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Reviews
Barfly (1987)
Charles Bukowski making a cine-novel of its own life
Remember when you first read some Bukowski books, how you felt interested in, just by living amongst losers, wretches, drunken people, perverts and whores... If you can recall how you felt by reading their uninteresting lives -uninterseting, though these lives were just feeling real. Just like some kind of microcosm dedicated to perpetuity... So yes, Hank wrote the story, and Schroeder shot the movie. It results in a beautiful movie, absolutely not dark or mean, but just kind of joyful. The characters played by Rourke and Dunaway just give the impression they pass through life without noticing it, their ambitions being all but to get some more drinks at the next corner's bar, even if they can't pay it. Rourke and Dunaway performances are incredible, in fact, and it's also so funny to watch at Stallone's brother as a macho bar-tender... Find the way to that poet who cannot live without getting smashed, looking like a loser and listening to classical music... and you'll love him (and the movie of course). It's just simple, and brilliant.
The War Game (1966)
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
48 minutes, none of them useless. If you can remember "Come and See", by E.Klimov, you precisely understand the way you feel -you've known it once. In a weird way, this fiction documentary had been produced by Her Royal Highness's BBC, but it just completely doesn't fit to the usual speech of governments. Yes, it had been banned from TV casts for like 20 years, and yes, it's easy to understand how such a movie would have produced the effect of a bomb in the 60's prudent society... The movie works in an efficient frame-line: just imagine what would happen if England was under the risk of some thermonuclear attack (of course from the USSR). The constant off-voice is pictured and never remains just theorical. What has the England government been planning to prevent its citizens from suffering? What are the effects of a thermonuclear explosion on human beings? Event if these human beings are something like 60km away from it? What would happen to the economy, the supplying of food, and even the fooding production? How would the people react, after some weeks of starvation? Is it possible to cure everyone? Is it even thinkable? These are kind of the points the movie deals with. Just remember the facts it relates are based on what happened in some German cities during the WWII, and of course the results of 'Little Boy" and its little brother... Just remember you've got nothing to lose watching this movie. Just remember you may feel some angry and desperate joy after having watched it. Just remember that's life, and no one really cares. Just WATCH IT !
Idi i smotri (1985)
Come and See the World... as it is
Come and See.. The first time I saw it, went almost berserk within the very depths of my soul -there's far too much about feeling, understanding, witnessing and living in this movie to stay quiet and phlegmatic after having watched it. Is it the very opening of the movie that brings this state of facts, as you're told you're just poor little bastards who can't understand anything of what's going on, that you'd remember everything keeps going on and on and on without you to escape it? Is it because these first sentences I can't quote are dedicated to the young protagonist in which we will entirely penetrate? Or may it be due to the almost unreal living reality the entire movie flashes over you? That very feeling that you could have done such things, in such a situation, that every guy down here might be anything we usually like to consider as morally impossible? Will you bare the absolute passivity of civilians -if we can call 'passivity' the fact of trying to save one's life by helping anyone stronger than one is? Maybe it is just because it depicts reality as it might be -not understandable, not to be focused on, not to be made or modified as we'd like it to be, but just as something you can't escape, that stands still when you're happy, when you're suffering, and dying.. Go and watch this movie -this is for sure. Look at it as it is -a requiem for loads of massacres -the first of all being perhaps one of instinct... Go, watch this movie. And feel hard for long. Be joyful if you feel bad.