Unforgiven

Normally, I am not much of a fan of wild west films. The cowboy romantic doesn't do it for me. What I require for me to enjoy this type of film is one of two things - (1) humor, (2) a good story. Unforgiven, luckily, covers (2) nicely.

A prostitue in a small Wyoming town gets her face cut up by one of her costumers. When the sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) doesn't punish the cutter and his friend to the other prostitutes liking, they throw their money together and offer a $ 1,000,-- reward to have them killed. One of the groups gunning for the money are one young wannabe killer ("Schoffield Kid"), and two retired ones, played by Clint Eastwood (William Munny) and Morgan Freeman (Ned Logan).

The main problem anyone trying for the reward money face is the no-nonsense sheriff, who takes anyone's gun in his town and beats them up - sometimes for no reason other than them not having noticed the sign specifying that no guns are allowed in town. A real asshole, that one.

After the trio kill the first of their targets, Ned Logan gets captured by the sheriff's men and eventually tortured to death. The Schoffield Kid finishes off the second target (his first ever kill), the climax sees William Munny facing (and killing) Little Bill Daggett.

A sometimes brutal, sometimes sad film, that won the best picture award at the Oscars and established Clint Eastwood as a great director.

from Roger Ebert's review:A lot of the shots are from the inside looking out, so that the figures seem dark and obscure and the brightness that pours through the window is almost blinding. The effect is to diminish the stature of the characters; these aren't heroes, but simply the occupants of a simple, rude society in which death is an everyday fact.

6/10

Dark Shadows

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp), owner of a blooming fishing business, gets cursed by a witch for turning her away. After his parents die in an unfortunate accident, his love throws herself off a cliff, he himself becomes a vampire. But the witch is not done with him. She turns the town folk against him and they bury him alive - or, rather, undead.

Some 200 years later, his coffin is uncovered at the construction site of a McDonald's. Barnabas returns to his family home, not quite getting the hang of the new era, also known as the 1970s. Everything technical he regards as being of the devil.

He reconnects with his ancestors and works to put the family business back on its feet - once again fighting the witch, who is the new big fishing business owner.

The look of the film is classic Tim Burton - as goth as it gets. It clashes heavily with the garishness of the 1970s, in which Barnabas looks hilariously out of place.

The film is based on a 1960s TV show, that - quite honestly - I had never heard of. It does have its flaws, obviously, but it sports an impressive list of actors in roles big and small.

"Ugliest woman I've ever seen."

6/10

V/H/S

Another "found footage" film. Just what we've all been waiting for, right?

A group of bad guys steal a collection of video tapes for some unnamed source. All the little films are, like, totally scary and stuff.

One is about a female vampire (I think) that first has sex with a trio of friends and then starts to kill them. Not that they deserve any better, those idiots. Personally, I would not hang on to the video camera I am carrying when I am already injured and trying to escape said vampire.

But, hey, that's just me.

Then there is this couple on a road trip who film the most trivial and boring things. Then they are the ones being filmed while asleep in some cheap motel room. The couple is predictably boring and the tape mostly is, as well. At least, there is a nice twist. The guy dies.

Oh good, tape no. 3 is of a group of young people going to some lake in the woods. After two minutes of first seeing them you can't wait for them to die, they are such assholes. They do. And...here is a little something I will record whenever I come across it:

DEAD CHEERLEADER ALERT!!!

Wait, the next segment is a video chat, not a VHS tape. How would this have ended up on a tape. This is cheating! One feed comes from inside a hunted apartment. There may be aliens involved. Or ghosts. Or something.

Lastly, the obligatory Halloween segment.

This is oh so bad.

1/10

Cinema Português?

Cinema Português? is a documentary on the first 100 years of Portuguese film and the lack of a Portuguese film industry. The questionmark in the title is there for a reason.

The documentary is just under one hour long and features intercut scenes from various movies and parts of an interview director Manuel Mozos (pictured below) conducted with one João Bénard da Costa, not only an actor but a professor, historian and author.

I saw the film during the annual local film festival Viennale and after the screening there was a Q&A session with Mr. Mozos and film director Miguel Gomes, whose latest work Tabu also screened at the festival.

The stories they told of life as someone working in film in Portugal were sad ones. After 100 years, less than 500 Portuguese film had been made. There is simply no money.

In fact, not a single film is being produced in Portugal this year. Not a one.

6/10

Skyfall

It's a good thing it is dark in movie theatres because I spent most of Skyfall with a big stupid grin on my face. I only got into the entire series with the arrival of Daniel Craig as 007 and loved Casino Royale. Also, I dimly remember a few scenes from older Bonds I must have seen at some point, though the only one I could still piece together was Goldfinger. I recently watched Dr. No and From Russia with Love and am on a mission to watch every single Bond film.

But so far...Skyfall is my favorite Bond film ever.

It may be much more thriller than action film, but it has a brilliant villain in Javier Bardem. We all expected him to be great but he was GREAT. The story was less a grand scale operation and more of personal vendetta - man against man (and woman) so to say. His first meeting with Bond is one of my favorite scenes.

We learn some more about James Bond's history and the new cast that gets introduced is also very appealing. The new Q was a necessity, of course, and Ben Whishaw fits the young nerd perfectly - his forté being computers more than fancy gadgets (kept to a minimum and made fun of). And with Dame Judi Dench leaving the series - heartwrenchingly - we get a new M, also to my liking this one. (What? Like you didn't know!). Finally, we meet Miss Moneypenny.

Love it! Love it! Love it!

10/10

Peeping Tom

Messed up kids turn into messed up adults. Documented in: Peeping Tom.

Mark was raised a test subject for his father, a psychologist studying fear in his child growing up. There was always a camera on the boy to record his fearful reaction to different situations and scares put upon him.

As an adult now he studies fear in others - young women he kills and films at the moment they realize that they are about to die. Basically, he was making snuff before the genre was widely known. And he is desperately trying to get caught, barely taking any precaution when killing and returning to the scene of the crime to film police at work and people's reaction when the bodies are discovered.

Ironically the one person that 'sees' right through him and realizes how troubled he is, is the blind woman living downstairs.

The film received harsh reviews when it was released, practically ending director Michael Powell's career. In the 1970s, however, it received reappraisal and has since become a cult film, prompting Mr. Powell's comment in his autobiography, "I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it."

6/10

The Innocents

The 1961 film The Innocents is based on the novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Originally, this was adapted for the stage and there is a theatrical feel to it. The setting is as ghostly and gothic as it gets in black-and-white British horror films - a country estate, way too big for its few inhabitants.

The focus of the story is on the new governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) and the two children she is hired to care for, Flora and Miles. The previous governess has died about a year before. Later we learn that she took her own life after the accidental death of her abusive boyfriend, who also worked on the estate as a valet.

Both, the former governess and the valet, appear to Miss Giddens as ghosts and she concludes that the children are possessed by the spirits of the lovers.

She takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of it all and - ultimately - save the children from the peril they are in. The two youngsters do appear to be rather mean spirited, especially the little boy. Miss Giddens' solution is to send off the staff and Flora and stay behind with just the boy, to help him freeing himself from his demon by facing him. It ends in tragedy.

Wonderful, classic film. The feel and setting was much later imitated in The Others, which I also recomend wholeheartedly.

8/10