DVD Views: Pretty Woman (1990)

Pretty Woman ***
Directed by: Garry Marshall.
Written By: J.F. Lawton.
Starring: Richard Gere (Edward Lewis), Julia Roberts (Vivian Ward), Ralph Bellamy (James Morse), Jason Alexander (Philip Stuckey), Laura San Giacomo (Kit De Luca), Alex Hyde-White (David Morse), Amy Yasbeck (Elizabeth Stuckey), Elinor Donahue (Bridget), Hector Elizondo (Barney Thompson).

Pretty Woman is one of those movies that everyone in the world has seen that I somehow managed to avoid up until now. For years, I did not watch it because I was not a fan of Julia Roberts. Then even when I got over my hatred for her – still not a huge fan, but I have to admit, what she does, she does well, perhaps better than anyone else – I still did not have much of an urge to catch up with this film. Yet the day after my wedding, when me and beautiful wife did not feel like doing anything, she decided she wanted to watch Pretty Woman, so that’s what we did. I cannot say that it is the classic movie that many people seem to think it is, but it is not as bad as I feared. For a comic fantasy, it’s not actually that bad.

Yes, the story of an apparently streetwise prostitute who is picked up by a good looking yet single billionaire and turned into a princess in less than a week is not exactly steeper in realism, but that’s not what director Garry Marshall is going for. Street walking prostitutes don’t look much like Julia Roberts, or her snappy best friend played by Laura San Giacomo, and at the risk of damning everyone in the profession, I don’t think that they are as sassy or have such a high opinion of themselves as Julia Roberts’ Vivian does in this movie. In the recent Steven Soderbergh movie, The Girlfriend Experience, Sasha Grey plays a high priced call girl who is sexy and smart and sophisticated and is really just a businesswoman, whose business is sex. But the high priced call girls and the street walking ones are as different as night and day. So while I believed Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, I did not really believe Roberts as a prostitute here.

But while I didn’t believe Roberts as a prostitute, I have to say I still enjoyed her performance. This may seem like I’m insulting her, but I’m really not, but I do think Roberts excels at these types of roles – roles where she doesn’t really have to play realistic people. She is a movie star, and when she is in full movie star mode, playing whip smart women, she is better than practically anyone else working right now. She is a throwback to the movie stars of yesterday, who did not so much act, as perfect a screen persona, that they used to their advantage in movie after movie. Here, she may be playing the kindest, most cuddly prostitute in screen history, but you fall for her right along with Richard Gere.

Gere himself is pretty damn good in this role as well. I have often felt that Gere is underrated as an actor, because he makes everything so natural and easy. But the guy role in romantic comedies is neither, but Gere pulls it off effortlessly. It helps the movie that the supporting cast, while full of clichéd roles, is played to perfection. Jason Alexander as Gere’s asshole lawyer, Ralph Bellamy as the old man trying to hold onto his company, Hector Eliazondo as the helpful hotel manager who transforms Roberts from the hooker to the princess and Laura San Giacomo as the wisecracking best friend. Yes, we have seen all of these characters in movies before, and since, but rarely have they been played so well.

Perhaps had I seen Pretty Woman years ago, I would have liked it more. It has become pretty much the prototypical romantic comedy, and has been copied so many times since, that the effect the movie perhaps once had has diminished. It is certainly still better than just about any straight romantic comedy I have seen in the last few years, but that’s damning the movie with faint praise, as most romantic comedies these days are really not very good at all. Pretty Woman is a reminder that when done right, romantic comedies can be enjoyable. Maybe not absolute masterpieces, but an enjoyable bit of fantasy, perfect for curling up on the couch and watching with someone you love.

DVD Views: Cujo (1983)

Cujo ** (1983)
Directed by: Lewis Teague.
Written By: Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier based on the novel by Stephen King.
Starring: Dee Wallace (Donna Trenton), Danny Pintauro (Tad Trenton), Daniel Hugh Kelly (Vic Trenton), Christopher Stone (Steve Kemp), Ed Lauter (Joe Camber), Kaiulani Lee (Charity Camber), Billy Jayne (Brett Camber), Mills Watson (Gary Pervier), Sandy Ward (Bannerman), Jerry Hardin (Masen), Merritt Olsen (Professor), Arthur Rosenberg (Roger Breakstone).

