Radmila Djurica

Comments

Trainspotting

Old film, very good one too. Cynical comment on Scottish working-class society. Cynical comment on society in general. Down to earth clear picture of a "junkyard" drug addict's mind, very colourful representing of poverty, cruel and crude. Again, director's masterpiece. "Choose life not drugs," he says. The film carries a powerful positive, message. Story is told with great excellence. Great cinematography too. Good choice of actors. A flawless directing!

It seem that the film was planned in director's mind for a very long time, then put it down on screen. Once in a while, national cinematography makes films that ticks all the boxes and gets into wider audiences' minds, outside of border. The kind of film that costs a little money and makes no money but gets enough attention.

A real life horror story told with great sense of humor in a beautiful and idyllic Edinburgh. It is a film for a piece of mind. There is a bit about mentality in this film, mentality of people that are not easy to handle, historically and in general, a society with their own mind, without any doubt.

28 Days Later...

A kind of dystopia, futurist overview on politics via frantic frame. A wonderful crew. Brilliant directing, simple and easy way of telling. Very inspiring story, that makes people think. There are many films like that out there. But this is the one that talks about bad politics on a right way, it talks to the audience directly, no beating by the bush. It address many questions of modern society. It leaves impression on a first site, society talks to society, people are in danger, there is a virus out there and very dangerous and twisted people on power, out there.

Very picturesque also, on a British way, cynical, even twisted way romantic film. A classic now of such subjects. Very underrated too.

The director Danny Boyle has very clear picture of what he wanted to achieve here. He is open and direct, he tells directly with pictures or the creative cinematic shots of it will be the world without life. Very good, very effective conversation, the screenplay is wonderful too. It catches attention right away and keeps us grounded.

The film, even very British, is easy and understandable anywhere else in the world.

The Shining

Popular literature into film is common thing, with but with strong archetypes, symbolic images makes the film a phenomenal success. A good story always matters, and it is all built around strong plots. A horror classic The Shinning by Stanley Kubrick is phenomenal. The perfect plot is grabbing all the attention, in the film, done by Stephen King’s classic novel the plot is more important than anything else. It communicates with us on an unconscious level. The conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations, but not with Kubrick. For one thing, if you play by the rules and establish realism in fantasy story, you get fantastic film. The film contributes to story's realism and grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas, and fantasy may deal best with themes in the unconscious. A good ghost story promises immortality, in a great sense of the uncanny, Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life. A good horror film needs to stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, anxiety, fear.

A Clockwork Orange

As a parable, A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick’s vision substantially less cerebral, that mainly reflects a cynicism about the government hypocrisy anywhere in world. It questions Christian theological and societal implications directed by atheist, in order to mock the religion and eyeroll at societal pieties. Orange was the movie that the director began pushing on at the beginning of his career. There’s a lot of hand-held camerawork, faster film stocks, fast-motion, slow-motion, lensing. There’s evidence in this film that Kubrick was, at that time, studying filmmaking. What I like most is chilliness of the film that spreads over luridness. It's about power relations and authoritarianism but with no humanist face. The director Luis Buñuel said for Clockwork, “I was very predisposed against the film; after seeing it I realized it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.” The film provoked polarized reviews from critics and became controversial due to its depictions of graphic violence. At the time this graphic violence was not common in films. The film was later withdrawn from British cinemas at Kubrick's behest, and it was also banned in a few other countries. I still think: that film's great.

Artificial Intelligence A.I.

One of my favorites. “I thought this would be hard for you to understand. You were created to be so young.”

This heartbreaking lines and very thoughtful idea of almost every SF film. Artificial Intelligence, and Gepetto who made David to last forever, centuries after David, sophisticated mechanical child, wants to become “a real boy”, like Pinocchio, reunite with the human mother he’s been programmed to love. How to program love: it's a heartbreaking and intensive film. A mastermind of ever question where love begins. David is eternally young, incapable of acquiring the wisdom and perfect perspective that come with age. He can’t comprehend the passage of time, much less the absurd and true nature of his mission. And he just wants his mother. And how the innocence of a child is expressed from one side and intense vulnerability on other. The magic of Spielberg’s SF themes extracts tears at both ends of the spectrum. Perfect directing, perfect order, a flawless cinematography and of course a big money.AI is much more about vulnerability, and it may be Spielberg’s best film, beside Schindler’s List, which seeks out redemption from an overwhelming historical horror real life.

