Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

An American journalist witnesses the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge hostile regime first hand in Cambodia. The story is gripping and interesting. It switches point of view from Schanberg's more detached perspective to Dith Pran's spectacular flight from Cambodia into a refugee camp. The film is so densely packed with atmosphere and many details that I couldn't look away for the two and a half hours. The ending is touching and doesn't feel over the top at all. I believed all the horrible events Dith Pran had to live through. (There is a brilliant young John Malkovich, too) It is also a film about Western ignorance and without being moralistic about it, the film makes a very clear point. We just don't care, after all. Even when we pretend we do. The cinematography was stunning, so was the editing. I decided to look at the first battle scene around minute 27. The Khmer are attacking and Schanberg has wants to document this for his newspaper. They arrive on site in...

The former court composer Salieri has gone mad as he accuses himself being responsible for the death of the genius composer Mozart. The trick of the film is to have the audience accept that Mozart killed himself, by indulging to the powers of writing a requiem. And it manages to do that - although it felt a bit long at one of two points, until that important revelation and connection between Mozart's inner working and his physical condition is established. The most intriguing thought for me was how Salieri arrives at the conclusion that not he himself kill Mozart, but he managed to cheat god into killing him. And his madness depends about the upholding of this mental construct. There are many other aspects of the films which fascinated me: the scene where Mozart dictates the composition is quite amazing, also from a musical point of view. That little deconstruction and analysis of that little part of the requiem reminded me that there are few things as gratifying as studying ...