Tiago's brain dump

While people tend to associate the Weimar Republic only with the birth of Nazism, it was also the environment in which thrived geniuses like  Robert Wiene ,  Fritz Lang ,  F. W. Murnau ,  G. W. Pabst ,  Ernst Lubitsch  and  Josef von Sternberg , directors who have helped to shape the Seventh Art one way or another, all with Great Movies selected by Ebert. I have started to talk about the prolific Weimar era with  Wiene 's  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), regarded by many as the epitome of the German Expressionist movement and the first true horror film ever made. However, even though each one of those directors has made at least a movie I simply adore, the one I esteem the most is undoubtedly  Fritz Lang , for two simple reasons: Metropolis (1927) and M . By the time serial killer Hans Beckert ( Peter Lorre ) makes his 9th victim, the city of Berlin has already been in turmoil for quite some time. The police, heade...

After talking about  Chuck Jones ' excellent  What's Opera, Doc?  (1957), I felt compelled to rewatch plenty of cartoons revolving around Opera (and classical music in general) that I used to enjoy when I was a kid. As a consequence of the amazing time I had in doing that, it was impossible for me not to choose  Miloš Forman 's Mozart  biopic Amadeus as the next movie to comment on. It was Mozart's my first opera ever,  Le nozze di Figaro , which I had the pleasure to watch at the Sydney Opera House  when studying in Australia. Also, I will be watching his  Don Giovanni  in a couple of months, at the  New National Theatre  in Tokyo, which will then become my girlfriend's first opera ever. Wrapped by Mozart's sublime music, the movie is told from the point of view of an old Antonio Salieri ( F. Murray Abraham ). After a failed suicide attempt, Salieri is committed to an insane asylum, where he accuses himself of having murdered...

Remember when cartoons were made to entertain the whole family instead of selling stuff to kids? It was a time before the popularization of TVs in the 60s, when short animated movies were screened on theaters, mostly for free, being fun and entertaining as well as culturally rich and, every so often, even thought-provoking. As such, it is no wonder that, in 1994, when animation historian  Jerry Beck  published The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals , 90% of the picks for greatest cartoons of all time had been released prior to 1960. It is also not at all surprising that, out of those 50, nearly 20% were resulting of the amalgamation of the geniuses of  Chuck Jones  and  Michael Maltese , with three of such cartoons,  What's Opera, Doc? (1st place),  Duck Amuck (2nd place) and  One Froggy Evening (5th place) also being selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being...

After having just watched Se7en , which makes use of the  Seven Deadly Sins  in order to make a harsh criticism on civilized society, the chances of me selecting a Great Movie to watch next also dwelling on the same topic were very, very slim. Nevertheless, by pure chance, I have picked  Aguirre, The Wrath of God . Go figure... At the end of the year 1560, an expedition of Spanish conquistadors sets off from the Peruvian highlands looking for the city of  El Dorado . Upon reaching the jungle, with their Inca slaves dying and their rations dwindling, they realize they may not find the golden city after all, and a party, led by Don Pedro de Ursúa ( Ruy Guerra ) and Don Lope de Aguirre ( Klaus Kinski ), is sent down the the  Huallaga river  to look for information concerning its whereabouts. Shortly after, however, Aguirre rebels against Ursúa, wounding him. He then renounces his King and forces the election of Don Fernando de Guzmán ( Peter B...

The two-cops-that-have-opposite-personalities-yet-are-forced-to-be-partners is one of the most overused clichés in cinema. Whereas very few movies based on this idea succeed in being remembered (e.g. Lethal Weapon - 1987 - and Lethal Weapon 2 - 1989), most of them are forgotten right after a good night's sleep. Thanks in great part to an inspired script by Andrew Kevin Walker and a fantastic imagery by production designer  Arthur Max  and art director Gary Wissner ,  Se7en manages to be one of those few. The movie revolves a round two cops, David Mills ( Brad Pitt ), who, aiming at advancing his career, had just requested to be transferred to the most dangerous district in town, and William Somerset ( Morgan Freeman ), retiring in a week's time, training Mills to replace him. Together they will hunt a serial killer ( Kevin Spacey *), who murders people he judges in violation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins . So far, nothing extraordinary plot-wise. But then, wit...

If, a few years ago, someone told me I would be absolutely mesmerized by a movie set entirely inside a sandpit and revolving around only two characters, I would have laughed at their faces. Also, if I were also told I would prefer the director's cut, 147-minutes long version of that movie, in which the story is unfolded ever more slowly, I would have said they were drunk. Yet, here I am with nothing but good things to write about  Woman in the Dunes . The story revolves around a man ( Okada Eiji ), who ended up stranded in the desert while looking for a rare variant of tiger beetle. Convinced by the local villagers to spend the night in the hut of a woman ( Kishida Kyōko ), located at the bottom of a sandpit, upon waking up he finds himself unable to leave: he has been trapped into helping the woman fill buckets of sand to prevent her house from being buried by the dunes. " If I fall behind, my house will be buried. Then the house nextdoor would be the next. [...]...