Criticultura em Portugal

Something Wild (1961) Directed by Jack Gerfein Starring Carroll Baker and Ralph Meeker   The early 1960s were an odd period in US film. The conservatism of the 1950's was still rampant, but the Kennedy election gave more of a view of the future to the public. While the big studios still dominated things, and there was very little “independent cinema”, even the big studios would sometimes experiment with some socially disruptive films like Rebel without a Cause (Warner Brothers 1955) or On the Waterfront (Columbia, 1954). These were edgy, but were made easier to sell by featuring young hunks like Marlon Brando and James Dean (more on them later). That any films  with any social protest at all were made is remarkable, given McCarthyism and the blacklisting of the most creative Hollywood talent. This conservatism was still pretty much the status quo by 1960-1, where the big grossing films were studio spectaculars like Ben Hur and Spartacus . So what to make of Somethi...

Fight without Hate (1948) Directed by Andre Michel The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912 Directed by Adrian Wood Olympia (1938) Directed by Leni Riefenstahl The excellent Criterion Channel, my go-to source for excellent films during this endless marooning plague, now has posted a fascinating set of over 100 years of films about the Olympic games, ranging from predictable teary-eyed personal triumph stories to very artsy, idiosyncratic studies. What I have found fascinating about them is how one can evaluate the societal mores of an era by both watching the panorama and listening to the commentary. Sportscasters tend to speak with far more improvisation than do most actors or other newscasters. So they let slip all sorts of interesting things. During commentary on the London games of 1948 we here lots of talk from the British commentators about the “American negro team” (perhaps as distinct from the actual American team). The racial remarks about “burly negros...

Boxing Helena (1993) Directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch Starring Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn The Head that Wouldn’t Die (1962) Directed by Joseph Green Starring Jason Evers and Virginia Leath Last week’s review of Dogtooth , the movie about entrapped, isolated children of controlling parents, got me thinking about other dramas of control. Of course, Shaw’s Pygmalion (then My Fair Lady ) is a famous example, as Henry Higgins seeks to remake a poor girl into a society lady. Ditto Vertigo, Hitchcock’s classic drama of a man’s obsession with the idea of a woman, rather than a real woman. These excellent dramas give rise to some uncomfortable truths about how some men would rather have a fantasy partner than work with a real one. I then remembered two films that take this concept to excess. Boxing Helena is a not-so-great movie that makes you pretty uncomfortable about sex roles, rather like Dogtooth makes you about parenting. The excellent British actor Jul...

Dogtooth (2009) Written and Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos Dogtooth is one of those excruciating films that enters a dysfunctional world so vividly that you need to pause it at times just to recover from its excesses. Like the best science fiction, it starts with an extreme conceit and follows through on it to the logical, if uncomfortable extremes. The idea here is that a middle-aged upper-class Greek couple is so determined to protect their children from society’s evil, corrupting influence that they lock them within their palatial estate and deny them all contact with society. No live TV, radios, cellphones, internet, newspapers, nothing. A single phone is locked in the closet only for use by the parents. The three 20-something kids never leave the expansive estate, and have no friends. The parents have a rich collection of carefully censored books, so home-school the kids, who seem well educated if very limited in their ability to express emotion or interact appropriately (ra...

The Koker Trilogy Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) And Life Goes On (1992) Through the Olive Trees (1994) Written and Directed by Abbas Kiarostami In the 1970s, just before the Iranian revolution, a group of young Iranian directors began experimenting with new forms of filmmaking that would create new artistic visions, but also reflect local Iranian culture. This “Iranian New Wave” was interrupted by the revolution in 1979. Several of the directors fled to Europe in the face of censorship. But the most well-known, Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), stayed in his country and spend two decades making films that focused on the traditions and people of Iran—not the new religious leaders, but instead life for the everyday person. These films have a remarkable, unique presence and style, making this director famous, admired by such renowned colleagues as Akira Kurosawa. His methods were extreme—for example he gets one of the local boy-actors to plaintively cry three minutes in...