9 MOVIES TARKOVSKY HATED AND ONE HE LOVED
Been reading Tarkovsky's diaries and letters and they're really enlightening. He occasionally wrote about films he had recently caught in the cinema, here are some excerpts:
2001: A Space Odyssey - 'A lifeless schema with only pretensions of truth'
The Godfather - 'Boring, unoriginal'
Apocalypse Now - 'Weak, cartoonish'
Lolita - 'Thoroughly empty.. Brought me nothing but sadness and disgust'
Killing of a Chinese Bookie - (on Casssavetes) 'I feel very sorry for him. I could weep.'
Manhattan - 'Monstrous boredom. I left in the middle'
Amadeus - '8 Oscars and so utterly middling!'
Tristana - 'Unbelievably vulgar'
Tre Fratelli - 'Disjointed, meaningless. It was awful'.
Terminator- 'This film pushes the frontiers of cinema as an art form'
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SUBLIME CINEMA #679 - POOR THINGS
Yorgos Lanthimos has been leading up to Poor Things for a long time. This is a best-of-career tour de force for the director, cinematographer, designers and several its actors. I was blown away.
The movie used a single camera, four archaic lenses and an Ektachrome 35mm film stock they had to create from scratch in a Kodak lab to shoot it. The result is a movie unlike any I've quite seen before. The colors are so rich - a result of the use of reversal stock, a very unusual and risky approach for a feature film, since there was no negative to work from. The textures are so bold and detailed, and the whole aesthetic immediately sets it apart from most recent movies.
I saw Ferrari recently and found the digital camera work dull. Then I walked out of this movie reawakened.
All of the visual effort would be pointless if there wasn't a good story and actors to brave it, but both Emma Stone and Mark Rufffalo have never been better, coming off like demented vaudevillians on an absinthe binge. They totally own and bring to life a script which would terrify most performers.
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SUBLIME CINEMA #675 - ANATOMY OF A FALL
Fully engrossing, beautifully written and acted film.
There's something so precise about the filmmaking, meticulous and rigid in its adherence to its own aesthetic rules. Even the cinematography is so purposefully, digitally bland that we rarely move or widen past the immediate confines of the characters states of mind, and are given no real sense of place.
We know we are in an alpine town, somewhere outside of Grenoble, but it could be anywhere really, cut off and isolated: the couple are living in an unfinished home and sleep in different bedrooms. They share a child, who survived an accident that left him partially blind. What he sees, or doesn't see, hears or doesn't hear.. Throughout we loop around the truth.
Brilliant stuff
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