As acidic and uncompromising a satire as I’ve ever seen. Varda turns the countryside and city streets alike into a tantalizingly colorful Garden of Eden (the film’s wildest bit of dialogue even gives us images of apples a-plenty), where men follow every temptation while women suffer all the consequences. Le Bonheur also comes with a dazzlingly complete aesthetic commitment to its ideas, from the title to the color schemes to the music. Rapid, almost subliminal cuts — starting with the…
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To Be or Not to Be 1942
A perfect screwball comedy wrapped within a great spy thriller, with a hard political edge to both. Everyone is great here, but Lombard gets a lot of the best lines and delivers them all flawlessly.
Side Note 1: BFI says that Lubitsch, a German emigre of Jewish ancestry, snuck an image from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will into this farce as a response to his being targeted in the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew.
Side Note 2: There is…
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Fire of Love 2022
Sundance 2022 #1
Basically Grizzly Man where the grizzlies are volcanoes. The volcano footage is very cool, as you’d expect. But the director is clearly most interested in the volcanologist couple who shot the footage over their decades in the field. They’re not quite compelling enough to sustain the film over its run-time. There seems to be some vague thesis here comparing their love to the volcanoes they study. The moments where the script reaches for that kind of poetic…
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Apples 2020
PFF 2020 Review #1
Apples invites immediate comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos’ films, especially in its portrayal of stilted interactions and bizarro social rituals. However, at the point where Lanthimos would rely on violence and brutality to induce discomfort, Apples goes in a different direction, becoming a surprisingly sweet and emotionally affecting examination of grief and mourning. Saying anything more would spoil too much, and I want everyone to have the same surprising experience I had as a viewer. Special shout-outs…
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