Bacurau

 

A collective response in Bacurau

After writing that The Hunt was the umpteenth remake of The Most Dangerous Game, I watched another thinly veiled rehash of the same material, Juliano Dornelles and Kieber Mendonca Filho's Bacurau. The hunters in this one are evil gringos preying upon the inhabitants of an isolated village in the hinterlands of northern Brazil. The writer/directors do a good job sketching the inhabitants of the village who collectively band together to defeat the wicked Anglos. As social parable, Bacurau is thin gruel, but the large cast performs well and the film is beautifully shot. Bacurau's coffin imagery is a distinctive and peculiarly Brazilian touch. The film is a magically realistic palimpsest with the skeletal remains of an old action plot still visible. 

The Trial of the Chicago 7

 

Just one example of the startling imagery of The Trial of the Chicago 7

Remarkably unengaging and badly directed, Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 is prime Oscar bait, but subprime cinema. Sorkin flattens all the participants into one dimensional caricatures. Mark Rylance and Frank Langella do solid work, but cannot overcome their miscasting as William Kunstler and Judge Hoffman. Eddie Redmayne and Sascha Baron Cohen huff and puff as, respectively, Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman, but cannot project a performance that transcends Sorkin's limited conception of these multi-sided men. Only John Carroll Lynch is able to make flesh and blood out of one of the seven as David Dellinger. Sorkin has made a name for himself as the Paddy Chayefsky of our era, but his direction would have seemed dull in the days of the The Philco Television Playhouse. A much better presentation of this travesty of justice is the bare bones BBC Production, The Chicago Conspiracy Trial. 

Best of 1958

1. Vertigo                                                                               Alfred Hitchcock
2. Touch of Evil                                                                     Orson Welles
3. A Time to Love and a Time to Die                                   Douglas Sirk
4. The Magician                                                                     Ingmar Bergman
5. The Tarnished Angels                                                       Douglas Sirk
6. The Hidden Fortress                                                         Akira Kurosawa
7. Bitter Victory                                                                     Nicholas Ray
8. Gideon of Scotland Yard                                                  John Ford
9. Bonjour Tristesse                                                              Otto Preminger
10. The Lineup                                                                         Don Siegel

         Honorable Mention

         Le Beau Serge -- Chabrol,

         The Ballad of Narayama -- Kinoshita, Du cote de la cote -- Varda,

         Rally Round the Flag, Boys! -- McCarey, The Music Room -- Satyajit Ray

         Films I Enjoyed

         Wind Across the Everglades, Party Girl,

         Cowboy, Man of the West,

         The Naked and the Dead, Gunman's Walk,

         Curse of the Demon, The Last Hurrah,

         Indiscreet,

         Gigi, Thunder Road, 

         The Vikings, God's Little Acre,

         The Long, Hot Summer, Horror of Dracula,

         Giants and Toys, Invention for Destruction

         Below the Mendoza Line

         Terror in a Texas Town, The Gun Runners.

         The Left Handed Gun, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw,

         Bell, Book and Candle, The Fly,

         Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Damn Yankees,

         South Pacific, The Quiet American,

         Auntie Mame, I Want to Live,

         A Night to Remember, The Defiant Ones,

         The Missouri Traveler, Houseboat,

         Run Silent, Run Deep. The Buccaneer,

         The Brothers Karamazov, The Young Lions,

         The Big Country, Separate Tables, 

         The Old Man and the Sea