Sunday 18 October 2009

Movie Review: For A Few Dollars More (1965)


The middle chapter of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, For A Few Dollars More is probably the least celebrated installment, but also ironically the most complete film among the three.

While A Fistful Of Dollars is magnificent in its sparseness and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is magnificently overblown, For A Few Dollars More sets about delivering the most solid character-driven narrative, perfectly meshing Leone's style with another brilliant Morricone score and a fleshed-out story now clearly backed by a bigger budget.

There are more locales, more extras, more scenes, more characters and more background than the first installment, without yet veering into all-out opera territory.

After the remarkable and unexpected success of A Fistful Of Dollars in Europe, Leone rapidly pulled For A Few Dollars More together. He convinced Clint Eastwood to sign-up for the sequel and reprise his role as the Man With No Name, even though the first film had not even been released in the US. With more budget at his disposal, Leone was also able to afford another American actor, and Lee Van Cleef got the role of Colonel Mortimer.

The plot sees Eastwood and Van Cleef as two bounty hunters who eventually team up to take down the gang of the vicious bandit El Indio (another perfect Gian Maria Volonte villain). There are bank robberies, gun-fights, exotic guns, and a terrific hat-shooting duel. The memorable secondary characters include Klaus Kinski as a massively haunch-backed member of El Indio's gang. The film reaches a climax with a final showdown that is almost triangular, sowing the seed for the magnificent finale that Leone conjured up for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The final math puzzle resolved by The Man With No Name is a terrific cherry on top of the icing on the cake, perfectly capturing the spirit of the trilogy.

For A Few Dollars More makes use of flashbacks and a simple but haunting tune (in this case played by a pocket watch), both tools that Leone would develop to chilling perfection in Once Upon A Time in the West.

For A Few Dollars More is the meat in the sandwich of the Dollars trilogy, not the most visible part of the meal, but certainly an essential component of the experience.






All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Sunday 11 October 2009

Film Review: We Loved Each Other So Much (2003)


The Lebanese Civil War erupted in 1975, and lasted for 15 years. Approximately 200,000 lives were lost in the conflict, which pitted the Lebanese against each other with a large dose of foreign intervention.

When the conflict ended, deep societal scars took hold, and exist until today.

In 2003, about 13 years after most of the shooting stopped, Dutch Director Jack Janssen took his documentary cameras to Lebanon and conducted interviews with Lebanese survivors of the war. In We Loved Each Other So Much, he captures a vivid cross-section of society: former fighters who were on opposite sides of the front lines; civilians who were caught in the cross-fire; members of the country's cultural community; an Armenian photographer; and two generations of Palestinian refugees.

The common thread that the film captures is the music of the Lebanese diva Fairuz. A brilliant singer with searing emotion in her voice, and famous throughout the Arab word before, during and after the Civil War, Fairuz did not leave Lebanon during the war, nor did she ever take sides; she simply survived the conflict along with her fellow civilians, and kept recording and performing whenever she could.

She became a symbol of hope and endurance -- ironically, for all sides of the conflict.

As the country disintegrated and Lebanon made the journey from the Switzerland of the Middle East to the world's most notorious hell hole, lives were destroyed, massacres were unleashed, buildings collapsed, society tore itself apart...and the music of Fairuz played on, often lamenting the misery unfolding around it or providing a diversion from it.

Janssen's cameras capture the full emotions of the war that the music of Fairuz unlocks in the Lebanese survivors. The interviewees gradually reveal themselves to be a range of victims and survivors, all with tender emotional wounds just below the surface. Many suffered personal losses and direct encounters with death. One former fighter sees little hope and lives in despair. Others have patched up their lives and carry on with hope for the future but a wary eye on the past. The songs of Fairuz bring back memories of life's milestones, often wrapped in the pain and suffering of a savage conflict.

We Loved Each Other So Much is a well-crafted testimony to the raw emotional power of music, and to the talent of Fairuz. It is also a stark and tragic human recounting of the consequences of war, and while the film focuses on Lebanon, similar wasteful tragedies unfold daily around the world.








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Sunday 4 October 2009

Movie Review: A Fistful Of Dollars (1964)


The seminal Spaghetti Western, A Fistful Of Dollars created a sub-genre, launched the career of Clint Eastwood and established Sergio Leone as a visionary director.

The Man With No Name (Eastwood), sometimes called "Joe", is an an expert gunslinger and arrives on a mule to the small town of San Miguel along the Mexico/US border. The town is dominated by two families vying for control of the cross-border illegal trade: the Baxters smuggle weapons while the Rojos deal in alcohol. The two families are busy trying to kill each other, and the coffin-maker understandably operates the only thriving business in town.

"There's money to be made in a place like this", proclaims "Joe", and he proceeds to alternately offer his services to the two families, getting rich as he plays them off against each other. Eventually the war between the families escalates to massacres and an epic final showdown between two men left standing

Despite not being able to communicate with his one English-speaking TV actor, Leone somehow harnessed the Spanish desert, a shoestring budget, and a supporting cast of Italians and Germans into a sly remake of the then-forgotten Japanese film Yojimbo. Ennio Morricone provides a sparse yet haunting soundtrack like no other, and Leone unleashes his artistry with several stylistic signatures, from tight focus shots on the eyes to dramatically staged operatic duels filmed from unique and dynamic angles.

A Fistful Of Dollars perfected the persona and image of the willing-to-kill anti-hero, a man so jaded he barely bothers to speak or introduce his name. His only virtue is that he is - perhaps - a bit less evil than all else that surrounds him. And maybe the Man With No Name is not a man at all, just a manifestation of death roaming the land as a symbol of the frontier's mortal dangers. 
With his poncho, ever-present cigarillo, and cynical soft-spoken style, Eastwood dominates the film to the point where the plot does not really matter -- only this character's next step is relevant. The colourful Rojos, with Gian Maria Volonte terrific as Ramon, are evil in the most brutally cartoonish manner. The feminine interest, in the form of Ramon's mistress Marisol (played by Marianne Koch, who says about five words in the entire film), is a suitably vague victim in this savage borderland.

Leone stages the wild set-pieces as baroque tableaux of bloody carnage fuelled by Morricone's mesmerizing music: the initial gun-fight with the Baxter cowboys; the overblown massacre by the river; the cemetery shoot-out; the prisoner exchange scene; one family slaughtering the other; and the final showdown are all over-the-top odes to death.

Hailing the merits of complex simplicity, A Fistful Of Dollars is low-budget rising to excellence.






All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.