I have been very delinquent in my dictations, I don't want to drench up an ancient thread (heck maybe it was December last year).
Wings of DesireWe follow angels as they float around late 1980's Berlin listening in on peoples thoughts. One falls in love with an acrobat and decides give up his immortality and become human.
Very artsy-fartsy. You basically hover around with the angels, listening to random peoples thoughts. Everyone's thoughts are very deep and poetic, and we just passively listen to them ruminate on this or that. The dialogue (monologues really) annoyed me, I wish the movie had atleast one normal conversation between two characters. Even when two characters meet up in the real world, they continue to read poetry past each other.
The movie is glacially paced and for the first forty five minutes pretty much nothing happens. However, if you stick around that long, it gets much better once the story kicks in.
What saved the movie for me, was the visuals. Its one of the best looking films I ever saw. There are so many shots that are incredible to look at, my favorite being the takes of the acrobat twirling in the air. The movie is also a great time capsule of divided Berlin. You see the large open spaces that were bombed out in the war and never rebuilt, and the Berlin Wall is a great landmark with its brightly colored Western side and plain, white, heavily guarded Eastern portion (loved the bunnies living between the wall and the barbed wire). Overall, a difficult but rewarding movie, and one of the most beautiful ones ever made.
8/10Night of the HunterI thought I watched this before but must have been thinking of something else. A great story about a murderous preacher who marries a woman in order to force her children to reveal a secret. The movie benefits from a good supporting cast and surprisingly good child leads, but the true star is the villain. He is smarmy, charming, conniving, and absolutely ruthless. The way he mocks the role of the children's father is incredibly creepy, he takes the tropes of typical fatherhood and makes them sinister and malevolent.
One other very interesting aspect of the villain is his interaction with women. He loathes them on a sexual level, exhibiting violent revulsion at any show of female sexuality. Yet women seem completely bewitched by him. His faux pious persona disarms them, and they mistake his psychotic misogyny for religious puritanism. He makes them repent of their sinful ways (dating boys, wanting to share a bed with your husband on the wedding night), and makes them go into a religious zeal, wishing to make themselves worthy of his attention. The message seems to be that religious suppression of female sexuality does damage to women, and that it is used to mask male insecurity and misogyny. A pretty progressive message for a film from the 1950's. Wonder how it got past the censors.
10/10