Galicius

I was looking forward to this film to see what a filming of a novel I actually remember quite well even though I read it more than 45 years ago. The reason I remember it so well is that the ending brought tears to my teenage eyes when Marcin finds out that a girl he adores is gone with the family to the vast Russia. I was surprised to hear the girl's father reprimand his family, or perhaps her, not to use Polish language at home. I don't remember that from the novel and I was under the impression that their exile to Russia was a political punishment. A good deal of the film is appropriately enough in Russian language while the novel is entirely in Polish. The student struggle is portrayed well and the oppressive Russian domination. The film focuses on the last years described in the novel.

It's an interesting film with a romance between a minor Polish military officer and a wife of a Russian officer stationed in a huge military base in Poland's Lower Silesia. A daughter is born out of the romance and the mother dies. We only find out in the end how it all happened when she, the daughter, and the widower visit the grave of the dead woman in Poland again after some twenty years. The same Russian actress who plays the mother plays the daughter role. More than half of the film is in Russian. There is fine music included of Ewa Demarczyk sung by the actress perhaps. It's in Polish with an accent with some Russian lyrics added. (We saw Demarczyk sing these songs at the Town Hall, NYC, winter 1987.)

Even with Bergman's star actors, all three or four, it's a question whether the "psychological turmoil" they undergo is interesting enough. It seems like another Bergman drama involving people with deep problems caused by traumatic events in their lives which no doubt is more than anyone can handle yet they involve each other yet it doesn't help anyone because the scars are too deep where they can't help the other damaged person in coming to some kind of a healing but even causes more harm than good. Add to that random cruelties in an isolated area and you have the makings of a Bergman film. Outstanding photography, and beautiful Liv Ulman, and Bibi Andersson in the prime of their careers make it a worthwhile experience.

At the heart of this film is a struggle for expression and historical truth demanded by students of a high school (gymnasium) in their senior year before working for their final exams and the faculty principally one hard liner for whom the last work in education is the official government version of history and politics. I have seen such on a smaller scale but in grade school during a struggle between the Gomulka regime and the church over religious education in public schools in the late 1950's. This is late 1980's when Solidarity was in jails and underground. There are leaders here both among students and among sympathetic faculty.

An alcoholic pill-popping mother who works in a café has a young son of perhaps eight or ten and makes her son's life most demanding however he manages remarkably well to be an A student and even take care of his mother more than she takes care of him. He runs into aggression problems at school and for steeling lunches to fill his need. The mother only moves him from one school to another. He ends up eventually in an institution. One of the girls in there asks him to be her brother and tells him "you can beat me if you want but would you be my brother?" There is a sort of salvation in the end for the mother and son when a strong-armed man comes into their life and the boy reluctantly goes back to the mother. There is much more to the film, a series of male friends, the mother brings home at night, an alcoholic older woman, a neighbor who sells vodka from her apartment after hours, police raids, crises at home, attempted suicide by the mother.

The title translates to "Old Bachelor". This film has only one professional actor, the main role of the old bachelor, and the rest are all amateur actors from the region of Zywiec and spoken entirely in the dialect of the mountain people (Gorals) of the Zywiec region which is South-western Silesia. This is a comedy about an aging hard working bachelor in his thirties who lives with his mother and has everything he needs minus a wife. He tries various ways of meeting the young woman he dreams about, a recently widowed neighbor with several children, a visit to a disco in the city, a computer matching service but all with no success. He is intrigued by an ad with a photograph in a newspaper from a young woman seeking to meet the right man. He writes her a couple of letters with the help of an old letter manual and at last he not only receives a response but she herself arrives bu bus. That's when the end of the film comes to a quick end.

"The Four Seasons" (1985) is about two brothers and a woman who live in nature and are fascinated by it and far away from the city. The older brother and the woman are living together. The younger brother appears to be visiting. They are building a cottage for their sick father. He and his aged wife arrive and the brothers try to bring him back to life. The brothers build a portable chair to carry him in and show him a chubby naked woman nearby who bathes in a stream. This perks him up some. They also build wooden handrails for him to practice walking. Fall and winter come. The father dies. The older brother practices how to walk between the rails wondering if he'll manage when he gets old.

An extremely ambitious young journalist working for a small newspaper in Northern Poland receives anonymous letters concerning his live-in girl friend. The return address only has a Latin phrase "Tibi et Igni" (For you and the fire) which can be interpreted as "Burn upon seeing it). First there are photographs then videos. He has no doubts it's her but his girlfriend denies it. The film is a real mystery up to about this point but the last third and the resolution is too bizarre by the widest stretch of reality. There is a third man in this, a newspaper editor of a rival, bigger publication who stages the whole story. He is recruiting the young journalist from first meeting him. There are even misleading hints that the editor is seriously religious though he turns out to be a murderer in the end. The unrealistic element in the story is that he could not think he could carry this on very long leaving bodies of young women behind.