Stephen King’s book Cujo is an almost unbearably suspenseful read. It takes its time setting up its characters and their problems, immersing us in their contrasting worlds – between the working class and the upper middle class, the white collar workers and the blue collar workers, before immersing us into a struggle for life and death when an innocent woman and her three year old son are trapped in their car over the course of several scorching hot days, unable to get out because a rabid St. Bernard is outside waiting for them. What happens is next is incredibly suspenseful.

The movie based on the book just fails to have the same impact. Part of the reason is that they have to cut out so much stuff to keep the movie to a 95 minute running time that it’s impossible to pay the same attention to detail as the novel did. The lower class family who owns the dog are pretty much shunted to the background – the mother and son go off on a trip early, and are not heard from again, and the crude father is rapidly dispatched by the rabid dog. Likewise, the woman’s lover, also lower class, is shunted to the side as well, becoming a standard issue loser. The details that they do keep – that of her husband’s struggle with his latest ad campaign seems downright silly divorced from all the details that were left out of the movie.

But perhaps all of these flaws could be forgiven had director Lewis Teague at least gotten the feeling of being inside that car right. In the novel, you get claustrophobic right alongside the woman her son, you can feel the unbearable heat, the long slow hours that stretch into days, the constant fear and panic of what the dog is capable of. Unfortunately, Teague is incapable of providing the same feelings in his movie. The scenes in the car are so hurried that suspense is never given time to build. We do not really feel like they are trapped in there for a very long time, and he fails to make us feel the heat.

Cujo is not all bad. It is a fairly well made, and the dog attacks themselves are appropriately scary. Dee Wallace does as good a job as she can as the woman trapped in the car, and young Danny Pinauro, in his pre Who’s the Boss days, is just the right amount of cute and annoying for a child actor. The rest of the cast is not as good, but then they are not really given much to do. Perhaps Cujo is just the type of story that works better as a book than it does as a movie. Perhaps I just enjoyed it more because King followed his story to its obvious conclusion, whereas the movie cops out in the end. But whatever the reason, I was disappointed in Cujo. I was expecting more given the caliber of the book.

Movie Review: Public Enemies

Public Enemies ****
Directed by: Michael Mann.
Written By: Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman based on the book by Bryan Burrough.
Starring: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis), James Russo (Walter Dietrich), Jason Clarke (John 'Red' Hamilton), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Branka Katic (Anna Sage), Rory Cochrane (Agent Carter Baum), Bill Camp (Frank Nitti), John Ortiz (Phil D'Andrea), Richard Short (Agent Sam Cowley), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Leelee Sobieski (Polly Hamilton), Channing Tatum (Pretty Boy Floyd).

No one makes action movies quite like Michael Mann does. Although he is probably better at directing action than any other director working right now, his films always concentrate more on plot, character and atmosphere than he does on the action. In Public Enemies, his epic movie about bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and the manhunt for him in the 1930s led my Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale), he has many action sequences that are expertly choreographed, photographed and edited, but we walk out of the theater talking about the characters, not just the action. The action is quick and violent - when someone in this movie gets shot, there is blood, and it feels like it hurts. But the action is just a small, though brilliant element, of this movie.

The movie opens as Dillinger has just got out of jail after serving 9 years for an armed robbery of a grocery store. But Dillinger does not stay out of jail for long - he daringly goes back in and breaks out his friends - real bank robbers - and together they will start their crime spree. Dillinger quickly becomes a household name in the great depression. Hardly a Robin Hood - he doesn’t give money to the poor after stealing from the rich - people still like him. He is polite, he doesn’t get violent unless he has to, and he refuses to steal money from the bank patrons. He isn’t after their money, he wants the bank’s money.

Dillinger, and bank robbers like him, present an opportunity for J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), head of the Bureau of Investigation. The problem is that all the bank robbers have to do is cross state lines, and the police cannot chase them. Hoover wants to set up a Federal police force to catch these criminals, and wants them to have different image for his men - he wants clean cut, respectable young men. When Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) kills Pretty Boy Floyd, he becomes a national figure, and so Hoover promotes him, and puts him in charge of catching Dillinger.

