Last night I watched Robert Bresson’s 1959 masterpiece Pickpocket. The act of crime is portrayed as poetically as one man’s path to emotional revelation.
https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/12/23/last-night-i-watched-robert-bressons-1959/
movies
Monos (2019)
Another example of the impressive cinematic talent coming out of Latin/South America. This one has touches of the usual suspects — Herzog, Jodorowsky — and, sure, a bit of Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies stirred in. But the familiar is wrapped in disarmingly new and fascinating perspectives. Monos comes with multi-layered messages built-in, the most present being how battles are often fought without any clear cause or aim to advantage those who do the fighting. All soldiers are often child soldiers in this regard. The cinematography is gorgeous and the Mica Levi score is used at a minimum for maximum impact. Stunning. *
‘People were dropping like flies’: why Monos was the decade’s most brutal film shoot
Youth of the Beast (1963)
Can a noir be vibrant? The color-play and set pieces (that movie theater mob HQ!) are such stunning eye candy that one is hopefully excused for losing track of the plot. Don’t expect anything less from a movie that begins with stylish ‘60s girls dancing to a jukebox (that’s, for some reason, in the middle of the street) while someone gets stomped on as the smallest car in Japan drives by. *
The movie also left me wondering how I can get ahold of one of these telephones:
https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/04/09/youth-of-the-beast-1963/
The American Soldier (1970)
Ricky is the noir protagonist of Fassbinder’s dreams — unflappable, irresistible, unassailable, part-American, stoically focused on the task at hand, instantly deadly with a firearm, and usually in close proximity to a bottle of scotch. But the dream overtakes Ricky as the film unfolds. Ricky becomes more and more exaggerated and, certainly, ridiculous in his increasingly dubious charms. We’re eventually confronted with a final scene that is absurd but, truth be told, not entirely surprising. It’s the culmination of a dream that’s taken on (or taken over) life. *
https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/04/09/the-american-soldier-1970/