minimal-cut-set Reviews

Summer of Sam (1999)

a (wonderful) remake of an old German movie?

[10/10 · 11 May 2006]

In N.Y.C. during the seventies, a serial killer still at large causes the reaction of the Italoamerican community. The movie is ten stars. and Spike Lee is, in my opinion, one of the best (if not the best) American director of our days.

I am just curious to know if the director was inspired by an old German movie (also very beautiful) by Peter Fleishman (the title, translated in English is something like Hunt Scenes in South Bavaria), of whom this movie could be considered, in my opinion, a very personal (and wonderful) remake. In the German movie a young (maybe homosexual) guy is persecuted by the people of his village in south Bavaria who think he is the maniac who killed a young girl simply because he is different and unconventional. In the Lee movie the plot is practically the same, just replacing Bavarians with Italoamericans.

So I think that Lee, as Fleishmann in the 1969 movie, wanted to show, and he did it very well, how intolerance and suspicion towards diversity can be a trigger for fascism and blind violence.

Finally, the actors are all very good and in particular I liked very much the performance of Adrien Brody and John Leguizamo.

25th Hour (2002)

Wonderful, but very very sad.

[10/10 · 15 February 2004]

In my opinion this is the best Spike Lee movie and one of the best movies I have seen in the last five years (at least).

I found it however deeply sad. Indeed, the plot is depressive, a drug-dealer sentenced to 7 years of prison lives his last day of freedom, but there is a kind of difficult-to-define undergound sensation involving the whole film, all its characters in all its situations, that makes it is really sad. I think (but I am not sure) that the (subliminal) message this film transmits is the following: 1)We live in a horrible world. 2)we feel that something is going wrong or is missing. 3)in some moments we are even able to imagine how it could be better. 4)But in any case we live in an horrible world. I gave 10 to this movie. I think it is the kind of movie that deserves a second vision.

Carandiru (2003)

very good film: terrible and all true.

[21 May 2003]

Carandiru is a a very good film. I think it is not the best Babenco's movie (e.g. not so good as Pixote) but yet it is one of the best film I have seen during this last year.

In the first place, it should be remarked that it needs a lot of courage to put on screen the beautiful and crude Varella´s book on the day-by-day of prisoners of the Sao Paulo jail Carandiru (once the biggest jail on Brazil, now demolished). In particular the movie shows one the the darkest pages in the recent Brazilian history, namely, the massacre occurred in that jail in October 1992: during a rebellion, the police invaded the prison and killed summarily 111 prisoners. Not a single policeman was even injured during the action.

In order to understand the movie, I think is very important to stress how deep has been the relevance of this sad and cruel event in the slow evolution of the Brazilian society towards less barbarian standards. At the time of the massacre most of the elites, media and middle class supported the police action and only ten years later, in 2001, some of the authors of the massacre has been put on trial. In other words the Carandiru tragic facts of 1992 and the way they have been so differently evaluated here during these years, reveals in a tragic fashion one of the most explosive contradiction of the present Brazilian society, in which a large majority of the Brazilians is completely excluded and plundered.

The movie of Babenco show this clearly and powerfully. Babenco used different kind of approaches. Most of the time the tone of the movie is realistic even bordering a documentary, but there are scenes in which the movie becomes visionary.

I am not surprise that the film was not well accepted in the recent Cannes festival. Critics from the first world are not expected to know much about the actual situation of Brazil (euphemisticly speaking). The fact is that Brazil in the USA/Europe imaginary continues to be unfortunately the country of carnival, football and samba and dark crude point of view such as the one of Babenco tend to be considered as disturbing or worst boring. So, while in the preview session for the press in Cannes 2003 most of the comments were "too long", this nearly three hours movie is one most

seen of the year in Brazil.

