stormwings Reviews

The Tree of Life (2011)

Christian culture and how to live as a male human being

[10/10 · 20 March 2013]

Yes, I'm comparing, too. And I felt more than a little bliss while watching this movie. Most at about 22 min - while listening to Elzbieta Towarnicka's voice.

It reminded me of Tarkowski. And it went further - no wonder, more than a generation later.

I have great expectations on art. I feel conversant with the chosen music, the chosen images of what telescopes captured from the space, it feels the same as in the caves of Lascaux. It entertains me in the right way - no distractions, the right way to compound something to show with awareness of what time I need to understand. Malick's showing simply fits to me.

He shows some people - and begins the "storytelling" half an hour later. No wedding nor war or "love scenes", simply some smile and tenderness. Very free and easy :-)

As already seen in "The New World" Mr. Malick shows in "The Tree Of Life", how thoughts and acting are connected. Somewhere I read, that an adult human being has more than 30.000 thoughts every day. Neither it's possible to be aware of them all nor to communicate them with spoken or written language. So if I want to get in contact I have to chose carefully. And I have to learn how to chose. This is one point where Malick went light years further from Tarkowski.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Who ever the creator is or was - Turn off the sound and watch...

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

"This is my world!"

[17 March 2013]

The first 'JodieFosterFilm' and the last I saw, and it was no surprise to hear that voice, so very different as heard in "Taxi Driver", so near to Erica Bain or Meredith Black.

The person - the vehicle or the source of the human dignity? Or both? Or none of this? Two young humans playing with this fundamental issue, well guided by a modest director or producer. This girl always slips out of her person and even when she is forced to get back into it she shows that this is not the way to live a human life. A whole movie to see what was signified in Taxi Driver, when she sprinkled white sugar on her jelly toast.

Tallulah, Iris, Rynn - played in one year or a little more. Oh yes, it's a difference if you're watching or if you're playing. And it's a difference if you're only playing or if you're able to become more and more aware about your feelings and thoughts as yourself and as in the role you're playing at he same time.

It seems to me that the whole crew leaves the room for the two young actors, who get into it and use it very careful. Like they did a hundred times before...

Stalker (1979)

It took over 20 years...

[10/10 · 14 November 2012]

...to become one with the girls face at the end. Those eyes, that let in what they see... I was not able to forget this great honest minute in cinema, and I am very happy having seen this before my children became eight, nine, ten years old. Yes, I felt something, back in the days I was watching "Stalker", and 'understood' the lines by Khalil Gibran "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself." But my culture had taught me: I have to preserve my children from something, keep them away from my feelings. Marta's father simply did nothing to her...

That most people don't know what hope is, what wishes are, and that there is no need to do anything to "make it come true" - these issues I had understood instantly; I had anticipated most of the upcoming events in the story because there was enough time while watching this film. The lack of surprises was not the 'boring' aspect - that was to stand the lies and how they eat up the power from the men. Through "Stalker" I learned what boredom is to me - simply the lack of truth. Since truth is always within myself boredom is the barred inner paths. Another film I saw that days, "Teorema" by Pasolini, was like a supplement to this inner knowledge. Both cleaned up something for my whole life.

I gave the movie a second title: "When three liars go for a walk".

But there is a look in the girls eyes at the end that cannot be played, that is always there in the eyes of children who had understood that they will die. (In "Nostalghia" they are missed.) Don't fake yourself with discussions like "Is this science fiction or not". Every movie is fiction and this has not much to do with science although there is a professor on the phone.

In "The Sacifice" ("offret") Tarkowski solved his own riddle. Marta knew, and nobody was able to listen so she had nothing to say.

May the water pour into our rooms of wishes. May there sometime be someone who covers us. Before the last rest.

Nostalghia (1983)

Is there anything to say about?

[10/10 · 10 November 2012]

No, not by me. A review can only be something about myself.

25 years after my experience with "Zerkalo" I wrote a late review here, and after a few other good films, tonight, I was watching Woody Allens "Crimes and misdemeanors" and "Nostalghia" - twice, my last movie I hope. First time with, second time without sound.

Whe I sit down the world begins to turn. Something happened to my senses or my brain, I don't know.

I need a polar night now. Some aurora borealis is welcome - and likewise dreams. Didn't have a dream for a long time.

Someone wrote here "Go no further." It seems not possible - I have to give away the DVD's or sell it, there are billions of other people and maybe someone likes it.

Nothing can stay as it is. A Glenn Gould - CD I think I'll keep for a while...

