Reviews

A strange story of Jesus (Clémenti), before his passion. His mother Marie (Zouzou) cannot get him out of the house to do his proselytizing, but eventually he takes bullhorn in hand and gets rejected at every door. He meets Marie Magdalène (Zouzou) who is happy to spend time with him as long as he gives her stones like her other clients. He spends a lot of time with these two women and occasionally goes out to proselytize in the water, on the rocks and in the swamps, He is ridden off his donkey by some thugs on horses while he gives out drugs to various prostitutes along the way. And he sees horrific suffering when his mother opens Pandora's Box. In the end, he wanders off into the ocean while a very pregnant Marie or perhaps Marie Magdalène lies on her back like a beached whale at the edge of the water. Beautiful stark rocky sets with intense lighting and minimal acting. Except for a few scenes with the thugs and Monty Python like fighting apostles, there is little music. Oddly compelling and intense visuals, that might hold anyone's attention, even if they knew nothing about the Jesus stories.

On the tenth anniversary of Japan's WWII surrender, a motley group of five, four men and one woman, gathers in the basement of a butcher shop to dig up a cache of morphine buried during the war. A grimly humorous tale of twisted relationships as one by one each of the group is eliminated. This early gangster film foreshadows similar tangled relationships in Shohei Imamura's later films. I do not have much more to say, but I liked the movie enough to write a comment even though I cannot fill up all of the 10 lines required by IMDb So I do not have much more to say, but I liked the movie enough to write a comment even though I cannot fill up all of the 10 lines required by IMDb

I wonder who is orchestrating the campaign to discredit this movie by voting in a block against it. I suspect that many of those 43 people voting a 2 have never seen it, and are simply responding to a viral effort to kill the film. But I cannot figure out what the puppeteers found objectionable with this movie.

The film itself has the feel of a low intensity Glengarry Glen Ross, without the claustrophobia or the cursing. With the passion and eagerness of aspiring musicians as a backdrop, this is really a story of the salesmen who allow themselves to be duped into believing that they are actually helping others.

Great World of Sound features some nice performances by the leads: Pat Healy as the reticent Martin and Carver Johns as his loquacious and exuberant partner Walter. All in all there is some ethical subtlety here. But that might be hard to detect if you've been a victim of a similar scam.

Matyoroy is a small village on a beautiful island with the same name. The party has decreed that the island shall be flooded for a hydro-electric dam. This story focuses on the inhabitants of Matyoroy, who watch the disassembling of their village. Darya (Stanyuta) is a grandmother who does not want to leave her ancestor's graves behind, but she cannot get anyone to help her move them to the mainland. She becomes the center of a group of islanders who do not want to move. Her son, Pinegin (Durov) is tapped to be the foreman of the crew preparing the island for submersion by the local party leader. They are supposed to disinfect the cemetery, cut down all of the tall trees, remove all of the people and livestock then burn all of the dwellings and barns. The residents move reluctantly, slowly harvesting their grain, digging their potatoes, and boarding up their houses. But a few, with Darya at their center dawdle so long that the island is flooded with them on it. They chose remaining with their forbearers to moving to the mainland. This film had some possibilities, but it ended up dark, heavy and leaden. Difficult to follow at first, it became weighted with symbolism, mysticism, fire, fog and overly dramatic music. I would have hoped that it would have been better if Larisa Shepitko had been able to complete the film. At least the shots of her first day of work with the cast shown in the short tribute "Larisa" seemed more interesting than the footage shot by her husband after her death.

Matiss Zelcs (Dombrovskis) is trying to find a woman which he ignored when he passed her and who was about to jump off the bridge last night. He heard her splash followed by cries for help, but never saw her or her body. The police don't want to continue investigation as no body was found. However Matiss starts his own investigation, finding that the woman had been drinking at a café earlier in the night he saw her, and had left her handbag behind along with some crumpled half finished notes to a certain Alexej (Korobov). After pretending he was her lover to get the articles, Matiss sorts through them carefully and takes a receipt in the name of Alina into the photo developers to get some slides she had left to be developed. He sees that she appears to have been a mother with a young son and a husband that she did not seem close to. Matiss further sees that Alina (Dzerve) was very interested in another man of whom the husband seems jealous. He also finds an envelope addressed to Alexej Mesetzkis and visits his flat. There he learns that Alina had been living for several months with Alexej who indeed is the man of the photo, but she has recently disappeared after several days of fighting. Without letting on that he has the slides or the half finished notes, he asks Alexej to consider if he has driven Alina to desperate measures.