Harrison's Flowers (2000)

this movie is awful and incites hate

[2/10 · 8 January 2003]

The plot of the movie is the following. The beautiful wife of a super-famous and handsome photo-reporter (who won the Pulitzer in the past) leaves family and children in America to look for his husband lost in the middle of recent Yugoslavian civil war, She refuses to believe in CNN (called here ICN) who reported her husband as dead. Together with three other friends-reporters (one of them is another Pulitzer prize), she gets inside Vukovar exactly during the final Serbian army assault and, while Serbs are massacring and raping everyone all around (her friends-reporter taking picture in the meanwhile of these super-cruel facts), she gets inside the city Hospital well in the middle of a bombing. Of course, she finds her husband and saves him. I think that this movie should not deserve any comment. The story is mostly unrealistic and some times absolutely ridiculous. But beyond this, the movie is also actually inciting to hate. So something must be said. Every time Serbs appear, they always do a lot of extremely nasty things, while our brave quartet, during its journey towards Vukovar, passes several time through a benign, or at least not malign, Croatian army (the one with the red and white chessboard flag). This manicheistic vision, Serbs are the bad guys and Croatians are the good guys, reflects the West version of the conflict. Indeed Serbs were responsible for terrible massacres, including in Vukovar where they were accused to take away and kill more than 200 people from the city hospital, but Croatians were also accused of mass killings (e.g. , the facts of Paulin Dvor and Gospic in the same year of Vukovar, 1991).

For people interested in the Yugoslavian conflict, I suggest to avoid this and watch instead two great movies, namely "Vukovar" by Boro Draskovic, and "Bure baruta" by Goran Paskaljevic and the good movie "No man's land" by Danis Tanovic. The first two are from Republic of Yugoslavia while the third is a French-Bosniac coproduction.

September 11 (2002)

to be seen but most of the shorts are bad

[4 January 2003]

The rumors around this movie, actually 11 shorts movies made by famous and less famous directors on the terroristic attack in New York of 11 September, saying that it is anti-American, does seems to me true only partially. I would divide the ideological approach of this 11 shorts into three distinct groups. There is the (pro-American) philosophy of those concerned about the tragedy experienced by the American people in that day. In particular in this line I would put the short of Lelouch, which I found simply ridiculous, the short of Amos Gitai which is talently directed but ideologically simplistic and in my opinion also somewhat repulsive, and the short of Inarritu, an empty experimentalism, which is really disappointing by the director of the wonderful "Amores Perros". Then there is the line (not anti-American but not pro-American): "OK 11 September was a tragedy for USA, but look also at other tragedies in other countries". In this philosophy I would put the powerless short of a not inspired Tanovic, the short of Samirah Makhmalbaf, which is not so bad but again somewhat artificial and the superficial and humoristic short of Ouedraogo. Finally there is the explicitly anti-American philosophical approach. Here I put the egocentric and awful (in my opinion) short of Chahine, the not so bad short of Mira Nair, about the unjust persecution of a Pakistani guy the American authorities, the terrible and convincing evocation another 11 September, that of the military push in Chile (supported by the CIA) in 1973, by the enraged Kenneth Loach. The remaining two shorts, namely the one of Sean Penn and that of Imamura do not fit in ant of the three groups. The Penn´s episode is a very poetic and sad looking at an old widower in his lone apartment with a surprising connection with 11 September in the final sequence. Nice Short. The last magnificent and dark episode, by Imamura, is definitely the best. A Japanese soldier comes back to his village after fighting in world war II, but (due to what he had seen and/or experienced?) something went wrong in his mind and he now is acting like a snake (!). So the people in the village, including is his wife, cannot accept him anymore. The short has a clear message and Imamura writes it at the end of the movie: There are no holy wars.

As a last consideration, I find very worrying the fact that this movie is actually forbidden in USA.

Vengeance Is Mine (1979)

great movie

[10/10 · 3 January 2003]

The movie show us the story of a japanese serial killer. We watch, in alternating flashbacks, sequences of his childhood, his cruel murders, the failure of his marriage, the destructive relation with his father, his escape through the country. The characters of the film, the murder, the murder´s father, the murder´s wife, a prostitute met during the escape and her old mother, are deeply delineated, realistic and human. There are many memorable sequences along the movie. A sex scene in a japanese sauna environment, an awfully realistic multiple killing in a truck, a subliminal and sinister persecution in a park with pools full of eels, and the marvellous and enigmatic end sequence. This is one of the best movie I have ever seen.