Movie Diary 2011-09 [September]

This comes right from my childhood days. Daniel LaRusso is a sort of an icon of my teen years, I always felt he had the power to conquer the world with his smile. It's funny how it becomes embarrassingly outdated each time I rewatch it, and at the same time it retains its beauty, at least the kind of beauty that plants the roots in the heart more than the brain.
The acting quality ranges from average (the two main characters and few others) to terrible, the soundtrack is so Eighties that could lead many ears to suicide and the reason why Okinawan residents felt the need to speak to themselves in Engrish remains an eternal mystery, but frankly, it doesn't matter, it brilliantly succeeds, as all the KK cycle, in its real task: being the inspiration to this.

A heartfelt experience. I greatly appreciate Gipi's comics mostly because of his dialogues, they've always had the power to touch me deep, and this movie is so powerful in that sense.
If you want to see a tasteless movie about an alien invasion, stay away from this. If you want to see a common film stay away from this.

Unfortunate events happen to some unfortunate kids, and they carry the burden in the adulthood.
Irritating and pretentious, the lack of originality in the story is accompanied by the lack of everything else I'm able to appreciate in a movie. Quite disappointing.
I look at it as a manual of "Things you must really avoid if you wanna told a story like this".

CASE 1: He loves her, but the work has priority; she loves him, but she's disappointed and suddenly meets another. CASE 2: He's unfaithful, he loves her; she's unfaithful, she asks for divorce. It's hard to rediscover the True Path of Love, and you live in the Republic of Weimar, and it's 1928, but finally everything comes out right (at least, until the next working day).
A high sophisticated silent drama who depicts two couples and their totally different ways to end a relationship, both failing miserably. Love reigns over them. Yes, it's called a spoiler.

Some wealthy guys spend their free time (life) in a huge Villa in the Berlin park of Tiergarten, doing nothing but always busy, while an overweight boxer (my hero) is just released from prison and, with his lovely wife, begins his struggle in search for a job and money (not necessarily both). The two worlds are about to collide, in a strange and unexpected way. And it's Christmas!
2/3 comedy, 1/3 drama, it has some amusing dreamy sequences at the end and makes clever use of multiple exposure right from the beginning. Very enjoyable.

Austrian silent set in Vienna with a classic plot of love, trickeries and misfortunes. Marlene Dietrich is in it, but the real pleasures are elsewhere (like the beautiful lengthy shot-reverse shot scene that these two pictures wonderfully testify).

This had to be a must see, at least for three reasons (all the clamor that followed its initial release, De Palma himself and his not yet completed public autopsy of dead cinema and, well, the presence of a Billy Corgan double in camouflage suit) so I took advantage of a late night broadcast to finally see exactly what I was expecting from it: shaky takes, YouTube videos, helmet-held camera, night vision, wild war crimes, Iraq criticism and a Billy Corgan double in camouflage suit, it's all in it, for your pleasure, or disgust. The fake French documentary shows haunting and somewhat poetic images of U.S. troops in this checkpoint doing nothing, simply waiting for death. Whose death, this time?