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?

Le Samourai(1967)

English title: The Godson

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Country: France

If you are not a fan of the thriller/neo noir genre, definitely watch this film. Still, if you are not a fan of the thriller/neo noir genre, go die.

"Le Samourai" bears hallmark to the fact that even a virtually plotless tale, with almost no dialogues, actions and drama can still make an absolute cracker of a film. Alain Delon mesmerizes us as the methodical, cunning, devoid of almost all human emotions and deadly assassin Jeff Costello. Jeff, indeed qualifies as the finest to have ever graced the screen. Melville with his meticulously measured sense of framing the shots, his absolute lack of hurriedness and direction which is minimalistic to the point of being sparse makes sure that we are in for the ride of our life.

So, just sit back and enjoy this classic. They just don't make them like this anymore.

La femme Nikita(1997)

English title: Nikita

Director: Luc Besson

Country: France

This is one of those peculiar films which have me in two minds, where I cannot decide whether I like them or I don't.

A drug-addicted and convicted cop-killer is given a second chance at life by the French government. Nikita is trained at a secret government facility to become one of their top agents, a spy, an assassin. She undergoes the transformation very slowly. And when she is ready, she is given a new social identity and let loose on the streets of Paris. She juggles between love and killing foreign ambassadors and such until a mission is screwed up. Big time. Then Nikita reallizes she has paid her dues to the society and decides to run away from everything that is dear to her.

The acting throughout is top-notch. Anne Parillaud captures the different phases of Nikita's life with equal panache. The build-up, the slow transformation, the screw-up, everything is portrayed beautifully. Luc Besson does a terrific job directing the film. But still, somewhere I got a feeling that this film should have been 15 minutes longer. The dilemmas and the revelations of Nikita's life could have been made to a bit more detail. But still, this is a great film to watch and most viewers would find it very satisfying.

And do look out for Jean Reno. He is fabulous in another Leon-esque "cleaner" role. He steals those 5 minutes of screentime from the otherwise brilliant Anne Parillaud.

La voie lactée(1969)

English title: The milky way

Director: Luis Bunuel

Country: France

Two pilgrims in a modern France set out for Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the body of St.James is believed to be buried. Throughout their journey they travel back and forth in space and time as they experience historical scenes referenced in different theological texts, all connected by a common notion. That of christianity, of heresy, of the dogma involving catholicism, of the beliefs and of the contradictions. They come across a priest obsessed with transubstantiation(who changes in his mind about it in a minute), a child with unusual powers, Marquis de Sade trying to preach atheism to a young girl in his own sadistic ways, an archbishop encouraging mass orgy in the name of Christ, nuns crucifying another nun, an angel of death and obviously Jesus who refrains from shaving his beard to make Virgin Mary happy.

Made almost 40 years after the famously notorious Un chien Andalou and L'Age Dor, this film still has some elements of Bunuel's blatant rendezvous with the equally, if not more eccentric Salvador Dali and their ideas of surrealist cinema. But on the whole, this film is much mellow, much more subtle with a tangible coherent structure in the narrative quite in the lines of "The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie". The scenes, the dialogues(co- written by Jean-Claude Carriere) reek of Bunuel's infamous sarcasm and black humor. Unlike his earlier take on Christianity, "Simon of the desert", this film is much closer to his latter work "The phantom of the liberty", only much more straightforward. But the dilemmas of his atheist mind, grown up in a completely catholic surrounding, are nevertheless very much visible. He constantly puts forward miracles, beliefs and ventures to counter them in peculiar and very satirical ways. He seems to believe one of his character's words "my freedom is a phantom" and still mocks it to the very end. The film is a collection of some wonderful moments. The best being the one where a priest sitting outside a room explains to a couple inside how the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus. He says that its almost like a sun ray coming through a window. At this very moment we see that at one moment the priest is inside the room, the next he is again outside. This has got to be one of the finest piece of cinematic irony ever.

True, that this film has got a huge number of biblical and theological references. Still for the ignorants such as me, it works completely. Dark, very funny, this film is indeed Bunuel's road trip to blasphemy! :D