gibsganich Reviews

Great Expectations (1998)

filled up to the rim with great ingredients but then it just leaks like a sieve

[6/10 · 13 December 2011]

Watching this at home I had to make a break after 20 minutes. First I really liked the adaptation. It had tempo, fresh ideas, good acting, interesting, contrasting settings such as the poor Florida neighborhood vs decaying McMansion, crazy old lady and posh niece, poor uneducated boy vs posh girl.

I also like how the main actor paves his way through an atmosphere through a world which is filled with some impenetrable, inexplicable weirdness. It's not just Estella with her mind swings. The New York snobs are not really snobs, the bad guys are not really threatening (I'm talking about a final brief chasing scene in an empty subway here). Some people pay absurd amounts of money for throwaway sketches labeled art. And so on.

Unfortunately there is the love story between Finn and Estella which takes precedence over the class issues and ascending the social ladder. Many other motifs from the novel still have been completely cut out, such as friendship details accompanying the Biddy, Wemmick and Magwitch characters.

All in all, the dramaturgy still seems unfinished or over-engineered to me. I think the producers (or whoever) decided to emphasize the love-story ... maybe for commercial reasons.

One reviewer said there's a big hole in the middle in this film. I think there are many little holes. It is a big bowl which the filmmaking team really filled up to the rim with great ingredients but then it just leaks like a sieve, until, at the end there is not much left. But it is still something.

I still want to read Dickens' novel. Maybe next year, as 2012 is just around the corner.

Carlos (2010)

lots of smoking and vintage cars

[9/10 · 28 November 2010]

I've seen only the first third of the film so far. However- if you read the Wikipedia article on Carlos (as I did because I did not know too much about the protagonist) - you will be surprised how closely the filmmakers seem to stick to the terrorists' real biography. Its obviously a serious, historically rather accurate piece of work.

If you are not too much into the cultural or intellectual aspects of the movie, you can also enjoy it because: The music is great, good acting, many different sets, the camera and lighting has an interesting, fake, low-quality 70s look-and-feel to it.

There is lots of smoking (in airplanes, at bars, in offices etc) and people often leave or enter a set on cool 70s vintage cars.

It captures the atmosphere of the early seventies really well.

Now let's see for the rest of the movie....

Golden Slumber (2010)

absurd conspiracy/man-hunt, entertaining but still profound

[9/10 · 20 February 2010]

I have seen this movie at the Berlinale Film Festival in Germany. For a European, it is always interesting and challenging to learn about Japan. The Japanese culture is so different from the European, so you generally cannot take anything for granted. In particular, this holds even more so for this movie.

It is about playing with the expectations and breaking assumptions, of any audience, constantly, no matter whether it is Japanese or European.

Some examples:

Can you expect to start up a rusty old car sitting in a swamp for years just by inserting a new battery?

Can you imagine a serial killer that is actually a nice boyish guy which acts as a guardian angel sometimes?

Would a mother leave her 3-year old child alone for a while to help some fugitive, to secretly install fireworks in the storm drains? And so on.

That is all what I want to say about the plot. The summary line and these examples must suffice. The absence of any certainties (regarding plot twists as well as underlying assumptions) makes it also bit confusing, but in a good way, though. Still, I think this complexity puzzled many spectators, and this is why there weren't many questions to the producers and the main actor after the festival screening.

Oftentimes in the movie something happens that seems to be completely predetermined, other events happen in a completely unpredictable and even absurd manner. The fact the movie walks on the fine line between determinism and haphazard, makes it also very profound. It is also a statement about the Japanese society and its people - and the many transformations it underwent in the last, say, 100 years. In this movie, most people have a positive attitude towards live and outcomes of their actions, even if bad things happen... murder, betrayal, treachery. Don't take it all too seriously.

I realize that I am trying to unravel the this movie. I have never seen anything like that before. Enjoyed it very much.

A Serious Man (2009)

Allusive parody for the well-educated cineaste

[6/10 · 24 January 2010]

With respect to most recent works of the Coen Brothers, this film is atypical.

At the center of the plot, there is no failed crime (aside from the protagonist's son with the drug problems), and there are no idiots (aside from the protagonist's mentally retarded brother).

Wait, there are quite a few idiot characters, but the main character, the Professor, clearly is not one.

I don't know all of the Coen Brothers works, but from all of those I've seen I think this film is closest to "The Hudsucker Proxy" from 1994, which was a "post-modern" 1930's newspaper movie spiced with numerous elements of parody.

In a similar manner, this is a 1960s weird Jewish family drama.

ALthough the autobiographical references (see "IMDB Trivia") and the loose adaptation of the Biblical story of Job give it a serious flavor, it contains some scenes from other genres (horror intro, school/college flick). In this respect it is so extremely postmodern that I think this script was written to make fun of film critics.

In any case, the 1960s fashion, cars, furniture and set designs are awesome, incredibly detailed and elaborate, and I enjoyed looking at these much more than following the plot.

The White Ribbon (2009)

Some comparisons

[9/10 · 1 November 2009]

These are some thoughts that come to my mind:

Mode of narration is similar to "Dogville" by Lars Von Trier. The setting and story - repressive feudal early 20th century society is remotely similar.

The "alternative Heimatfilm" genre (a Heimatfilm is a usually sentimental film with a regional background, although this film is certainly not sentimental) - is similar to Edgar Reitz' Heimat TV Series from the 1980s (Pre-World-War 2 stories in rural village near french border)

The menacing atmosphere combined with visual beauty, created by the camera-work, reminded me of Ingmar Bergman/Sven Nykvist movies from the 1950s.

The ending is open, and the message of the story is incomprehensible after all.

• This is unfortunately, also a hallmark of *any* bad movie that starts with high artistic ambitions but falls short of them.

• There is a hard-to-grasp touch of nihilism and moralism. This might be typical for Haneke. Both of these traits may be disliked by many viewers (or reviewers)

All in all, this film is a piece of art that should be very sale-able on the International Film Market, and I guess making a profit was also one of the main objectives in making this movie. Nothing wrong with that.

Schartl (1994)

post-modern Bavarian humor, both sensitive and disgusting

[3 October 1998]

Sigi Zimmerscheid is a satirical comedian from the traditional, catholic city of Passau, Bavaria. His movie is one of the weirdest pieces of celluloid I've encountered this year. The movie's structure vaguely resembles "Monthy Python's meaning of life", but it is a bit more stringent and was produced with a much lower budget. It is a funny movie, however, the humor is kind of drastic, cynical, blasphemic, disgusting, taboo- breaking; and it is not intended to make you roll on the floor laughing. However, there are some pearls hidden in the dirt. Some camera shots demonstrate an incredibly sensitive view for composition, color and timing. For instance, ordinary street pavement and standardized suburban houses look magical and slightly scary, respectively. Zimmerscheid has also composed the music which is unbelievable because it is so diverse, covering groovy drum solo, string quartet, piano... . This originary mix of primitivity and sensitiviy make this a truly post-modern piece of art.