3 June 2007
Movies
The Lives of Others (5/5) at Landmark on Sat. It takes an easy target--the tragedy of state surveillance in socialist East Germany in 1984--and pulls out a finely structured and poignant drama. The emotional impact lasts until, unbelievably, the very last minute of an unusually paced final act. Really, this film needs to win some sort of award.
After I found out that I was foolish enough to order Arrebato from 5 Minutes to Live even though it was in "Spanish with no English subtitles" and not in "Spanish with English subtitles"--making me question my command of reading English anyway--we watched Figures in a Landscape (3/5). A nicely abstract flick that examines the idea of man as primarily a malignant atagonist to society. Robert Shaw and a young, doughy Malcolm McDowell are Mac and Ansell: fugitives fleeing in the titled landscape from a helicopter of great menace and (eventually) military troops. Their characters are bristly at first and eventually become almost sympathetic. It has the dry, dramatic minimalism of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and the existential barrenness of The Naked Prey.
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