tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18679397659020554472024-03-14T01:13:34.590-07:00Goya Cinemamovie reviews, abstruse theories and occasional sterile polemics.Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-73124679193739381692016-01-30T03:57:00.000-08:002016-01-30T04:00:31.233-08:00La Glace à Trois Faces (The Three-Sided Mirror, Jean Epstein 1927)
I watched
this remarkable 1927 Jean Epstein silent film to learn something about French
Impressionism, an avant-garde film movement that developed in France in the
1920s and had great influence on later European cinema. I tried to look at it
with humility and curiosity, but without letting its stature as a Highly
Significant Silent Movie interfere in any way with my enjoyment of it.
What Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-61130339649438230252015-11-18T15:51:00.001-08:002015-11-22T04:29:53.658-08:00"He gave the audience absolutely nothing": Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
Recent years have seen a proliferation of films centering on elderly people and their struggle to be happy in spite of health problems and low life expectancy. Mainstream cinema has not failed to recognize the potential of stories about old people engaging in passionate and sometimes exotic love (It's Complicated, Marigold Hotel), overcoming social and ethnic barriers (The Bucket List), orIvan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-40971941701511755302015-10-24T09:19:00.000-07:002015-10-24T09:46:59.045-07:00The sound that wasn't there: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
As always, David Bordwell's observations on very
specific aspects of film art prompt us to search through our mental movie
database for instances of particular cinematic techniques. Thinking about the
movies we watch in a "transversal" way is an efficient test for
checking how much attention we pay to film style, and trying to recall
films featuring a particular framing, cut, camera Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-27088452221528904452015-09-20T14:13:00.000-07:002015-10-24T09:20:46.436-07:00How to prevent a carnage: Diplomacy (Volker Schlöndorff, 2014)
Diplomacy is the kind of movie you might expect to find in the film schedule of one of those
invaluable government-funded cultural organizations like the Alliance Française
or the Goethe Institut that foster international education programs, promoting tolerance,
peace and intercultural dialogue. A Franco-German co-production dedicated to
the memory of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-12719855015285751412015-08-09T05:22:00.001-07:002015-09-10T00:21:55.935-07:00Musical Interludes II: The editor's hell. A few notes on Polanski's The Pianist
In my
previous entry I
discussed musical performance in Letter From An Unknown
Woman, Max Ophüls's 1948 classic about a woman's life-long obsession
for a mediocre pianist. In particular, I observed how little realistic the
scenes with Louis Jourdan at the piano were – a strange thing indeed, at least
to a modern sensibility, for a film where musical talent plays so huge a role
Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-30969786247759161442015-06-20T14:27:00.000-07:002015-06-21T12:14:27.532-07:00Musical Interludes I: Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
Jakob Gimpel's hands playing Liszt's "Un Sospiro" in Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Every time
someone is playing a musical instrument in a movie, I can't help but pay
attention to how realistic the performance is. And since I'm an amateur piano
player myself (something my neighbors will never stop thanking for) I
particularly enjoy scrutinizing finger movements on the piano keyboard when Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-58196466328394317772015-04-20T10:01:00.000-07:002015-04-20T11:46:40.212-07:00Jacques Kapralik (1906 - 1960)
Kapralik's illustration for The Philadelphia Story (1940).
Those of you who regularly follow David Bordwell's blog will have already caught up with his latest
post about an unidentified artist who during the 1940s made stylish, elaborate tableaux to promote some top MGM productions. These peculiar works are made with cutout figures of the actors involved and 3D objects as well, creatingIvan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-39581893487346104162015-04-03T07:20:00.000-07:002015-04-03T07:20:00.332-07:00Chromatic shocks, or the unexpected virtue of black-and-white inserts
What do
Disney's 1951 extravagant rendition of Alice in Wonderland and Quentin Tarantino's martial-arts flick Kill Bill have in
common? As you'll have guessed, it involves a particular use of black and white.
To my knowledge, no other movie has employed it this way – if you know more
examples, please let me know. So let's see what it is and why it is so peculiar.
Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-41163260745472189962015-03-24T14:30:00.000-07:002015-03-24T14:30:23.572-07:00Adieu au Langage: A shamelessly self-celebratory update
Well, apparently
I'm not talking nonsense all the time:
writer/translator/director Ted Fendt has updated his in-progress list of works
cited in Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au Langage on his MUBI page,
adding my conjecture about the now-famous movie's epigraph, "Those lacking
in imagination take refuge in reality".
My guess is
that the phrase may have been suggested to Godard by an article Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-27598206755265026002015-03-09T16:02:00.000-07:002016-12-13T05:39:23.238-08:00A most innocuous enfant terrible: Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014)
Like a big
Chekhov's gun with the price tag still attached inevitably destined to go off
in the final act — no real spoiler here — a sci-fi premise opens Xavier Dolan's
latest film: in the year 2015, a superimposed text informs, a Canadian law is
enacted that allows parents of mentally ill children to give them in full and
irreversible custody to the state's health careIvan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-54320521728962537902015-02-16T15:06:00.001-08:002015-02-16T15:10:28.181-08:00A tough subject: Wit (Mike Nichols, 2001)
Forget
about the morbid adolescents of Restless, the cheesy
bromance of 50/50, and even the well-off academics of The
Barbarian Invasions. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by
Margaret Edson and directed by Mike Nichols in 2001, Wit stars
Emma Thompson as an unmarried English literature scholar diagnosed with advanced
ovarian cancer who realizes that all she can count on are her Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-38280412373823914182015-01-24T05:34:00.000-08:002015-02-18T05:57:10.857-08:00Metaphors and other toys: Adieu au Langage (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
There's so
much to say about Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au Langage — a
movie that's too deliberately cryptic (some would say irritating) to be taken completely
seriously, and at the same time too intelligent to be dismissed as a simple
divertissement from an octogenarian director who had already secured himself a
place in the annals of cinema 50 years ago. The risk is to get lost Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-14655953585192423032014-12-14T06:55:00.000-08:002015-01-24T07:09:36.821-08:00Two films from the Balkans: Zakloni (Ivan Salatić, Montenegro, 2014) and Okean (Tamara Drakulić, Serbia, 2014)
Picture courtesy of Ivan Salatić.
The 32nd
edition of the Turin Film Festival, an annual event that is as old as this blogger, ran
in my hometown from November 21 to 29. This year the festival offered a rich
selection of American movies of the 70s, so I had the opportunity to catch up with little-seen films like the irresistibly funny Taking Off (1971), which was Czech director Miloš Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-72737853353856605662014-11-18T14:01:00.000-08:002015-11-04T08:46:56.983-08:00The horror of choice: Woman in the Dunes(Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
The ant-lion, also known as doodlebug, is a tiny predatory
insect that digs little pits in the sand, then hides at the bottom waiting for
preys, typically ants, to fall in. When this happens, the sides of the pit
start to collapse, dragging the ant down toward its doom. If you are wondering
why I'm telling you this, you probably haven't seen Woman in the
Dunes.
In the title sequence, Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-41183070037756032322014-10-24T17:10:00.000-07:002014-10-26T05:21:38.469-07:00Confusion is sexy: Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Jean-Luc
Godard once said that every movie is ultimately a documentary about its actors.
This is particularly true of Under The Skin, Jonathan
Glazer's first effort in ten years. In fact, despite most reviews describing it
as a sci-fi film about an unnamed alien, actually the protagonist does have a
name: it's Scarlett Johansson.
Some
movies, I think, originate as answers to specific Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-39417203491414029812014-09-24T16:00:00.001-07:002014-10-25T07:50:06.866-07:00Coming full circle: The Broken Circle Breakdown(Felix Van Groeningen, 2012)
Unfairly
overshadowed by Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza in the
foreign-language film category at the 2014 Oscars, this remarkable movie from
Belgium reminds us that heavy subjects don't necessarily make heavy movies.
There are many ways a filmmaker can engage us emotionally without appealing to
our most basic Pavlovian instincts.
