9/10
The most feminist movie I've ever seen is also notoriously one of the most difficult to endure. A 3 1/2 hour movie in which very little happens except the day-to-day monotonies of its title character. This was a movie I was born to like, and after reading about it for so long, it was nice to sit down and watch it and have it be exactly what I knew it would be. I don't feel like I watched a movie so much as I lived with Jeanne for 3 1/2 hours.
5.5/10
Lucio Fulci's 1975 spaghetti western is a wildly uneven affair. It starts out well enough with four individuals (a gambler, a pregnant prostitute, an alcoholic and a man who sees ghosts) travelling together as the last survivors of a bandit attack on their town. It gets even better when Tomas Milian (The Big Gundown, Companeros, etc) shows up as an anti-Christ hippie gunslinger, but when he turns on them and leaves them for dead, he leaves the movie for dead too, because it turns into a crashing bore. Entirely too much time is spent on the prostitute's pregnancy leaving little room for the big revenge scene, which is a major letdown. There's other problems too - a ridiculously ill-fitting folksy soundtrack, a terrible English dub (the original Italian track is on the DVD, but unsubtitled), and some pretty bad acting. There's some flashes to suggest a better movie buried in here, but it's beyond the point of saving.
8/10
Andrei Tarkovsky's autobiographical stream-of-conscious film, it's probably as hard as anything to get into, just because of how personal it is. Indeed, the only one who would understand just how everything fits is Tarkovsky himself, the rest of us are on the outside looking in (I could make some flimsy 'mirror' allusion here but alas). Despite the lack of plot or coherance, Tarkovsky is such a magician that it's never a chore to watch what unfolds onscreen, and there are some remarkable images that I won't soon be able to forget.
4/10
You wouldn't think a 70's Nazisploitation softcore trash movie could be quite so boring, but unfortunately, it is. The sex scenes aren't particularly interesting, though the torture and gore is fairly well done. The plot (too much of it!) is plodding and largely a bore, although it does lead to a fairly cool shoot-out at the end. The two best things in this movie are, let's face it, residing on Ilsa's chest. Other than that, not much of note here. It wasn't so-bad-it's-funny, nor was it really interesting in a what-were-they-thinking way. The only unintentional humor came from the actors' accents coming and going (they're German SS officers in a German-based camp...and they all speak thickly-accented English? Okay then). Too often B movies sound like more fun in theory than they are to actually sit down and watch, and that's definitely the case with this one.
7.5/10
I missed most of the "classic" Kurosawa during the local repertory cinema's centennial tribute but I was at least able to catch Dersu Uzala last night (and hopefully Kagemusha on Sunday). The film tells the story of a Russian soldier named Arseniev and his friendship with mountain man Dersu Uzala, whom he meets while mapping the Russian forests and mountains. Essentially an odd couple road/journey movie, there isn't a whole lot new from a narrative perspective, but the film succeeds because of the chemistry between the two leads, and the movie's stunning cinematography and direction. At 144 minutes, the premise feels slightly stretched (much of Dersu and Arseniev's second meeting is just a restaging of events that occured in their first trek together) but it's such a beautiful film to look at, it's hard to really care too much.