Kautokeino-opprøret (2008)

A personal challenge

[9/10 · 10 November 2012]

I'm not a critic and I do not write reviews to be 'helpful' for others. "It's important that I'm sayin' the right sayin'. It's less important that you hear." Words taken from the character "Nell" in "Idioglossia", a stage play that later was adapted by Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster, as producer and as actress.

So here are some glimpses, I hope they will be not very 'off topic' Addiction, social rules, the Word of the Lord and the ones who have to decide either to deliver it as a gift or to promulgate it as a verdict, the different quadrants of law and emotions - this film deals with a lot of things that often seem to be mostly clarified in our world. I think they aren't. So this movie is not only a view to history.

I was very surprised by the bishop. A tall, beautiful, young man, Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau. I would give an extra star for casting him.

When there is a border in a nation, when two or more ethnicities live there then life seems to become more demure, rough, brittle. Anni-Kristiina Juuso (Elen Skum) had played Anni in "Kukushka" some years ago, a movie that shows how difference makes us rich and gives power and health. But for this we need to have individual contact. We're simply lost without this.

I'm an European, I've been to Sápmi and to Kosovo. I can feel how fragile we are. I'm happy that there is peace in the north, and share this world with the Sami people who live in four countries.

At the end you can hear Mari Boine: "And so the spring river opened up again / And so we let ourselves drift with the flood..." Have I went too far away from the movie?

The Cuckoo (2002)

High art - not only how to chose who'll be the first after 4 years

[10/10 · 10 November 2012]

Also how to "teach your children well" and how to chose a place to do that.

Most of what I could say about this brilliant movie is written here already, thank you for that, you who share your views and feelings and thoughts! One of the most astonishing perceptions I made is how simple it is to make visible what often seems to be only the fabric on which a story is told. It's one of the best "sex films" I ever saw. It smells, it bristles of the taste of two men and one woman, plain, honestly. I think that this is the reason why it does all fit.

The end reminds me of Tarkowskis ending of "Stalker". And of the line "did you exchange a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage" by Pink Floyd. Or "If you love somebody - set them free". To set children free is not difficult when you are able to be yourself.

After this I was watching "The Kautokeino Rebellion" just to see Anni-Kristiina Juuso again. And again I felt her radiance, her anima, through the thickest costumes... I wish I had access to something like that when I was a child.

Inception (2010)

Welcome to the machine

[1/10 · 10 November 2012]

What are you trying to show, Mr. Nolan? That there is always an enemy, even in deepest dreams? And that we have to fight it to make humanity come true? A budget of 160.000.000 and a gross of more than 800.000.000 for this waste? Oh, I have to consider, that it was bought all over the world. Seems that millions and millions of people wanted it. Did they? It has nothing common with dreams I know, with any kind of interacting, living together, as I know. I could not feel anything after the children at the very beginning were off.

Yes, it's important to look, to discover, what consciousness is, what dreams are, what spirit and mind are.

Yesterday I wrote down my reviews for "In A Better World" and "Another Earth", one day before for "Solyaris". I think I'm opened up for dreaming, for reflect about it, I'm opened up for art.

This movie throws a lot of waste in the way to art and consciousness.

Was it ironical, tongue in cheek? No, they believe in that. It becomes bigger and bigger, meanwhile it surely has become a Billion Dollar thing.

What did you dream? - It's alright, we told you what to dream. So welcome to the machine.

In a Better World (2010)

They try and try

[3/10 · 9 November 2012]

"But later the veil returns and everything is alright again." It's exactly what many people want to hear, and this movie tells it to them. And wins awards.

No! There was said "...and you carry on living. Then things will be alright again." Is there a difference? Yes, it is. But this is lost a few seconds later. Because this is the way a man should speak to a boy? I don't know and I don't want to venture a guess here any more.

It seems to be one of the most perfidious "trick of mind" to keep on narrating, to "make a story complete". So the business goes... to capture beautiful pictures of the sky does not make art yet.

Try it again, please. It was not bad at all!

I'm not mad, I'm sad. A movie full of males, very different, but the faces all disappear so quickly... no, not all: Big Man stays somehow. I have to face it now on my own.

Good, that no one tries to tell me a story at this point.

Another Earth (2011)

This film ends at the moment it should start

[4/10 · 9 November 2012]

Yes, I do not need - and want - more of those stories shown in cinema; stories that more and more people already know in so many different ways.

Rhoda is played more than well, and that's the reason why I was watching the whole movie, enjoying her grace, her voice, her silent happy shiners - a little more as the word "sometimes" puts it. The three stars I gave are two for Brit Marling and one for the camera (e.g. when she comes visiting the piano-playing Burroughs).