Much like Mann’s earlier film Heat, where Robert DeNiro played a bank robber and Al Pacino was the cop chasing him, Public Enemies essentially looks at the two sides of the investigation - Dillinger staying one step ahead of the police, and Purvis trying to catch up. Also like that film, the two main figures in the film only have one conversation in the film. After Dillinger is arrested (he will escape again), Purvis comes to visit him. The showdown between the two men is one of the best scenes in the film.

But the central relationship in the film, the one that makes Public Enemies a great film and the one we remember, is between Dillinger and his girl Billie Frenchette (Marion Cotillard). I was not as big a fan of Cotillard’s Oscar winning performance in La Vie En Rose, but she is sensational in this film. She has the most gorgeous eyes of anyone on the planet, and Mann makes great use of them in her multiple close-ups. Often her performances hinges on slight changes in her eyes, that convey more genuine emotion than any amount of dialogue would. Depp and Cotillard have terrific chemistry together right from their opening scene, where he picks her up in a bar. She is the emotional heartbeat of the film, and she certainly deserves another Oscar nomination for the film at least.

Mann is one of the best directors working right now, and he shows us why in this film. Not only does he draw great performances from his leads, he fills the supporting cast with great actors - Giovanni Ribisi, James Russo, Brank Katvic, John Ortiz, Rory Cochrane and Leelee Sobieski are just a few. I loved Crudup as Hoover, who plays him as slightly effemenite, as well as bitter and spiteful, hunting at the man that he would become. And Stephen Grahmm is great as crazy Baby Face Nelson, Dillinger’s opposite, who is quick tempered, and opens fire at the slightest provocation. But the visual look is also tremendous. Working with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Mann avoids the usual clichéd sepia tone of depression era films, and instead goes for a crisper cleaner look, shot mostly in shades of grey. So while this movie is certainly an homage to the old Warner Brothers gangster movies, as well as later films like Bonnie and Clyde, it is not beholden to them. It has a look and feel all of its own. While the camera moves in this film almost as much as it does in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Mann actually knows what he’s doing, something that I’m not sure Michael Bay did. The camera work, not to mention the great production design by Nathan Crowley, and a wonderful score by Elliot Goldenthal, all combine to make this one of the great technical achievements of the year.

Public Enemies is not quite the rip roaring action movie that I think some audiences will be expecting. While it is certainly true that the movie spends more time on character than on action, when the action sequences are wonderful. Mann knows that one of the most important things about action sequences is to orient the audience to ensure they know what precisely is going on. Unlike some many directors who mistake shaky camera work and rapid fire editing for exciting filmmaking, Mann concentrates more on movement within the frame. No one does it better than Mann does, and Public Enemies is one his best films, and one of the best films of the year so far.

DVD Views: Tokyo!

Tokyo! ***
Interior Design *** ½
Directed By: Michel Gondry.
Written By: Michel Gondry based on the graphic novel by Gabrielle Bell.
Starring: Ayako Fujitani (Hiroko), Ayumi Ito (Akemi), Ryo Kase (Akira), Nao Omori), Satoshi Tsumabuki (Takeshi).

Merde **
Directed By: Leos Carax.
Written By: Leos Carax.
Starring: Jean-François Balmer (Maître Voland), Denis Lavant (Merde).

Shaking Tokyo ***
Directed By: Joon-ho Bong.Written By: Joon-ho Bong.
Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa (Hikikomori), Yû Aoi (Pizza-Delivery Girl), Naoto Takenaka (Pizza-Delivery Man).

Movies like Tokyo always seem to be in theory they turn out in practical terms. This is a film that brings together three of the most daring filmmakers working today - French filmmakers Michel Gondry and Leos Carax along with Korean director Joon-ho Bong - and asks them to tell three different stories set in Tokyo. All three filmmakers deliver unique movies, but only one of them - Michel Gondry - delivers a truly exceptional film. The other two are more uneven. Yet, I do think that overall the film is worth watching, I have seen all three filmmakers do better work.

