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| Fellini and Mastroianni on set |
Oh the mountain of must see movies and my humble attempts to scale it...
Progress will be compiled at the end of each month and the films are listed in order of preference.
8 ½
Federico Fellini (1963)
Felini’s meta-masterpiece follows a jaded director’s efforts
to balance the artistic, religious and romantic forces in his life amidst the production
of his upcoming film. Marcello Mastroianni plays the disillusioned Guido with effortless cool in a film which is perhaps the richest celebration of the cinematic craft; a surrealist circus with plenty of hot Mediterranean blood pumping through it's veins.
Once Upon a Time in the West
Sergio Leone (1968)
Modernity pulls into the Wild West track by track in this epic opus to Leone’s Spaghetti series. The stunning Claudia Cardinale plays a New Orleans lady of the night who arrives in a burgeoning Western town to find the man she left for and his three children gunned down in cold blood with the man responsible seemingly on the payroll of a crippled railway tycoon who dreams of the Pacific Ocean. Quentin Tarantino has become synonymous with the homage but amongst his vast number of influences surely this film has left the deepest mark. Seen today, the ending feels so Tarantinoesque one would almost think Leone was picking at his brain as opposed to the other way around.
Mother and Son
Aleksandr Sokurov (1997)
Sokurov’s first film to make major waves internationally
focuses on a son’s tender efforts to nurse his dying mother. Sokurov used
coloured glass plates, special lenses and the influence of painter David Casper
Friedrich to create some stunning imagery but viewed on a rainy Tuesday
afternoon- and with a pace comparable to Tarkovsky at his most contemplative- this
humble viewer had neither the head nor the heart for such an undertaking. This
is cinema at its most serious.
