Jonas Ferry’s blog

Otesánek (Jan Svankmajer, 2000). A couple who can’t get children animates a tree branch, which turns out to be a great threat to everyone. Wonderful animations and a great character in the form of a precocious girl who takes it upon herself to be a hero. [8/10]

Sybil (Daniel Petrie, 1976). A woman suffers from multiple personality disorder and seeks professional help. All split-personality films are silly, and although this is no exception it manages to be somewhat believable and with a really scary character from the woman’s youth. [7/10]

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955). A retired burglar has to return to his occupation to clear his name from suspicion. Interesting characters and Cary Grant in a serious role makes this good. [7/10]

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938). A woman disappears from a train, but no one believes the young woman who claims it. A silly spy film, with a horrible love story, ridiculous humor and the biggest McGuffin I ever saw. [5/10]

Metropolis (original title: Metoroporisu) (Rintaro, 2001). In a future city robots start a rebellion, but a young boy befriends a female robot who happens to be really important. The slave robots are interesting and even though the story is a bit cryptic the different situations are interesting. [7/10]

The robot Tima looks up in Metropolis (2001).

To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). A black man is put on trial in the American south for an attempted rape, and the white lawyer who defends him find himself under pressure from society. A great film, that focus on racism without being either utopian or dystopian. [9/10]

The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993). Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween, wants to do something new with the holiday and kidnaps and impersonates Santa Claus. Everything is great about this film: the characters, the mood, the jokes and most of all the music. Danny Elfman not only composed it, but sang the songs as Skellington. I’ve seen it before, but now I increased my IMDb rating from 9 to 10. This is one of the best films of all. [10/10]

Eragon (Stefen Fangmeier, 2006). A young boy lives as a farmer with his parents, but wants to seek adventure and his destiny in far away places. Luckily his family is torched, so he can go away and learn to use the force… I mean magic, to fight an evil wizard. Sound familiar? I watched this with Helena in Paris in French, but I think I got most of the “story” anyway. It’s interesting to note that the French didn’t have numbered seats, you had to come really early and wait in a queue to get a good seat. [4/10]

Arthur et les Minimoys (Luc Besson, 2006). A young boy is shrunk to a size of a few millimeters and has adventures in a garden. This film was obviously a way to sell a lot of merchandise, but I was still disturbed by some of the themes in the film. Was the love story between the ten-year-old boy and the seductive princess voiced by Madonna really necessary? [4/10]

Amelie from Montmartre (original title: Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain) (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Amélie is a shy woman who lives and works in Paris. She finds a hidden box she wants to return to the owner, and on the way she meets a lot of colorful people. But really, the film is about so much more. I like the narrative tricks Jeunet uses, when he introduces people by presenting their likes and dislikes (a technique also used in his short film Foutaises). When me and Helena was in Paris this New Years we had coffee at the cafe Amélie works in the film, and we visited many of the places used in the film. I’ve seen it before, but this time I give it a 9 instead of the earlier 7. [9/10]

Miller’s Crossing (Joel Coen, 1990). A power-behind-the-throne gangster has a fallout with his boss, joins the opposition and plays the two sides against each other. The film reminded me of the great samurai film Yojimbo (1961), with its cool main character that inexplicably is a hero. What makes him successful is his belief that everyone does everything for a reason and what saves him is that no one can figure out his reasons, maybe even not himself. A good film with the main character always one step ahead of the audience and two steps of everyone else in the picture. [8/10]

A coma woman from Talk to Her (2002).

Hable con ella (English title: Talk to Her) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002). Two men are united by caring for women they like at a coma ward in a hospital. One of them is a nurse that takes care of a woman he was secretly in love with before her accident and the other is the boyfriend of a female bull fighter. As I’m a vegetarian and generally nice to animals I hated the bull-fighting scenes because of the pointless cruelty. I didn’t really connect with any of the characters of the bull-fighter couple, and that made me feel less connected to the story as a whole. The bull fighter’s boyfriend was a writer of some kind, but you never see him work. That makes him feel more one-dimensional as you don’t know what kind of person he really is. [6/10]

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949). Cody Jarrett is a ruthless gangster and a mama’s boy, cruelty and dependence in one. His gang goes into hiding after a train job, and to avoid getting the gas chamber for the people killed during the robbery he confesses to a lesser crime. But a police officer isn’t satisfied, and plants an undercover cop in his cell to make him admit to the other job. The film has multiple people in main roles, but no clear protagonist. This is a strength, as you might see the film from the gangster’s, the police man’s, or the undercover cop’s point of view depending on who you like most. As I’ve said before there are three common variants of film noir according to Krutnik: the tough investigative, suspense and criminal-adventure thriller. White Heat has elements of all three, and some elements can be found in the character Cody Jarrett. In a tough suspense thriller the main character knows less than the audience, but in the other two variants he knows more, and Cody is driving the story while at the same time getting more tangled in the police’s web. Two final notes, the first on the high technology used: the police has regular phones in their cars, they use “oscillators” to track cars by triangulation and spectrographs to compare dirt the train crime scene and a dead body. It must’ve been really cool when the film was new. Also, there’s a town called Springfield with a character called Dr. Simpson. [9/10]

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (English title: The Warrior and the Empress) (Tom Tykwer, 2000). A man and a woman meet by, what may be, chance when he saves her life and she becomes obsessed with him. The film is full of coincidences, but not annoyingly so. The woman still has to fight to meet the guy again, and she has to fight for him to not shut her out. She works at a mental institution where he has to hide for a while, and together with the quirky-but-determined girl it gives the film a Cuckoo’s Nest-meets-Amélie feel. If not for anything else it’s worth watching for the magnificent introduction shot and for the sequence where the main guy meets himself. [8/10]

Chance meeting under a truck in Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000).