ztruk2001

There's enough broken down fans, chickens, dark allys, twists, and seedy characters in this thing to keep you glued to your seat, contemplating the film, for hours after its concluded. Quite frankly, you'll be too terrified to even move. If anyone has played the excellent Sierra adventure game, "Gabriel knight: Sins of the Fathers", you'll see a clear inspiration with this movie. Angel Heart is a nightmare of a film-noir flick with a little of the horror genre mixed in. Truly one of the most involving films I've ever seen and by the end of it, the audience will feel as though they've been taken through Hell. Mickey Rourke plays Harry Angel, a small time private investigator in New York City. Most of his clients are jealous lovers and that sort. Angel gets a call one day by Louis Cyphre, a clergyman of a strange religion, asking him to track down a man who is in dept to him. Angel Heart moves like a detective drama with the pacing. But the film is so much more than just a gather clues and evidence type of thing. There's a real psychological horror that builds up as Angel nears closer and closer to his man and as he begins to question the validity of his employer, Mr. Cyphre. Mickery Rourke is brilliant in the movie. He plays a detestable and dirty chainsmoking hustler who will do almost whatever it takes to find the person he's after. Yet the character is also likable because of Rourke's charm, which allows for us to care about him. Robert DeNiro is creepy and downright disturbing as Louis Cyphre in all his subdued glory. The production is amazing. Angel Heart feels like a dark moody blues and jazz number. The story starts in New York and ends up in New Orleans. Lisa Bonet and Rourke have one of film's most notorious moments, a sex-scene that got her kicked off "The Cosby Show" and almost landed the film with an X-rating. Parker's movie ain't for the squimish or faint of heart, that's for sure. Many of the voodoo scenes with chickens are freaky enough, let alone several of the films' gruesome murders. Alan Parker directed the film perfectly. He's vowed to work in every genre and made one hell of a flick with Angel Heart. Michael Seresin did the cinematography for the movie. He also shot Parker's earlier film, Midnight Express. Trevor Jones composed the film's score. Overall just a damn fine piece of movie making. You'll be hard pressed to find a more surreal and nightmarish movie than this with such great acting and storytelling. The ending will leave you gasping for air, yet somehow you will have seen it coming all along.

Grade: A+

Famously made and inspired by director Howard Hawks' and actor John Wayne's contempt for the western High Noon, Rio Bravo similarly features a frontier lawman waiting on pins and needles until someone can arrive. In High Noon it was the bad guys. In Rio Bravo the bad guys are already in town, it's the U.S. Marshall the sheriff is waiting for. But make no mistake about it. That's nearly all these two movies have in common. High Noon was a dark, cold, and desolate black and white six-shooter melodrama and political commentary. Rio Bravo is a warm, exciting, joyous, and bright technicolor ode to male camaraderie and the old west. Howard Hawks' film contains all of his trademarks. Hard drinking men, fast talking women, enough hidden sexual innuendo to get you kicked out of Church, and of course the dialogue. Sharp, funny, and biting. John Wayne was in fact never much of a talker. He's no Cary Grant. But he is the Duke. Hawks' surrounds him with a colorful assortment of characters to react to and interact with, which is when Wayne is in his element. Walter Brennan is the yappy and big mouthed old codger, Dean Martin is the down-on-his-luck drunk, Angie Dickinson is the insecure but headstrong gambling dance hall girl, and Ricky Nelson is the quiet but youthful rebel gunfighter. Those are the main characters. Ward Bond offers good support as a do-gooder cattle rancher. Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales provides plenty of comic relief as the hen-pecked and stereotypical Mexican who runs the hotel and acts as a go-between for Dickinson and Wayne and their uncertain romantic relationship. Each of them too proud to express their true feelings and emotions. John Russell fills the shoes of the villain, a rich and ruthless cattle baron who hires men to do his killing for him - 50 silver dollars a head. Russell sees very little screen time, but other than the fact that his character is there and we the audience know he's there and so do the characters, he doesn't serve any real purpose. In fact he functions in a similar fashion to what Hitchcock describes as the Maguffin. The good guys need somebody to fight against and he's it. But that's just an excuse to get the ensemble together and have them talk, talk, talk, and then talk some more. You'd be hard pressed to find a movie with more masculine male-bonding and men being men than what's in Rio Bravo. The movie is comprised of one classic scene and entertaining moment after the other. Angie Dickinson throwing the flower vase through the window, the gang sitting around and singing "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me", the seven minute opening without a word of dialogue, Dean Martin pouring the whiskey from the glass back into the bottle, John Wayne going up to see Dickinson at the film's conclusion, and on and on and on. Great story, great script, great acting, beautifully shot. What more could you ask for?

It isn't surprising that many people have been thrown off or wierded out by Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. This is the man who directed the great 1972 film, Last Tango in Paris, which threw out the rule book concerning what could be talked about and shown regarding sex in a non-pornographic film. The Dreamers isn't as revolutionary or shocking for it's day as Last Tango in Paris was, but it's every bit as daring and provocative. It is Bertolucci's homage to the movies themselves and the people that spend an infinite amount of hours in darkened rooms watching them. For us psychopaths out there where movies are more than a religion, myself included, The Dreamers lets us know we are not alone, however it also informs us just how alone we might be. Film is the greatest art form because it can be the most collaborative with many people's vision or the most individual. It combines music, sound, photography, acting, politics, religion, entertainment, fun, and everything into one package. What else other than the movies allows the beauty of a person who's been dead for a hundred years to shine forever? Long after all the Presidents are dead and long after the frescos of Michaelangelo have tarnished away, and long after the pyramids have eroded, we'll still have film. We'll still be able to watch Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, and James Dean as though they were still alive. In fact as long as people watch their movies, they are alive. It's this sory of mentality and obsession that Bertolucci both praises but also warns the dangers of in his film The Dreamers. Michael Pitt (Matthew), presumably summoning up Leonardo DiCaprio with his performance, plays an American exchange student in Paris in 1968 during the student riots. He is pretty much a loner, an outcast, and misfit - both free and restrained by his undying love for film. In Paris he meets a pair of French siblings, a brother and sister played by Eva Green (Isabelle) and Louis Garrel (Theo), who share his affections towards the cinema and immediately befriend him and adopt him as one of their own. It's ironic that they choose to coronate him with the lyrical quote "He's one of us! He's one of us!" from Freaks. Perhaps they see themselves as freaks. It's a deep movie and it throws many curves at the audience which will push people's ideas of what is morally correct and incorrect to the extreme. The Dreamers breaks many taboos. Mostly the incestuous relationship between a brother and sister, who feel as though one another are their only true companions in life. It doesn't shy away from nudity, both male and female. Together the three of them, Matthew, Isabelle, and Theo form an emotional and sexual bond through their love of movies and their common feelings of being misplaced in the world. The Dreamers is a damn fine movie that might be difficult to appreciate because of its content. Something I really enjoyed was seeing the clips of the different movies in the film when the characters talked about them and played games revolving around the films. Breathless, Top Hat, City Lights, and Scarface are a few of the movies that are featured in The Dreamers.