superb. But it's also thanks to the good acting and the realistic art directions, which makes it more authentic then most of the anti-war films of it's time. And all the sad feelings, Veronikas grief and longings is so emotionally touching. It is indeed a very good anti-war film, that we can feel with our whole body. And it was the first in line of other russian anti-war films such as: Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier and Bondarchuk's War and Peace. All of them perfect anti-war films in any way, with no heroism nor any victory, just loss.


Grade: B+


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"Unpleasant Realism"

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Year: 1974

Country: United States

Language: English

Number: 582

Director: John Cassavetes

Starring: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper, Lady Rowlands

John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence is an amazingly realistic movie, to realistic, that one can be truly emotionally engaged and shocked, and scared of the out come of the characters themselves. Richard Dreyfuss have stated that he throw up during the film. This is a picture made from Cassavetes own soul, he spend his own money producing the film, and got some help from our leading man Peter Falk, who plays it's excellent along with Cassavetes' first lady Gena Rowlands who is even twice as good as Falk. They both really are those mentally ill people they are portraying.

A Woman Under the Influence is the story about the married couple Mabel (Rowlands) and Nick Longhetti (Falk) who is both what we can call mentally ill, though Nick is also insane, in are less harmful and more reliable way then Mabel is. Mabel seems to live in a different world than her husband which is not the real one. The only thing that holds their marriage together is their love for each other.

A Woman Under the Influence is one of those movies I like to call "unpleasant realism". It's a harrowing story, with real people and real issues, Insanity, and how it's effects the families, friends and specially the children which really horrified me, it was so terrible that If I had the power to really interact in a movie, it would have been this one, and the thing I would have done was called child services right away. Gene Rowlands delivers her sole greatest performance in her whole career.

Grade: A+


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"A real underground film"

UNDERGROUND  




Original Title: Подземље (Podzemlje)
Year: 1995
Country: Serbia and Montenegro/France/Germany
Language: Serbian, German, English
Number: 901
Director: Emir Kusturica
Starring: Miki Manojlović, Lazar Ristovski, Mirjana Joković, Slavko Štimac 


Emir Kusturica's Underground is one of those movies you never thought you where gonna see again. It's reminds me actually very much about The Tin Drum in that sense that it's more like a fantasy fairytale than the usual war drama film. Instead of a ungrownable boy, we have an intelligent chimpanzee. We have a orchestra that follow our main protagonist around every where they go. Due to all this, the story is amazing, and the subtext is just a wonderful and sad portrayal about the repressing conflicts between all the ethic groups in Yugoslavia.

Underground takes place in Belgrade in Yugoslavia durring world war II. we follow two best friends, Marko and Blacky who both works for the resistance, and they also are in love with the same girl, the actress Natalija who's at the beginning is in love with a nazi officer. But she eventually falls for Marko, and not Blacky who seems to bought the rights for her. Marko and Blacky's family and friends is hidden in Marko's basement, where they eventually starts manufacture weapons. He knows that he can't have the women he loves as long as his friend is around. So he come up with a plan of hiding them in the basement, and be sure to role the siren on a regular basis so all the people in the basement know it's not safe. He continue to do this even a long time after the war is over. The people down there thinks the war is still going on. While Marko has become one of the most powerful communist leader, while he makes his "deceased" friend Blacky a hero by raising statues of him and even gives permission to make a film about his life. How long will this charade go on?



I think I give a shot and try to tell you what's the symbolism is. The concept of hiding people in the basement, is to hide the truth of what really happened. Compared to the yugoslavian conflicts, not between yugoslavians and the germans, but rather croats against serbs and other ethic groups that isn't meant to live side by side in the beginning. The only reason that yugoslavia was united, was because of the lies. But it was immediately broken when the only thing that kept them together was gone; yugoslavia's president Tito. After that, all the old scar went back, like the humiliations after the war, when the serbs massacring thousands of croats as revenge for supporting germany after the war. But no one except the croats knew about it. It was first after the war that the anger of being pulled under the carpet or underground really had reached the topp. Lies puls all people together no matter what differences, but lies will not last for ever, and when it does people starts to remember their disagreement. The only thing that can pull them together is a common enemy.

