Tiago's brain dump

In this day and age, in a society so numb to violence, it is hard to imagine a time when people used to be scared by  Vincent Price  movies. Back then, it was commonplace for horror films to revolve around either the classic monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula and so on), or the fears of the  Atomic Era  (such as aliens, giant mutations resulting from radioactivity, and failed scientific experiments with catastrophic results). Although the  Hammer  films, with their graphic violence, were pushing the boundaries of what could be shown onscreen, the horror element itself was still quite detached from reality, be it in some Gothic castle in the past or in the laboratory of a crazy scientist in the near future. It was not until 1960, with  Michael Powell 's  Peeping Tom  and  Alfred Hitchcock 's  Psycho , that horror was brought to the real world, to the present-day society: far away from the literal monsters from before, embodying pure ...

Ingmar Bergman 's Persona and David Lynch 's Eraserhead (1977) are very peculiar movies. Both are experiments in film-making conducted by renowned directors with full control over the final product, fiercely defying conventions and, in the process, leaving so many questions unanswered that they end up alienating a great part of their viewers. Their uniqueness, however, has influenced the work of several acclaimed directors, most famously Stanley Kubrick , who openly adored Eraserhead , and Robert Altman , whose masterpiece, 3 Women (1977), draws very closely from Persona . Yet, while Eraserhead tends to be relegated to the cult movie circuit nowadays, Persona  still figures prominently in countless Great Movies lists, being one of the most written about movies I can think of... Why? One night, after having appeared in the play Electra , Elisabet Vogler ( Liv Ullmann ) makes the sudden decision to stop talking. Having ultimately entered a near catatonic state, Elisabet...

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. [...]...

Well, this is a tough one... Whereas many of the songs in West Side Story are widely recognizable (thanks to an excellent work by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim ), not so many people have actually watched the movie. In fact, Ebert himself finishes his Great Movie review by saying that this is a film that comes short of its full potential. So why did he give West Side Story its 5th star by including it in that selective list? The dancing itself, says he. Well, I respectfully disagree... The movie spans a 2-day interval, telling the doomed love story of the Puerto Rican immigrant Maria ( Natalie Wood ) and a local guy, named Tony ( Richard Beymer ). It so happens that Tony was a founding member of the Jets, whose rival gang so happens to be the Sharks, whose leader is Maria's brother Bernardo ( George Chakiris ) -- thus setting the stage for one of many adaptations of  Shakespeare 's Romeo and Juliet . As far as adaptations go, I would say this is a pretty good...