The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford

The outlaw Jesse James was one of the first American celebrities, enjoying the fame that the printing press could deliver in the growing United States of the early 1880. His notoriety was laundered by romanticised tales that likened him to Robin Hood, washing away his murderous deeds and cruel, arrogant nature. He was a sum of his media parts as much as a feared bandit who robbed trains and banks with his gang.Casey Affleck delivers the film's most haunting performance as Robert Ford, the 19 year old hanger on whose brother Charley (Sam Rockwell in wonderful, complex form) is already a part of the Jesse James gang. But Robert is a little strange in his obsession with James, which makes James unsure about him. Brad Pitt paints James as an enigmatic, edgy, volatile and indeed sometimes vile figure, verging on mentally unstable.Andrew Dominik, clearly enamoured with Ron Hansen's much praised novel, adapts the book with intense attention to its rich, textured style. I haven't read it myself, but Newsweek's Peter S. Prescott describes it well: "The language of Hansen's novel is dense and textured, requiring careful reading. The pleasure of the book is in the eloquence of its dialogue and description, which are both literary and historically appropriate." The film reflects these elements - to a fault. The first two hours is diminished by a lack of clarity, a result of both the complexity of characters and relationships and a fearfully difficult dialogue - both in period style and in sheer audibility. The screenplay seems to have been driven by a desire not to miss any of the nuances and textures of Hansen's book, which is a problematic approach for cinema. The result seems like a meandering, unfocused screenplay that breaks down our willingness to be transported by it.In every technical detail (save the dialogue mix), the film is outstanding, with stunning cinematography and production design. The performances of the entire cast - and there is a large cast - is exemplary, and Dominik's ability to sustain tension in the latter scenes is admirable. While it is acknowledged that the exact details of the last days or months of Jesse's life will never be known, the film gives us an opportunity to appraise it as fictionalised biography - and at least as valid as the many others in that genre.