The first film is Gondry’s. It is about a young couple who move to Tokyo so that he can pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. They do not have a lot of money, and cannot find a decent apartment, so they are stuck in the tiny apartment of a friend, who grows more and more frustrated with them, particularly Hiroko, who unlike her boyfriend, seems to have no ambition at all. She cannot even get a lousy part time job as a gift wrapper. She starts to feel useless, until one day something strange happens to her, and she starts to feel useful again. What that is, I cannot say, but let me say that fans of Gondry’s weirdness will not be disappointed. Gondry, who I think has struggled a little since he had to start writing his own screenplays, has not made a film this good since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film has a great visual look, and as always the visual effects in his films are low budget, but great.

Leos Carax’s film, Merde, is the strangest and most ambitious, but the least successful. A strange man emerges from the sewers of Tokyo and torments the citizens. At first it’s little more than stealing cigarettes, and doing other harmless things. But when he comes across some hand grenades, things get more violent. Put on trial, they discover that he speaks some kind of archaic language that no one else understands. A French lawyer, who says he understands him, comes to defend him. The movie starts out interesting, and contains a wonderful tracking shot at the beginning, but as the movie progresses, it becomes tedious. Merde, the crazy sewer man, speaks his own strange language, that the French lawyer then has to translate into French, then has it translated in Japanese. Everything that is said takes forever to get out for us to understand. While it is an interesting idea, especially when Merde starts going off on his racist rants, it doesn’t quite together.

Joon-ho Bong does something quite interesting in his film. While Gondry and Carax use the vast expanse of Tokyo to full advantage, Bong’s film is about a hikikomori, essentially a shut in. He has no contact with the outside world, except for the food delivery men who come by. One day, a beautiful girl delivers his pizza, and they two connect. She has some of the same obsessions as he does, but when an earthquake hits, she gets scared, and decides to stay in her apartment, forcing him to go out in the world for the first time in years. While this film certainly cannot compete with Bong’s great films - Memories of Murder and The Host - it is an interesting film.

And that kind of sums up Tokyo as a complete movie as well. Like New York Stories or any number of other projects that have done something similar, the results are a little disappointing, as we know the directors are capable of better work, and the constraints of the project show at points. But all three of these films - even Carax’s which I didn’t much care for - are more interesting than most films I see. This may not be a great film, but it is an entertaining one.

Weekly Top Tens: The Most Memorable Movie Suicides

Let me just say this at the beginning – please no one read anything into this list in terms of my mental state. I’m not suicidal, I just happened to come up with this idea when brainstorming new subjects for my top ten lists last week, and decided to run with it. Anyway, these are the 10 movie suicides that I find most memorable – the ones that stick with me, and haunt my dreams at times. Needless to say, there are spoilers for the movies below, so tread carefully.

10. Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) in Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
I put this one done at number 10, because there is no real suicide scene in Leaving Las Vegas. In a sense, the entire movie is the suicide scene. Ben Sanderson is miserable in his life. He has no career, no wife, nothing keeping him going except for alcohol. So he decides to go to Las Vegas and drink himself to death. To Ben, it’s not just important to die, which he wants to do, he also needs to punish himself, so he picks one of the slowest, most painful ways to die imaginable. Nicolas Cage is great in the entire movie, but in the closing scenes, as he approaches death, he breaks your heart.

9. Blake (Michael Pitt) in Last Days (2005)
When Gus Van Sant’s Last Days opens, Blake, a rock star based on Kurt Cobain, is pretty much already dead. He spends his days wandering around is dilapidated mansion, not really interacting with anyone, surrounded by hangers on who do not care, and stoned out of his mind on drugs. The movie does precisely what the title implies – follows Blake in those last few days of his life before he actually kills himself. It is a haunting movie, and Michael Pitt delivers a great performance. The suicide itself is not really seen, but we do see Blake’s lifeless body on the floor of his shack, and then his spirit leaving his body and climbing a ladder upwards, apparently to heaven. It’s an odd, but haunting, moment in a film that up until that point seemed to be committed totally to reality.

8. Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) in Mouchette (1967)
Mouchette is a little girl (probably around 12) whose life is one tragedy after another. Her father is an alcoholic who is cruel to her, her mother is sick and bedridden, and Mouchette has to do all the housework and look after her infant brother. She is mocked mercilessly at school for wearing tattered clothing. One night, she is caught in a rainstorm, and found by an epileptic drunk, who has just killed a man, and wants Mouchette to be his alibi. When she tries to escape, he catches her and rapes her. When she finally gets away, and goes home, she finds her mother has died. She is called a slut by the store clerk, who notices the scratch marks from the rape. Finally, Mouchette decides to end it all, and rolls herself down a hill into a river where she drowns. Out of all the movie suicides on this list, Mouchette’s makes the most sense. After all she has been through, death must have seen like a sweet relief.

7. Father Karras (Jason Miller) in The Exorcist (1973)
The only “sacrificial” suicide on this list, because it is far and away the most disturbing and memorable. When the more experience Priest dies trying to get Satan out of poor little Regan, Father Karras takes over, and challenges the demon to leave the little girl, and enter his body. The demon does, and Karras immediately throws himself out the bedroom window, crashing on the stairs below, where the tumbles down and dies at the bottom. The suicide in the film is one of the most shocking moments in a film full of them. Jason Miller plays the scene perfectly. His face is truly haunting.

6. Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore) in The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Without a doubt, the saddest suicide on this list. Poor Brooks has been an inmate at Shawshank prison for nearly 50 years. He has got used to the routine, used to running his library, and his friends, and his bird Jake. When he gets released, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He tries working the job the assign to him, but packing groceries hurts his hands. The world has become full of cars and moves much faster than he is used to. He thinks about committing a crime to get sent back to jail, but he’s too old to do that now. Finally, feeling he has no other alternative, Brooks climbs up on a chair in his lonely room, and hangs himself. No matter how many times I see the film, this scene still gets to me.

5. Nick (Christopher Walken) in The Deer Hunter (1978)
When the movie opens, Nick seems like a good, well adjusted young man. He asks his girlfriend to marry him, and he plans to go through with it when he returns from Vietnam. But once he and his friends get over there, and are taken prisoner and forced to play Russian roulette by the guards, something in Nick just snaps. He had made Michael (Robert DeNiro) promise he would never leave him over there, and when Michael, who has gotten out and gone home, finds out that Nick is gone AWOL, he goes back for him. His finds that his friend is pretty much entirely gone, now playing Russian roulette for money. The only way Michael can get through to him is to agree to a game between the two of them. As the gun clicks on one empty chamber after another, we get a feeling of dread in the pit of our stomachs. We know what is going to happen, and so does Nick. But he pulls the trigger anyway.

4. Billy Bibbitt (Brad Dourif) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Poor Billy Bibbitt is only in the mental hospital in the first place because his overbearing mother has stripped of what little self esteem he ever had, and turned him into a stuttering, insecure mess of a human being. When R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) enters the ward, he effects all the patients, but Billy perhaps most of all, getting him to come out of his shell a little bit and feel better about himself. When the final party comes, and Billy loses his virginity to one of McMurphy’s girls, for the first time in the movie, Billy seems actually happy. He stops stuttering and actually stands up to Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who treats him the same way his mother did. But all Ratched has to do is mention Billy’s mother again, and he turns into a stuttering mess. The next time we see him, he’s bleeding to death after slashing his wrists. A tragic ending to a kid that we had grown to love.

3. Randy the Ram Robinson (Mickey Rourke) in The Wrestler (2008)
In the 1980s, Randy the Ram was the biggest name in professional wrestling. He filled stadiums with screaming fans, made millions of dollars, and had women begging to be with him. Now, 20 years later, he has lost pretty much everything, but is holding onto his dream. He wants to get back to the big time. But years of doing steroids, and living hard, have taken their toll on Randy, who has a heart attack, and is told never to wrestle again. He tries doing that for a while – tries to reconnect with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and start a real relationship with a stripper (Marisa Tomei), but finally he realizes he cannot take it anymore. He needs to roar of the crowd to keep him going, and if he doesn’t have it, he’d rather die. His “suicide” is nothing more than a wrestling match, that strains his heart too much. Although we do not see him die, we know the match is taking its toll on him, and he knows it as well. When he climbs the ropes one final time to deliver his patented Ram Jam move, he knows when he lands he’ll be dead. And he doesn’t care.

2. Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) in Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Diane Selwyn left her small Ontario hometown in the hopes of making it big in Hollywood. When her lover (Laura Elena Harring) leaves her though, Diane invents her own fantasy world, where she is the sweet and innocent Betty, and Harring is Rita, a woman with amnesia who needs her to help put together a mystery. But when the fantasy world comes crashing down around her, Diane cannot take it. Seeing people coming to get her, she pulls out a shoots herself. David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is one of the best films this decade, and this is only one interpretation of events, but it’s the one I prefer. Watts’s performance is amazing, and the final scene is haunting.

1. Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Full Metal Jacket (1987)
It’s almost a shame that Private Pyle’s suicide ends the first half of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. It ends that section with such a bang, that everything that comes after it seems a little hollow by comparison. The first half of Kubrick’s film ranks among the best work of his career. The second half, not so much. But Private Pyle remains one of his most fascinating characters. Out of shape, he is tormented by his fellow recruits and draftees, not to mention the drill sergeant (R. Lee Ermey, a former real life drill instructor). The army slowly breaks down down Pyle, turning him into a unthinking, unfeeling killing machine. As she sits in the bathroom, he has completely snapped, and he turns the gun on the drill instructor, before he turns it on himself. The gunshot that blows Pyle’s brains out may in fact be the loudest gunshot in cinema history. It is one of the most memorable, and disturbing, moments I have ever seen in a film.

DVD Views: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971)

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971) *** ½
Directed By: Vitorrio De Sica.
Written By: Vittorio Bonicelli & Ugo Pirro based on the novel by Giorgio Bassani.
Starring: Lino Capolicchio (Giorgio), Dominique Sanda (Micòl Finzi Contini), Fabio Testi (Bruno Malnate), Romolo Valli (Giorgio's Father), Helmut Berger (Alberto), Camillo Cesarei (Micol's Father), Inna Alexeievna (Micol's Grandmother), Katina Morisani (Micol's Mother), Barbara Pilavin (Giorgio's Mother).

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opens in Italy in 1938. Mussolini has already risen to power, and he is started to put more and more restrictions on the Jews in the area. The latest offence is that Jews are no longer allowed to marry non-Jews, have non-Jewish servants, attend public schools and other offences. It is strange to watch how the two Jewish families at the heart of the movie react to what is going on.

The middle class family debates what is going on, leading to arguments. Giorgio is enraged by what is happening, and does not want to accept it. When he is kicked out of the library at his school, he demands to see the director, who apologizes for kicking him out, but he has to. He doesn’t make the rules, and he has a family. “All of Italy has a family”, Giorgio replies before storming out. His father tries to rationalize things. No, he does not really like the restrictions, but the Fascists here are not nearly as bad as the Nazis, he says. They still have their fundamental freedoms. They are still Italian after all.

But the Finzi-Continis don’t even seem to notice what is happening. They are exceedingly wealthy, live in a gorgeous estate in their small town of Ferraro, where they are the wealthiest, most influential people in town. If they aren’t allowed at the tennis club anymore, who cares? They have their own court where their adult children Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger) can have their friends over. Only Giorgio is Jewish, but the rest like them anyway. They stay locked away in their big house, and their vast garden, and ignore the world outside. It cannot possibly effect them.

At the heart of the movie is the relationship between Giorgio and Micol. He has been in love with her since they were kids, even though back then he didn’t get to see her very often. She and her brother were homeschooled, but they had to come out once in awhile. At the time, Micol seemed to like him as well, always smiling and laughing and waving when they saw each other. Now that they are older, Giorgio wants to move forward with their relationship, but Micol rebuffs him time and again. Why? They obviously like each other – we can see that in scene after scene. She does not like the guy she is having an affair with very much, but she does it anyway. Micol is trying so hard to hold onto the past – hold onto the image she has of Giorgio when they were kids, that she will not allow herself to move forward. This is also why she never leaves the estate her family owns. Outside of those walls, that garden, is an outside world where she doesn’t know what is going to happen. Inside, she is safe. Right?

