My Favorite Movies

Nicolas Cage stars as the Kaufman twin brothers Charles and Donald, he is no Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers but he does a decent job. Charles is having a hard time writing a screenplay adaptation of a novel written by a journalist on an eccentric horticulturalist. He is an even more insecure and paranoid version of George Costanza. The scene where his lady friend is longing for him to go inside with her is painful... ("I can't drink coffee late at night, it keeps me up." :p)
The brilliant Kaufman touch is that the film is about him in the process of writing the script, going as far as writing what he is going to say next, intertwining real life with the story. Writing on empty people who fill up their lives with other's misery is hard stuff, he is so desperate that he asks his dumb obnoxious brother for help. Donald succeeds at writing a script without making an effort, just to show how crap gets so much attention and good stuff is often overlooked because humanity is not worthy! I'm kidding. Or maybe not. I didn't believe he could be the one with the flair to spot that there was something more going on between the crazy plant nut guy and the journalist for her to become so enthusiastic about orchids through the book but then it's necessary for the over the top unoriginal climax that plays just like a big fuck you to the industry. Everything he didn't want to impose on the film ends up happening.

It's about time I pay homage to this wonderful film, one of my favorite. This is the story of Sam Lowry, son of Ida Lowry and a deceased executive. Sam has a dead end job at the records department and wishes for a simple life where he could find love. Sam's beautiful dreams are filled with buildings blocking his path towards love, symbolic of being trapped in a world where evolution and technology renders true human contact seldom (think about the internet for instance) making love almost unreachable. Ida on the other hand spends her life consuming and getting cosmetic surgeries making her even more artificial, as if she's becoming more a part of her possessions than a human being. She doesn't understand Sam and thinks he must be insane for refusing a promotion to information retrieval, afterall he wouldn't even have a job without his mother's contacts. Another crucial character makes recurrent appearances through the film: Harry Tuttle. He helps Sam fix his ducts when the incompetent underpaid city workers, tired of following procedures, do not deliver. He seems dangerous at first but he becomes some sort of a hero for us and a socialist friend to Sam "Listen, kid, we're all in it together." Tuttle owes the government money and is considered a terrorist responsible for bombings the city has endured. The bombings are similar in nature to the ones we have targeted at capitalism, they are fueled by the government and aided by company owners (represented by the restaurant waiter who helps guards get into the church in Sam's dreams). The goal is to put fear into people to have more control over the population and therefore make more profit. Tuttle may refuse to be a part of the machine, but he certainly ain't a terrorist. The government spread propaganda urging citizens to denounce these so called enemies of society i.e. anyone who doesn't follow the rules of the game "Don't suspect a friend, Report him." The story begins when a simple paperwork error misplace Harry Buttle for Harry Tuttle. Sam's paranoid boss Mr.Kurtzmann, who looks like he often takes credit for Sam's good work, asks him to fix the mistake. Buttle has been wrongfully arrested (one of the best scene in the history of cinema imo) and tortured leading to his death, which means Sam has to deliver the money they have overcharged him (money that should have been charged to Tuttle) directly to his widow. When Sam arrives he encounters his dream girl Jill Layton, a neighbor who has seen the arrestation of Buttle and who is planning to file of complaint. What he doesn't notice is that he is followed by a government spy, who aren't too happy that he repaired their mistake, making it public. Sam dreams of battling the system represented by a multicultural machine and defeating it with its own weapon "If you really want to fuck up the system, you do it from the inside." As he removes the machine's mask, we can see that it was powered by a man represented by a mirror image of himself, admitting that he feels guilty to be a part responsible for Buttle's death. In the same dream some puppets represented by Ms.Buttle and her kids are chained up to the buildings like prisoners of the system, their suffering makes it harder for Sam to be free. He eventually accepts the promotion to information retrieval in hopes to find Jill. To get the promotion he helps Mr.Helpmann (an old friend of his father) who is handicapped to piss, remembering us that you have to kiss ass in order to get to the top! Sam's friend at information retrieval Jack Lint is the perfect example of a superficial person, he places his job ahead of everything including his wife (whom he keeps refering to by the wrong name :o) and his children. His so called ambition got him a job requiring no conscience which consists of torturing citizens to retrieve information from them. Otherwise Sam's new job is exempt of companionship, everybody are rivals regarded as numbers trying to outperform each other. He is finally able to track Jill thanks to his new rank and goes along with her to her place of work where she transports houses made from a powerplant whose slogan is "Power today. Pleasure tomorrow." Sam knows they want to shut her up and tries to save her from the government. He ultimately becomes even more a rebel than Tuttle, who choses to escape reality and exists more in government lies and urban legends (represented by his transformation into government papers and city newspapers in Sam's dreams). Instead of fighting for their cause, Tuttle is nowhere to be seen when Jill gets killed and Sam gets caught by information retrieval... Mr.Helpmann appears at the end as Santa Claus, showing that capitalism is the new religion "Consumers for Christ" where information retrieval is comparable to confessing sins. Sam looses it and escapes in his fantasy world, Jill was right: "...far away... It's not far enough." He will be happier in a world where he is not restrained and he can live for what he believes. Brazil is not far from our reality where consuming is life, most people follow the trends, the government tries to control us, war is used to make profit, some people think religion sets them free, homeless people are outcasts of society...

