Change Your Image
blitzturm-1
Reviews
American History X (1998)
Clear message, but not a very innovative movie
I'd heard great stories about how brilliant this film would be, and got a little disappointed after watching it. Sure, it's a nice story with a very clear and unavoidable message but it did not really disturb me. I like a film to disturb me, to make me doubt my opinions. And I can get disturbed by strange and obsessive people, not by a single swastika now and then. In this movie everything was so obvious, clear cut and outspoken: the dialogs seemed to be taken from high school plays: our thesis on racism'. The filming was smooth, there even were some background violins if I'm not mistaken. But there was nothing raw, nothing hidden, nothing seductive, nothing strangely energetic in this piece. The whole story got told'. And I really disliked the black&white of the flashbacks, that did not add anything worthwhile. Conclusion: Of coarse' I can agree with the message but the filming was a little cheap. I'm curious about the movie Tony Kaye wanted to make.
Gummo (1997)
Gummo; the image mirrors its disrupted personages
In criticising a movie, what leads me the most, is the impression afterwards, the traces it left in my memory. Sometimes, a film has a nice story, perfectly told, beautiful filmed - and still I've forgotten it as soon as I left the cinema or switched off the video. Gummo doesn't contain such a story - there's no plot to be told - and still it is one of the most impressive movies I saw lately.
Sure, there's something to pass on: It's about kids and childish adults living in an antisocial neighbourhood, which has been disrupted since it got struck by a tornado. It's about two boys who kill cats with their small rifles to sell them for local Chinese restaurants. It's about cursing and raging kids, apparently lacking loving parents to look after them. But all those remarks do not cover the film in any way.
The movie is poetic in a sense that it is filmed in a same chaotic way as its subject of disrupted childhood appears. The movie is full of pointless, distracted and dreamlike stories, told by uncontrolled adolescents as to illustrate the almost sleepy tracks of their lives. The characters seem to lack any normal social recollection, which seems to be replaced by the overwhelming memory of the tornado event. There is no story to be told, there's only moments to recollect. In that sense, the form of the movie mirrors it's content - and that has been done beautifully.
And there are fantastic moments to recollect from this movie. The scene with the little Solomon, getting his spaghetti diner in the bath tube, the albino woman telling about her love for Patrick Swayze, the drunken kitchen party that ends with the killing of an innocent chair, the teen girls working on their nipples, the boxing fight in the kitchen by the boys who are supposed to have killed their parents and of coarse the speechless Bunny Boy. Those moments, how fragmentised they may be, won't soon fade from my memory. The fact that this movie does only harvest 1's and 10's in the User Ratings - that it has been displayed by the Netherlands VPRO television - can only be a great compliment to its director Harmony Korine. I'll reward it with a 9.
Dead Man (1995)
to make the silence heard
I can write about the briliant play of Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer. Like others did before. But one of the most striking things to me was the beautiful sound and music by Neil Young. Sometimes his guitar sounds like a thunder storm, sometimes the absence of his play intensifies the silence. In the end, when William Blake has entered the indian deadcamp you actually seem to here how losing consciousness sounds. Superb. In the same way that the black&white film seems to intensify the the brightness and 'color' of the natural land, does the music provides the conversation with an extra layer. It cuts loose sentences, makes them stand on their own. In thes way it fragmantizes the story. I liked that a lot.
Gimme an 'F' (1984)
The kind of movie that gives America a bad name in film business.
This movie is too stupid for words. Even if you consider it to be a parody on movie-making, if you consider it to be completely camp, even than you're wasting your time watching it - for you've seen it a hundred times before. But maybe you are a big fan of high shrieking girl voices, you're still loving Barbie and Ken and you can stand this typical '80s electric guitar background noise... Well, than you'll have a chance.