Her turning away from herself at the very end shows why this movie is as it is. Then she turns again to herself, but: - - end.

To make it clear: this is not any kind of rating the movie quality. I see, that many people were rating it high and I can see that they are right. And I do not confirm most of the negative assessments. No, my point is another one - I feel thirsty for real encounters, alternatively stories, with / about people who already are on this "other" earth, who live a full life with themselves.

A glimpse of it was seen in the hospital. And that the camera was very close in this scene shows me that the people who made this film already feel or sense about the things which to find there.

Left thirsty and got a little (but beautiful) drop... and now, as I'm writing, giving the fourth star - for making me aware of it. It is still much more better than the most garbage I see every week in the media.

Solaris (1972)

Candles and rain in a space station

[10/10 · 8 November 2012]

Have you ever heard Pieter Bruegel's "Jagers in de Sneeuw"? Tarkowski's adaption of Lem's novel, four years after the first one (by Boris Nirenburg) and forty years before the Solaris opera and the Solaris stage play, seems to be the first of its kind, the birth of "science fiction" as I know it, including the "full set" of human impulses when dealing with this questions, what we could find on other planets, under other suns.

Tarkowski found an end which still brings a shiver to my back. Although I "know" that we cannot make the earth as big as the space or find the immortality somewhere outside.

Somehow it feels like Philip Glass knew the Music of Eduard Artemev. And Natalya Bondarchuk is so very beautiful... one of the few in cinema, this essentially belongs to my personal review. This special beauty I saw again only in Jodie Fosters play of Eleanor Arroway in "Contact" by Robert Zemeckis.

Remember: it was the time mankind looked for evidences for the last fundamental force of nature, the weak force; the only force that violates parity-symmetry, and it was found one year after Solyaris.

1997 the father of Ellie Arroway - materialized from her memories - said, that the only thing to stand this emptiness is 'each other' Andreji Tarkowski left us with a very important issue: it's not possible to distinguish between reality and memory without each other, and that this is the key to find a way how to learn to love the whole manhood - after discovering the basics of nature.

He found a way to say this in the middle of the cold war. Not directly but through the lack of it. Solyaris is a kind of "elementary particle physics", dressed in art.

And beauty.

Mirror (1975)

Almost every scene like a painting

[10/10 · 5 November 2012]

In 1986 or 87 there was a "Festival of Soviet Films" in the most east corner of the GDR where I used to live, with films that showed the actual artistry of film in the land of Breshnew, Andropow, Tschernenko and finally Gorbachev. I remember "Proschanie" by Klimov, "Dead man's letters" by Lopushansky - and one of the "add-on-program": "Zerkalo" by Tarkowski.

I was sitting there slowly understanding that the Soviet Union had not killed or banned all of her inconvenient masters of art and science, and I became addicted to Tarkowskis movies. No - they were essential nutriment.

New hope was rising: Will we hear the truth about Chernobyl?

Robert Palmer's "Addicted to love" was out and Tina Turner's "Private Dancer"... and I had noticed that there was a man living nearby called Vaclav Havel, who was a friend of Frank Zappa.

I was 25, had two sons and a new born daughter, and wondered how important the children in Tarkowskis films are. The Pushkin-letter read by a boy and the woman from the photograph without frame behind him looking into my eyes through the camera... and I remembered the first time I saw a house on fire (in the village where my grand parents lived, we stood there and I was looking at my grandfather... he said "noone can help here"). I was 6.

And I remembered "Ivan's childhood", which I had seen when I was 16 - I suddenly saw the soldier girl under the birches and asked the projectionist in the cinema "Is this from the same director?" - "Yes!"

"Zerkalo" showed me that cinema can be art. I was sitting there taking photos of the screen in my mind more than a hundred times, and when I left the cinema I said "beauty depends on how you look at the world".

That this is how the only mirror works I recognized later, but I had seen this, a great gift to my life. "Zerkalo" opened a door on which is written "simply watch, be aware and let it in". Time is not linear, and nobody will understand the life of another human being, but understanding this makes us able to understand each other.

Sometimes I think this is "The Best Movie Of All Times". But then I remember that there is no need to rank it.

Tarkowski gives hints - deliberately or not - that this is only his movie: at the beginning we can see the shadow of the microphone on the wall, at at the end we see the rail of the dolly between the trees. Why not standing still and watch them go? Yes, how to move a camera is one of the most telling skills in this movie - just like in his others.

