Kind of a movie weekend. I watched Captain Corelli's Mandolin late last night on A&E. I thought it was good, though the ending was fairly compressed. Apparently the book takes a different path. The movie induced me to try and learn a bit more about Italy's role in World War II. Usually, we just hear about the Germans and the Japanese, but nobody discusses Italy much. Of course, they swtched sides partway through the war, which definitely explains things a bit.
Today, After the Thin Man was on TCM, so I watched that. I know I'd seen about half of that movie once before, though I still missed an important point this time. Oh well. Those old Thin Man movies seem to stack up pretty well given that they were made in the 1930s, though there are some things that wouldn't go over well for a modern audience.
Well, I had been thinking of going to see Jersey Girl tonight, but since the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival is going on, I figured I'd try something different. I'd missed most of today's showings, but a movie from Poland named Insatiability (Nienasycenie in Polish) sounded interesting.
It's a movie that is really hard to put into words. I've only been able to find a few English reviews on the Internet, but I think there's general agreement that the movie is ultra-bizarre. One person said that it's so bad, it's brilliant. I don't know if I would call it bad. Okay, yes I would ;-) There are some silly moments that, if it weren't for the extraordinary context, would be thrown out by most people as tripe.
I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find something more bizarre than that movie. I'm sure stranger stuff exists, but this was very…different. The movie is based on a book written by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz in 1927. I'm not sure about how close the two are in content, though the retro-futuristic look of the movie would fit if the director was trying to create an environment that was futuristic for 1927…
I guess the film's director, Wiktor Grodecki, had visited this area a while ago and had done some work here, but I don't know much other than that. Someone high up in the film festival's staff (maybe the director or whatever his title would be) had intended to give a nice long introduction for everyone, but he got caught up somewhere else.
Anyway, I think that people who like bizarre movies would like it, though I won't think less—heck, I'd probably think more—of someone who hated the thing.
Posted by mike at April 4, 2004 12:57 AM | Movies , TV | TrackBackYea, I did'nt get a chance to see it yet ...but I lived and worked with wiktor, and David Svec all over Poland and the Czech republic; I spent 11 months with them planning this film...or should I say looking for producers to finance the film.....
belive me Witkiewicz was a strange bird, I saw an expo on his life and art while in warsaw in 2001 he would scketch theses drawings and list the drugs he was on i.e nicotene,alcohol,absenth ect...on the bottom left hand portion of his art, using the chemical symbols to represent the drugs insted of the actuall words.
He also was an arrogent man he would charge people up too one hundred dollars or whatever the zloty was back then..just to sit and ask him questions for only five minutes....Witkiewicz kinda remindes me of the Beeaje Quick of the 1800, original yet seemingly plageristic.
Wicktor on the other hand went to Lodz film school in Poland and came to the states in the early 80's. I belive? or so Iv'e read from all his personel clippings and what he told me. he was in exile here to escape from the communist regime. And did a lot of traviling, so he probably wanderd through your town at some point.
I would suggest "Mandragora" as his best work, a film about young runaway boy's in Prague who get caught up in the ugly world of drugs and prostitution.
regards,zip