Film Blog - ilianFilm

The Matrix, freedom and Alice in Wonderland

10/23/2013

I just saw "The Matrix" again on the big screen and I loved it … again. That is, if you can get beyond the first 15 minutes. Not that they are that bad, but it's obvious that they are inferior to the rest of the film. What I'm referring to is the staging, the dialogue, and the acting in the beginning scenes.

With the physical appearance of Morpheus things change drastically. I want to make one thing clear, everything changes from that point - the acting, the dialogue, and the script becomes more intellectual. From this point the film takes us on a journey and doesn't let us down. The special effects, fighting scenes, and the philosophical message and meaning, keep the viewer constantly invested.

Sweet and Lowdown

6/4/2013

Sweet and Lowdown combines two of the great talents in recent cinema. Sean Penn proves that there isn't anything on celluloid that he can't feel or express.

His portrait of Emmet Ray is funny and complete down to the last leg and hand gesture. He is one of the two best actors of our time. Sweet and Lowdown displays his incredible range of talent.

Taxi Driver

5/19/2013

Taxi Driver has a lot of negative aspects, but it would be silly to shrug off its baroque visuals and its high-class actor, Robert De Niro, whose acting range is always underscored by a personal dignity. He's very good at wild manic scenes and better at poignant introversion: a man watching TV in a trance and eating while not looking at his food, or giving the sense of tense repression. Every scene combines the frantic and the still, almost simultaneously. The film has a good sense of modern paralysis, people flailing about energetically but not moving an inch (“twelve hours of driving a taxi and I still can’t sleep").

Natural Born Killers

4/13/2013

"Natural born killers" is MTV on LSD. In a barrage of images juxtaposed in jump cut style editing that last no longer than a few seconds, we become passengers on a hallucinatory and murderous trip.

Oliver Stone's film shows the creation of the celebrity culture through television and its negative impact on our understanding of entertainment. Mickey and Mallory Knox start as murderers but they are escalated into stardom by reality TV host Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.) and his hunger for higher ratings.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

4/8/2013

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is a martial arts ballet told in shades of green.

In Chinese philosophy the color green symbolizes knowledge and this film is the "greenest" film I have ever seen. Not only is the sword green but the environment around the characters is almost exclusively the shade of that color.

The Elephant Man

3/11/2013

The Elephant Man, is a touching story that left me with mixed feelings. I not only felt empathy and emptiness, but also an anger with the world. Human cruelty is always present, and the hunger for entertainment often sacrifices morals and values. This type of entertainment profits off of weakness and misfortune to satisfy the masses.

Requiem For A Dream

3/9/2013

Requiem For A Dream, explores the lengths to which people are willing to go to achieve their dreams, while simultaneously demonstrating the destructive nature of addiction and its uncontrollable influence on the addict. The production is Darren Aronofsky’s vision of this tangled “journey” filled with good intentions, wrong choices and resulting destruction portrayed beautifully in the film’s three plot lines-Summer, Fall, and Winter.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2/13/2013

What audiences need is more films that can tell simple stories as well as provoke us with subject matter. Stories that urge us to congregate at the coffee house post-screening and “force” us to discuss how our daily lives parallel or differ from what we have just seen. Stories that make us think about changing our habits of narcissism and self-absorption. Stories that encourage us to think outside the box and contemplate how we might change the corporate driven society we live in with its myth of personal freedom .

From "Gimme Shelter" to "Spinal Tap"

2/11/2013

After all the glory following the cultural rebellion of the 60s, what was left as the 70s approached, was a strong sense of decaying values in every aspect of life. If we cannot learn from the past then we are going to lose the true sense of ourselves, of who we are.

What Gimme Shelter portrays is a lost decade, with lost ideals, where the next stage to follow is attitude and hunger for money, as we see in Spinal Tap.

Cotton Club

1/27/2013

The film takes place in Harlem, New York from 1928 to 1931 and combines song and dance with drama. The director, Francis Ford Coppola, looks back at the peak of the legendary Harlem nightclub where blacks performed to a white audience. Most of the gangster scheming, normal for that era, were staged in public places, like the Cotton Club.

Lone Star

1/23/2013

Lone Star, by John Sayles, is a feature film that blends drama, mystery, romance and social issues. The film deals with a murder and a love story but is mostly about how people from different cultures and generations try to live together.
The narrative of the film is about borders. While jumping about in time, the story unveils different borders that often separate, instead of promote a crossing point for peaceful exchange - between countries, between past and present, and between cultures. The director's editing technique where the camera “pans” to the past without fade-outs, cutting, or breaking the action, suggest that the present and past are tied intimately together, and both live within us. Every individual is free to choose whether to bury their past, merge it into the present, or just live for today without looking back: “The blood only means what you let it.”
The final scene shows Pilar and Sam sitting at a blank screen and discussing their future. Pilar, who is a history teacher says: “Forget the Alamo.” This shows that both of them decide that the knowledge of their blood relation doesn’t change the feelings they have for each other. They choose to forget the past, the history, and destroy the border that stands between them. The border that exists only in their minds.

3.5 / 5

Director: John Sayles
Staring: Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena

The Weather Underground

1/1/2013

The Weather Underground

LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION

The Weather Underground exceeded my expectations for a documentary piece about the sixties. For some reason, that era has never been an inspiration to me, and I always thought of it as a reign of anarchy, drugs, and promiscuity.

People who critique moving pictures fall into 3 general classes:

1. Reviewers - are generally journalists who describe the contents and general tone of a movie, with only incidental emphasis on aesthetic evaluation.

2. Critics - are also journalists for the most part, but their emphasis is more on evaluation than on mere content description.

3. Theorists - are usually professional academics, often the authors of books on how movies can be studied on a more philosophical level.

Author

I'm a film critic and I like to write about films that are exceptional and stand above the rest.

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"The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn't be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work that they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understandings and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily bad critic if he makes errors in judgement. He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others." ( Pauline Kael )

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