Filmcap: The week of April 17-24

So I am officially about a week behind on these because of finals. Though I think I'll be able to catch up soon once finals die down. This week I finally finish Band of Brothers, some Italian World War II stories, one very artistic Iranian film, one very Hollywood-ish Iranian film, and two movies about bank robberies.


If you like Martin Scorsese here's a cool 40 minute long interview with him, they go over the usual suspects but they also talk a bit about Shutter Island which you won't hear much about yet.

Band of Brothers (Tom Hanks, Erik Jendresen, Steven Spielberg, 2001): This is the HBO miniseries that may just be the most famous miniseries that has aired on television thus far. My high expectations were subdued though by many people calling it a 10 hour version of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," a very good movie but not a film I loved as much as others did. My reaction of "Band of Brothers" is basically that it is better than "Saving Private Ryan" and definitely worth watching (maybe even a must-watch) but I didn't fall in love with it. The only reason I thought this series was good was because it was true. As a visual historical document in narrative form, it's brilliant. It does a great job at giving us the journey of one group of soldiers through World War II. Getting to see the characters as they go through training, D-Day, and the many other battles of WWII is a very valuable experience, but more valuable is seeing how these characters change and how their mentalities are and friendships are affected by the war. The only part of this film that would be more impressive if it was a completely fictional story, would be the way every character feels like a real person. But this story is true. Everything is true and that's why it is such a fascinating watch. There are lots of things in this series we've seen before, including many war movie cliche's. The only reason they're excusable is because this is true, but if the story was not true I'd be much less enthusiastic about the series. But if a true story is filled with cliche's and is boring, just because it's true doesn't make it great. Band of Brothers though takes that issue and almost completely figures out a way to take care of it by fully embracing that it is a true story. In the beginning of every episode they show you the actual soldiers in real life talking to the camera (there are no names to prevent spoilers of who will die), and the show ends with them talking to the camera. They fully embrace that the show is a true story and that's what makes it more emotional than if it was fictional. I strongly urge you to watch the show just to see a comprehensive view of what life was for these particular men in WWII. The first half is not as strong as the second and it is a bit hard to track who is who, but it's all about the collective experience. This will teach you a lot and make you feel a lot. Just don't expect wall to wall action.
Grade: B+

Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946): This is the second of Rossellini's War Trilogy, the first one being "Rome Open City," which I saw a few weeks ago. This one is different from that, because it more of a series of vignettes. All of the vignettes are set during the Allied liberation of Italy during the end of WWII. The vignettes each move up from Sicily to northern Italy as the allies liberate the country. Each of the six stories is very human. Most of them focus on the everyday Italian people, but some of them focus on the soldiers themselves as well. The stories have some weaknesses, and some are slightly better than others, but overall they give you a great impression of life during that time. It's a great war film actually, because it shows many different sides of a war, including the side of ordinary citizens. Besides a scene here and there, you don't see much of non-soldiers in war movies. Certain scenes in this film are so human you can't help but get drawn into them. Rossellini examines many themes in the stories while keeping them all tied together by the war. Some of them are a bit overly sentimental, but most are very effective. It's a great companion film to the "Rome Open City," and a great example if Italian neorealism.
Grade: B+

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994): This is the last of the unofficial "Koker Trilogy," following "Where is the Friend's Home" and "Life and Nothing More...," both of which I have talked about previously. The second film in the trilogy had an actor playing Kiarostami as he went back to Koker after an earthquake to find the main actor of the first film. This film focuses on the making of the second film, "Life and Nothing More...," particularly one scene of that film in which a couple talks about how they got married the day after the earthquake. It focuses on the two actors that play that couple, because the guy wants to marry the girl playing his wife, but she won't seem to budge. This sounds very confusing and complicated on paper, but Kiarostami does it all so simply. His directing seems to be all about simplicity. Many of his shots are static and there's not a whole lot of variety of shots, but they're all very well chosen and he's not afraid to linger on things for some extra seconds, or in the case of the final shot, for many minutes. In addition to showing you the redundancy of being on the set of a movie, the film also shows us what seems like a real Iranian romance. The situation of wanting to marry the girl playing your wife puts this brilliant spin on romance and how he achieves his desires to marry her. At the same time Kiarostami also plays with the language of cinema, but not in a gimmicky way, it's all very poetic. This is certainly the best of the three, but I'm not so sure it's for everyone. It's definitely for mainstream audiences and only a certain amount of art-house film fans and film buffs will appreciate it as well. Nonetheless I found it to be marvelous and fascinating.
Grade: A

