Veronica (Griffin Dunne, 2013)

Admittedly, the screenshots don't do justice to the tone of romantic despair that Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone convey so beautifully.

Griffin Dunne's Veronica is at odds with everything else in Movie 43. No irony, no faux-edginess; it's all heart. A real treat.

Deadfall (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2012)

Deadfall is a classic example of a film that lives on the strenght of its director's virtuosity. Given a terrible script to work with, Stefan Ruzowitzky makes the most of it by focusing on the basics of each individual moment: how do you shoot a car crash? How do you shoot a murder? How do you shoot a sex scene? Taken as a whole, the film doesn't make a lot of sense, but moment to moment, it's beautifully realized.

Buñuel Ever-present

 

This is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

 

Vamps (Amy Heckerlink, 2012) 

Two movies watched yesterday.

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)

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Five great scenes from Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a film so packed with cliches and heavy symbolism that only at the hands of a master craftsman could it have turned out as good as it is. Zemeckis is the most modern of filmmakers working in the classical Hollywood mold.

China, China (João Pedro Rodrigues e João Rui Guerra da Mata, 2007)

Trapped in a life she doesn't want, China finds her freedom in small moments of bliss she invents for herself, and in those moments, China, China comes alive like few other movies do.

This scene, a 3-second handrail slide that's made to last 10 seconds — because that's how long it takes to really appreciate it — is probably my favorite in all of João Pedro Rodrigues' work.

Viagem à Expo (João Pedro Rodrigues, 1998)

Viagem à Expo is a sort of follow-up to Esta é a Minha Casa, this time following the Fundo family on a trip to Lisbon, to visit the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition (Expo '98).

After getting to know the family in their natural environment(s) — in France and Trás-os-Montes — we now get to see them in the role of "tourists". Because the subjects of the film are now, for the most part, passive (walking, watching, learning), this was never going to be as interesting as the first film was, and for that reason also, it is unsurprising to find that the best scenes are the ones in which they are "allowed" to fall back into familiar territory (a chance encounter between José and a fellow cobbler, and a devotion-filled visit to a religious giftshop).

Rodrigues still manages to keep things relatively interesting, visually, by virtue of his camera placement.

Esta é a Minha Casa (João Pedro Rodrigues, 1997)

Esta é a Minha Casa, a documentary following a family of Portuguese emigrants in France, as they travel back home to Trás-os-Montes, finds João Pedro Rodrigues with one foot back on Ethnographic Film territory — registering behaviours, rituals, customs (something not completely absent from his feature films) — although the director's primary interest is clearly in the film as Cinema, showing an obvious effort to always find interesting angles from which to shoot the action, and editing it in a somewhat abstract, fragmented way, which seems counter-productive to the purpose of Ethnography.

The film is marvelously complemented by the ethnographic essay it originated, Filomena's Silvano's De Casa em Casa, which paints a more comprehensive picture of the human side of things, and gives context to the action in the film.

I found this footnote especially amusing:

Out of politeness, José never made any negative comments towards the films. He merely regretted the absence of some shots for which he had high expectations, (...) and asked for copies, if possible, of all the material we shot. He has, however, confided in his neighbor, a sociologist who put us in touch with him, expressing his perplexity at how the film was shot. The main issue was related to the fact that the classical cinematic representation focusing on the face, the part of the human body which in western culture is more directly associated with personal identity, was not the director's option of choice.