This is a very slow movie with little conversation, much of it in Russian rather than Latvian. Long slow black and white shots mirror the depressed mood of the main character in a movie that feels a lot like Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. But as with Stranger Than Paradise, I had a hard time staying awake through the first half of Krisana.

Oliver (Demy) and Marianne (Régnier), his pregnant French fiancée have come to vacation in Corsica, where she swims while he joins his cousin Vincent (de Peretti) and other locals in the daily boar hunts. Though Oliver grew up on the Island, he is returning to Corsica from Paris, and is accepted in the hunting party only because he is with Vincent. Many of the older women in the village know his mother or grandmother, but they are skeptical of his Parisian girl friend. His vacation is turned upside down when he stops to get air for his tire at the local convenience store and witnesses a murder of the cashier by one of the more volatile men of the hunting party. But he does not go to the police right away, trying to figure out weather to tell anyone. And of course, his aunt tells him that in Corsica that people cannot get hurt if they mind their own business. But his silence takes its toll, straining his relationship with his fiancée and making him even more quiet on the hunt and with Vincent. Well developed realistic hunting scenes and subtle male female dynamics. This is intense, uncomfortable and real with a constant low level tension developed by the tight music and effective black and white dream sequences.

In Chasing the Birds, Farukh (Dzhanik Faiziyev), a young boy gets a brutal education in medieval Uzbekistan. The boy wakes the town shouting that the almond trees are in bloom, and gets a sound beating for rousing the towns folk from their sleep. Farukh is pursued by Amandyra (Dilorom Kambarova) a young woman who has a crush on him, and wants to elope with him, but when she is forced to marry after he does not come for her, she is unwilling to leave her wealthy new husband for him. Much of the film happens in open fields and streams, with Farukh's flashbacks to the village and his mother who died at his birth. This is all too jumbled to follow any chronology, or even know when the boy is dreaming, daydreaming or remembering an actual event. The boy also lost his father to drink, and then the town folk take all of Farukh's remaining possessions to satisfy his father's debts. After leaving the village with only the clothes on their backs and their ingenuity, Farukh and his childhood pal Khabib find a young orphaned girl Gultcha, who tags along with them until she and Khabib fall in love. When Farukh is away, a member of nobility who has taken a fancy to the girl, has his hunters invade their camp and then he rapes her. The Bey then kills Khabib in an underwater knife fight, before battling with Farukh. Lots of color and flashbacks & dreams make it hard to follow this non linear mystical story of lost loves and abuse by bandits or landlords. The acting is pastoral, even simplistic and the subtitles are hard to read against the light background; but the visuals are spectacular, so the 87 minutes are not a total loss.

After losing his job in a layoff, Pedro (Gomez) cannot tell his family or the others in their happy but poor shared household. Instead he has a dream of finding a suitcase with an inexhaustible supply of money and using that to give his wife Margarette (Kaplan) an unforgettable birthday feast. Through the dream he always has to watch out for the petty police officers and is embraced by the poor who are happy to see him when he hands out money. At the end of the feast he has only the bill from the grocer and no money to pay.

This is an odd cross between Chaplin and Fellini, with subtle expressions of emotion, clear social commentary, Nino Rota like music and a bittersweet ending.

Well made.

In a mythical pre-colonial village fishing village on the south coast of Senegal, a strange ocean mist hangs over the waters for weeks and the local fishermen fear to go out to sea. One son of a wise elder, after his father's death decides to take his boat onto the waters and returns when the mists lift with a full catch. He has become a hero, and has won the heart of the prettiest girl in the village, but has also won the envy of his best friend, who also covets the girl. When the friend murders the hero, and drags the body to sea, no one in the village explicitly accuses him. But within months the girl agrees to marry him. Immediately after the marriage tells him that she is pregnant, that she wants no sexual relationship and that he will raise his victim's son as his own as the price of forgiveness. Painful as her price for forgiveness turns out to be, that is not enough for the ghost of the victim.

The pace, the magic, and music of this movie remind me of "Daughters of the Dust" by Julie Dash.

The film opens with a confrontation: a woman, whose husband has disappeared in the bush, is being forced by her husbands family to marry another brother so the husbands infant son will be raised in the family. She runs away to a remote village where the family cannot find her and raises her son in poverty as an outsider. Several years later, when the outsider is blamed for bringing bad luck in the form of an infant's death, she and her son are run out of the remote village.

Most of the story is told from the point of view of the young son, after he is found mute in the savanna and has been given the name Wend Kuuni by his adopting family. Only when his speech returns after several more years do we learn of his mother's flight from her ancestral village and their flight from the mob at the second village. But it is important to understand this history as a contrast to the Wend Kuuni's adoption into a family and sense of belonging in the third village.