Diego Maradona (2019): Asif Kapadia is cornering the market on documentaries about celebrity tragedies. After the impressive Senna and Amy biographies, comes this complex story about a fallen god of football who has the…misfortune of being still alive today. For the dramatic purposes of the movie. Maradona’s story lacks the morale shattering life-cut-short variable, although one could argue that surviving and falling as low as he’s done should be tragedy enough. With the movie focusing mostly on the Argentine’s period in Napoli, we get a beautiful arc of rebirth-omnipotence-downfall, but don’t really get the sense of what followed, with a quick and shocking wrap-up-scene meant to provide closure. Kapadia’s usual hagiography is just as present when it comes to Maradona’s life choices and it lessens the movie to some degree, by treading the same territory as with Amy – Maradona being exonerated, the inhumane pressures of being a football deity (media pressure, local culture, public expectations) indicted. Even so, the movie is entertaining to watch, as Maradona’s years in Napoli were especially colorful and reminiscent of an age pre-dating the personality-ostracized PR world of modern athletes. 8/10
Demoni (1985): If you’re looking for a gory 80’s Italian zombie flick, look no more. In this cult movie set in Berlin (!), random people are invited to watch a mysterious movie. Turns out, the movie comes to life and a sort of zombie infestation manifests itself. The special effects stand out in a an otherwise thin narrative, with some amusing bits and pieces (the blind man going to the cinema? his caretaker ditching him to make out with a random guy?) and not much in terms of scares. Drawing the line, Demons has enough character to withstand the test of time and proves a decent entry particularly for genre enthusiasts. 6/10
Der Rosenkavalier (1925): “But TS, how did you stray in pre-WWII cinema? And such an obscure movie, to boot!”
Well, the local philharmonic with the German Cultural Institute of Timisoara organized this screening/concert of Robert Wiene’s Rosenkavalier and it’s been a while since I last saw a silent movie. Wiene is known for his Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), which I have yet to see, but RK is something quite different. An adaptation of Richard Strauss’s 1910 opera, Strauss himself conducted the orchestra on the film’s debut in Dresden. The story is your usual comedy mess of mixed lovers, masks and inheritances, so if you’ve seen any romantic operas, you’ll know where it goes pretty quickly. I can’t say I was enthralled with the movie, but some clever scenes surprised me and the orchestra’s accompaniment made the experience worthwhile. As an aside, I learned (by reading an IMDb review) that silent movies were generally not silent in the 1920s, as only the reputable theaters provided an orchestra. Medium venues played popular songs on the piano, whereas in smaller ones “coughing or marital discussions together with children howling were the music accompaniment “. A good little bit of trivia. 6/10
Ready or Not (2019): After their failed feature length debut in 2014, Devil’s Due, directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett produced a thoroughly enjoyable flick this time around. The story: as Grace (Samara Weaving) marries into the Le Domas family (and gaming empire), she has to survive a game of life or death on her wedding night. If you want to go meta, you can call RoN a critique of the 1% and everything that comes with wealth, inheritance and traditions, but it never takes itself particularly serious. While this is a traditional (genre) movie in some ways, it packs enough flair, humor and, yes, gore to make it stand out, thanks also to its strong cast – Adam Brody, Henry Czerny and Andi MacDowell, to name a few aside from Weaving. 7/10
Under the Silver Lake (2018): After two great movies in The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014), David Robert Mitchell goes all-out David Lynch with Silver Lake and…somewhat misfires. The movie follows Sam, a Hollywood-based pop-culture addict who is in the throes of despondency when he meets a mysterious girl who just as mysteriously vanishes. With a newfound purpose, he embarks on a cryptic search through that’s markedly bizarre and eclectic, unraveling his life’s meaning, in what you’d expect of Hwood excesses. You can’t fault the movie for being unambitious and, somehow, it finds a path by the end, although it feels like its climax is three quarters of the way through. Andrew Garfield’s character is representative of the lot and takes some getting used to, which is probably why it felt like UtSL came up short – it’s interesting conceptually, but none of the people inhabiting it draw you in. Still, with such a detail rich and ambiguous story, there’s enough to bite on to make me will it towards a 7/10
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