Yo, doggs. This is what I watched over the weekend:
Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton) Finding-tastic! Nemo-riffic!
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov) Mmmph (shrugs shoulders and stares confusedly). I didn't like this movie, but the fault may have been with me. The film traces the life of Armenian poet troubadour Sayat Nova in a series of painterly images drawn directly from the poet's work. My background with Armenian history and literature is pretty much zero, so the images meant little to me and I quickly became bored and surly. Two critics I greatly admire, David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum (who despise each other, by the way), both love this film, but I can go my whole life without ever seeing it again and die happy. Not that I'm going to be happy when I die. I'll probably be in intense pain and scared to death, but you never know. Either way, happy death or agonizingly miserable death, I probably won't see this again.
Rififi (Jules Dassin) Dassin was an American director blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He basically said "fuck this shit," which I believe is a direct quote, and moved to France. This is his first French film, a jewel heist noir with a spectacular 35-minute robbery scene that is completely wordless. It has all the cliches of the genre (the sickly and aging yet suave criminal mastermind fresh out of prison, the ex-girlfriend now hitched up with a rival gangster, the perfect crime, the criminals unraveled by their own petty, human weaknesses), but it does it with panache, my friends. Maybe a little pizzazz, too.
God Told Me To (Larry Cohen) Quite possibly the finest mass psychosis/murder spree/detective thriller/alien abduction/artificial insemination/hermaphroditic Christ figure movie ever. Plus an Andy Kaufman cameo!
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