Quick Hits

Some other films I watched recently that I don't have time to write posts.

Hobson's Choice
Score: 80%

The Visitor
Score: 70%

Into the Wild
Score: 62%

Momma's Man
Score: 66%

Dear Zachary: A Letter To A Son About His Father

A heart-wrenching film, Dear Zachary: A Letter To A Son About His Father, will leave you emotionally exhausted. This is a film that shows the best of humanity, through the pure love of friendship, family, and two amazing parents. But it also depicts the worst of humanity, and a broken judicial system. Some have argued that the movie is manipulative, and that's a somewhat fair argument, although I disagree with the use of the word manipulative and its negative connotation. A good man was murdered, and his friend created this movie, initially to memorialize him, and to share the film with friends and family only. But as new events sprang from this tragedy, the film changed, along with the purpose of the film. Does the filmmaker have an agenda? Sure, but I think every filmmaker has an agenda. Given the highly subjective nature of the documentary, and how close the director is to the subject, I see it less as manipulation and more as an unfettered emotional release of love, hatred, anger, and frustration in the face of tragic circumstances as they are unfolding, channeled through a camera's lens. It's impossible to really critique such a film. I did find moments in the film to be overwrought and heavy-handed, too frenetic at times, overly stylized in places, but certainly nothing that robs the movie of its real power; it never distracts and the movie maintains its firm grip on our hearts, squeezing and never letting go.

Dear Zachary: A Letter To A Son About His Father
Score: 70%

Slacker (me, not the movie)

Yes, I've been slacking off on my blog. And to commemorate my slackdom, here's a poorly thought out, less than interesting, totally uninspired list of some movies I've seen recently with merely a rating.

Rec
Score: 67%

Young @ Heart
Score: 70% (100% for the people in the film, 40% for the director)

Standard Operating Procedure
Score: 78%

Amarcord

Every summer I look forward to going to see films at the Paramount. I ended this summer at the Paramount with Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical film, Amarcord, a masterpiece that manages both poignancy and bawdiness in a nostalgic and often dreamlike remembrance of his youth in a small seaside town in Fascist-era Italy. The film is populated with a menagerie of larger-than-life characters, characters that, despite the satirical elements in the film, Fellini clearly has a tremendous fondness. There is no central character; Fellini just parades them all before us. If there is a central character, it would have to be the town.

Set over the span of one year, the film is book-ended by the arrival of Spring. There are multiple narrators, some even addressing the camera directly, as Fellini guides the viewer through life in the town of his memory, laced with moments of the fantastical. Fellini's direction is masterful, the film flowing with rhythmic effortlessness of orchestrated chaos, a hypnotic dance to the wonderful Nino Rota music.

On the surface, the mood is mostly up tempo, the residents brimming with life and the film loaded with humor, from the lofty satirical to the lowly fart joke and everything in between. (Yes, there are many a fart joke to be had here.) There are also many moments of wistfulness that Fellini renders with the touch of a poet, such as the scene when the grandfather gets lost in the fog. And magical moments, as when a peacock descends through a curtain of falling snow to land on a frozen fountain in the town square.

Fellini once said: "My films from my past, recount memories that are completely invented." Here, Fellini invented a deliberately artificial universe, one that not only illustrates that memory is not reality, but also stresses that the hopes and dreams Mussolini's Fascist regime offered were illusory.

I know it's an oft repeated phrase, but they really don't make movies like this anymore.

Amarcord
Score: 94%