Children of Heaven (Majid Majidi, 1997): This is the only Iranian film to have ever been nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, but it's by no means the best of what the Iranians can do (see: the movie above this). It's very Hollywood-ish, and is kind of like Iranian movie by way of Hollywood script structure. But this is not to say the movie is horrible, it's still a really good movie, especially for families. As a fan of film in general though, there are certain things in the movie that cater directly to American audiences, or are taken directly from Hollywood movies. As a result it's not completely original and it didn't give me satisfaction from a filmmaking perspective or a cultural perspective. But again, there are great things in this movie. There is a sequence in the film where the boy at the heart of the story goes with his dad to the rich part of Tehran to try to get a gardening gig, and it's a brilliant sequence that I felt really got me into lives of the characters and economical factions of the culture. The structure itself is kind of derivative and predictable, but the execution is fairly top notch and so it all still works. It's a movie I'd certainly watch with a family and children, but it is a bit frustrating to think that this movie would be the one nominated for best foreign film and not something like Kiarostami's "Through the Olive Trees." In any case this is still a movie with more good than bad, but because it's one of the more famous of the Iranian films, I gave it a bit more scrutiny than otherwise.
Grade: B

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967): This film is talked about a lot because of its influence on American cinema in the 1970's (though more accurately it didn't influence other great filmmakers instead of just be the first one out of the gate). It's known as the film that brought the French New Wave to Hollywood. The editing was fast, the romance unconventional, and the violence was bloody (for that time period). Today, it still stands as a great film, though I probably don't get how fresh it was for audiences back then. The movie is wildly entertaining with great performances all around, including Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Gene Hackman. Equally as good, if not better than the performances is the great quick editing, a style of editing ruined by so many action movies that use them to ramp up tension or something, but it usually just makes everything a sensory experience that has no meaning. This film reminds you of how you can use the fast French New Wave editing to actually have substance if you do it right and sparingly. Also great is the way the film examines the phenomenon of bank robbing at the time, the screenplay does a great job at showing how bank robberies back then were not perceived the way they were today. This is a solid, entertaining film that still stands up very well today.
Grade: B+

Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009): This documentary takes on a big issue, and it's too big. If you've seen Michael Moore's previous documentaries, you know what to expect from this. He takes on one big issue, in this case capitalism, comments on it in grand fashion with small personal examples, and then throws in a confrontation. This film would be much more successful if it was smaller scale and not so huge in ambition. Moore wants to tackle capitalism in epic fashion, and not capitalism, but America in general sometimes. If he were to make smaller scale films about individual scenes in this film he would make his point much more clear and concise. I definitely respect Moore, his opinions are certainly in the same ballpark as my idea and what he advocates for is certainly healthy compared to the opposite, but the ways he says those things is not the way I would do it. He is very often guilty of oversimplifying complicated issues. He oversimplifies for two reasons, his scope, and his audience. First, he tries to tackle too much in too little time and so he ends up having to oversimplify or mention only in passing some very important and complicated issues. Second, his audience is everyday blue collar America, and so I feel like he is forced to dumb things down for them and so he simplifies everything. A couple weeks ago I watched "Inside Job" and that was a much better movie about capitalism even though on the surface that's not what it tried to do. That film focused on one event, and was more successful because of that. Regardless of all these things, Moore can still create great emotional scenes and is always entertaining. He still has the ability to get important issues to a mass audience, hopefully he regains some of that.
Grade: C+