This film deserves a much higher score than what IMDb has. Much of the humor though is in the language and is untranslatable. The main character Mikołaj Biesaga, played by Marian Opania, is flavored with a Podlasie dialect. The story takes place in the Mazury region in the 1960's. The title's first reference is to a miraculous saving of his life during the war. He vowed to build a road statue to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He neglects his vow explaining that raising a family and financial difficulties prevented him. He is now a widower with grown children, thinking he may die soon, and takes up the project again. The main obstacle is the local Communist authorities that won't allow him. A bus of 20 women arrives in the village. They are prisoners who arrive at a collective farm to get re-socialized helping out on a fish farm and the fun begins. There are prostitutes among them and one of them Lola Katafalk, played by Ewa Kasprzyk, and Mikolaj strike up a relationship, which leads to the second meaning of the title "Saved by a Miracle", that it's never too late to fall in love.

If this film is sad, drab, and unappealing it's because it describes the life that is just so. The four girls portrayed here live in a closed-in poor neighborhood in Warsaw prior to WWI Warsaw. They graduate from a gymnasium (High School) and have limited potential for further careers. Franka, the most academically promising has the saddest ending. This is based on a novel by Pola (Apolonia) Gojawiczynska (1896-1963) published in 1935 that deals with everyday problems, tragedies of the average,gray life. She is in solidarity with the downtrodden and is from her own experience which was not unlike the lives she describes.

I thought this odd title in the original was a corruption or play on words of English "Love Story" but I am corrected and it refers to men living off women. We have a gangster heists mystery drama but on the light side with many misgivings as it unfolds especially the odd pairing of an average looking middle age man just released form prison who falls immediately into the arms of two beautiful women, a blonde, and a brunette, no less. There is more murky going-ons involving money; some kind of an elaborate plan of making 100 million dollars is hinted at but none of it very clear. It's hard to take the film seriously at any point. Then there is the surprise ending which is meant to explain all our previous misgivings but that just may be a little too late if you managed to stay to the end.

This film starts off awfully. I couldn't fathom 1916 czarist officers partying and all speaking Polish. It was like watching a Hollywood movie with actors playing foreigners speaking with an English accent for the effect, as is often the case with Hollywood films about foreigners. There is no substitute for the original language. Then the film got interesting about 20-30 minutes into it as the story unwound with the appearance of the beautiful stranger. It's a spy mystery on a train but the twists are such (for someone unacquainted with this genre) that even though you think you know what is happening you are surprised again, and so on to the end.

You may need to press "Subtitles" button on your DVD pilot to see the titles.

If the film was made in chronological order I would have turned it off when the rape scene started getting long as a something beyond disturbing and why do I have to watch this crap. But the scenes are in reverse order and it's easy enough to figure this out after about twenty minutes. I don't know how I lasted the first twenty minutes of wild camera work and trashy sounds. I suppose we were curious what happens next. What happened next was gory violence beyond limit. Then the rape scene and I should have ended it there but at this point it was with an attitude of "what the hell, it's only a film". So we got to the beginning at the end and the only redeeming part of the film the beautiful Monica Bellucci. Would have turned it off if wasn't so upside down. Definitely not recommended. See the last fifteen minutes of the film or so if you must. Spare yourself the rest.

"Noce I dnie" (Days and Nights) is the film version of a major Polish novelist Maria Dabrowska's (1889-1965) best novel of the same title. It was published in 1932-34. The novel grew out of nineteenth century realism but the author's work is on an epic scale in its genre and language. The film is a close reading of what Dabrowska wrote. I know of no English translation of the novel yet. The DVD we saw had no English titles however I can't imagine rendering into English the author's linguistic inventions. The author created a language from what was commonly spoken and enriched it by an extensive knowledge of how the language developed over time. This is how the poet Julian Przybos described Dabrowska's linguistic contribution.

"Matka krolow" calls to mind Wajda's "Man of Marble" in that it incriminates the communist system of government only in an earlier period beginning in pre-war Poland and continuing to just after Stalin's death. The absurdity of official propaganda is made obvious and the nastiness of officials in a power play of who is in and out of favor, the Stalin period games within the ruling mob, which is deadly to at least one of the Krol brothers, is a major part of the story. The mother works and suffers hard through it all with head raised high. She is a survivor like Solzhenitsyn's Matriona ("Matriona's House"). Politics is beyond her. Family and friends is what matters even though one of her sons and and long time friend fail her in the end.

"Tredowata" (Leper) is based on a novel published in Krakow in 1909 by Helena Mniszek of the same title. The film is an excessively sentimental drama at best on the Cinderella theme. Most of the characters are unappealing and Cinderella (Stefcia) is hopelessly lost among them. Even the Prince (Waldy) is an aristocratic bore. We don't know why they fall in love except from the looks they exchange. The setting in the novel as in the film is turn of the century (XIX-XX). The heroine's death (on wedding day in the novel) is seen as a victory of an individual against her society. There were two previous films based on the novel made in Poland in 1926 by E. Puchalski and 1936 by J. Gardan. The author published a sequel to the novel about the Prince's future in 1910 and both novels were popular despite their trivial quality. Luckily no one followed the sequel with a film.

