A Mexican American adventure directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Jaime Fernandez.
The Robinson Crusoe story: An Englishman is shipwrecked on an island for many years and eventually befriends a victim he saves from cannibals.
This was a basic telling of the story. I read the book a while ago and liked it. It seemed that the book had Robinson in a more humbling experience, but this film had him keep his bravado and arrogance. I don't remember the dog and cat being in the book, but I could be wrong. This was recorded on shitty film, not the Technicolor/Cinemascope good stuff. Hence, although it was in color, it looked pretty bad. It looked dirty to tell the truth. If this were being written for school, I would have to discuss western colonialism ideas and why Robinson treated Friday like a slave. He did, but that's how the book was written in 1719. I rate this adequate, but it's going in my Shipwrecked folder with the Cast Aways and Swept Aways. Watch it if you like desert island survival flicks as much as I do.
A French Italian comedy directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Julien Bertheau, Jean Rochefort, Jean-Claude Brialy and Michel Piccoli.
Continuous characters are involved in unrelated events which are meant to make the viewer question socially accepted norms of behavior.
Most of this was incoherent. It just seemed like there was no point. Some of it made a great deal of sense, though. There were 3 scenes that I wish to highlight.
In the first scene, a group of people sit at a table which has toilets instead of chairs. As the scene goes on, it is revealed that they find food to be disgusting. 1 man from the group gets up and goes to "the dining room" to eat in private.
The second scene involves a school girl who has disappeared. Her parents are notified and they rush to the school. When they enter the classroom, the teacher is trying to explain the situation and the girl walks up to tell them she is there. The teacher calls roll and the girl stands up when her name is called. The parents and child go to the cops where the man filling out the report examines the girl who is standing right next to him in order to fill in hair color, eye color, clothing, etc.
A man with a rifle is in a tall building and picks off people on the street. The court hears his case, sentences him to death and he walks out with everyone else like nothing happened.
By using nonsense, absurdity and opposites, Bunuel has created something more than just a comedy. Unfortunately, the people who get it and understand some meaning are the ones who would not need these preconceptions questioned. AND Those who need these preconceptions questioned and should think about them would not understand the film enough for it to prompt them to reflective thought. Using this line of thought, it could be seen as a film used to boast mental superiority. Smart people who get it would show it to their dumb friends and laugh when the friend did not understand. I rate this adequate because what I understood of it was quite funny.
A Mexican comedy directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Luis Alcoriza.
A rich man is drunk all the time, spends too much money and doesn't care about anything. His family all sit around and do nothing. When his brother hears of the problems going on, he convinces the family to move into a poor neighborhood while Spendy McSloshster is passed out. He eventually figures out that he is being lied to and plays the same joke on his family, saying that he really did lose all of his money.
What a unique plot! That was the best part. I've seen revenge, quests, oh no there are monsters, the Fern Gully/Avatar nature deal, check out my super powers, but joke reversal is not done often. We even had dynamic characters! Pretty much everyone changed from the beginning to the end, except the fat, offended extra woman who got called a man. I can't really say too much about dialogue because of the language difference, but acting was spot-on and convincing. As with most Bunuel films, the costumes and sets/locations were nothing special. What I did like about sets was the window washer's platform where the main character tries to jump off a building. Camera-work and editing were pretty straight forward and old fashioned. Lots of medium and long shots with a few close-ups for variety and heightened emotion. The camera coming into focus when the main character wakes up was very appropriate. Audio was a little on the rough side. All of the dialogue was clipping like the sound effects in an old kung fu movie. IMDb lists a rating of 7.3/10 and Rotten Tomatoes lists an Audience Score of 75% for an average (if you couldn't figure this out) of 74%. Yeah, the Bunuel flick that I like gets a C and all the rest get As. Great. I'm rating this good for being unique instead of the same old horse puckey that gets recycled by every other film and it's sequels. Eventually, people might realize that good movies are not the same as other movies. Being different is what makes them good.
A French Spanish romance directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina.
An older man tells the story of his relationship with a younger woman to passengers on a train. The woman has lead him on, only to turn him away multiple times.
