The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Who Killed the Electric Car?, Art School Confidential, Death in Venice, The Leopard, Street Fight, & Reds

Half-assed review time! Mainly because it's been almost a month since I last updated about movies watched. And split over a few posts.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu was pretty depressing. It's a Romanian film about an older Hungarian who moved to Bucharest, where he was left by everyone who might have had a reason to love him: his wife died, his brother and sister live hours away and he owes them money, his daughter lives in Toronto and never calls him, his neighbors can't stand him, and the only thing he has is his drinking and his cats. And this film follows him after he woke up one day with a headache and an inability to keep food down. Although many people whose movie taste I seriously respect called this one of the best films of last year, I thought it was very well-made, but just a slight eh. Still good, but not best movie of the year quality.

Who Killed the Electric Car? is another frustrating documentary about reasonable things being destroyed by big corporations and the government in cahoots, this time about how GM built an electric car that could have gone 300 miles between recharges, but was sabotaged by GM and a government trying to keep the old internal combustion engine industry going. And replace one destructive engine with a less destructive but far more inefficient one (hydrogen fuel cells). Why couldn't we just have electric cars? That would be awesome. Also: Mel Gibson's beard was awesome. If only he weren't a crazy person.

Art School Confidential felt like a satire of art schools in search of a plot. The murder plot didn't feel like it worked nearly as well as the parts about how stupid and ridiculous art school can be. Art may be subjective (de gustibus non est disputandum and all), but some art is bad. Objectively.

Death in Venice I just didn't like very much, as it was a movie about a pedophilic composer who is dying. It looks gorgeous though. Luchino Visconti can make a beautiful film, but sorry, I just didn't feel it.

The Leopard has Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon playing Sicilian aristocrats struggling to find their place in a unifying Italy in the 1860s. I'd complain, except that it's Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon. Who are great actors. It was pretty long, and the battle scenes were a little confusing (I had trouble telling white people apart! They were all wearing the same orange uniforms! And the Italians weren't diving!), but the use of color was outstanding, and the unification of Italy is really an under-covered aspect of history in American high schools. Because I remember it as maybe two days where we discussed that and the unification of Germany together.

Street Fight is especially interesting to me, due to the fact that I heard my two of my bosses in the movie (and another former coworker as well). And that the fight for the soul of black community in 2002 was between Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on one side and Spike Lee and Cornel West on the other. Now, as a young white liberal Jewish man, who could I possibly be more in favor of? Ignoring the fact that it's a 32 year old Rhodes scholar/Stanford football star who has worked to improve Jewish-black relations vs an old crusty vulgar corrupt dude who votes enormous pay raises for himself, Spike Lee and Cornel West are pretty awesome, and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have this tendency to say anti-Semitic things and not be awesome at all. Although I knew the ending beforehand, it was disgusting to see just how terrible Sharpe James was in his attempts to ratfuck Cory Booker. Just goes to show that The Wire is capable of being an accurate representation of not just the drug trade, or stevedoring, or the schools (and soon to be the media), they got local politics just right as well.

Reds is a very long film, and just reminds me of how Warren Beatty has so much talent, and has squandered so much over his career. You have great films like Bonnie & Clyde and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and crap like Town & Country (a movie that's supposed to be so bad, I'm tempted to see it, even though I know I'll hate myself in the morning). The movie is so long that it can't fit on one DVD. I bet they could have though, it's only 194 minutes long. The cast is full of famous people, from Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson (acting!) to Edward Hermann, Paul Sorvino, M. Emmet Walsh, Max Wright, Maureen Stapleton, and even Gene Hackman in a small role. Could have had about an hour or so cut. I'm not sure why all those interviews were included in the film, most of them were just duplicating what was shown in the film proper.