No country for old men

Over wide shots of desolate, expansive West Texas country in June 1980, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) narrates his belief that the times are changing and that the area is becoming increasingly violent. As Bell's narration concludes, the film's antagonist, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), is arrested and taken into custody by a sheriff's deputy. The deputy scarcely has time to describe Chigurh's unique weapon, a captive bolt pistol, to authorities before Chigurh wraps his handcuffs around the deputy's neck -- strangling him to death, and allowing Chigurh to escape.
Miles away, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) hunts pronghorn antelope near the Rio Grande when he stumbles upon a group of corpses and a lone dying man: the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry. In addition to a shipment of heroin, Moss finds two million dollars in a satchel, which he keeps, leaving the lone survivor to die. Later that night in bed with his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), Moss's conscience pushes him to return to the scene with water for the dying man, which shortly triggers a cat-and-mouse game between a gang of Mexicans, Moss, Chigurh, and Bell as they chase the money and each other across the West Texas and Mexico landscapes.
Chigurh, a professional hitman hired to retrieve the stolen money, tracks the satchel with a radio receiver corresponding to a small transponder hidden in the satchel. A meticulous, brooding psychopath, Chigurh does not hesitate to kill anyone impeding his mission; his victims range from Mexican gangsters and law enforcement officials to civilians he encounters by chance. Moss, unaware of the transponder's existence, sends his wife Carla Jean out of town while he darts from motel to motel in an attempt to elude both Chigurh and the Mexicans sent to retrieve the money. In the meantime, Bell focuses his efforts on locating and protecting Moss, following the trail of corpses left by Chigurh, while he tracks Moss and the money.
Chigurh tracks Moss through several Texas towns, climaxing in a border-hotel firefight that spills onto the streets. Narrowly escaping death by crossing the border, Moss wakes up in a Mexican hospital and meets Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), an assassin dispatched by the drug buyer. After Moss disregards his offer to save Moss' life, Wells returns to his hotel where he is ambushed and killed by Chigurh. When Moss has second thoughts about the offer, he calls Wells' room and Chigurh answers. Chigurh offers Moss a deal, if Moss forfits the money and his own life, Chigurh will not go after Carla Jean.
Moss rejects the offer and orders Carla Jean to travel to El Paso, where he intends to give her the money and move her out of harm's way. Carla Jean agrees, but timidly informs Bell of Moss' destination. Bell travels to the El Paso rendezvous point only in time to see the finale of a firefight between Moss, and some Mexicans who have tracked him there. When Bell reaches Moss, Moss is lying dead on the floor of his motel room. Later that night, Sheriff Bell returns to the motel crime scene, where he finds the lock of Moss' hotel room door blown out in a fashion similar to that of Moss' trailer. Entering with his gun drawn, he remains unaware of Chigurh, hidden in the shadows silently observing the cautious sheriff. Surveying the room, Bell discovers the vent cover of the air conditioner has been removed with a dime, with drag marks inside denoting the former presence of the satchel. Bell sits in the darkened room, staring at shadows, before leaving without encountering Chigurh.
Days later, a weary Bell visits his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), a former sheriff now confined to a wheelchair. Announcing his retirement because of the changing, violent times, Ellis points out that the region has always been violent, accusing Bell of "vanity" in thinking that he could change the condition of the world. Miles away, Carla Jean returns from her mother's funeral, where she encounters Chigurh waiting for her in her bedroom. Chigurh, reminding her of Moss's willingness to risk her life to save his own, flips a coin for her life and asks her to call it. Carla Jean, disgusted with the gesture, refuses to call it, surprising Chigurh. As Chigurh leaves the house, carefully checking the soles of his boots, he is involved in a car accident, leaving him nursing a broken arm as he flees the scene before the police arrive.
As Bell sits at home reflecting on his life choices, he relates to his wife (Tess Harper) two dreams he had, both involving his deceased father, also a lawman. Bell reveals briefly that in the first dream, he lost "some money" that his father had given him. Bell says that in the second dream, he and his father were riding horses through a snowy mountain pass. His father, who was carrying fire in a horn, quietly passed by Bell with his head down. Bell then relates that his father was "going on ahead, and fixin' to make a fire" in the surrounding dark and cold, and that when Bell got there, his father would be waiting. Bell closes the dream narrative, and the film, with the final words: "And then I woke up."

13.Tzameti - Gela Babluani

In a town on the Normandy coast, a young man has been hired to replace some wooden attic beams in a house not far from the small apartment in which his immigrant Georgian family lives. He inadvertently rips a hole in a ceiling of the room below, whereupon he learns of a package that promises considerable riches. When the house's drug-addict owner overdoses fatally, the young man grabs it.In "13 Tzameti," one surprise triggers another in ever-spiraling fashion. Yet it is already clear in its deceptively low-key opening sequences why this extraordinary film, written and directed by young Georgia-born Gela Babluani, took the best first feature prize at Venice in 2005 and the grand jury world cinema award at Sundance earlier this year.
While the film's score strikes an ominous foreshadowing note, the tone of "13 Tzameti's" first scenes is droll, verging upon deadpan. That package proves to be a veritable Pandora's box, with the young man, Sebastien (Georges Babluani, the director's brother), discovering detailed instructions that will prompt him to assume the dead man's identity and take off for a hotel, off-season and deep in the countryside, where a clandestine high-stakes gambling tournament has attracted around 40 men, virtually all middle-aged and older. What the game entails and its rules won't be revealed here, but "13 Tzameti" — "tzameti" is the number 13 in Georgian — is not for the faint of heart.Every frame of the film reveals Babluani's confidence and sound judgment. Instead of staging the film's initial sequence like a conventional thriller, Babluani evokes a somber, even leisurely mood, suggesting the plight of Sebastien, an intelligent young man all too aware of his meager prospects in life. This mood extends all the way into that rural resort, abruptly giving way to shocking intensity.At times Babluani recalls the austerity, the closely observed fascination with secretive ritual, of Robert Bresson, yet he expresses these qualities — in ravishing black-and-white CinemaScope — with a poetic cinematic grace that is all his own. As an actor, Georges Babluani possesses the same resources, with a special understanding of the effect of emotional reserves held in check. Although it's likely too stark for everyone, "13 Tzameti" offers a mind-blowing experience for anyone willing to go along for the ride.