Slightly odd and inconclusive, but interesting. The plot held my attention mostly because Conchita treated the main character so poorly. He was also always getting robbed by her male friends. I did care about what happened to the characters, but I can't decide whether I liked Conchita or not. There were some very funny lines of dialogue that were spoken by the butler. He was a master of Stephen Chow style deadpan delivery humor. Seeing that it was a story told in flashbacks, some narration would have been cool. Some people hate narration, but I tend to like it. The costumes and sets were pretty mundane, except the back room dance show (image and female anatomy points). Camera-work and editing were very smooth and stable. I think the style that Bunuel was going for was seamless and it worked correctly. Most of the audio was in French and I found English subtitles that worked when adjusted correctly. There was also some Spanish spoken with no subtitles or subtitles in Spanish. IMDb lists a rating of 8/10, AllMovie lists 4/5 AllMovie Rating with 4.5/5 User Ratings and Rotten Tomatoes lists 100% Tomatometer with 90% Audience Score for an average of 88%. I think that's a little high, but internet consensus indicates that if I think a film is mundane, most people will like it. I rate this o.k. because there are much better things to watch, but it held my interest.
A Mexican drama directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Ernesto Alonso and Rita Macedo.
A man believes that a music box gives him the power to wish people dead.
Boring. Again, Bunuel made an hour and a half long episode of The Twilight Zone. The plot would have fit nicely in 20 minutes if his lack of success in romance and a few deaths were skipped. As is, it took too long to communicate too little. There were 3 characters: Archibaldo, "the woman" and "her husband/father". These latter 2 roles were filled multiple times by different people. I found the dialogue a little dry and dull for a movie about supposed murder. The acting was all done very professionally though. It is very rare for me to watch a film with sets and costumes as mundane as the ones used in this. It was just regular clothes and regular places, nothing out of the ordinary. The camera-work, staging and shot composition were exceptional. I think that may be the only reason to watch this. There was a good variety of long and close shots, with most being somewhere in the middle. There were also some creative low angle shots and shots of items that the main character is looking at. That was the thing to do at the time: Character looks and we see what he is looking at. There was a botched special effect of the main character remembering the death of his governess in which blood is coming from off-screen instead of from the governess. Audio was in Spanish and I got good English subtitles, so it was another situation of half-understanding the spoken dialogue while also reading it. IMDb lists a rating of 7.9/10 and Rotten Tomatoes lists 100% Tomatometer with 93% Audience Score for an average of 90.6%. I disagree. People love it and I don't see what all the fuss is about. I rate this poor because I think it was too mundane and boring to be worth filming in the first place.
A French Italian drama directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean Sorel.
A married woman goes to work at a brothel in order to realize her sexual fantasies. She gets involved with a gangster client who follows her home to start trouble if she doesn't comply with his wishes.
For a film about prostitution, I would have expected more nudity like Jesus Franco would have done. The plot was extremely simple and predictable. The characters developed along similarly predictable paths. I found it appropriate that this was in French because France has a reputation as "the city of love" ...even if you have to pay for it. As with the Chinese films, I think that there was something lost in communication as far as the dialogue goes when it got subtitled. The acting seemed pretty decent though. I really believed the young gangster's acting as #1 bad boy. Locations made sense and costumes were plain, but the prostitutes wore the correct lingerie and the gangsters wore the right suits. The camera-work that stood out to me most was the main character's feet going up stairs to the brothel. The dreams looked amazing too and I actually got what they meant. Audio was mixed right, nothing too loud or too quiet. This won 4/5 awards that it was nominated for in the late '60s. IMDb has a 7.8/10 rating listed and Rotten Tomatoes lists 96% Tomatometer with 85% Audience Score for an average of 86.33%. I think that's a little too high. Sure, it looked good, but it takes more than a pretty face to win me over. If I can figure out what the dreams mean, it's too simple. It's also missing some nudity. I rate it o.k. Maybe you should watch it and see if you agree with consensus that it's amazing or with me that Jesus Franco would have done it better.
A Mexican drama directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Jorge Mistral.
Two young women are living with a rich insect collector. One of them is his wife. Her long lost lover returns from a journey and this causes problems. The other problem is the drunken man from whom the insect collector got so much money. When not putting pins through moths, rich boy goes to terrorize this poor sod and try to take his home, causing Mr. Drinky to get violent.
It's really weird to half-understand the spoken language of a film while reading subtitles. The plot started out really weak and prissy, but it got way more interesting and gritty as it went. Obviously, I don't remember the characters' names, but I could identify them very easily. Even the butt-ugly maid and silent boy were identifiable characters. Dialogue flew by at an alarming pace. English speakers think Spanish sounds fast, but the subtitles were almost flickering they changed so quickly. Add to that understanding about half of the spoken Spanish and it's clear why I forgot names. The sets and costumes seemed like a mishmash of whatever European clothing and buildings could be found in Mexico at the time. I'm not saying they looked bad, just a little desultory. The video quality is what looked bad. It was grainy, noisy, blurry and dark. The shots seemed to be composed thoughtfully though. Speaking in the audio department, dialogue seemed to be at the correct level, but sound effects were more towards '70s kung fu style clipping. IMDb lists a rating of 6.8/10, AllMovie lists an AllMovie Rating of 2.5/5 with 4/5 User Rating and Rotten Tomatoes lists 67% Audience Score for an average of 66.25%. I would argue for a little bit higher grade just for ease of character identification. There are lots of films that could learn much from this! I rate it poor. This is what happens when I watch a movie, work, and then try to write about it. If you really need to see Mr. Drinky get tormented by the bug collector, go ahead and watch it.
