MOVIE REVIEWS
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
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Away from her Sarah Polley 2006
This is a beautiful, clever, unforgettable movie.A man and a woman, who love each other, need to be together, even if they’re married to someone else. This is the reality which a couple have suppressed and hidden from each other in a lifetime of happiness and beauty, until the wife eventually breaks down when she, apparently contracts Alzheimer’s disease and is institutionalized. The movie draws every last drop of our emotion out of us, as it presents the struggle of the couple, especially the man, to face reality and release his wife and take a drastic step so that the true lovers can be together.
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The Lesson Kristina Grozeva, Peter Valchanov 2014
This is a brilliant movie, which succeeds in building up tension out of very ordinary events that could happen to any person in the course of an ordinary life. The acting is brilliant in portraying naturalness and reality.
The plot is simple and hits home powerfully in a matter of fact way. The teacher tries to teach her pupils honesty, but instead she is finally taught by the criminals to be a criminal. The lesson, which should have been a lesson in honesty turns into a lesson on how criminals turn honest people into criminals.
The lesson for the viewer is that when criminals aren’t caught and punished they are a danger to society because they will turn honest people into criminals.
Mon 27th Oct 2015
Movie Reviews
Monday, October 26, 2015
1.The Invisibles. Mushon Salmona (Hebrew/ English subtitles) מושון סלמונה 2014
The movie shows dramatic and tragic sociological situations, arising out of the difficulties of Bedouin societies in adapting to life in a modern Jewish state, like sons going against their father’s dictates, wanting to marry a Jewish girl, rather than a girl from the tribe, wanting to decide for themselves what to do in life and meeting the demands of bureaucracy. It shows that the Beduin want to be good citizens of Israel; to go to the army, earn an honest living, raise a family and generally be a part of Israeli society. But the bureaucratic obstacles are so great that they fall back on illegal and anti-social behavior.
2. The Buffalo Boy. Minh Nguyen-Vo 2004
This is a Vietnamese Movie about a boy, living in a sea of flood waters. His situation changes according to the alternating dry and wet seasons. His only true friends are the buffalo, who plough his rice field in the dry season and die of hunger in the wet and other people who live in this flooded land. Water dominates everything. People are little specks on the landscape. His life is a constant struggle to keep the buffalo alive and to keep the few friends he meets alive also. The film could be entitled how to keep things alive when everything around you is dying.
3. Tangerines Zaza Urushadze 2013
An amazing movie that shows the absurdity of war in the midst of a beautiful, fertile land. Everything is lush and green but the people are killing each other. Death reigns in the midst of beauty and richness and we ask ourselves how this can be? But once again we are reminded that living in the midst of natural beauty has no effect on the ugly, murderous side of man’s nature. It is a fact; we humans hate each other and invite death even while we’re surrounded by life.
4. Ex Machina Alex Garland 2015
Man finally creates a robot, a beautiful woman, naturally, that can think and act for itself, just like a human being and naturally it uses all the wiles of a woman to trick the unsuspecting male into her trap and help her to reach freedom, out of the control of her creator. This is a pretty good movie, with lots action and mystery.
5. Aloft Claudia Llosa 2014
In this movie snow is the dominant feature, because accidents often happen in the snow, making it an excellent backdrop for the movie’s theme: A man’s life is full of tragic events, which are accidents, partly caused by him, subconsciously and partly by phenomenon outside his control. Sadly people, including him, don’t understand the accidental nature of events and so are moved to self-guilt and to blaming others and so causing much more suffering than the original event. The story is sad, but it’s not a sad movie, because it moves quickly between tragedy and the joys of life. The scenes are well filmed, bringing out the full poignancy of each, making them unforgettable.
6. The Confession Costa-Gavras 1970
This is a historical movie about the need of Communism to constantly carry out purges. It could be called “showing that Communism is pure” at all costs, even at the cost of injustice to individuals in the system. This could be the motto of all totalitarian societies. A democratic society also demands sacrifices of the individual, but in return it protects the individual from injustice and should always be on guard against any encroachment of injustice in the system.
