Los Olvidados (Bunuel, 1950)

Los Olvidados (Bunuel, 1950) - #TSPDT #109

A boy from the slums tries to escape his fate as a criminal but it keeps coming back at him.

It was an amazing watch and the depressing feeling already eminent in the beginning got worse during the course of the film.

There is the incessant knocking of evil on the door throughout this film. Although the movie itself feels pretty upbeat in a way - which might have to do that most of the characters accept their fate and try to make the best of it. The only thing that sets the hero really apart from the others, is his respect towards other people - even if there is only very little. And although we try to sympathize with him, the scene in the correction facility with the hens shows, that - even though not without hope - he is already pretty far advanced on the path towards doom. (There's a thing with chicken and evil)
The evil boy - lustful, revengeful, hateful and enticing at the same time - is definitively a great villain to hate and, funnily enough, I really longed for him to get punished. I wonder if it's easier to hate the bad guy than admiring the hero - or is it just easier to summon the mean into a character, maybe because there are so many sources to draw from.

Kommentare

Beliebte Posts aus diesem Blog

Time of the Gypsies / Dom Za Vesanje (Emir Kusturica, 1988)

A supernaturally gifted boy from a Gypsy community is forced to survive in the world of crime. The intriguing qualities of Kusturica's films I've seen is his relentless depiction of basically crazy communities. Not just agreeably potty, they're usually outright interstellar-nuts. Here, he follows the fate of the rather harmless boy Perhan, that leaves for Italy in hope of a better future for him and his loved ones. There are some enormously interesting images in the film that kept ringing long after. The ritual in the river and the last scene in the church ruin (with a horse standing somewhere far back in the image...). After sketchily mapping out the scenes it is surprising how rigorously three-acty the screenplay is constructed. The first act seems quite long in terms of time and number of scenes, but there is also a lot of imagery spent on depicting life in this crazy universe, which makes the second part in Italy much more believable. And there is a certa...

The Bank Dick (Cline, 1940) #DTC #848

The grumpy family head and hobby sleuth gets hired by the local bank. I have never (gasp) watched a WC Fields movie before, so it took my pretty long to get used to this - in its time well known - personality that is quite a misanthrope. The pacing of the actual film felt slow and the scenes had not a lot of connection to the grand story, basically just setting the stage for the gags Fields was performing. It is quite interesting if you start to sympathize for such a thoroughly unsympathetic character on screen. Maybe because the man basically just wants to be left alone - everything that happens to him, even under the most contrived circumstances doesn't affect him in the least. It doesn't even look like he is interested in the money. Except for the money part, the disaffectionate personality seems like a rather modern rendering of the hedonistic generation Y, despite all vintage look-and-feel. I wonder about the other films, hope to get around to see them soon.

Detour (Ulmer, 1945) #TSPDT #390

A hitchhiker is picked up by death and then picks up his personal tormenting devil. The plot looked fairly straightforward, but the magic of this gem is that the story strand convolutes until it tightens into a strangling gordic knot - which is pretty much exactly what happens towards the end. The flashback structure are very noir-ish, so was the plot - everything straight down, right from the beginning. I really rooted for the guy to get out of this situation, but every time he takes a decision it actually gets worse - so in the end I was just hoping he might die and get relieved. Most striking was the jaw-dropping performance of Ann Savage. She pops out about a mile and her character is rendered so immensely unlikeable that I wondered that she has not been called the godmother of a new type of acting school (maybe she was?) This is definitively a film worth studying again. Its shortness does nothing to diminish the impact and it is rich on details.

Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

Dieses Blog durchsuchen