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Author Topic: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob  (Read 19538 times)

MartinTeller

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #100 on: November 12, 2020, 11:01:14 PM »
Typically anti-Bondo of me, I'm far more Team Molina.

Sandy

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #101 on: November 17, 2020, 11:12:15 PM »
Au Hasard Balthazar



“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

There's a new PSA circulating about called Stand Up Against Street Harassment. One of the clips shows someone bothering a woman in the subway and an older woman gets out of her seat and stands between her and the offender. It's a simple act, yet an effective one. This film lacks any such acts. Where is Marie's intercessor? Who will stand up for her; protect her from harm? Who will teach her how to say the word no and how to stand up for herself? Everyone is so busy ignoring the threat, they have no time to consider the consequences. Marie is left with no more power than her donkey companion, so they both are led to their "slaughter." Stand up. Dammit.

“Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?... It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #102 on: November 18, 2020, 03:16:56 PM »
Sad that bugged you watching the film. I think it's a gut-wrenching look at human suffering that makes us empathize with the plight of characters as they endure various horrors of existence. And, of course, Balthazar himself does not have a particularly nice life. It's easy to think that it's our job to make our lives better for ourselves but to an extent, we are all a bit like Balthazar in that the suffering visited upon us is not something we ask for nor something we can completely escape.

Sandy

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #103 on: November 18, 2020, 03:50:59 PM »
Sad that bugged you watching the film.

Don't feel sad about my reaction. I see it as the film being successful, for it to put me in that agitated space. Me feeling powerless alongside the girl and donkey is just what it set out to do. I appreciate cinema that challenges me.

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I think it's a gut-wrenching look at human suffering that makes us empathize with the plight of characters as they endure various horrors of existence. And, of course, Balthazar himself does not have a particularly nice life. It's easy to think that it's our job to make our lives better for ourselves but to an extent, we are all a bit like Balthazar in that the suffering visited upon us is not something we ask for nor something we can completely escape.

Agree.

I'm all about pulling myself up by my bootstraps, but we've got to be in this together to make it all work. I've needed outside support at times and hope to be able to offer it too.

Teproc

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #104 on: November 21, 2020, 09:44:37 AM »
L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

Between this, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé/A Man Escaped and some scenes in Pickpocket, I wish Bresson had done more thrillers. I don't know if you could call L'argent a thriller, exactly, but some of it plays that way, though it's of course mostly a tragedy and a condemnation of materialism. I generally don't think Bresson is all that didactic a filmmaker, but it'd be hard to miss his point here, which is that money is the root of all evil... or rather its physical embodiment. It's the first time I've really wondered about Bresson's political stance. There are elements that definitely point towards conservatism (the way he lingers on the "Hôtel moderne" sign, or one of the main characters arguing that he engaged in criminal activities because of the "new ideas" going around which would make his behaviour acceptable), but it's not like he has an idyllic view of the simple country life (see: Balthazar, Mouchette, Diary), so really he's just a Catholic grump, and one could read this whole film as a metaphor of original sin, of the fall of man, just swap the serpent with a 500 francs bill.

Whatever the case may be, Bresson's usual stylistic approach works very well for this story because he doesn't waste time trying to make us too emotionally involved with the characters (the issue I have with Pickpocket), something that the acting style would make impossible anyway. No, it's just people falling down the rabbit hole of sin, just because they see other people doing it and being rewarded for it. As a cycling fan, it makes me think of the way dopers justify it by saying "everyone else was doing it anyway". Well yeah. Bresson takes this exercise to a pretty extreme place by the end here, and even though he never shows us the violence, those final few images are quite disturbing, ending his career with perhaps one of the most striking sequences he's ever directed.