Kevin Thomas

Carl Theodor Dreyer - Vampyr

Expressionist cinema

The first Expressionist films, notably The Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Phantom (1922), Raskolnikow (1923) and Schatten (1923), were highly symbolic and deliberately surrealistic portrayals of filmed stories. Other early examples came from Austria, just as Der Mandarin (1918) by Fritz Freisler, Der Märtyrer seines Herzens (1918) with Fritz Kortner, Inferno (1920) by Paul Czinner and The Hands of Orlac (1925) by Robert Wiene.
One of the best expressionist actors was Fritz Kortner, who played also in Viennese films and Berlin-films. The dada movement was sweeping across the artistic world in the early 1920s, and the various European cultures of the time had embraced an ethic of change, and a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles. The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal, and other "intellectual" topics (as opposed to standard action-adventure and romantic films); the German name for this type of storytelling was called Kammerspielfilm (chamber film in English). Later films often categorized as part of the brief history of German Expressionism include Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), both directed by Fritz Lang.
The extreme non-realism of Expressionism was short-lived, and it faded away (along with Dadaism) after only a few years. However, the themes of Expressionism were integrated into later films of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in an artistic control over the placement of scenery, light, and shadow to enhance the mood of a film. This dark, moody school of filmmaking was brought to America when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. They found a number of American movie studios willing to embrace them, and several German directors and cameramen flourished there, producing a repertoire of Hollywood films that had a profound effect on the medium of film as a whole.[citation needed]
Two genres that were especially influenced by Expressionism were the horror film and film noir. Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves by producing such famous horror films of the silent era as Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera. German emigrees such as Karl Freund (the cinematographer for Dracula in 1931) set the style and mood of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets, providing a model for later generations of horror films. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Michael Curtiz introduced the Expressionist style to crime dramas of the 1940s, influencing a further line of filmmakers and taking Expressionism through the years.

German Expressionist Film Today
Ambitious adaptations of the style are depicted throughout the contemporary filmography of director Tim Burton. His 1992 film Batman Returns is often cited as a modern attempt to capture the essence of German Expressionism. The angular building designs and severe-looking city squares of Gotham City evoke the loom and menace present in Lang’s Metropolis. One may even notice the link between the evil character of Max Shreck portrayed by Christopher Walken, and Nosferatu's star, Max Schreck.
Burton's influences are most obvious through his fairy tale suburban landscape in Edward Scissorhands . The appearance of the titular Edward Scissorhands none too accidentally reflects the look of Caligari's somnambulist servant. Burton casts a kind of unease in his candy-colored suburb, where the tension is visually unmasked through Edward and his gothic castle perched above the houses. Burton subverts the Caligari nightmare with his own narrative branding, casting the garish “somnambulist” as the hero, and the villagers as the villains.
The familiar look of Caligari's main character can also be seen in the movie The Crow. With the tight, black outfit, white makeup, and darkened eyes, Brandon Lee's character is obviously a close relative to Burton's film Edward Scissorhands.

Platoon - A review by P. Attanasio

"Platoon" is a triumph for Oliver Stone, a film in which a visceral approach to violence, which has always set him apart, is balanced by classical symmetries and a kind of elegiac distance. This is not the Vietnam of op-ed writers, rabble-rousers or esthetic visionaries, not Vietnam-as-metaphor or Vietnam-the-way-it-should-have-been. It is a movie about Vietnam as it was, alive with authenticity, seen through the eyes of a master filmmaker who lost his innocence there.

