February 2010 Archives
Salaam Bombay! (1988)
I saw this movie before I saw Slumdog Millionnaire and it ruined Slumdog for me. I think Slumdog is a cheap ripoff of Salaam Bombay, which is a movie that has real taste and characters that are human and have depth to them.
It’s a movie about street kids in Bombay. It starts with a little boy named Krishna. He does something wrong so his mother tells him he has to work at the circus in order to pay for it and he can’t come home until he does. So then he works at the circus but one day his boss sends him out on an errand and when he comes back the entire circus has left without him. So he is all alone.
So then, Krishna decides to go to Bombay and work so he can get enough money to go back to his mum. He makes some friends with street kids like Manju and a drug addict named Chillum. He also falls in love with a girl named Sola Saal who he wants to save from becoming a prostitute. He does some bad things like robbing and old man and setting things on fire, and he has bad things done to him, like being robbed and treated badly in his chai tea delivery job. He keeps hoping to get back to his mother the whole movie so he can go back to his little village.
I liked this movie because the kids in it were real children who had been through difficult things, like in the Brazilian movie Pixote, which was made in 1981. I really like movies about street kids. It’s like these kids didn’t have anything to do with getting where they are but they have so many problems to deal with. Movies like this make me feel very lucky and they also make me want to do more to help street kids who aren’t as lucky as me.
-Plum
Suggestions Please!
This week I am going to do something very different. If you read my blog, can you please tell me some different movies that you think I would like? If you read my posts, you know the kinds of things I like to watch. They are movies that make me think and that are about out of the way subjects or people. I also like old movies. I’m off for a few days so I’m looking forward to what you all have to say when I return.
Thank you.
Plum
La Dolce Vita (1960)
This film was directed by Frederico Fellini and made in 1960. I really liked it and after I watched the film I watched the director’s cut and I read an article on it. The film is the very first film that has the paparazzi as a main character in the film. The main character is a reporter for a tabloid newspaper, and so he is one of the paparazzi. His name is Marcello.
The film has a structure that is made up of seven episodes. Each episode lasts for about a night. The episodes start at night and end in the morning, and in each episode the main character Marcello has a problem that may or may not be resolved in the morning. Some examples of these episodes are:
1. Marcello goes out with this rich aristocrat woman and then comes home the next morning and his fiancee has tried to kill herself and he has to take her to the hospital.
2. Marcello goes out walking around with a movie star named Sylvie and he tries to make her like him but then the next morning her fiancee tries to beat him up when he takes her back to her hotel.
3. Marcello goes out with his father to a club and and they hang out then his father leaves to go home the next morning.
One thing that I tried to make sense of was the ending of the movie. In a lot of movies, things are said that are really important at the end, or the main problem in the movie has been solved. First, it’s hard to tell if this is really the end of the film because you never know if the episodes were shown in order or not, so that is something to think about. But let me tell you what the movie’s ending was. In the end, there was a really big party that got kind of crazy and in the morning, everyone who was still awake goes down to the beach. They see this really big dead fish on the beach that looks prehistoric, and it is dead. No one has ever seen anything like that before. Then, Marcello sees a girl that was his waitress before, and she is further down the beach. She tries to tell him something, but he says he can’t hear her and goes back with the people who are having the wild party.
When I watched the director’s cut, the film critic that was talking over the movie said that this meant that Marcello was seeing a vision of Christianity that was dead, which was represented by the fish. Then, he said that Marcello saw the young girl who was his salvation but he doesn’t listen to it and because of that, he stays lost.
I think thats a really interesting way to think about the movie, because all of the different episodes that they show in the night time basically have people doing whatever they want and they don’ t always do what they think is right, for example Marcello is always cheating on his fiancee with other women. So, you could say that the director Fellini is showing how no one in that time had any morals.
I would definitely recommend this film because it is supposed to be one of the best films ever made.
-Plum
picture from passionforcinema.com
The Great Gatsby (1974)
I watched this movie last week and it was pretty good. It is based on the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and it is starring Robert Redford who started the Sundance Film Festival which i hope to go to one day.
Jay Gatsby was a really rich gentleman. He had all these grand parties and he was really mysterious– no one knew who he really was and what he was really like. People were a little scared of him but they came to his parties because he was rich and they had a great time.
Then you learned his history during the movie. Basically when he was young, there was a really rich woman named Daisy and she was in love with Gatsby but she couldnt marry him because he was poor. So he went away to the war and he said that she should wait for him cause he would make things alright. But then, she went ahead and married a really rich guy.
I didnt really understand this film very much, I guess because I have never been in love and I can’t imagine doing that for another person, or why he was so mysterious. I thought it was shot really well though. I really liked the scenes with the parties because they just really showed how out of control the people got and they got the mood of things; the parties almost seemed like they werent fun because they were so crazy. I would recommend this movie probably for older people. I dont think teenagers or children would neccessarily be able to understand it.
-Plum
picture from movieberry.com