Spoilers
abound! In fact, this entry is intended Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-18509569046923122842014-08-22T04:37:00.000-07:002015-10-24T09:18:13.331-07:00The Cow-Boy Girl contest comes to an end
Had the
only raison d'être of this blog been to provide David
Bordwell with the missing piece of the Magnificent Ambersons puzzle, I'd still
be happy with it. That being said, I hope there's more to life than
The Cow-Boy Girl and that we will have more occasions to talk
about cinema in fresh and engaging ways.
If you have
no idea what I'm talking about, here you can read Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-77360904746589117742014-08-20T16:08:00.000-07:002014-08-20T16:08:37.803-07:00Hurrah! A poster! A poster!
You may recall that at the end of May I tried to contribute to solve a mystery involving an unidentified poster briefly appearing in a scene of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Film historian David Bordwell was responsible for it.
After almost two months since then, I thought Mr. Bordwell had thrown in the towel. So I was really excited when a few days ago he published two Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-2153539150130382252014-08-17T08:08:00.000-07:002014-10-26T07:48:23.569-07:00Disney's Maleficent: Adding complexity, with caution
One of the
most common complaints leveled against Disney films has always been the lack of
complexity. Their detractors generally emphasize that the Disney universe seem
to adhere to a rigid Good/Evil dichotomy, with little or no room for nuanced,
multi-faceted characters. Disney's latest effort Maleficent,
a live-action reinterpretation with gothic undertones of the 1959 iconic
animated Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-13233766053781435702014-07-10T15:29:00.000-07:002014-10-25T04:10:54.686-07:00On the origins of a Hitchcockian dictum
In my last
entry I discussed Xavier Dolan's 2013 thriller Tom at the
Farm. I tried to show how, in my opinion, the director's failed
attempts at building suspense largely depended on bad staging and ineffective
camera placement. In fact, despite many reviews having described Dolan's work
as "Hitchcockian", the term seemed to me totally out of place in that
case.
The abuse
of the term Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-54254470731117759632014-06-15T05:21:00.000-07:002015-03-01T14:15:00.631-08:00Killing the suspense: Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm (2013)
Recovering
from what for me was easily the worst cinematic experience of the year and in
the impossibility of rewinding the whole thing in my head, I decided that I had to
make something good out of it by at least trying to understand why it had been
so frustrating. Was it Xavier Dolan's omnipresent, falsely angelic face? Or maybe the exploitation of the theme of homosexuality to seek the Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-3388786622539186462014-05-31T04:37:00.001-07:002014-07-10T03:08:46.213-07:00The missing picture
Film theorist David Bordwell yesterday posted an article on his blog about movies referencing other movies, and how allusionism is not a prerogative of contemporary cinema. He discusses the allusions present in a scene of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, where many movie posters dating to 1912 can be seen in the background of a lengthy tracking shot. He concludes the article with Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-63790600709475454112014-05-23T08:44:00.000-07:002015-03-09T04:10:59.410-07:00Nymphomaniac (Lars Von Trier, 2013)
In a recent article film
critic Matt Zoller Seitz advises wannabe film critics, among other things, to study history and psychology. I was reminded of his advice
while watching Nymphomaniac, and especially I was wondering
in which way psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, has influenced
filmmaking and film criticism. Indeed, a lot of movies these days seem to have
been bathed Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-80185375527556128792014-05-09T10:00:00.000-07:002014-10-24T16:47:31.388-07:00Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
Spike
Jonze's Her will be probably be remembered as the most
old-fashioned futuristic movie ever made. Set in in an unspecified future where
checkered shirts and high-waisted pants seem to be the latest fad, it follows a
lonely ghostwriter as he embarks on a love affair with the female-voiced,
ever-evolving operating system of his personal computer.
His name is
Theodor Twombly, a Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1867939765902055447.post-70115658270797098332014-04-25T00:30:00.000-07:002015-03-26T10:16:50.874-07:0035 Shots Of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)
A strange
thing happened to me after watching Claire Denis' 35 Shots Of Rum.
Once the film was over, I thought I would forget both the story and its
characters very quickly, because it seemed to me that nothing remarkable had
happened during its 100 minutes running time. Only after a few days I realized how
much the film had settled in my mind, despite (or maybe I should say precisely
Ivan Paiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06161358669131198464noreply@blogger.com0