Carrie (1976)

Posted on October 29, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip for French Toast Sunday.

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a social outcast due to her crippling shyness, awkward nature and plain, dowdy appearance, all a product of her intensely overbearing religious mother (Piper Laurie). Carrie’s pariah status comes to a head when, after a particularly bad gym class, she experiences her first period in the communal shower at school and, not understanding what is happening, she believes she is bleeding to death and pleads with the others for assistance, who only provide mocking and humiliation. Her mother believes the blood to be a curse from Satan and locks Carrie in a closet, but it seems all this mental and physical torment is causing the traumatised girl to develop telekinetic powers. Continue reading →

All the President’s Men

Posted on September 16, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip series over at French Toast Sunday.

June, 1972. Five men are caught having broken into the Watergate Complex, specifically the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Routinely checking out their trial, reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) begins to suspect something may be up through some odd details of the trial, and a shared phone number amongst the address books of some of the accused. Bob’s colleague Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) helps Woodward write a piece on the potential scandal, and the two of them – with the support of their editor Benjamin Bradlee (Jason Robards) and a highly secretive and selective informant known only as Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) – dig ever further into how far this story goes.
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Donnie Darko

Posted on September 12, 2015 by jaycluitt

One morning in early October, 1988, troubled teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is coerced into sleepwalking by a mysterious figure in a creepy giant rabbit costume. He wakes up on the local golf course and heads home, only to find a jet engine has fallen into his bedroom, with the FAA claiming no such engine is missing. Had Donnie been home, he’d have been killed. In his dream, Donnie was also told that the world would end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 26 seconds, so he sets out attempting to unravel this mystery whilst also dealing with the regular trials and tribulations of a teenager in the 80s.

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Schindler’s List

Posted on September 6, 2015 by jaycluitt

During World War II, an entrepreneurial member of the Nazi party, Oscar Schindler (Liam Neeson) takes advantage of the mistreatment of Jewish citizens by using them for cheap labour in his enamelware factory. However, as he gets to know his workers better – particularly his right hand man Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) – and witnesses first hand the inhuman brutalities they must endure – particularly at the hand of concentration camp overseer Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) – Schindler begins to realise the change he can make to the people around him.
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Deliverance

Posted on August 28, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written for French Toast Sunday as part of my USA Road Trip series.

In a few months time, the Cahulawassee River is to be flooded by a dam. Four men, only two of whom have any experience canoeing, set out to row down a stretch of the river, before it is tamed by man and gone forever. However, the river has other ideas, as do the locals who don’t think too much of these naive city folk heading down their river.
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Vivre sa Vie

Posted on August 27, 2015 by jaycluitt

This review was originally written for Blueprint: Review.

Over the course of twelve chapters we experience the life of Nana (Karina), an aspiring actress and shop assistant who turns to prostitution when her acting career fails to take off.

There comes a point where you have to just sit back and declare that some things aren’t for you. You’ve tried them, often numerous times, but always with a similar, less than stellar result. No matter how hard you try, it’s just not something you can get on board with. And so it is with me and the cinema of the French New Wave. It’s not the worst I’ve seen – I’d possibly hand that crown to Godard’s À Bout de Souffle – but Vivre sa Vie comes close. It strikes me as a film in which the director is actively challenging the audience to pay attention, providing as he does multiple occasions where surely only the most fervent of viewers can remain engaged. Throughout this film we witness an entire letter being hand written, word by word, with the camera focussed intently on the letter. A poem is recited, in full. A conversation is had with French philosopher Brice Parain. And through all the ambling, overly self reflective, ponderous yet vapid naval gazing I struggle to maintain a grip on my conscious state as Godard hints at, but never fully embraces a narrative.
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JFK

Posted on August 25, 2015 by jaycluitt

On November 22nd, 1963, President John F Kennedy was killed, supposedly by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself was killed by a man named Jack Ruby before the case could go to trial. Despite several other theories, the case was dropped for three years, until Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, picked it up again after noticing some discrepancies within the Warren Report, written to document the details of the assassination. Garrison and his team re-launch the investigation, certain that there is more to it than simply one man and his gun.
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La Grande Illusion

Posted on June 27, 2015 by jaycluitt

On a mission to re-do aerial photographs over a German base during the First World War, the plane is shot down and the two Frenchmen on board are captured by the German army and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. There, along with the men sharing their quarters, they attempt to tunnel out, but before they are able to they are shipped to an escape-proof stronghold, run by the same German officer who was the cause of them being shot down in the first place.
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Picnic at Hanging Rock

Posted on June 24, 2015 by jaycluitt

A field trip from an Australian girls’ school to the nearby geographical landmark of Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day in the year 1900 goes awry when four students separate from the rest of their class to go exploring the rock. Whilst everyone else is asleep, one of their teachers heads off in search of them, but only one of the original girls returns, forcing the rest of the class to abandon those missing, including the teacher, in order to return home before nightfall. The school and town becomes obsessed with finding the vanished girls, as does a young Englishman who happened to see them heading into the rocks.
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In the Mood for Love

Posted on June 20, 2015 by jaycluitt

Two couples move into the same small tenement building in 1960s Hong Kong on the same day. Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) is a secretary and personal assistant at a travel company, working under her adulterous boss and literally keeping his affairs in order, whilst her husband is often away on business for longs periods of time. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) is a writer whose dreams of writing martial arts serials have floundered due to lack of inspiration. His wife often works late too. When Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow begin to suspect that their respective partners are having an affair with one another, the two become close, and the chance to follow in their partner’s footsteps becomes a tentative possibility.

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