SCREENING LOG - 6/12/2006-6/18/2006

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Camera Buff (1979, Krzystof Kieslowski)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078763/
Call me impressionistic, but I find this early feature by the Polish master a more compelling effort than his later, highly lauded works like THE DECALOGUE or the THREE COLORS TRILOGY. Like all of his films, there's a bit of self-conscious, high-concept gimmickry involved in the plotline - a factory worker buys a camera to record his newborn infant and unexpectedly enters a new career as an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Kieslowski characteristically milks the premise for all the socio-philosophical relevance he can manage, but unlike his later films that seem to regard its characters largely as moral chess pieces, this one has a firmly ground-level view of human dilemmas, rooted in its hapless protagonist's moment-by-moment experiences: initial euphoria over both his baby and his new camera lead to dreamy ambitions, which somehow bend into family upheaval and workplace intrigue. It is simply one of the best films made about filmmaking (Rob T-2, you out there?)
YES (#1 for 1979)

Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin (2003, Richard Schickel)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379730/
I haven't seen most of the other Chaplin documentaries that have been done -- the one I saw when I was a wee lad, UNKNOWN CHAPLIN by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, was focused much more on behind the scenes footage showing Chaplin's fastidious working process. Richard Schickel's documentary is less honed in on one fascinating aspect of Chaplin the artist; instead it works as a well-paced, critically incisive overview of Chaplin's career, musings on recurring issues underlying artistic vision, and the relationship between his work and his often troubled personal life. One of the nicest aspects of the documentary is the mosaic of voices that give their take on the Chaplin legacy, his contemporaries, ex-lovers, his children Geraldine and Michael Chaplin, as well as critics like Andrew Sarris, actors Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr., and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. A lot of interesting threads and subthreads are raised, none explored particularly indepth as Brownlow and Gill do with Chaplin's working technique. The most persistent theme that emerges is one of a man in constant, insatiable need for an approving audience, whether it be the legions of fans around the world who crowded theaters to see his films or mobbed him at public appearances, or the succession of young women (many of whom were under statutory age) with whom he carried romantic affairs, and his immediate family, for whom he played the role of household clown as well as father, in his later years spent in exile from the United States. All in all it's an excellent overview of Chaplin's life, career and artistry.
yes

Bitter Rice (1949, Giuseppe De Santis)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040737/
A couple of crooks on the lam mingle with a group of migrant rice farmers while plotting to steal their harvest in this clash between Italian neo-realism and old-fashioned melodrama, featuring heavy doses of rice farmer wastrel Sylvana Magnano's double scoops of ice cream cleavage in various stages of unconcealment. Watching this movie reminded me of what it was like over a decade ago when I got to witness the revolutionary potential of the Nirvana-alternative rock movement degenerate into crass commercial pop. The sense of greater authenticity and reality that the likes of Rossellini, Visconti and DeSica were striving for here gets used as window dressing for a sex and pistols potboiler that would do King Vidor proud. In fact the film seems to thumb its nose at the neorealist impulse from the first scene, showing a prissy radio announcer giving a patronizing description of the rice farmer lifestyle, seemingly unaware of the real story of lust and greed lurking knee-deep in the paddies. Despite singe-handedly making a mockery of one of the most important cinematic movements in history, the film is a jolly good romp bordering on camp, with a couple of sexed up dance numbers standing head and shoulders above the rice planting.
yes

Eternity and a Day (1998, Theo Angelopoulos)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0156794/
TSPDT #866
The film that won Angelopoulos his much-coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes (three years after he openly bitched about not gettting it for ULYSSES' GAZE), this film, though lauded by many, has also been seen as a clear symptom of what one director diagnosed as "Palme d'Or-itis": the condition of making movies solely to win festival prizes, by virtue of a story and style with obvious appeal to the festival circuit. The story here seems to suppor that assertion: a dying writer spends his final days with a young Albanian refugee and reconsiders the meaning of life through his interactions with the kid. Though at times Angelopoulos' concern for the child, or the sociopolitical conditions that brought about his plight, seems to extend no further than what one might find in the film's press kit, the film is gripping by sheer virtue of a handful of extraordinarily choreographed long takes, most notably one involving the illicit selling of kidnapped boys, and one where the writer's recounting of an anecdote transitions seamlessly into a historical flashback. In such sequences Angelopolous displays his characteristically supple handling of time and space, as fluid as consciousness can be.
yes

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