Antonio Salieri

Film: Amadeus
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I had forgotten just how good Amadeus really is.

I mean that just as it sits. I remembered it as great in a way that few films are, of course. It’s great and grand in that “really earned Best Picture” way that even fewer films are. It’s the sort of film that, even if you had another horse in the race, you couldn’t really object to its winning. It’s a piece of Hollywood legend that Laurence Olivier announced the winner without even opening the envelope, but there really wasn’t any doubt which film deserved to win. I remembered all of this. I remembered Tom Hulce’s insane giggle and F. Murray Abraham’s combination of adoration and hatred. But I forgot just how damn good this film is, how entertaining it is, and how much I enjoy watching it all unfold.

And the music. Oh, the music. The glorious, unreal music that runs through this entire film from start to finish. The music is so sublime that even without the rest of the things that make this film so watchable and so both good and great, it would still be worth nearly three hours of your time simply to listen to it. Throughout we are graced with compositions from Salieri and Mozart, and are given key pieces of Mozart’s great works including The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, and his epic requiem mass. How the hell did I forget all of this?

Off Script: The Asphyx

Film: The Asphyx
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

There is a particular joy that is typically denied the horror fan: period pieces. Sure there are horror films set in the future, especially in space, but there’s something particularly entertaining about seeing the supernatural world depicted in a Victorian setting. Such is the world of The Asphyx, an odd little British film that rather goofily explores the razor-thin line between life and death.

Enter Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens), a man of wealth, philanthropy, and science who conducts experiments of “psychical research.” He arrives home with his new bride-to-be, Anna Wheatly (Fiona Walker) to meet the rest of his family. These are his son Clive (Ralph Arliss), his daughter Christina (Jane Lapotaire), and his adopted son Giles (Robert Powell). We also learn of his current investigation. He and his friend Sir Edward Barrett (Alex Scott) have been experimenting with photography. Specifically, they have been taking pictures of people at the moment of their deaths. In each case, they notice an odd smudge near the person, and they determine that this smudge is photographic evidence of the soul leaving the body.

Ringside

Film: Rocky; Million Dollar Baby
Format: DVDs from personal collection on laptop.

When you think about Rocky, it’s likely that you think about the fight at the end of the film or the fantastic training montage that leads up to the fight. That’s natural, because it’s a film about boxing and about a guy who gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance. It’s easy to forget the first hour of the film that sets up those scenes at the end. It’s easy to forget, in the career he had in stupid cop and revenge films following this breakthrough role that Stallone is a smart guy and a capable actor (he did, after all, write the screenplay). With the jingoistic and maudlin series of sequels that followed the original film (Rocky V, anyone?), it’s easy to forget just how damn good the original Rocky really is.

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) is a bum of a fighter and a part-time legbreaker for a cheap loanshark named Gazzo (Joe Spinell). We start with one of his fights, which he wins. He takes a beating and a cheap headbutt, and walks away with the grand prize of about $40. The next day, Mickey (Burgess Meredith), who trains boxers at the club Rocky uses, kicks him out of his locker. Rocky and Mick have never had a good relationship because, as Mick tells him, Rocky had the makings of a contender but wasted his talent.

Moves Like Jagger

Film: Performance; Gimme Shelter
Format: DVDs from NetFlix on laptop.

Performance is not one film, but two. That these two films have the same characters and that one ends specifically when the other begins is of little importance. That the two films eventually meet and merge at the end, though, is of very great significance, and it’s equally significant that the two experiences placed under this single name are packaged as a single entity.

Let me explain. At the beginning, Performance is a fairly standard British crime drama. We’re introduced to Chas (James Fox), who works for a man named Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon). Chas is a foot soldier whose main job is intimidation. We get the sense that Chas is in it for both the money and the violence. The trouble starts when Harry decides to take over a bookie joint owned by a man named Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). He expressly forbids Chas from being involved in the takeover because Chas and Joey have a rocky history.

Boredom Made Flesh

Film: Uzak (Distant)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

With Uzak (Distant), Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has given me something of a poser. I’ve been sitting here looking at this almost-blank document for 20 minutes trying to think of something to say about this film and honestly, not much is coming. I’m not sure that this is a fault in the film. Ceylan’s film is simultaneously a brilliant piece of cinema and dreadfully dull—but it’s dull by intent.

Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) is a commercial photographer living in Istanbul. There was a time when he was greatly interested in art and the more artistic side of his profession, but time and necessity have turned him into a sort of wage slave. Mahmut seems to be passively dead from the neck up. Things change, or at least have the potential to change, when his cousin Yusuf (Emin Toprak) arrives from the country. Yusuf has lost his job in a factory when the factory closed. He’s come to Istanbul with the dream of working on a ship, hoping that not only will he see the world, but also make money.

Redemption

Film: Tsotsi
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

The opening 15 minutes of Tsotsi is one of the most intense film experiences I have ever had. In this 15 minutes or so, our title character (Presley Chweneyagae) kills a man in a subway, beats one of his friends half to death, shoots a woman and steals both her car and her infant son. The genius of the film, much like the genius of a film like Peeping Tom, is forcing us as the audience to eventually come to respect and even like a character as reprehensible as Tsotsi (which translates as “Thug”), and to do it in the very short running time of the film. It’s remarkable.

Tsotsi is the leader of a gang of four. His seconds are the large and somewhat genial Aap (Kenneth Nkosi), Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe), and the more scholarly Boston (Mothusi Magano), who the gang also call “Teacher Boy.” Instigating a mugging on the subway, Tsotsi stabs the man and the others hold him up until the other train riders depart. Afterwards, Boston reacts badly to the murder, confronting Tsotsi on his evident heartlessness. This leads to Tsotsi beating Boston badly, then running away on his own. It is here that he sees a woman struggling to enter her home. He jumps into her car and shoots her when she protests, not realizing that she wasn’t going back for the car, but her son.

Ingrid Meets the Proletariat

Film: Europa ‘51 (The Greatest Love)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

There’s a strange tenor to Europa ‘51 (also known as The Greatest Love). I’m half convinced that Rossellini’s message as presented is dangerous rather than uplifting or in any way enhancing of the human spirit. This is a film that attempts to have a huge emotional impact on the viewer, and in my case mostly failed to move me that much. More to the point, I genuinely can’t tell if Rossellini’s morality tale is pro-communist, anti-communist, or if (in the words of Tim Curry in Clue) communism is just a red herring.

Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman) is a well-to-do socialite living in Rome in the years just after World War II. There is hope of a continued peace, but the country is in some turmoil. The Girards have enough money to not only live well but to entertain fairly lavishly. The relationship between Irene and her husband George (Alexander Knox) have an evidently distant relationship. It’s not at all adversarial, but it doesn’t seem to be very close.