And in that way, "Platoon" is the first serious youth movie in ages, for at its heart, the war is treated as a rite of passage in its most intense form. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) volunteers out of idealism; the first thing he encounters, on the airport tarmac in Saigon, is a cart of body bags. It's downhill from there. As the movie progresses, a kind of civil war develops within the platoon, between the "juicers" (who drink) and the "heads" (who smoke dope). Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) leads the juicers, who will do anything they need to survive -- some of them thrive on violence. Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is chief of the heads, who are trying to survive with some shred of their humanity left intact. Put schematically, Barnes represents the death instinct, Elias the life instinct.
But "Platoon" is anything but schematic -- without the architecture, the emotion would overflow. The movie is beautifully written (by Stone), constructed with strong, clean lines, immaculately paced and regularly surprising. Stone uses dialogue to evoke social class and a bygone era, or to add humor -- the talk is street-smart and wittily profane. And when Stone writes a speech, he writes a speech -- he's a one-man antidote to the sterile, laconic naturalism that has dominated screen writing for years. A platoon is, after all, a fairly large group, and the highest achievement, perhaps, of Stone's writing is the vividness with which he has drawn the supporting players, and the clarity with which he's orchestrated our sympathies toward them. That supporting cast is uneven -- in particular, John McGinley enters the realm of cartoon as Sgt. Barnes' second banana, and Kevin Dillon's sullen affectations pull you out of the movie's powerful reality. On the other hand, though, there is a staggeringly good performance by Keith David, as a vet counting the days till his discharge who befriends Chris; fine work by Francesco Quinn, as the headiest of the heads, and Mark Moses as the hapless lieutenant. But the stars are so good, the supporting cast almost doesn't matter. Charlie Sheen, an actor with square-jawed, neighborly good looks, exerts a quiet authority at the film's center, a bright alertness -- he's not sensitive, exactly, but sensitized, drinking it all in. He anchors the more florid performances of the two sergeants warring for his soul.

And in choosing those two, Stone has brilliantly cast against type: Dafoe, who has previously played sleek villains, becomes the humanist Elias; Berenger, the amiably hunkish TV star from "The Big Chill," becomes a monster with scars crawling across his face. By turning Dafoe, a classic villain, into a saint, Stone gives you a sense of the anguish of sainthood -- you get the sense that Dafoe's Elias has battled back his own dark side.
Similarly, Berenger's Barnes seems less like a cardboard Satan than a kind of ruined man -- you see the high school football hero he once was. In "Platoon," Stone creates a sense of brooding ominousness, an atmosphere teeming with danger; he also shows a soldier's boredom, the endless hikes and ditch-digging, without ever boring the audience. And he gets in the irritations of war, too -- "Platoon" is a marvelously tactile movie, in which you feel the heat, the rain, the bugs and snakebites.

But mostly, Stone, himself a Vietnam veteran, shows you the fear and confusion of war, the sleeplessness, and the terror when you finally fall asleep and invite an ambush; the odd sort of scorekeeping after the ambush, when you count how many you "got" and discover that one of your own had his chest blown apart. "Platoon" has the most brilliantly realistic war footage of any Vietnam movie yet, startling, chaotic battles without an overlay of esthetics or ballet. Which is not to say that "Platoon" is entirely inside the action.

It may be about Chris Taylor, but the point of view belongs to someone older, who has looked back and made sense of it, sorted out the heroes and villains, learned a lesson. Scored largely (by Georges Delerue) with Samuel Barber's mournful Adagio for Strings, shot in craftsmanlike style (by Robert Richardson) on a minuscule budget, "Platoon" has the sad intimacy of an old ache. And for all its agitation, it has moments of beauty that seem to slow time. "Platoon" has obvious flaws, particularly the hero's voice-over narration, which adds little, and pieces of acting and writing that simply go over the top.

But that's the thing about Oliver Stone -- when he errs, it's always because he's gone too far, never because he hasn't gone far enough. In the past year, with "Salvador" and "Platoon," he has gone from a screen writer who seemed to bring out the worst in the directors who hired him to one of the five or six American directors who matter. He stands almost alone on the contemporary scene -- a writer-director with a strong stylistic signature, stronger political convictions and an unplumbable heart.

Full metal jacket - a review by Slyder

As I watched Full Metal Jacket, I was totally impressed by the way legendary director Stanley Kubrick, could build such a piece like this. I enjoyed it very much but was pretty astounded by the message that it gave out, and certainly makes me wonder about the coining of this movie as “The Greatest War Film Ever Made,” though Platoon and Apocalypse Now could give it a run for its money.

