THE HARSH TRUTH OF THE CAMERA EYE: Movie reviews. Mostly very short….

Max Headroom: It can’t possibly be as awesome as you want it to be, right?

It is awesomer.

Divorce, Italian-Style: I Netflix’d this on reader recommendation after that post I did about Ten Commandments-themed movies. (So yes, you’re getting a rough sense of how long it takes a movie to wander to the top of my queue.) The reader noticed that I didn’t have any comedies listed, and suggested that this might fit the bill.

At first I was wary–it seemed like the movie might be going for an “aren’t wives just awful? so tacky…” shtik; but by the end I found the movie funny and satisfying. There’s a great sense of time and place, too–the scenes in which La Dolce Vita comes to the tiny Sicilian town’s cinema are fantastic and hilarious.

Chariots of Fire: Also suggested as a Ten Commandments-y movie, “Keep holy the Sabbath” being a major plot point and all. This… hm. It was really well-done (except for the annoying soundtrack-flashbacks in which characters re-articulated the Themes of the Movie, sigh), but really not my thing. I suspect athletic and religious types would get much more out of it.

The “…and then what happened?” final titles were pretty fascinating in that each of the main characters did get a life that the movie suggests they would have considered good.

Videodrome: Literal-minded Cronenberg flick about, like, the television age, and porn. Desperately not my thing despite the presence of Debbie Harry. I will say that I don’t think this is as good as Dead Ringers (also not my thing, but legitimately troubling and memorable and unique), because of the literal-mindedness.

(And Dead Ringers had some pretty amazing color control, if I recall correctly.)

Opera: Dario “Suspiria” Argento takes on Verdi’s Macbeth!! This was fantastic.

I mean, okay: It doesn’t have what philosophers would call “a point.” It’s a horror flick about bad stuff happening at an opera, and it’s Dario Argento, so, you know, a crow eats an eyeball and stuff like that. (Although the “menaced in her panties!” scenes were kept to a refreshing minimum.)

But the music, of course, is amazing; the colors are supersaturated; the camera is all swooning and swizzling and enthralling. It was worth watching some really crap Argento (see below) to get this doomy, glittery showstopper.

The Stendhal Syndrome: Speaking of crap Argento. The idea (hallucinations based on great art + police detective being stalked by the criminal she’s hunting) seems perfect for Argento’s style, and the opening scene in the Uffizi gallery is great. But the Stendhal-syndrome stuff is fairly minimal, and nothing interesting replaces it. Plus it’s very, very, very, very rapey, and… I hated that, I hated having it on my tv set all fetish-like and going on and on. Bah.

Demons: Not actually Argento–he produced, but somebody else directed. Starts out hilarious and fun, and I think if I were more of a gorehound I would have thought it was great popcorn-horror. It’s basically ’80s music + gore. So, you know, if that sounds good to you… that’s what it is.

Trauma: More Argento. Serial killer, electroshock, repressed memories, anorexia. I found it unmemorable (oh snap!) except for the lovely, Evanescence-avant-la-lettre closing credits song.