The film was directed by Vittorio De Sica, who is best known for his neo-realist works of the 1940s and 1950s. This film is not like those ones at all. Those films, that all took place in postwar Italy, had a reality so harsh for its characters that they could not hide from it. They were poor, they had nothing, and they worked constantly to try and survive. The characters in this movie are different as they have everything, and even though storm clouds are on the horizon, they choose to ignore them. Only Giorgio seems to fully grasp what is going on, everyone else seems to want to rationalize what is happening or ignore it. They do so at their own peril.

DVD Views: Shoeshine (1946)

Shoeshine (1946) ****
Directed By: Vittorio De Sica.
Written By: Sergio Amidei & Adolfo Franci & Cesare Giulio Viola & Cesare Zavattini.
Starring: Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale Maggi), Rinaldo Smordoni (Giuseppe Filippucci), Annielo Mele (Raffaele), Bruno Ortenzi (Arcangeli), Emilio Cigoli (Staffera).

Like the best of his films, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine tells an incredibly simple story with powerful emotions at its core. The story is not complicated, the characters not difficult to read, yet the emotional power the film has over its audience is stunning. Like he would later do in The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D., De Sica’s film is a neo-realist classic in the best sense.

It is post war Italy, and Pasquale and Giuseppe are two poor boys in Rome, who no longer attend school, but work as shoeshine boys, and doing whatever other odd jobs they can find. Pasquale’s family is dead, and he stays with Giuseppe, whose family is poor and needs him to earn money, because no one else in the family can. Theirs is a hard life, and the only joy they take in it is by going to the stables and riding a horse they have their heart set on buying. They do not really need to own the horse, but in a sense they do. It’s their dream, and without it, they may cease to be able to continue on.

Giuseppe’s brother comes to them one day with a job. Take two American army blankets to an old fortune teller who will pay good money for them. They do this, and they’ll make 500 lire, which they really need since they are only 3000 lire short of buying the horse. They agree to the job, but it doesn’t go quite how they think it will. After they sell the blankets, Giuseppe’s brother and some friends arrive posing as police, and rob the woman blind. Pasquale and Giuseppe get a bonus for not saying anything – enough to buy the horse, which they ride through town and feel like kings for a day.

But the fortune teller is able to tell the police who the kids who sold her the blanket were. They are arrested and thrown into a juvenile jail, which they are told they will stay in until they give up their adult accomplices. They steadfastly refuse to say anything, but then the guards play a trick on Pasquale, pretending to beat Giuseppe with a belt, until Pasquale confesses to get them to stop hurting his friend. When Giuseppe finds out, he feels like Pasquale has betrayed him and his family, and the former best friends become enemies.

De Sica was one of the founding members of Italy’s neo-realist movement – a style which can still be seen today in the films of the Dardenne brothers and the great Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. At the time, there was very little money to make films in Italy, so directors like De Sica made films on the streets, instead of in studios, and used non-professional actors, to save on money. The result were films like Shoeshine that have a simple power to them, because they seem so real. Unlike the German filmmakers at the time, who seemed to stick their heads in the sand and refuse to acknowledge their countries sins (something that to a certain extent is just now being corrected), the Italian masters wanted to show their country, warts and all. De Sica’s later film, Umberto D, led to a reformation of pensions for civil servants, even while the Minister of Culture decried the film saying things were not quite that bleak.

In Shoeshine, De Sica has progressed from his earlier films – like the little seen The Children Are Watching Us – to make a genuinely great film about post war Italy. His affinity with children would remain throughout his career, and his ability to drawn natural performances from them remains unrivaled. Perhaps the kids in this movie were so natural because the reality of their lives wasn’t so different from that being portrayed on screen. But whatever the reason, Shoeshine remains a great film – a film that draws us in to a world full of children who are forced to grow up too fast, who stubbornly hold onto to childish dreams, because really, that’s all they have. Reality has encroached their lives far too early.