Underground is simply a joy to watch. It's both funny and sad. It's funny to see the two best friends Marko and Blacky run around in Belgrade underground like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting. I also like the passionate love affair between Marko and Natalija. The whole movie is pretty much like a Fellini film, in that sense it feels like a circus and where everything is possible. It also has a great message about war, and never have I seen such effective scenes of how horrifying a bombing is, as much as there are some funny situations. I really enjoyed this movie, and I really hope to see it again soon.


Grade: A


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"Suicide is painless. Take it or leave it."

KIPPUR

Original Title: כיפור (Kippur)
Year: 2000
Country: Israel/France
Language: Hebrew
Number: 967
Director: Amos Gitai
Starring: Liron Levo, Tomer Russo, Uri Klauzner, Yoram Hattab


In 1973, during Yom Kippur, the holiest and most solemn holiday in the jewish fate, Israel was surprisingly attacked by the arabs on two fronts, by Egypt and Syria. The director Amos Gitai himself was called up for the war, as part of a helicopter rescue crew, who had the job of caring injured soldiers to the helicopters, and it's exactly what Kippur is about. It all begins with two friends, from the same platoon who first tries to find the rest of their platoon, but they have disappeared. And the two friends decides to volunteer as helicopter medics in the Golan Heights.

There some people who might call Kippur the Israeli Platoon or Saving Private Ryan. I would rather call it the Israeli M*A*S*H, with out the humor of corse. There's no gunfight, and the soldiers don't seems to be in any danger. It doesn't look like any of those films. Kippur is rather the kind big budget film that's play it very safe and unoriginal made. A desperate attempt to make their sole war epic. The acting is also over the top, and is not believable. It ironically also tries to be an art film, by having an opening scene where we see two people making love on a white sheet, covered in nothing but oil paint in all colors. Another desperate attempt of winning our attention, by trow in art. It's practically forced on us, and practically the whole movie as well.




But I also have something good to say about this movie. There's very few handhold camera scenes, and those are the once that is amazing, to bad is to few of them, or else this movie would have felled more authentic, like being at the battlefield yourself. And there also some amazing air photos from the helicopter. The film also contains some monologues from some of the soldiers, who tells about who they are, or some events before the war that had some impacts on their life. And those are usually good, It's actually something that is typical with the Israeli war movies, such as Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon, with is actually much better than this one, unlike Kippur, they actually have a point, and is not desperately trying to seek attention by dress up like an art film. My conclusion is that Kippur could been a good movie, if they haven't taken it so serious, and started to experimenting much more, instead of trowing a big budged and do nothing more that conclude this movie with an art scene that give us the illusion that it's symbolize something. The problem is, it's symbolizing symbolism. I had great expectations for this film, and I somehow wish I could say I liked it, because of it's message. But when art and the technical come in the way, and force us to watch, I feel like I'm being forced to buy it.


Grade: C-


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"Mmmm... cherry"

TASTE OF CHERRY

Original Title: طعم گيلاس  (Ta'm-e gīlās)

Year: 1997

Country: Iran/France

Language: Persian

Number: 927

Director: Abbas Kiarostami 

Starring: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi

Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry is an extremely deep, reflecting drama about the values of life and death. It's a realistic film, in sense of time, we don't feel any jump in time, and it's not even filmed in real life time. But it might feel like that because of it's many long shots, which is just incredibly beautiful and relaxing as yourself was a part of that scene, in the same environment as the characters. Taste of Cherry is a story where we follow the middle-aged Mr. Baadi who is driving around Teheran's industrial landscape, to find some one who will take the job of bury him after he has taken his suicide pills, lying in his grave, a hole he dug near a cherry tree. But it's easier said than done, many people don't like the idea of being a part of someones suicide. Some of the people he meets even quotes The Quran. Some are just very frighten.



