Band of Angels, Raoul Walsh *****
Vanishing Point, Richard C. Sarafian *****
La prima notte di quiete, Valerio Zurlini *****
No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese *****
Rabid Dogs, Mario Bava *****
Senna, Asif Kapadia *****
Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer *****
The New York Reaper, Lucio Fulci *****
The Wings Have Eagles, John Ford *****
The Man With the Golden Arm, Otto Preminger *****
Shame, Steve McQueen *****
Air Force, Howard Hawks *****
Tenenbre, Dario Argento *****

The Beyond, Lucio Fulci ****
Seven Men from Now, Budd Boetticher ****
Gentleman's Agreement, Elia Kazan ****
Lola, Jacques Demy ****
Blood and Black Lace, Mario Bava ****
Yama no oto, Mikio Naruse ****
The House of the Devil, Ti West ****
Days of Wine and Roses, Blake Edwards ****
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay ****
A Separation, Asghar Farhadi ****
Warrior, Gavin O'Connor ****
Uncommon Valor, Ted Kotcheff ****

Phenomena, Dario Argento ***
The Innkeepers, Ti West ***
Vengeance, Johnnie To ***
It Should Happen to You, George Cukor ***

Como não tenho nada para dizer, ficam aqui os últimos filmes vistos com respectivas notas.

The Big Sky, Howard Hawks

"Hawks and Ray are opposites, a little bit as Castellani and Rossellini are. In Hawks we see the triumph of the mind; in Nick Ray, the triumph of the heart. One can argue against Hawks and for Ray - or the other way around; one can condemn Big Sky in the name of Johnny Guitar or accept them both. But anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself". 

François Truffaut.

E sabe tão bem voltar à velha Hollywood. Mais concretamente a Street Scene, filme de King Vidor. Não deixa de ser o filme mais fechado filmado unicamente em espaço aberto. Numa só rua com muito, muito movimento. São os picados e os contra-picados, os grandes-planos, num filme cheio de emoções em tão pouco tempo (a acção decorre apenas em 24 horas).

"Os Homens que Odeiam as Mulheres", é um filme vazio. Um material como este, merecia mais, muito mais. Não só a nível de longevidade do filme, as mais de duas horas e meia não chegam para condensar toda a informação. Ou seja, todo o conteúdo parece não fazer sentido. Parece que estamos a presenciar um episódio de uma série em que tudo tem de caber naqueles 50 minutos.
Não sei se Fincher foi a melhor escolha. Na verdade sempre me pareceu a escolha acertada. Não se lhe pode apontar qualquer erro, o certo é que também não possui o mínimo rasgo de ousadia. Piloto automático. Nada como o seu anterior filme Social Network – ele tão criticado – para mostrar o que este Fincher é realmente capaz. Zodiac foi a grande surpresa em anos, e de Benjamin Button fico com os últimos 45 minutos de filme.
Neste, há personagens ocos, na sua maioria. Só Rooney Mara me parece bem aparoveitada (não vi o filme sueco ainda).
Eu queria ter gostado do filme. Muito. Mas depois de sair da sala, não deixo de pensar que o dinheiro deveria ter sido aplicado no filme do Eastwood. Esse senhor que nunca dá um tiro ao lado.

Mil filmes do Michael Bay, do Scott, ou até do cabrão do Cameron e o seu Avatar ao pretensiosimo do Gus Van Sant no seu último filme. Sem mais nada a acrescentar.

The Seven Year Itch

The metaphor is exaggerated. It doesn't take seven minutes to realize that The Seven Year Itch is beyond smut and licentiousness and that it takes us part the limits of evil to a kind of worn-down regret, good humor, and kindness.

An "average" American (Tom Ewell) accompanies his wife and son to the train as they go off on vacation. He returns home alone, determine on conjugal morality, and determined also to follow the advice of his doctor not to drink, and maybe that of his minister.

But a girl - the likes of which you've never know (in the biblical sense) except in dreams - has just moved into the apartment upstairs, and she sows troubled thoughts in his mind, already disoriented by temporary celibacy.

The most important character in the play, the focus of all attention, is the man who is deliberately ordinary, somewhat less than average both physically and intellectually, so as to ensure the identification of the male audience and the greater enjoyment - sadistic, "superior" maybe envious - of the women. In the filme, the center of interest shifts to the heroine, for the excellent reason that when she is on screen there is nowhere to look but at her body, from head to toe, with a thousand stops along the way. her body draws us up from our seats to the screen as a magnet attracts a scrap of metal.