But certainly this was a great rebound for Kubrick after his commercial failure “The Shinning,” and pretty much this film has become another classic in the Kubrick library.
So the story follows the experience of Private Joker (Mathew Modine), who joins the marines, and he and a squad of recruits undergo a scorching, dehumanizing and downright mentally and physically exhausting combat training.

Led by brutal Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), the recruits learn what it takes to be trained killers, and to be fearless against the enemy. The audience manages to also learn about the toll that it has on the recruits, especially Private Gomer Pyle (A then-chubby Vincent D’Onofrio), whose cracking under pressure and low self-esteem would eventually prove devastating.After his experience and graduation Private Joker is sent into Vietnam to fight the war and more so to as a Marine correspondent for Stars and Stripes magazine.

But as he covers the war, Joker must also fight to stay alive in the lethal hunting grounds of Vietnam.The first thing that comes to mind is comparison, since that’s the only way to make sense of why would Kubrick would set up the film in two parts. Anyways, both sections show how the elements of war affect an ordinary person.

The training and the fighting are always the challenges, but also take a toll on somebody since you’re always physically and mentally abusing from your own self. Both training and real war have their own points of brutality. Training has is strong point on being brutal on the human body and mind, it teaches you and beats you to pulp until you learn on how to act like an animal, how to kill on sight, and that takes a toll on a person, it changes you forever, and can no longer be the same person you were before, instead your mind is filled with hate, and filled with the urge and desire to kill somebody, you’ve just become a killing machine.

The first state of dehumanization has ended.Due to the brutality of the first part, the second part isn’t as mesmerizing as the first one, but its still captivating, and it follows our recently baptism-of-fire-ed Private Joker as a correspondent to an army gazette. But as he joins a fellow platoon to cover the latest in the Tet Offensive, we are also met with plenty of soldiers, and how they behave now. They’re more hardcore, they’re deranged gung-hoes, some more than others.

For some of these soldiers this war is a nightmare, and they want to go home, for others, it’s a heaven, and they kill people like crazy. It doesn’t show as much as in the first section but we can clearly see the second stage of dehumanization (a trademark in mostly all Kubrick films), on how the trained killers react on a real life war environment. These people at first have never killed anyone before, and now, after been brainwashed in the boot camp, they see the enemy and go kill without mercy, without remorse. This of course leads to savagery and madness.

So what are the similarities between the two? Were shown from the top, and through our guide, Private Joker, that war is hell, but we fight to preserve the peace, to preserve freedom, or simply to see how it brings out the worst in people.

Of course, that’s what most war movies are all about right? But what’s most unique about this film is that it isn’t a pro-war movie, much less an anti-war movie. Kubrick masterfully narrates the story on both sides of the genre of war, and lays all the cards on the table, with the audience free to choose the point of view that they want, in other words, the movie is whatever you want it to be (a good example is Joker’s outfit, he carries a peace sign medallion and in his helmet is written “Born To Kill”). The film never stops being a portrayal of the Marine Corps, but the involvement in the war and the aspects of war are laid around as the subplots and background of the main story, it doesn’t help a cause nor is against a cause nor it even supports a cause. It’s just a story of a soldier and his involvement in the Marines.

The performances were great from all over. Modine gives out one of the best performances of his career. But R. Lee Ermey astounds in the role of the brutal Drill Sergeant Hartman, how could he not? He was one in real life. Vincent D’Onofrio was also great in a physically and mentally demanding role as the stricken Private Gomer Pyle, while Adam Baldwin also shows us another dark side of humanity as the gung-ho Private Animal Mother. Kubrick’s direction as always is top notch, and the script, co-written by Gustav Hartford was also great.
In the end, I recommend everyone to watch this movie. It’s a war movie yes, but it’s like no other war movie, it doesn’t support no left or right, it stays in the middle and simply tells its story, and never veers off to any direction. For a film to do that requires someone with a lot of talent. But hey, only a great director like Stanley Kubrick would’ve pulled it off. He’ll be sorely missed.