Recommendations: Elvira (ebs 90)

And another drug-addict film hits the theaters!
---
The result? Errr... Damn, I don't know. It has a poetical tone and smart photography, but it doesn't contribute to provide the questionings and powerful statements that other films of the genre achieved to impose. Nice performances, yes, but the premise falls half the way through the film and the most noticeable anti-Hollywod intention of the predictable ending didn't save the rest. It's good to watch, but it was unnecessary.

63/100

Wasn't this an extraordinary film? Perhaps it wasn't exactly a masterpiece, but it was an intense and pretty much ingenious psychological ride. Malcolm McDowell first performance is genius and Anderson's approach towards the factors that affect the violent perspective of the youth is horrifically shocking. Ambitious, yet a groundbreaking attempt.

86/100

- Who wrote that?
- You did.

La Notte (1961)

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: Italy / France
Genre: Drama
Length: 122 minutes



Michelangelo Antonioni is a complete master of elegance and a brilliant student of female passions. The second part of Antonioni's unofficial "Incomunicability Trilogy" is titled La Notte, a wonderful essay on love triangles and its predominant effects on a modern burgeois society. However, it is much more than a love triangle story: it is a psychologically challenging Italian masterpiece of the man's eternal struggle for eliminating his necessity of building a relationship with several women after creating the false illusion of boredom because of a clear confusion of the terms "love" and "lust". Through deep character development and a delicious craftsmanship, La Notte takes us into a journey of inevitable perdition, confusion and lost priorities, referencing romantic cinema classics in the process.

Giovanni Pontano is a famous novelist who visits his best friend Tommaso Garani with his unsatisfied wife Lydia in Milan. Later on, Giovanni decides to attend to a promotion party for his new book held by billionaire tycoon Mr. Gherardini, falling in love with her daughter Valentina and jeopardizing his marriage after Lydia finds out about the affair. If this wasn't enough, Lydia, in the middle of her desperation, begins his search for another man and flirts with a playboy named Roberto. Michelangelo Antonioni won the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival of 1961. The film also won 3 Silver Ribbons for Best Score, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director given by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 1962.

At first glance, the plot may suggest a conventional melodrama of extramarital affairs. Nonetheless, Antonioni's delicacy converts such plot description in a burgeois feast for the senses, resulting in a fully-developed essay about the unsatisfied human condition. A gracious musical score accompanies a filmmaking style and a seducing editing that seems to have been based and influenced on the burgeois transition that Fellini suffered since the direction of one of his best films, La Dolce Vita (1960). Once more, a glorious (urban) cinematography decorates the passionate power of such honest portrayal of unfulfilled romantic needs, and the top notch cast enlightens such dramatic mastery with Marcello Mastroianni as the materialist writer, Jeanne Moreau as the existentialist wife and Jeanne Moreau as the beautiful daughter of a powerful public figure.

Despite the fact that it may be easy to state what characters are to blame, the reasons are not to obvious. Antonioni's complexity goes beyond what we may catalogue as a perfectly congruent heartbreaking story. The film opens with an eagle-eye perspective of the city of Milan amidst the sunlight, so Antonioni may also be one of the directors who want to express the exact opposite ideas of the film in its introduction and in its conclusion. In other words, the beginning means exactly the opposite to what the ending means. We are introduced to what are famous personalities within the plot and we follow their actions through a single day. Whereas Giovanni's popularity has achieved to make him surrender against the power of money and worshipping, Lydia is just an acquaintance for the rest of the fans. Such event is clearly demonstrated in the party sequence, which almost covers the second half of the film. The title, consequently, may indicate the viewer that the key events and the conclusion take place during the night, especially when lunacy, arrogance and alcoholism take over the people's souls once the rain starts to fall, screaming, laughing and jumping inside the pool. Even so, this is false. A best friend that is hospitalized and is near death is just only the motor used to clearly establish the rotten personality of Giovanni who hides his most degrading faults inside his novels. During the day, such hospital vist takes place. It is during the day when he is easily seduced by a mentally sick woman. Lydia, on the other hand, witnesses rockets being fired towards the sky while visiting the old area of Milan where they had lived once. Monica Vitti, one of the best Italian actresses that have ever graced the big screen, was the perfect choice for incarnating a seemingly peaceful and harmless femme fatale. She is a woman who does not care about the consequences of her actions; she just has fun and takes the best out of the moment. Naturally, she does not have any love priorities, not to mention her confused perspective of morality, but this characteristic is the one that seduces the psychological witness of Giovanni.

Despite how literal the ending may seem, it is not. Director Michelangelo Antonioni should not be underestimated. La Notte suggests a new beginning, redemption and renewed love, but Antonioni has the peculiar narrative characteristic of transforming his stories into cinematic cycles. Therefore, the ending is open to personal interpretation, just like in his next films L'eclisse (1962) and Il Deserto Rosso (1964). All in all, La Notte is one of the best Italian films of the decade, featuring one of the most audaciously sexy scenes shot during the decade. Extraordinary performances and a multi-talented script make of La Notte an experience to be reflected on, not to mention that the running time felt half-an-hour shorter than it really is.