On screen, there is no chance to reflect. Hips, nape, knees, ears, elbows, lips, palms of the hand, profiles win out over tracking shots, framing sustained panoramas, dissolves. All these, it must be admitted, doesn't happen without a deliberate, measured, finally very effective vulgarity. Billy Wilder, the libidinous old fox, moves along with such, incessant suggestiveness that, ten minutes into the film, we aren't sure what are the original or literal meanings of fraucet, Friggidaire, under, above, soap, perfume, pnties, breeze, and Rachmaninoff.

If we admire, rather than grow annoyed, it is becaeuse the film's verve and inventiveness, its cavalier vigor and naughtiness demand complicity.

The filme is sincere, really much better than that. The bawdyness lies not in you or me but in Wilder, who has pushed daring to the point of directing a few purely pornographic shots with great precision (although because they are stylised they will elude 98 percent of the audience). Take, for example, the milk bottle between Tom Ewell's legs as he squats on the floor in front of a half-open door.

Another interesting thing about the film is that, maybe for the first time, we are given a filmed critique of films. Jacques Rivette says, and I agree with him pretty much, that the first scene in Scarface, when a nightclub employee angrily throwns out confetti, streamers and a forgotten brassiere, signifies in Hawk's mind that the film bears no relation to the exoticism of Underworld, made the year before by Joseph von Sternberg, also with a script by Ben Hecht. In both cases, in Underworld and in Seven Year Itch, we have a polemical cinema that is also something more.

We may also recall in Stalag 17 a happy prisoner doing a series of imitations, including a pretty good one of Cary Grant. In The Seven Year Itch, for the first time we are given deliberated citations from other directors, with the same frames, angles, and position of the actors. Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, Frak Borzage and others are more less directly cited. But the film Wilder constantly, refers to, so that each scene becomes a vengeful slap, is David Lean's Brief Encounter with its streams of tears and its amorously awkward couple - the least sensual and most sentimental film ever wept over. Some people eve  weep thinking about it - inexhaustible tears from English crocodiles. "Rachmaninoff! his second concerto for a piano and orchestra never loses its effect," Tom Ewell declares, just because he's seen Brief Encounter and he has figured out that Rachmaniniff is infallible n affairs of the heart and body.

If The Seven Year Itch were only a weapon aimed at the English cinema it would already be estimable for its attempt at demystification.

I have not mentioned the name of the actress. I have loved her since Niagara and even before. She is person of grace, somewherebetween Chaplin and James Dean. How could anyone resist a filme that has Marilyn Monroe in it?

François Truffaut - 1956 -

Mais um Polanski, o que só vem a comprovar que se encontra em grande forma. A experimentar e a explorar como sempre os espaços fechados. Apenas com quatro personagens (todo o trabalho é deles)  e ainda com um enorme trabalho de escrita faz-se um grande filme. 80 minutos chegam.

Hereafter, ou o filme mais injustiçado do ano.

Só vi há dias atrás, mas este, tal como muitos outros acabam por me dizer que pouco devo estar atento a algum meio crítico em geral. Pois Hereafter é sim o filme mais injustiçado do ano. E Clint Eastwood tem destas coisas, o cineasta mais clássico dos tempos modernos - só James Gray actualmente - pega em três histórias sobre a perda, passadas em três cidades diferentes. As histórias, no final, acabam por se interligar, num encontro que nem Haggis nem Innaritu (e outros que tentam constantemente este meio) conseguem de forma tão poderosa.

O Tsunami parece-me das mais avassaladoras e destruidoras cenas que tenho memória de assistir nos últimos anos. É Eastwood a ensinar como se filma.

A cena em cima, a minha preferida é com o personagem de Matt Damon, e da, cada vez mais bela, Bryce Dallas Howard numa aula de cozinha. Nada artificial, tal como todo o filme, coisa que já li por aí. Enfim, nunca deverei duvidar de um filme de Eastwood.

Is the cinema the thing that counts most for you?

I ruined my life for it. I have no family, no wife, only daughters. All women left me because I never stop thinking of my job. My only two hobbies are my dogs and my sailing boat. Work is very important to me. John Ford once said, "I know that in bars they are saying bad things about me. But I am shooting films in the mountains with Indians while they are talking..." 

Lucio Fulci