Belfast

“Belfast” is without any doubt Kenneth Branagh’s most personal film. It has universal resonance, everybody can relate, but it depicts a real time violence, a hard political time for Irish in Northern Ireland, but through the innocent eyes of a nine-year-old boy. And it’s shot in black-and-white, with every now or so fantastic color.

In an insular neighborhood of Northern Ireland, Branagh has made a film both intimate and ambitious, and for me, a small masterpiece. There is a bit of oversimplification in, as well as an emotional distancing in the way the film is shot, but with perfect balancing the writer/director, a man who is actually from a theatre, for the most part, helped shape the singular cultural force he’d eventually become. In Belfast, we clearly see through open windows and cracked doors, down narrow hallways, cramped living room. “For the ones who stayed. For the ones who left. And for all the ones who were lost.” Branagh’s wistful heart is on display in Belfast. The sincerity in film wins everyone over. The simple, quiet moments of valuable life lessons are the main credit here.

Blue Velvet

Written and directed by David Lynch, Blue Velvet is one of the American films where sex has the danger and the excitement due to a charged erotic atmosphere. This is something that Lynch masters with: erotic atmosphere and secrets. The center of film evolves around secrets, erotica and hallucination, crowned with a fab Lynch’s humor. Where Lynch fantasies are coming from? Even if it is from unconscious, Lynch identifies it as fantasies. The setting is of course, an archetypal. A small town in an indefinite mythic feel of American suburbs that feels like the past and present, and Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey, young man that commutes between the lady of the night (Isabella Rossellini) and the hometown sweetheart (Laura Dern). The movie has fantastic visual humor, Lynch-like poetry, sustained right there to end. Lynch’s uses irrational material and handle it really well because his images are not fully on conscious level. He uses phantasm characters such as Dennis Hopper, who gives the movie horrific energy, and Dean Stockwell, perfect nightmare character. The film was released before the fabulous Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me that crowned Lynch as a king of secret societies, small-town mystery.

Psycho

"I think, murder in the bathtub, coming out of the blue, that was about all," Alfred Hitchcock told to Francois Truffaut once.

In the 60s, “Psycho” was low-budget film and it’s hard to imagine how radical and strange really was. A voyeur uses hotel room to watch Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). He is a taxidermist Norman (Anthony Perkins) that watches through a keyhole. Hitchcock manipulated time, space and the viewer on a perfect way and left no shadow of the doubt that he is still is a master of suspense in film. Generations of cinephiles have studied the shots but none really worked out “Psycho”.

For that period the film was very subversive: its violence and his portrayal of sex, voyeurism presented the first American film to show graphic violence with perfect frenzy with shower scene. A woman makes off with embezzled money, and get killed by “Norman’s mom”. First time the film talked about domineering mother, and her son (Antony Perkins) on such way. The film portraits a classic case of double personality with such ease.

This is one of the films I can watch over and over, without getting bored.

HABLE CON ELLA

Talk to Her (Hable con Ella) Spanish film directed by Pedro Almodovar has been nominated for several European Film Awards. This is wonderfully haunting, meditation film that talks about loneliness, love and desire on the most original way possible. It's the story of two women--a ballet dancer and a bullfighter, in comas--and about men who love them. The film is also about friendship that develops between Benigno (Javier Camara), a nurse, and Marco (Dario Grandinetti), an Argentine writer, and is the core of this wholly original tale. Such a mysterious movie where he is looking for miracles in the forbidden places. “The movie is like a declaration of sadness, of melancholy. I did not know if it was going to be understood. It was a radical decision that I took. I do not know why I did it. It was almost like a reaffirmation of myself,” said Almodovar. Its relationship with two spectators that reproduces in the film’s narrative. “I wanted to show that for utopian love only one person is necessary, and that passion can move the relationship forward…” said Almodovar.

The Prestige

Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige deals with the cost of deception. Two protagonists, rival magicians Albert Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) that are into a deceiving audiences, but in the end, their deceptions reach far beyond the stage. Robert has faked his own death through a new technology he purchased from Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). Angier’s wife, Julia, is part of their act, miraculously escaping from a water tank, until one night, the trick goes wrong. Julia drowns and Angier blames Borden. Nolan uses all this questioning of identity as a metaphor for what the artist does, surrender themselves totally, for the sake of one perfect illusion. “No one cares about the man who disappears, the man who goes into the box. They care about the one who comes out the other side.” - The Prestige

Simple enough, there are identity questions in film that plagues even the most sophisticated of individuals. Questions that may trigger sporadic bursts of mild existential plight. This is a film about identity, very underrated too.

Further remarks

There are many good films. There are many best films but it is hard to single out just some.