Strike a Pose! Films.com

Hey everyone! I’ve just come to make a quick note and announce how the site will run from now on until the next few months:

Monday’s I’ll announce the weekend box office.

Wednesdays I’ll be writing a review for any film I’ve seen over the week. Sometimes I’ll try throwing in 2 but it’ll be tricky.

Fridays will be “News In Review” with all the links to news articles I find most important throughout the week.

Every once in a while an new video will be added, and hopefully quickie youtube submissions will come in between major posts. In any case, this new format will help (hopefully) to streamline the website so my audience knows what to expect more often.

Later, gators.

For International Cinema (a film course I’m taking right now at Salisbury University), we watched an Italian film some might know as Life is Beautiful. In Italian, the title La Vita e Bella rings very poetically and is all you need to know from the get go: That this movie is living, breathing poetry about darkest hours and brightest smiles.

Guido is a middle aged man traveling through the Italian countryside, bringing immense life and indomitable imagination with him everywhere he goes with his hyperactive talent for humor and romance. He meets a woman who literally falls on him from the sky, and decides pretty much in that moment that he’ll look for her every chance he gets- she is his “princess.” The first half of the movie is his demonstration of character and whimsy- consistently drawing others into his imagination and making life truly worth living for those who surround him. However, he just so happens to be in the wrong time for love- that being the 1940′s, where it was popular to name children Adolf and Benito, and the disregard for human life took a back seat to “progress.”

He succeeds at wooing his woman, and even is gifted a very smart, and very well played child named Giosue, with whom his life truly becomes beautiful. The time catches up with him, however, and he and his son are taken away to a Nazi Holocaust camp, where there fate will be unknown. It’s up to Guido to mask the horrors of this life from his son, much to young to understand, and make sure that his son never has to know the real suffering, the deep hatred, and the cruel traumas of war. The movie is about this gift that a father gives a son. Is it a gift of ignorance, or a gift of freedom? You decide for yourself, but for me, it’s a gift of salvation.

This film has gone on to win numerous awards, including Best Actor Oscar for its star, the stellar and always entertaining Roberto Benigni, who well deserved his acclaim even though his entire film has been bashed some critics for being unreal and unfair to the past.

Well, I’m here to set the record straight- I am not even going to wait till the end of this review to say this: This movie strikes the biggest pose I’ve seen in a while. Clever, sympathetic, sweet and never exploitative of the true events (it handles the Holocaust tastefully), yet the ending is still guaranteed to evoke tears in even the hardest hard-ass.

Filmed in some way that resembles classic Technicolor looks, with flat, exaggerated coloring that truly brings it into a romantic genre, the film feels like a 1950′s or 40′s classic, but with the spirit of hindsight to make it even more potently covered in the era it is trying to amicably recreate. For something that feels so old fashioned it completely blows away most modern efforts to entertain while making the viewer consider the situation the characters are in. The movie Moulin Rogue, for instance, uses modern day effects of grandiose coloring and movement to keeps it’s viewer on the picture at all times. What this film does is mainly give you one incredible character, various incredible settings, and frame them all in an astonishing script that never lets up on laughter and joy. This isn’t just the joy of romance, parenting, or survival- its just the ability to breathe. I used to have a theory- as long as we’re alive we’ll be alive. We can breathe, we can live. It’s slightly abstract but if I could ever find a movie to define what I meant, this film would be it.

Automatically getting a seat in my top 50 flicks of all time (and possibly top 10 upon later viewings,) Life is Beautiful isn’t so much a story of struggle as it is a story of the power of imagination and living. To say something any more original about it would be quite difficult, because this movie so quintessentially sticks to that theme, it’s probably bar none the best example of pacifistic dignity ever captured on film.

****/****

Poster art for our newest flick at Salisbury University, which premiered at the Student Activities Fair in Winter 2007.

Film to come soon.

Hey readers, just thought I’d pop by and deliver a really great link. This one comes from JohnAugust.com and is about the difference between a BEAT and a PAUSE in screenplay writing.

Here’s an excerpt:
They mean the same thing, though I almost always use beat.1 The term is probably taken from music, because it refers to the natural rhythm of dialogue. A beat is the pause a speaker takes to separate thoughts. Calling one out can help clarify a joke, a point of information, or a shift in the scene.

John August is a premiere Hollywood screenwriter, who’s works include Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Big Fish, and his breakthrough work, GO. He has also done work on IMDB for their Ask A Filmmaker Column numerous times. I’ve liked his realistic and informative writings on his blog and those articles, so now I share the link with my fellow film makers. Keep up with it! He posts pretty often.

Meeting on Thursday.

I was looking up Prince (the artist) probably because of that crazy performance he gave at the Super Bowl- the only part of that boring game I barely paid attention to.

So I decided I’d check out what the hell was up with him doing the music for one of my top 50 films of all time, Batman. I mean, didn’t it seem a bit out of place? No. It didn’t. For some damned reason, even though the movie had a visually gothic-noir setting, was about a dark crime-fighter and a killer clown, and was more extremist and ridiculous than psychedelic in terms of direction, the over all “super style” of the film pretty much was the perfect padding for Prince to re-land his career on. Supposedly the album for this flick saved his career by the end of the 80′s.

Course, everyone who’s seen Shaun of the Dead would probably be inclined to think differently.

In any case, I want everyone reading this to watch this old music video I found on YouTube, and see just how bizarre, eclectic, and downright entertaining this whole montage of madness is!

Batman Begins? Screw THAT! I accept that it was a great movie, but it didn’t have a Prince soundtrack- hell I don’t think the movie had a soundtrack at all. Regardless of the quality of the 1989 film, it is still by far the most stylish movie ever made. If you can comment and name one that tops it in over all panache, flamboyance, and insane disregard for boredom, then please do so now. I saw this film when I was barely 2 years old IN THEATERS, and ever since then this has been one of my faves, with almost every line personally memorized, not to mention the amount of damage it did to my senses. Not a frame of this movie lacks some sort of visual, audible, stylistic punch!

And this video embodies all of that! Damn, Prince! You’re one freaky musical genius!