8/10
Legend: All-Time Favorite | Great  |  Very Good  |  Good  |  Poor  |  Bad

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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #105 on: November 21, 2020, 06:31:09 PM »
All Bresson, all the time! I do think it's interesting that this is an anti-material film that tells the story of a material object. I can't think of many films that tell the story of an inanimate object. The Red Balloon comes to mind. I do think he's more conservative politically but he also seems to be sympathetic to people who commit crimes (see Pickpocket) as partial victims of circumstance.

Bondo

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #106 on: November 21, 2020, 08:04:06 PM »
Ashes and Diamonds

To me, this film is all about Zbigniew Cybulski in the lead. In a film that is often plagued by bad dubbing and hammy acting (occasionally including Cybulski), his character's charming flirt/joker provides a tempo and grounding to the film that tends to dissipate whenever the story leaves him. I get the purpose of the other scenes in providing context, but in some ways they feel like a failure because I still feel a little left out of what is happening. Having seen Wajda's Kanal, I at least can grasp when Maciek talks about spending too much time in the sewers during the Warsaw Uprising, but some of the finesse of where the fault lines in post-Nazi Poland didn't stick as well. And I suppose fair enough because that lack of clarity in purpose is at the heart of Maciek's crisis of faith in his action. There are a couple scenes in particular that do a good job of cementing this effectively. So yeah, if it was mostly just the Maciek scenes, it would be a higher B sort of rating but all the other stuff makes it settle more like a B-.

MartinTeller

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #107 on: November 22, 2020, 03:58:57 PM »
I think you might enjoy Dredd although I don't think it would make my next top 100 of all time.

Now I'm curious to know why Dredd ended up on your list to begin with. It's a reasonably entertaining film, taking cues from Escape from New York, RoboCop and Die Hard (among others) with gobs of stylized violence and fairly impressive special effects. However, either it's sincere in its glorification of fascistic law enforcement (a la Dirty Harry) or it's satire. I'm inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt here, largely because Urban's performance is so ridiculously gruff and robotic that he's hard to take seriously as a hero (or anti-hero). But I have to wonder if a viewer who already supported the idea of a hyper-militaristic police force wouldn't walk away from this with all their feelings validated. I think whatever satire is there doesn't come through loud enough, just a faint tongue-in-cheekness. On the other hand, you don't want it to be a sledgehammer either. It's a fine line, and probably why satire is something that doesn't often work for me.

Well, I wanted something different from my usual fare and I got it. I didn't hate it and as "brain-off" "popcorn movie" (god, I hate both those terms) entertainment it was somewhat enjoyable. I can't say it whetted my appetite for more action flicks though. Rating: Fair (65)

Bondo

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #108 on: November 22, 2020, 05:28:55 PM »
That’s why I consider the Stallone version superior. Not as stylish to be sure, but specifically self-critical of the system ala Minority Report.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Top 100 Club: Sam the Cinema Snob
« Reply #109 on: November 22, 2020, 11:16:23 PM »
I think you might enjoy Dredd although I don't think it would make my next top 100 of all time.

But I have to wonder if a viewer who already supported the idea of a hyper-militaristic police force wouldn't walk away from this with all their feelings validated. I think whatever satire is there doesn't come through loud enough, just a faint tongue-in-cheekness. On the other hand, you don't want it to be a sledgehammer either. It's a fine line, and probably why satire is something that doesn't often work for me.

This is what I was getting at in previous back-and-forths we've had about films I've been concerned with glorifying that which ought not to be glorified. Of course, it's case-by-case, and the discussions we've had previously haven't necessarily been on satire, i.e. Taxi Driver, but I think there are a lot of films that are dangerous in the wrong hands. The question is whether that's a valid point of criticism, but again, to me it's case-by-case.

I've only seen Judge Dredd, the original, as part of an anthropology course that was one of my electives for my BS in education. I had never thought I'd see it, and never thought it'd be something I'd take seriously, but I just remember being fascinated at the lecture and the amount of seriousness the professor put into it, and it opened me up to the possibility of cultural commentary coming from less-academic places. But I don't actually remember a lot about the film.  :-[
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