Owner: Cinematic Sojourns URL:http://codeknown.blogspot.com/ Join Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 07:25:05 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: A collection of personal reviews, essays and articles on cinema of all sorts and varieties. Site statistics:Click here
Azumi (2003) - Ryuhei Kitamura 2007-09-03 04:43:00 Not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, Azumi is a simple story told fairly well with plenty of fighting and blood-spilling thrown in to keep the audience entertained. The story is essentially one of assassins being sent out into the world to kill bad men, only to start questioning their actions when they come across nice people and witness innocents being slain. I could probably throw in a quote here about how along with great power comes responsibility, only in Azumi the assassins have no responsibilities, are are actively encouraged not to feel guilt. Azumi herself, is the only woman in the group, the fastest and most talented of all of them it is abundantly clear from the first reel that she is the one who will save the day in the end.Considering the body-count (very high - 3 figures at least), explosions and other sorts of violence it's surprising that such a film could be as dull and boring as this. The dialogue is monotonous and - for the mostpart - the editing of t
La Casa Sperduta Nel Parco (1980) - Ruggero Deodato 2007-09-03 04:27:00 It's a good job Ruggero Deodato made a name for himself, and established a reputation with Cannibal Holocaust because watching The House On The Edge Of The Park one could easily assume he's the Uwe Boll of the 1980s.Starring David Hess from Wes Craven's Last House On The Left the parallels to that film do not end there, although in Deodato's film there are attempts at social commentary - albeit ones delivered with all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer. The set-up is very close to Craven's film - people are tortured and abused at gun/knife-point before the captives turn on their captors to wreak bloody vengeance. The way this film never remotely approaches reality, is also a feature shared with the earlier work, only whereas Craven went for comedy Deodato goes for the plain ludicrous. A spoiler follows, but as i wouldn't recommend this film to anyone then i don't think it matters much (even so, if you might watch the film just skip to the next paragraph). The most ludicro
Finding Neverland (2004) - Marc Forster 2007-10-02 16:58:00 The key word here is competent. There is nothing specifically bad about Marc Forster's film, it's just there's nothing particularly exceptional about it either. Depp and Winslet phone in reasonable performances while Forster does the minimum with the material provided to produce a film which, although not in the least bit dull, doesn't ever amount to something that feels wholly satisfactory.The story follows J.M. Barrie as, under the pressure of critical slatings of his latest plays, he immerses himself in the world of Sylvia Davies' children - one of whom becomes the boy upon whom the character of Peter Pan is based. All this going on while - unbeknownst to the family, Silvia is desperately ill following the passing on of her husband. Backed by a financier at the end of his tether, with more money than sense, the Peter Pan story conjures itself in the head of Mr Barrie heavily inspired by the children with which he so closely associates. There is a brief mention of the rumours ci Read more:Neverland
A hot sojourn of a very different nature - photos from Egypt 2007-10-28 05:11:00 Went for a week all-inclusive in Egypt
- Hurghada to be precise - earlier this year with Faye. Spent the majority of the week going brown, then red, by the pool drinking free beer and cocktails and eating the free burger and chips. The one excursion we did go out on was a day out into the desert, racing over the sand dunes in the back of some very rickety ol' jeeps (sans seat belts) before riding camels and looking around a bedoin village before being entertained by traditional dance and food in the evening, stopping on the way back in the middle of the desert for a bit of star-gazing (without any ambient light the sky looks very different
indeed).On coming back we spent about 10 hours being delayed in an airport with a very British mutiny by half the flight passengers who got it into their head that our flight wasn't safe to take off. Considering it was a military airport i found it surprising that the ruction kicked up by irate travellers was too much for the staff to handle - to t Read more:nature
, photos
Frantic (1988) - Roman Polanski 2007-11-01 05:09:00 Roman Polanski's Hitchcock homage, Frantic
, was a far better experience than i'd bargained on. Harrison Ford plays the American bureaucrat out of his depth in a very mono-linguistic Paris. His wife scarpers while he's cleaning his nether regions in the shower beginning the film's main plot line - the search for his wife. The film could just as well been called Frustrated because he runs into dead-ends wherever he turns. At first, it seemed the film was making fun of - or at least highlighting - the pitfalls of cultural/linguistic ignorance in a foreign land; it's ok while everything's fine but as soon as things go array things get very difficult very quickly. However, this taut first half with minimal action and maximum notching-up of palpable tension gives way in the second half first to a plot involving drug smuggling, then finally to international nuclear espionage and a showdown on the Seine.Beyond the fisticuffs, a naked Ford receiving a roundhouse kick to the face, characte Read more:Roman
Black Moon (1975) - Louis Malle 2007-11-26 05:10:00 The tagline for Malle's first English language feature, "An apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland", is as misleading as it is an accurate summary of everything the film stands for. It is apocalyptic, but only in the most rudimentary of senses with the setting of the film taking a large backward step here in favour of the actions and events that form the film's plot. Don't understand? Well, i've seen the film twice in the last couple of days and neither do I. Enigmatic, perhaps even profound, Malle eschews cinematic dogma with confidence and aplomb providing a film that's as baffling as it is absorbing, intoxicating and off-putting in equal measure. Essentially, the film follows Lily. We don't know who she is but she's running (more specifically, driving) from something. A couple of external scenes show there is some kind of war of attrition going on between men and women. When she can get no further by car, she continues on foot first following a horseman(?) then a unicorn she spies. Read more:Black
, Louis
Went The Day Well? (1942) - Alberto Cavalcanti 2008-01-16 06:13:00 Went The Day Well? rises wonderfully from it's mid-War propaganda roots to quickly become an engaging, entertaining wartime thriller warranting several viewings. The 1942 Ealing Studios production starts as innocently as any rural drama with a truckload of troops entering a village under the auspices of some kind of communications mission. The villagers suspect nothing, and nor do we - the accents come with the stiffest of lips; the only odd behaviour is the scolding of a young boy curious to see what's on the back of the truck under the tarpaulin. As with most films of this type however, where a con is afoot, the audience are told early on that these are in fact Germans in disguise (in a similar vein to Battle Of The Bulge). Curiously, it is the women in the village who have suspicions fi Read more:Alberto
Rope (1948) - Alfred Hitchcock 2008-01-12 05:27:00 Is this the rope by which Hitchcock
hangs himself? For me, yes, well - at least in part. The obsession with style and technique here really overrides the plots focus and any sense of realism. The rope may be awaiting the film's protagonists, it may be the ingredient that gave them away, but in trying for so long to tie the long tracking shots together Hitch' comes desperately unstuck for this particular viewer.The set-up is simple: 2 impossibly arrogant bourgois students murder a classmate purely to see if they can get away with "the perfect murder". Murder, they proffer, is not just a crime but an art form reserved for the higher classes of individual to be perpetrated on the weak lower echelons of society. After the murder the 2 students hold a party attended by the deceased's girlfriend Read more:Alfred
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