I don't know why in the world the title is in English and transliterated to Polish in an awkward fashion. It's even incorrect. We are involved with American English here because the main character goes to Chicago. The syllable in "love" is not pronounced "a" in American English but it's closer to a Polish "o" so "lowju" would be a better transliteration. Figura plays quite a different role from the serious one later in "Zurek". She was much better in the latter film. I wasn't much impressed by "I Love You". There were a few funny moments but only a few for me. Maybe I missed things but four letter words never impress me no matter what language they are. The two actors were just bumbling along and not doing much of anything else. She was supposed to be a teacher. The scene where she talks dirty on the telephone in front of her class was totally unconvincing and not funny. I had no idea what he was doing except that he was studying English for twenty years without learning anything and then he gets some kind of an invitation to study English in Chicago where he also learned nothing. Pointless film to me.

This film is so bad that we didn't even laugh once and it's supposed to be a comedy. The only reason we continued watching it was that we are trying to catch up on Polish cinema and we were thinking maybe there would be some redeeming value in the end. There wasn't. There is a second and third part to this film. We ordered both parts 1 and 2 and we ended up watching both but we almost gave up in the middle of the second film and promptly canceled part 3. There is nothing funny in this supposed comedy. It's stupid. Worse Polish films we saw. It reminded me a little bit of Hogan's Heroes but this was worse. Why would we want to make a comedy about WWII in Poland? There was nothing funny about WWII. I read Stanislaw Grzesiuk's "Piec lat kacetu" ("Five Years in a Concentration Camp") where he uses humor to survive a terrible Gusen camp but that's a different story.

This film requires a huge suspension of disbelief. You take for granted what is presented, the setting, the characters, you go into the somewhat exotic world, a trailer park in the open sky world of the Southwest. But after about a slow moving half hour you start shaking your head at what is going on. How do most of these people survive here? How does an agoraphobic man end up in the desert? Who pays for the beer that he's been drinking for two years? You can't buy beer with Food stamps! And who gave him a job with a car no less after two years of doing nothing? It would be much tougher to write and stage his job interview. Who pays for the hospital stay? What kind of a hospital is this that leaves pills by the side of patient's bed? When you discover in the end that we were watching a young poetry genius you wonder why didn't some of that genius come out in her earlier words and actions.

This randomly picked up film at a local library was shocking. Even while watching it I expected a horde of junk food establishment defenders to jump to the "contains spoilers" section here at IMDb and I found no surprises there. This film is a much-needed wake up call with a powerful message. It's not a disjointed story: the story is its message. You probably will seriously consider what kind of a hamburger you will eat again after watching this. It will also show you some the work that poor illegal immigrants do that no one else wants. It brought us a large step closer to a vegetarian diet. Cattle-beef meat industry is seriously roasted here to the well done. It recalls "Meat USA" on PBS of some years ago.

This is a film about three con people including John Cusack, his mother, and girlfriend. We actually fell asleep while watching this on DVD. Because we liked all three main actors we decided to watch it again next day. There must be a lot of con men and women in the world but we don't think we could fall for any of the silliness that's performed here. John isn't even funny as he always is. Anjelica Huston is so unfeminine here it's hard to watch her. Annette Bening stands out if you can suspend your sense of reality. Wasting two hours on this film clearly shows us that with the many thousand film choices we need a lot more preparation in picking the next film we watch.

This adaptation of an almost classic film makes some weird changes and leaves others that look like an anachronism in a world forty years later. It's better to take the new film for what it is and judge it on its own merits and flaws. Sabrina's sojourn in Paris is too brief to remake her and for Paris to become an obsession on her return. How does she land directly into the world of high fashion? It's hard to accept the younger brother's sudden transformation from a playboy into the responsible serious role of his older brother. It happens towards the end just when the plot needs a new direction. Just as his new doctor finance suddenly reappears when needed. She and all the minor characters are just one-dimensional figures. Ford is well…no Bogart but Humphrey wasn't any better in the role either. Julia Ormond, despite the criticism on this forum, is the one bright star. She shines and has a bit of Hepburn quality in her radiance as a grown woman.

A Romantic Comedy requires suspension of disbelief like a romantic relationship itself, which won't happen unless you venture into the fantastic and unknown that the apple of your desire promises. But you have to walk a fine line to stay on the rosy side and not see the absurd behind the pink colored sunglasses you put on. We enjoyed this film because the characters were almost believable and we kept on our rosy sunglasses. Uma was so much more wonderful than in the Kill Bill films. Garofalo was totally new to us non-TV people. It was hard to make her look unattractive even in subdued light. But it's not a family film: unnecessary phone sex scene and language. If the absurd doesn't get to you then you will enjoy it.

The only reason we saw most of it is that we dozed off and on through half of it. Normally when we end up with a dog of a film we simply stop watching it. When we had enough of this sorry story we were lucky it suddenly and somewhat surprisingly ended. Plain obnoxious. A fat guy has all sorts of women swooning over him. Supposedly because he displays such a detached attitude and is so non-possessive. He's a mentor to a younger friend throughout the film. We couldn't figure out what could attract women to this fatty. Nobody does much in this idyllic Santa Fe except mostly party, open the refrigerator, eat and drink. Nobody does much work. Didn't get this one at all. Don't bother.