96/100

- Are you really twelve?
- Yes. It's just I've been twelve for a very long time.

LÅT DEN RÄTTE KOMMA IN (2008)

Director: Tomas Alfredson
Country: Sweden
Genre: Drama / Fantasy / Horror / Romance / Thriller
Length: 115 minutes



An inevitable comparison with Stephanie Meyer's Twilight (2008), one of the most retard vampire novels/movies that modern era has ever seen despite it being specifically aimed towards stupid, mindless, pop-cultured audiences, is arised. Both stories were based on a novel, both stories deal with a vampire romance, both stories were released in the same year, but what happens when you put a visionary low-budget director to compite against a Hollywood one who possesses Robert Pattinson as her strongest weapon?!! The answer, unfortunately, is box-office success and popularity, not to mention a giant female and homosexual audience (with all due respect) seeing it for the wrong reasons. Surprisingly enough, Låt den Rätte Komma In, one of the most original and captivating vampire stories ever brought to the big screen, did not pass completely unnoticed. It is a passionate masterpiece of a poetic genius, and it easily belongs to a Top 3 of the best Swedish films of the decade.

Oskar is the typical bullied 12-year old boy who lacks the proper comprehension from his parents and is constantly mistreated by the injustice of fate while simulating and imagining revenge towards his classmates. One day, he meets a 12-yead old girl who offers him the love and care he has long yearned for, but who happens to be a vampire. Later on, both will have to face a strong, seemingly separate destiny. The film won around 56 awards in national and international film festivals, including other 12 nominations.

What makes Låt den Rätte Komma In such a fascinating experience it its delicacy and resulting poetry. The characters are, above all, human, and the treatment that the vampire mythology received resulted in an unexpectedly heartwarming new perspective. This gorgeous piece of art has the attention to detail and stillness as its greatest highlights. We are offered with exceptional camera angles that simulate to play an omniscient role. The musical score helps to build a shocking experience of unconventional romance. Moreover, if the score is taken out, the filmmaking style may partially mirror the atmospheric brilliance that directors such as Theodoros Angelopoulos possesed, even slightly reminding us of Topio Stin Omichli (1988).

Instead of introducing the audience to stereotypical, one-dimensional characters who ultimately are the biggest attraction of the plot, just like in Twilight (2008), Låt den Rätte Komma In shows two young and very different individuals. Oskar is the confused and psychologically abandoned boy who inevitably starts to learn the difficulties involved in the process of adolescence. Eli is a vampire whose background is left unknown except for an old man who used to take care of her while slaughtering people for providing her blood with no apparent motivations. Naturally, to portray a vampire with emotional capacities was a necessary technique regarding the connection that both characters start to build. Oskar obeys his emotions and his sentimentalist intuition; Eli is a girl that clearly states that she is not a girl, but a person that has been 12 years old for a very long time.

We may draw the conclusion that the long time Eli has lived has allowed her to gain more experience from life and helped her to clearly establish her priorities, being the most important to satisfy her inevitable thirst for blood. Even so, love is the powerful machinist of the compassion and empathy that both build towards each other. Being surrounded by a frosty landscape and consequent really-low temperatures, their love heats the world. Oskar finds protection in her, whereas Eli discovers love quite probably for the first time. It is interesting how Alfredson's direction and the screenplay itself kept a childish personality in Eli, just like if her age and, thus, her personality were meant to be eternal. A moving collision, therefore, was meant to happen since Eli finds comprehension in him. The aforementioned characteristics instantly give birth to a final question just after the viewer has seen the masterly shot climax: how long will their love last?

With several scenes that transform frames into beautiful pieces of art that could be directly recreated in visually stimulating paintings, Låt den Rätte Komma In is a triumphant cinematic project for the new decade considering the vampire horror genre. The gothic and mythical elements behind a conventional vampire story are left aside and intellectual audiences of patient and artistic mentalities are invited. Moving from a romantic nature to what may possibly be an apocalyptic one since the sickness is spread through the random Swedish town, the film is an absolute modern masterpiece, not only smart at reinventing the genre, but also applying a twist to the matters of adolescence and establishing the delicious rule of letting a vampire in in order to avoid its doom.

98/100

In Bruges had a drastically different atmosphere overall and even the fans of the genre could not perceive it. Those who could are complaining about the whole film except for Farrell's exceptional performance and the climax. The city of Belgium is used as an environmentally gothic background for unleashing a sensational brief dose of dark humor, a not-so-common screenplay and a powerful punch in the stomach right in the moment when we least expect it. It is different and somewhat audacious; the pace was perfect and the movie itself makes a spoof about the gangster honor code!

74/100