Figliomio Reviews

The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023)

Literally everything here is wannabe

[25 May 2024]

Literally. Yes, literally. Everything. Just about everything. No, totally everything, as in every thing detail, performance, line of dialogue, direction, cutting, camerawork. Script. No, especially script. Here, yes, meaning in this film, the particular film featured on this page. Is. Is as in 3rd person singular as refers to the film under discussion here. Is, you know. Wannabe. As in, not really. Nah, does not work at all. As in the director may have thought he was the reincarnation of the three Coen brothers at once. But he is not even one. He is less than one. He is not a brother at all. Nor Coen. He is a wannabe.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

They must have stayed up half the night

[20 January 2022]

To make Macbeth unexciting, boring, plodding, bland, irrelevant, static, tiresome, humorless and did I mention boring? - that must surely be a bit of an achievement in itself. As if to highlight these failures of inspiration, the director goes for the creative coups of shooting in shadeless, digital not-so-black and bleached white, framing statically in academy ratio, having his actors speak directly to the camera and presumably spending the whole of the budget on his own fee. All in all, it looks and sounds like it was made by someone who hates Shakespeare for others who don't care.

Terror House (1942)

Old vintage

[27 August 2019]

This film seems to have been written, acted and directed in the early 19th Century but left unreleased until 1942 (perhaps a squabble over the final cut between producer and director, or maybe the production ran out of money and the rights ended up with the bank).

Apostle (2018)

Wish Netflix would stop trying

[20 October 2018]

A feeble-minded mix of nonsensical derivative horror, every sentimental cliché in the book, risible dialogue, and the usual iPhone filmmaking that you expect from Netflix. It's ironic that however many billions they have to spend, they still don't have a clue what makes a movie.

Crooked House (2017)

Plodding and humourless

[4 November 2017]

If you want to spoil an Agatha Christie story, transfer it to the screen exactly as written, with all the earnest endless talk, cardboard characters and everyone taking themselves absolutely seriously. Then if you want to make the film really hopeless, add a few extraneous anachronistic bits which contribute zero to the plot - the Mafia, the CIA, a Sam Spade-like private investigator in 1950s Soho whose father had been a policeman and mysteriously murdered, nope, this one will be neither detailed further nor resolved nor relevant to anything at all... Can you possibly go more wrong if you were doing it on purpose? And get the aforementioned 'Sam Spade' character to be essayed by one Max Irons, an actor probably not destined for glory, first because he's prone to puckering his face a lot and keeping mouth open when in doubt, and second because he doesn't seem to have a clue who his character is and how he landed in this particular mess. Avoid at all costs.

The House of the Blue Shadows (1986)

Puzzling

[2 May 2015]

Apparently everyone who got the Onibaba reference can't hold back their excitement over this film. Unfortunately, the mask is just about the only thing that lifts it out of the doldrums. There are three speaking parts here, of which only two characters are actively involved in the so-called plot; their involvement is limited to screaming at each other in whiny voices when the director wants one of them to leave the otherwise uneventful scene. Sometimes the man leaves to let the girl prowl around the old dark house; then it's the girl's turn, and she leaves to give him the chance to do his own prowling undeterred. Some tracking shots would have been moody if there were anything here to be moody about. And I don't think the director himself knows exactly what happens at the very end (or, in fact, in the few middle bits where anything does happen - e. g., what is the significance of the doll that the protagonist eventually takes to bed? what do the children burn? I don't much care, but it would be nice to know it wasn't all just completely off the wall).

Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn (1966)

Vastly overrated

[2 August 2008]

Despite the legends that have grown around it, this is a God-awful movie. Shpalikov as a director is completely clueless. His framing is dull, his shots arbitrary, his editing lacks rhythm - in short, he has no visual sense at all. The problem with rhythm is magnified by scoring: the music is grating, distracting, totally out of touch with the images. But the lack of formal technical mastery of the art is perhaps secondary to the pretentious handling of story, character and dialogue. The falling in love of the two dull protagonists is not so much unbelievable - the film's champions will no doubt say that stranger things happen in "real life" - as it is completely artificial. If such things happen they do not happen in this bland way. There is absolutely no sense of chemistry, of a growing intimacy between the characters - which is essential even if their feelings are to be shown up as a delusion in the second half of the film. The banalities they tell each other as they allegedly fall in love will not support a casual friendship, much less a deeper feeling. The language they use is the language of bad theatre, and no one ever spoke like this even in the 60s. The clownish flashbacks are coarse, and their frivolity breaks the mood and atmosphere of the story (what little there is of both). The centerpiece of the film - the theatrical performance of "The Cherry Orchard" - is so hammy and downright atrocious that it would be funny in a campy sort of way if the director were not taking it so painfully seriously. The play's interval with dancing in the foyer is all wrong - they didn't dance in theatre foyers in Russia - and apparently needed only because the director wanted some dancing. The second half of the film is slightly less objectionable as at least the psychology of the break-up is more plausible then the psychology of falling in love. But the characters remain blanks. No doubt this was intentional - Antonioni was big at the time - but with Antonioni the flow of images, the expressionistic mise-en-scene, the evocative landscape built up the sense of the inner life that the characters could not express directly. Shpalikov's cyphers have no inner life. If you want to see how the psychology of the characters can be captured on camera indirectly, how landscape and the physical world can frame and enhance human figures, see Marlen Khutsyiev's "July Rain" made the very same year. That is the true masterpiece using the language of cinema to express things which would otherwise be left unsaid. What Shpalikov did was a pretentious exercise of an aesthete who did not bother to learn the language of the medium that he used. A failure on all counts.