After a second viewing, I must revise my note to 4,5. This is probably the most brilliant crime film I've seen since Usual Suspects. I just thought at first that the dialogues were a little too clever for college students, it felt unnatural at some parts and made the story more complicated than it is. Nevertheless it's extremely well directed and shot and deserves the praise most people give it.

Forget all the lies created to make you feel worthy, all efforts to comply are futile. Your true identity will always come back to haunt you unless you're willing to lie to yourself and make people believe it. That's the only way they will accept you as you are not. Complete loss of morals and feelings of disconnectedness will follow if you fail.

A love story happening in two different era reminding us of how we haven't changed despite evolution. A hope for everlasting life transformed into an understanding of nature's way over accepting fate, about a much more stronger bond that can unite us indefinitely. A man who tries to overcome the laws of nature and who along the way selfishly forgets why he wants to... A beautiful and thoughtful movie.

The masquerade that every "functionning" contemporary family lives to a certain extent. It shares the ideology with the film "Happiness" that often within the most seemingly perfect family model hides the crudest reality beneath. It was a joy for me to see the truths they were hiding from each other explode in their faces (literally for the father). It left me wondering: must we stop living a lie or is pretending to be happy the only way to be? "If you stick to your story, it stops being a lie."

Happiness or how I learn to laugh at the disgusting truths about life matters

better than Kubrick's version imho

This film oozes simplicity. There's no need for dialogue and it almost feels like a narrationless documentary, yet every moment is captivating. It's all about sight and sound.

saddest movie I've ever seen, very hard to watch a second time

it made me want to see Teshigahara's documentary on Antonio Gaudí...

the ultimate movie of the 90's

the most realistically portrayed love story I've seen

It says so much about life and human relations without actually saying anything. How life is a mere addition of meaningless events, but also how we come to bind with people who feel the same way as we do and how our insecurities prevent us to strive for reaching the unknown. Even though we're raised to have morals ingrown, we feel lost anyway. "You know it's funny, you come to some place new and everything looks just the same."

Scary and well acted. It's too bad that the ending doesn't make the pieces of the puzzle perfectly fall into place like I anticipated it, instead you're left with an answer that explains the craziness which made it easy for the director to mess with us all the way through she who tries to bear the pain and imagines all sorts of scenarios to overcome her guilt... still definitely worth watching. If you want a better take on schizophrenia, see Spider.

An absolute classic, a directorial debut as impressive as Mean Streets. It deserved a much wider recognition. "Everybody is fucked up but nobody wants anybody else to think they are but everybody knows they are anyway so"

Oliver Stone's masterpiece

Hideko Takamine is fantastic

A tale on loneliness, isolation and the meaning of life. A professor on vacation is forced to help a woman who works for the sake of the village she belongs to. At first he feels alienated by her way of life and tries to escape "Don't you feel all this is meaningless? Are you raking sand to live, or living to rake sand?" but as the story unfolds he gets accustomed to it and attracted to her... He realizes that what is meaningless isn't their minimalist way of life, but the things he wanted to get back to. In the end he finds new aspirations to no purpose except to keep is mind going and you know he is finally settled down.

Like Setsuko Hara previously in Tokyo Story, Hideko Takamine plays a widow who remained faithful to her late husband's family. Instead of getting the recognition she deserves for keeping the family store alive during and well after the war, and respect for not remarrying, the family sees her more as a nuisance now that they want to build a supermarket and won't have a use for her anymore - except her brother-in-law who is infatuated with her... Naruse doesn't tell us if he's for or against keeping traditions and isn't judgmental of the character's attraction to each other. Considering the consequences that ensue I think it's one of the strongest aspect of the film. This is the kind of impossibility contemporary love stories lack, not only because forbidden love is tempting but because instead of wondering how great it could've been we're usually left with definite (boring) possibilities.

http://beta.onf.ca/film/chat_dans_le_sac/

A Geisha becomes a manipulative bitch (which I adored) instead of being victimized and passive like most female protagonists in Mizoguchi's films. The script is very strong and there's absolutely no fucking around which makes it one of his most accessible films, also it's more of a noir with less melodrama than we're accustomed to from Mizo. The protagonist's heartless ways, solely motivated by greed in order to survive as a Geisha, eventually come back to bite her, concluding there is no way to win in her situation. The only fault I can find is that the acting is downplayed in favor of the story, but then it can be seen as an advantage. It's probably because I'm so used to the more theatrical acting of Kinuyo Tanaka.