"Zerkalo" is like "In a silent way" composed with camera and light...

Short Cuts (1993)

When ever...

[10/10 · 25 October 2012]

...I try to tell from inside the universe of one single human being I become speechless because I cannot decide what to say and what to conceal.

But not these three men who wrote this screenplay like a symphony between Bach and Jazz - and Mark Ishams music is the same kind - divinely brilliant.

A novel? Two? Three, five? Or is this all hackneyed phrases? Is there a difference at all? Three hours full of moments I found myself smiling and slightly shaking my head at the same time. Never saw such a lot of 'perfect pairs' as in "Short Cuts"!

The set dressing and costume design are straight to the point. Always winking. Don't worry about little earthquakes. Never get a breakfast in a diner without sunnies. And don't lose heart because of a body in the river... Simply enjoy - inside the prison of life :-)

Hannibal (2001)

A tribute to Dante Alighieri - without tears

[9/10 · 15 October 2012]

A great thank to Patrick Cassidy! "Vide Cor Meum" I kept in my soul.

To portray Firenze that way was not the only really great idea - to get to Europe, to the cradle of the renaissance, and to use an anthropophagous M.D. to present and represent some key aspect and applied ethics in medieval times. "Avarice, hanging, self destruction" - "I make my own home be my gallows." It still works. Be aware of Renaldos, Masons, Pauls...

Julianne Moore gave an outstanding "Goodbye" to the phantom 'Clarice Starling' that almost became real by that magnificent work of her predecessor. She never tried to copy something from her, and she did not "trample" on "her". I felt a deep silent satisfaction - just a little bit like bliss - seeing her in her beautiful unpretentious black dress at the end of this two hours stripped from pride, weapons and the connection with the cannibalism, that she let ran after the last attempt to imprison it. You cannot catch this, much less if you're trying to use cuffs.

Incipit vita nova.

The Brave One (2007)

Anyone...

[10/10 · 11 October 2012]

... can cross that line. Said to all who forgot it or like do deny.

What remains when happiness disappears and you're willing not to fake yourself but then faking yourself with shootings in which 'the others' die instantly without a scream and your gun is always loaded?

I once held a drawn bow in my hand and know how a loaded weapon changes the feeling of the own body. Jodie Foster knows it and although she had inscribed her face to a character who makes use of the light trigger she always makes clear that this is not the only way. The movie shows full respect from different views to this fundamental issue by leaving enough silence to become aware about the movie in spectator's brain.

The story seems only like a muzzy frame disintegrating itself when ever it is possible while "making a movie".

Every single human being has to figure out how to live with fear - how to live at all, even "with a grudge". That's hard, yes.

What can happen when some of the best meet and do their best to make art out of a "kind-of-standard-topic" using the financial power, knowledge and the equipment of the worlds most famous entertainment industries? You can see it when watching "The Brave One". The story disappears more and more every time I watch this magnificent work, but what I see still grips me tight and I feel my face getting wet. Mostly silent. Listen to Jodie Foster's voice during the 2 minutes (from the last caller on) when the first of her shots is heard again and Erica leaves the studio at 1:14:25. Emily Dickinsons poem „Death" spoken with a dark voice while putting gloves on - ennobled by a touch of music - just as she is called by name on the street in the night, between the last time she rather voiceless had tried to be received by a police officer and then calling the new friend on the phone in the night while waiting for the next one to kill. Anyway.

~ * ~

In my mind "The Brave One" is already far beyond questions about law or morality. There is no cheat code and no ace up my sleeve. Even if I think so. But then a reminder asks me to listen again carefully how heart and brain sound together.

Some thankful words to Ene Oloja: Without you this film was simply impossible. Although this is only a story someone with open eyes had to wipe up the blood. God is a woman.

How to come to an end? Simply stop writing and post the lines to where it's intended to.

And forget about Erica Bain - if I can.

Nell (1994)

What the light has been made for...

[10/10 · 30 September 2012]

This movie is 18 now, there are reviews from zero to 10, so here is mine: Albert Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited..." „Nell" shows that kind of knowledge which is behind the „veil of Isis" and that's because some aware people got together to make this visible.

It seems that we still need „stories" to reach this, but stories are only a start and never a conclusion.

„Thou are beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah" - this world is full of grace if you begin trying to say it to anyone, because all you say is to yourself.

„Who's Tirzah?" Jerry Lovell asked, swimming, laughing... It always makes me shine.

Alicia Foster's face at the very end shows all we need to know - during about 16 seconds. The most beautiful thing a camera ever could have been taken for; the light was made for.