La Strada

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdreview/lastrada.htm

At first it seemed too simple, too lacking in ironic perspective, but Fellini knew what he was doing.  As soon as the Fool, with his sense of life and of fun, enters, the movie gets deeper and deeper, almost by the gesture.  Gelsomina, who before seemed like a three-quarter wit, turns out to be someone who just needed a good teacher.  We ache for her to go off with the Fool, then to stay with the circus, then to stay with the nuns.  But she has figured out how to love Zampano in a deep way.  Posthumously, she succeeds in changing him from monster to someone capable of sorrow and anguish over his own monstrousness.  That sorrow is all he needs, as Dante, Fellini's fellow Italian-Catholic, teaches us, to go from hell to purgatory; to feel sorrow is to no longer be in the grasp of evil, psychologically speaking.  After Zampano leaves Gelsomina behind, I wonder why the movie is continuing--who cares about Zampano, the monster?  By the end, we know why the movie continued.  Gelsomina has redeemed Zampano by her own example of grieving, by her loving him, and by her dying the way, Zampano learns, she has died.

Firefly

http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/11/25/best-science-fiction-movies-of-the-last-decade-2000-2009/

Firefly sometimes traffics in ideas, and sometimes doesn't; it sometimes feels more like a western than science-fiction show.  But its world is believable, its characters irresistible.  The production values, despite what look like a limited budget, are excellent.  Josh Whedon is a student of finding different ways to keep narrative pulse throbbing.  It's just pop--that is, it doesn't hold out the possibility of getting a sophisticated viewer to see the world differently than he or she did before-- but it's pop with a commitment to being as excellent as it can be as story-telling.  Comparing it with the original Star Trek creates an example of how an understanding of how much audiences can process has increased.

The image above is from the movie/after the fact pilot, not the show; actual stills from the show didn't come up on my google image search.

Star Trek

laughingsquid.com

A reference in a book I was reading to Star Trek (and the author meant the original show, I believe) as a very philosphical show, so I ordered the first season.  The first episode (as far as I could tell; the menu was hard to interpret) was certainly idea oriented, being about a member of the crew who, because of an encounter with a mysterious force-field plus a knack for ESP, begins to grow in mental abilities at an exponential rate.  The show becomes a variation on the Frankenstein theme.  So far so good.  The production values, the lack of faith in peoples' minds to move quickly, the felt need to laboriously make each of its narrative points, all were astonishing.  And the sexism--I am against holding previous world-views that were shared by large parts of that previous culture anachronistically against a work of art--but the sexism was too laughable.

The Duchess of Langeais

http://pics.livejournal.com/glvalentine/pic/0001tx1w

At the very first, things seem too stagey and arty; then it was gripping, a modern-day version of La Princesse de Cleves, as cerebral as it was romantic and passionate.  I'm hung up, though, about one thing: at perhaps the crucial moment in the movie, Antoinette swings over from resisting Mariveau to being hopelessly in love with him.  The change comes when he forcibly, outrageously, cruelly takes control of her--not raping her, but worse, in a way.  His psychology is consistent enough, but why the hell this move on his part shoul make her love him--it seems unrealistic to me.  Maybe in the nineteenth century, in Balzac's world, people acted this way?  But the movie rests on the heroines's intelligence, pride, dignity, and sense of irony.  Having this crucial plot corner-turn being so unsatisfying was unsatisfying.  An unusual, brilliant movie.

Glengarry Glen Ross

http://www.gamespot.com

There's something either sadistic or masochistic about the script/story; it's Johnny-one-note-ish; it's quite unrealistic; it looks to be half-way between a film of a play and an actual movie.  But the acting is so wonderful, from so many characters, that it seems unforgettable (probably is unforgettable, but how can I know yet).  Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino stand out but only because they have the most complex and most sympathetic roles.  And the acting couldn't be great if the lines didn't have plenty of drama.

District 9

http://www.smcm.edu/studentevents/2009/index.html

What I had read, both before and after viewing the small part I watched, told me I should persist beyond the beginning, but I couldn't get myself too.  So jangling, discordant, so interested in reveling in the ugly.

Juliet of the Spirits

http://nurse-marbles.livejournal.com/61349.html

This seems like a remake of La Dolce Vita, in which the main character is in semi-crisis because his/her life is incoherent; experiences a crisis (Marcello's philosopher friend kills himself and his children, Guilietta discovers her husband's adultery and goes mad); and then responds to the crisis (Marcello by running from it and leading an existence more dissolute and humiliating than before, Guilietta by imaginatively freeing herself, at least to a degree; she unties the hands of the child-version of herself, and says goodbye peacefully enough to the spirit of her grandfather).  The idea that it's a tired recycling of images and themes (cf. Ebert) seems to me wrong, although I haven't seen 81/2, which preceded it, in decades.  It certainly has a structure, in which the elements of her incoherent life keep haunting her, such that the fantasy and the relatively real scenes are counterweights to each other.  Guilietta Masini has much quiet dignity, and her lack of sexiness, her lack of joie de vivre, give the movie gravitas: she's not just another part of the auteur's erotic phantasmagoria.  Certainly the movie takes patience, as its narrative pulse is not prominent.

L.A. Story

http://www.filmbender.com/steve-martin/

This has problems: Victoria Tennant often looks as if she weren't part of the movie; it makes jokes for the sake of the jokes more than for the sake of the whole.  But I loved it, because Steve Martin draws my empathy powerfully, because it's very funny, and witty too, and because it satirizes Los Angeles intensely yet in a civilized, good-humored way.  It's highly reminiscent of the delightful All of Me.  Its overlap with some Woody Allen movies is large.  Its references to other movies are many; its introductory footage is an homage/parody of the beginning of La Dolce Vita.