Angela(2002)

Director: Roberta Torre

Country: Italy

Angela runs a shoe store with her husband Saro Parlagreco, when actually they deal in drug trafficking. Angela helps put up the shoe store show while Saro with the help of his cousin, controls his well disguised drug business. Problems start when Saro brings a new guy, Masino to help him. Angela and Massino fall for each other and their torrid affair gives the suspecting police a chance to round them all up. This little film is supposedly based on a true incident that took place in Palermo, Italy. The director's use of handheld camera and extreme closeup shots of all the characters make this look like a docudrama more than a film. And her use of closed, dark spaces give this film a very claustrophobic feel. The only saving grace is the very beautiful Donatella Finocchiaro as Angela, on whom the camera hovers for alomost the entire length of the film. She almost carries the film single-handedly and there's really not much else to look out for. What could have been a gripping tale of passion, guilt and organized crime remains only a mellowed Italian drama.

Adoration(1987)

Director: Olivier Smolders

Country: Belgium

A Japanese man invites the beautiful woman he loves to his place. After they have dinner, she recites some poems and he records them. Then he shoots her with a gun, cuts her body parts and eats them one by one.

This 16 minute long film is based on a real life incident. Its shot entirely in monochrome and has no dialogues except for the part where the girl recites some poems. The special effects are awesome, the director uses very innovative camera movements and angles to make this film technically almost perfect. The film works in its totality too. In the very short time frame, the director succeeds to present a very strong picture of passionate power play. The man looks at the woman with awe, kisses her, listens to her recite. After killing her, he even undresses her with utmost care, strokes her body with his hands and finally consumes her completely. What better way to culminate the ultimate passion that a man feels for the woman of his dreams! Its sick, its perverted. And its still the most basic, most natural form of obsession. Very interesting piece of cinema, this. But definitely not suitable for all.

The Unborn(2009)

Director: Who cares.

A pathetic excuse for a film.

Une femme est une femme(1961)

English title: A woman is a woman

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Country: France

Angela is a stripper who lives with her boyfriend Emile. She wants to have a baby with him but Emile refuses. She turns to Emile's close friend Alfred instead. That is about all that there is to the story of this cute little film by JLG. Its his style of film making and Anna Karina, the most beautiful woman on earth, that makes this film work. Godard, notably an American cinema fan, took the b-grade gangster film genre, dissected it and remade it into "A bout de Souffle" in his own sly way. Here, he does the same with the Hollywood musical genre. There are constant references to musicals(Angela wants to star in a musical with Gene Kelly). And the use of background music is the most interesting it can ever get in any film. Godard not only uses discontinuity in music(as in "A bout de Souffle") but he does so much more with it. Sometimes the music is a supplement to the dialogues spoken, sometimes they stop to let the characters speak and at other times they are just too loud to let us hear what the characters are saying. He lets a score stop at the middle and starts another from nowhere and suddenly goes back to the former. To follow it thorughout the film, is absolute fun. The film has its unique moments when the characters interact directly to the audience, they bow to us, wink at us or even asks Jeanne Moreau how her film "Jules et Jim" is doing. Technically this film is outrageous, much as JLG's other works. But on the intellectual level this remains one of his most accessible works. Apart from being playful and comic at different levels, the narration doesn't really test the viewer's intellect.
The film belongs to Anna Karina. She's there in almost every shot. Her mischievous smile, beautiful body and the divine face is utillised to every possible bit. The film kind of reflects how much JLG was in love with this woman. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy do justice to their roles. There's an absolute hilarious scene where Brialy and Karina doesn't talk to each other and communicate only through the names of books they choose from their bookshelves. Overall, this is a really nice comedy that should appeal to the common viewer as well as the hardcore JLG fan such as me.

November(2004)

Director: Greg Harrison

When I picked this dvd up from a local library, I didn't have much hope. I just thought of it to be another run of the mill Hollywoodish thriller. Boy! I was in for some surprise!

The film centers round Sophie, who is a professional photographer in LA. She lives together with her boyfriend Hugh and has a pretty normal life complete with the cheating on her boyfriend with some guy from work. But one evening something happens, something tragic. A held up, followed by a shoot-out in a corner store. And then the dream and the reality starts mixing up for Sophie.

The film is just over an hour long and is divided in three parts viz "denial", "despair" and "acceptance". The three parts are but different takes on the same incident, the shoot-out that takes place on a November evening. They start essentially with same sequence of shots, continue to tell us about the same evening, the same incident, the only difference being the music and the use of light and the way Sophie interprets the incidents. The "denial" part is the darkest of all where Sophie tries to deny the absolute facts in her life, facts that would dawn on the viewer at the very end. In the "despair" part, she sort of comes in terms with these facts but is ridden with pangs of grief. This part uses much brighter though a bit yellowish light to keep up with the theme. The last part, "acceptance", shows Sophie finally accepting the inevitable and seek salvation. This is obviously the brightest part and the background music is also vastly different from the other two.

I won't give out any more details of the plot. Those interested should really go forward and see this. This small independent film makes a statement as strong as any so called "classic". In fact it is a rare film that is both very intelligent and intriguing at the same time. Courtney Cox does a wonderful Sophie, James LeGros is a delight to watch as Hugh. This actually might be the best Hollywood film I have seen in quite a long time.

P.S: IMDB gives "November" 5.5 out of 10. When will they grow up?