 
Taste of Cherry is just a terrific piece of filmmaking, about a man who drives around on a quest, and we are so lucky to get along on his quest, we even get a long in his car. We get to meet every kind of different personalities, who tell their own stories about who they are, where they are from, and what they are doing in the dusty outside of town. A great colorful movie, with a lot of colorful characters.


Grade: A


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"The Worst Movie Ever Made?"

SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM





Original Title: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
Year: 1975
Country: Italy/France
Language: Italian
Number: 601
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Starring: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti


What do I think about Pier Paolo Pasolini's last motion picture, Salo, or the 120 days of sodom? Well it's a horrible, pervert, grotesque and soul ripping piece of a feature film. The word humanity doesn't exist, neither do mercy and neither salvation. And I can ask myself: "Does god exist". This is a movie that one should think more than twice about seeing. This was Pasolini's last film, which was released only twenty days after he was brutally murdered in 1975.


Salo is set in the year 1944 in the Mussolini controlled part of Italy, the Italian Social Republic commonly known as the Salò Republic. A bunch of upper class fascists, which includes a Bishop, a duke and a magistrate, decides to buy over a dozen of young people of both sexes, which they gonna use to practice all their nasty sexual fantasies. Only just describing them can give you nightmares. And let I just put it straight right away, there's no happy ending. Due to the year it's set in, you might think that Allied soldiers will break in and free the poor souls any minutes. But it doesn't happens. There's no light in the tunnel, except maybe the title which says 120 days. It's pure sodomizing just as the title says. One other little positive thing is that this is not a pornographic film, There's no close-ups of erected genitals . And that's probably because it's not gonna seems tempting in anyway. And it's actually the close-ups of a man's and a woman's genitals what makes it a porno film. I'm not saying that I would have enjoyed it if it was, but it might have distracted you from following the story and it's points, as many other porno films does.





There's no proof that such grusome even have taken place in the fascist Italy, But orgies just like in the movie have, in every part of the humanhistory and it's more and more shoking for each time, specially that this can happen right now as we speak, like in a basement. But in Salo it's not a basement it's a mation of sodom. There's no coincidence that the rich people are fascist, the people on earth that we know have exicuted the biggest, most terrible crimes against humanity. But my question is, whould there be any Salo if they had used other people than nazis? It would have worked with upper class people who's ordinary outside, but then it would have been to offensive towards all rich people, though Salo itself is excactly that, except most people who'd only see them as fascists, but the message is there, that's mostly because Pasolini himself was a communist, but also because his brother was killed by the fascist.


One can ask one self the question: Why? Why would anyone make such a horrible movie? The answer is very simple, to show how terrible the fascist regime was in the eyes of Pasolini. Not that I'm denying that it wasn't, because it was probably that horrible, because many people got killed. The paradox with Salo is that most of the sex slaves don't want nothing else but die. But it's also the ones that begins to accepting their masters, and starts to enjoying it all, the Stockholm syndrome.

Did I enjoy this movie? No. Did I like it? Yes. Because it's a movie that breaks boundaries of what's appropriate in films. In some cases it is necessary to do so. To get as close as possible to the people's minds and horrors. To get directly into the nightmare itself. To understand the reality of some ones pain. To get as close as hell itself. I want reality, though the plot might not be reality, the people and their pain certainly are. The fact that react with disgust makes me happy that I actually have a load of humanity inside. I would not sit next to a person that didn't do the same.


This is to date the longest review I have ever written, I could talk about this movie all night. But I stop here and conclude this movie as gruesome but necessary. I give it a Thumbs up. The only thing that remains is only to warn you. If you have to watch this movie, make sure you got no food and drink on the table, most because the horror of seeing what the people on the screen are eating, and you don't want vomit all over your carpet. One advise to prepare yourself is to read a lot about the movie before you see it. You must be scared as hell of this movie, it's eases the pain that you would have felt if you have seen this without knowing anything about it before you saw it.


Don't say I didn't warned you.

Grade: B+


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