A French Mexican adventure directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Simone Signoret, Charles Vanel, Georges Marchal and Michel Piccoli.
A revolution starts because the government takes over mining claims in South America. An old man and a stranger who is new in town are blamed for it, so they leave with the man's daughter and prostitute mistress as well as a local priest. They take one of the military men hostage and head into the rain forest. He escapes with their food and meets up with other soldiers before being shot. The group is left to find their way out of the jungle with no supplies.
This was slow to start, but I liked it more as it went on. The plot started off looking like a Sergio Leone fistful of revolution epic, but turned into wilderness survival for the better. The characters were relatively static, but what interested me was that their relationships with one another changed over time. The hero was a typical Indiana Jones dude who came into town like Trinity. Dialogue was all in French, but I found good English subtitles. I thought the acting was spot-on, but stereotypical like the characters. The world already had tons of western cowboys to model the hero and romantic interest after, as well as the old man in 1956. Costumes looked like a standard western, but sets and filming locations went far beyond that old Texas town. There was lots of jungle B-roll and the locations for scenes in the jungle looked good too. I really like those big, weird-shaped trees. Camera-work was definitely to my liking and very much Sergio Leone style. There were lots of long shots showing distance and space, but not many close-ups. Doing a quick click-through, I hear no non-diegetic music. The dialogue would have been the correct volume if I needed to hear some French and the sound effects were mixed loud, but not clipping. IMDb has a rating of 6.9/10 listed and Rotten Tomatoes has 92% Tomatometer with 60% Audience Score for an average of 73.66%. I would go a little bit higher than that and was glad that Rotten Tomatoes had such a high site score for it. I rate this adequate and would recommend it if you want to see a Sergio Leone film starring Indiana Jones on a jungle survival adventure.
A Mexican thriller directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Silvia Pinal.
Rich dinner guests are trapped in a room of the house where they attended the party. Even though the door is open, they cannot leave. They run out of water and food, lose their humanity and turn against one another.
It was an interesting premise that seems like it would have made a good Twilight Zone episode. An hour and a half seemed a little long though. The plot does develop more fully than my brief description, with different characters acting their parts in the psycho-drama. All of the characters were rich, white and well-dressed, making them difficult to differentiate at times. The doctor always stood out for his age and relative sanity. I could understand a word or few of the Spanish dialogue, but found good English subtitles. The only problem was that "Y" was replaced with "T". The dwarves of Conde Petie in Final Fantasy IX get "hungert", Not Mexican aristocracy. I thought the actors did a great job of going crazy. One woman pulled out her hair and everyone looked haggard in their suits and gowns. Needless to say, not too many sets. There was an exterior and a dining room at the beginning and a church at the end. There were also some exterior shots spread throughout as people outside could not enter the house. Everything else was in the room. Camera-work was not the best I've seen, even accounting for black and white. That honor goes to Fire over England, a dull, but beautifully shot film. I thought the shots stayed too much in mid-range without getting very close or far away and the general compositions just didn't do it for me. There was a disembodied hand special effect and some creative double exposures or layering to make a dream sequence. The audio seemed on for dialogue and there was not much noticeable music (seems to be the current trend). The gritty style and surrealist subject matter definitely reminded me of Un Chien Andalou. IMDb has an 8.2/10 rating listed, AllMovie has 4.5/5 in both AllMovie and user ratings and Rotten Tomatoes has 96% Tomatometer with 93% Audience Score for an average of 90.2%. Why this gets a consensus A- and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) gets a consensus C- is beyond me, but that doesn't happen here. Not on my blog! I would say it should be reversed. This gets my o.k. rating because I don't think it's as magnificent as everyone else apparently does.
An art film by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.The plot is a bit murky with surrealist and dada symbolism.I like weird movies, so this is a real treat. From the ants coming out of a man's hand to the guy dragging the ten commandments, 2 rabbis and 2 dead donkeys on 2 grand pianos, they spared no shock value. If Holy Mountain was too tame and Chronopolis was too coherent, then you must watch this. It will rock your fucking world and you will have no clue why. I'm rating it awesome because Holy Mountain actually is better, but for it's time, nothing beats it.
