Well, I was wrong.

I just rewatched this film expecting to see a spectacular, but ultimately somewhat superficial epos. However, not only does De Palma coax what is perhaps a career-best performance out of Pacino, but the movie is wildly entertaining while at the same this serving as a stinging criticism of the Reagan administration’s hypocritical “war on drugs”, which was little more than a PR-campaign and the consruction of an external enemy.

De Palma makes it clear that both police, bankers and politicians are all corrupt, meanwhile using Tony Montana as a scapegoat to illustrate everything that is wrong in America. No wonder the afro-american community has taken this film to heart, as they have experienced this first hand.

Watching Scarface today, it’s easy to forget that the story was contemparary in 1983. The political reality that the movie describes - enormously brutal violence, government corruption at all levels – was happening outside the movie theatres as the movie played out on the screen. No surprise De Palma almost got lynched after this one. The criticism of the Reagan administration and American society was so intense that it was impossible to accept. It was an incredibly ballsy move by De Palma. The satirical critique of capitalism and the American Dream is easily recognizable in this movie as well as in De Palmas filmography as a whole.

Making Dressed To Kill, Blow Out and Scarface back to back over three years? Has any major Hollywood director ever offered a more direct criticism of American society? All while keeping his audience glued to their seats with their eyes wide open.

Cage’s character, Terrence McDonagh, is a highly flawed, corrupt cop who at one point decides to jump into a flooding prison cell from one story up to save a drowning prisoner. The result is irrepearable back damage and a permanent condition of severe back pain. These chronic back pains spiral McDonagh further and further down into a world of narcotics and prescription drugs.

Setting the plot in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a masterstroke by Herzog. If there is ever a place to illustrate the brimming injustice of the ever-growing inequality in the U.S. (and the world), this is it. (Consider the plans to privatize and gentrify the area in the wake of the catastrophè.)

I find it hard not to see Cage’s tortured cop as a metaphor. A metaphor for how poverty and downward social mobility as the result of disease, injury and disaster strikes coincidentally, dragging shame and humiliation along in its footsteps.

Cage’s good deed does not go unpunished. His injury perfectly illustrates how New Orleans’ poor and predominately black population was brought to its knees. The same way desperate people all over the world see the windows, doors, and borders of opportunity close all around them by a brutal, overwhelming, and merciless force, as poverty sweeps up its random victims.

Brilliantly, The Road sheds light on the struggle of the poor, starving and desperate populations of the present day world. It removes the blindfolds from the prosperous, showing a harsh truth. Steven Spielberg also the same in his underrated allegory War of the Worlds.

However, director John Hillcoat chooses to use tremendously low contrasts in his imagery. At times it’s hard to make out anything at all in the the muddy grey and brown colors. The flashbacks to present time, on the other hand, have over-saturated  colors, creating a dramatic distiction between now and then. A different approach emphasizing the parallels between the two worlds would have been much more interesting in a cinematic sense.

Because that parallel is the real story here.

The camera is always a player in Nowhere Boy.  Nowhere Boy at times uses editing and cinematography to achieve beautiful results. Let me give you one example of how director Sam Taylor-Wood uses cinemas own vocabulary to convey meaning.:

At one point Lennon is given a guitar, and rehearses in his living room. We see him pull out the guitar, sit down, and start playing. He is alone in the room. After a few seconds we realize that the images have been sped up. The other members of the family fly in and out of the living room at exaggerated speeds while John sits still and plays his new instrument. The idea is that he has finally found his calling.; for him time is standing still.  It is understood that John’s life will never be the same again after this moment, brilliantly reinforced by pure visual storytelling.

The editing in Kick-Ass is rapid and competent. It is a rare sight to see action-sequences edited together this well, without cheating. Most action-directors employ a blisteringly-paced and eventually confusing form of jump cutting that leaves the audience to make out the spacial-temporal logic of the scene by themselves. Such directors do not show how the different elements of the scene relate to each other. (Take for instance films like Quantum of Solace,  District 9 or Avatar. )

Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaugh is, however, able to do this to a considerable extent. The action sequences in Kick-Ass are exciting, suspenseful and truely involve the viewer. 

Add to that an unusually vibrant color scheme and a truly charming lead actor in Aaron Johnson and you have the year’s second best action movie to date, only behind the fascinating real politics of The Green Zone.

When was the last time you saw a film that transported you to another place, another reality, another world. This movie does that -and keeps you there spellbound.

In the Mood for Love is by far Kar-Wai’s best film. There was not a better example over the decade of a film using the elements of pure cinema to create atmosphere, emotion and reflection. Certain segments of the film combines music and mise-en-scene to create astonishing results, carrying the viewer away into a dark, dreamy world where you are completely encompassed in the film’s universe. The rythm, color and pacing of the gorgeous, slow, tracking shots have a hypnotic effect which reaches for cinemas highest aspirations.

Other shots visually and metaphorically underline the films theme of distant, impossible love.  A true masterpiece of visual cinema.

Check it out for now:

I will continue the list tomorrow and the following days..

1. In the Mood for Love (see above)

2. There Will Be Blood

3. Femme Fatale

4. Match Point.

A highly politcal film from Woody Allen. A beatuifully crafted and suspensful love triangle as as well as one of the most subtle political films of the noughties. Allen comments on the politics of choice and freedom by using, among other things, the game of tennis as a metaphor. Simply one of the most entertaining and intelligent films of the past ten years.

5. Oldboy

Camera movement is essentially cinematic. But some director don’t utilize these possibilities. There are tons of directors who hardly ever move the camera or explore focus or editing - in short, the cinematic language. Two of the most critically acclaimed directeors whom I’ve never seen move the camera are Bent Hamer (Factotum, Eggs) and Roy Andersson (You, the living). They are good at what they do, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Cinema is about communicating space.  Film can communicate three dimentional space in a way none of the other art forms can.

This is done primarily with the techniques of editing and camera movement. It is an absolutely essential aspect of the art form.

Steven Soderbergh does a pretty good job of this in the battle scenes in ‘Che’. He doesn’t really engage with the language of cinema to any extensive degree in the two films. But at one point we see the guerrilla soldiers walking down a river shot from an overhead angle -it is a rare and refreshing visual touch that adds some texture to the film.

But still – space is represented quite consistently in the film’s battle scenes, especially the final scene where the Bolivian soldiers close in on  Che and his men hiding in a a hillside behind some rocks. As the the soldiers (who are far superior in numbers) approach, the claustrophobia mounts. The way this is done is through use of foreground and background in the frame, as well as consistency in the communication of the spacial relations in the editing. That means that there is a relationship between the shots, that they relate to each other and work together to communicate space, and don’t contradict each other visually. 

I will write more  tomorrow.