Guy Ritchie, Snatch (2000)

Having seen Troy (2004) and Seven Years in Tibet (1997) starring Brad Pitt, convinced me that Brad Pitt must be the worst actor currently alive in Hollywood. Ever since, I have periodically been in heated debates with Hollywood movie fans, who swear that I am wrong about Brad Pitt. So I throw the dogs a bone and admit that I thought Pitt delivered an excellent performance in Fight Club (1999). But at the same time, I have sealed a pact with myself, that I would no longer watch movies that feature Brad Pitt.

I recently was pointed out the existence of Pikeys or Irish Travellers and the same person recommended to me to watch Snatch, in which Bradd Pitt plays the Pikey Mickey O’Neil. Irish Travellers are a fascinating ethnicity that can be traced back to the Medieval era as a separate people and speak their own language. Although Guy Ritchie is a mediocre director and a simply horrific script writer whose humoristic punchlines never rise above the level of predictability, in Snatch he has gathered a few actors that are able to uplift a bad movie to an entertaining movie. Snatch is not a very good movie, and although Pitt plays a similar character in Fight Club, the latter stands in a different category. Pitt’s acting in Snatch is also not particularly outstanding, but he does impress by his effort to remain true to the authentic Irish Traveller’s language, which he apparently studied intensively. If you’re interested in Irish Travellers, Brad Pitt’s acting in Snatch makes it worth watching the movie, but that’s the only reason.

Rudolph Maté, The 300 Spartans (1962)

Having read Frank Miller’s comic book based on this movie earlier, it is fabulous to see the source of inspiration for it. The 1962 movie cannot be seen solely as a re-enactment of a classic epic, but has to been viewed with the Cold War in mind, just as we will have to view the 2007 movie with the Iraq War in mind. Nevertheless, the movie rises above its time in place and history, and is a fabulous work following the Greek epic, which in its time surely no less was a piece of political propaganda. So concluding, if we were to ask ourselves can art be made under the banner of political proganda, we will have to admit that it has been done, and thus it is possible.

See also:
Frank Miller, 300

Ron Howard, The Da Vinci Code (2006)

The Da Vinci Code is not a classic movie, and like the original book never reaches the literary level of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or In the Name of the Rose, so also does the movie never achieves the closeness of perfection like the filming of In the Name of the Rose. But like the book, the movie, is worth while watching for the literary structure and its genial play with the theme. Of course, as a phenomenon that grasped the fascination of the popular and religious audiences for some years in the beginning of the 21st century, it is perhaps a must to inform oneself about Dan Brown’s book, and with this obligation watching the movie is simply entertaining, although you should seriously doubt the casting of Tom Hanks for the role of Dr. Robert Langdon. Tom Hanks was born to play the role of average, white-bread all-American, not that of a highly distinguished academic with an edge.

Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

Steven Spielberg, Munich (2005)

It could be me, but I like the Steven Spielberg who makes movies that lie close to his cultural heritage as an American-Jewish cineast, so much better than the Steven Spielberg of the blockbuster movies. Okay, this is just me, I can’t digest the average taste of the masses very well, something has to have roots in order to grow into a lasting impression. So when someone asks me, when is Steven Spielberg at his best, I would suggest them to go and look at his documentary project Shoah, Schindler’s List or Munich.

Spike Lee, Malcolm X (1992)

The philosophy of black resistance against the white suppresion in the United States has brought forward many great black thinkers and ideologists, and the life stories these leaders had to tell are not seldomly compelling and extrordinary, like Frederick Douglass‘ ‘A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’ or Booker T. Washington‘s ‘Up from Slaverly.’ But few stories will be so dramatic and of lasting inspiration in American culture as that of Malcolm X. As despised by contemporary and some elements of modern white culture out of fear for the power of a black man, as he was by fellow black civil rights leaders, and ultimately brought down by the fraticide of his own people, the Nation of Islam, as he became to question the power of a movement out of whose ranks he had risen.

An excellent re-enactment of Malcolm X’s autobiography by co-stars Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, who looks stunningly close to the historic Malcolm Little or ‘Red.’

Stanley Kramer, Inherit the Wind (1960)

It is rare to see a movie that is 50 years old about a topic that was in the news 80 years ago, that still has kept its relevance and cinematographically not been dated whatsoever, but ‘Inherit the Wind’ is a classic of its own sort. Of course, there’s no acting like it anymore, with star actors like Spencer Tracey, Fredrick March and Gene Kelly who were trained in an era that good actors were most of all drama actors who played character roles. But also the play by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence is brilliant with lines like ‘I might be rancid butter, but I am on your side of the bread’.

The play is a celebration of thr triumph in modern Amerika of the free-thinking individual mind versus the dogmatic believers of the old faith. But how actual this fight still is unfortunately in the bible belt of America and the world! Creationism is not dead yet and the scientific findings of evolution are painful in their truth and denial of divine powers. Only stain on the movie is perhaps the conciliatory tone by which the movie ends, in which the ‘agnostic atheist’ walks out of the court room with the Bible and Darwin’s ‘The descent of man’, while attacking the nihilist reporter played by Gene Kelly, to whom nothing matters and for whom no one will be mourning at his grave. This stereotype of the nihilist is powerfully exploited by religious people, portarying him as a lonely and pathetic figure, the cold thinker who deep down, behind his facade of self-assurance hides the depth of loneliness. So, okay, you are gonna have to shrug your shoulders at the end, but apart from the last 60 seconds, it is all worth watching.

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!”

The play was based on the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which the teacher John T. Scopes resisted the state law that forbid teaching the theory that man descended from lower animals in public schools or school funded by state money. The whole discussion resembles closely the policy of the current Bush administration that forbids federal funding of research using new stem cell lines, fund AIDS/HIV programs that support the use of condoms or that directs funds to faith based initiatives mainly. Do I believe in the evolution of man, in progress and advance of knowledge, yes, wholeheartedly, but it may be noted that progress occurs in different paces and not all folk out there advance with time.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972)

A movie after a book by the acclaimed Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, and a juwel of artistic cinema. You may wonder how any one could ever have the atrocious nerve to re-do it! Yes, you didn’t count on Hollywood, they indeed thought of it in 2002, but there’s not a cinematgropher alive in Hollywood who can approach this brilliantly construed movie.

Ashutosh Gowariker, Swades, we the people (India – 2004)

Another movie with star actor Shahrukh Khan. The social themes in Bollywood movies are predominant and certainly are in Swades, we the people. It is actually why I like Indian cinema, words like emancipation, unemployment, poverty, injustice and a plot advocating brotherhood, education and patriotism are very common. It gives Bollywood a touch of moral superiority that Hollywood can’t reach for.

Valeri Todorovsky, The lover (Russia – 2002)