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Reviews
O Cangaceiro (1953)
An opus of Eisensteinian dimensions
I saw this movie as an adolescent in the 60es just once on TV, but it still is one of only a handful which surface at least once every five years. As other reviewers have pointed out before, the great music by Zé do Norte was a major factor for this memorability. Foremost here is the ballad "Mulher Rendeira" (The Lacemaker), especially in the unforgettable scene when the gang rides in a duck line along a ridge which is set against the dusk sky and the gloomy grandeur of the Brazilian Sertao. In their leather garments, pepped up by the symbolism of amulets and talismans, the bandidos in this movie resemble an archaic tribe living in this land of dust and thorns for eons already. The movie is filmed in black and white which is lending it a certain kind of credibility reminding of a documentary. Although presenting a different plot, Barreto's movie was obviously inspired by the fate of the most famous couple of Brazilian cangaceiros, Lampiao and his wife Maria Bonita, who were killed in 1938 with seven others of their gang by the police.
Außer Rand und Band am Wolfgangsee (1972)
Completely trite time capsule
If you look for a capsule of the exact period in time when fun-loving and clean-cut girls had the "choice" of wearing either ultra-short miniskirts or tight hot pants, this is it. The negligible plot of this movie exposes a clique of simple-minded beauties who decide to run a lakeside hotel in a postcard-like part of Austria. With looks and charm and cleverness they succeed in achieving just this. As most of the German B movies of the 70es the imagery contrasts an assortment of trashy looking older people with fashionable younger ones who could easily be enlarged from molded plastic Barbie&Ken-figurines. There is some Schlager style singing of the period to punctuate the plot. And well, some of the actors like Jutta Speidel later turned to more serious work.
Jersey Girl (2004)
An entertaining vision of fatherhood
The press agent Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck) stumbled into his marriage with Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez is as short-shrift here as in their real-life relationship). Before being able to test it the hard way by raising their child together, the mother dies at childbirth. Ollie is forced to move from his New York City apartment into the New Jersey countryside shack of his father Bart (George Carlin), who is also a widower. Bart takes care of little Gerti at first, while Ollie tries to forget his grief by working. Inevitably, at the first instance of bringing the baby in, he blows a media appointment and gets fired. What follows is an impressive dialog with the baby, in which Ollie accepts the girl as the center of his future life even if that requires reducing his standard of living by joining his father's team of public workers. The movie then jumps into Gerti's seventh year (sympathetically played by Raquel Castro) and episodically outlines the life of a single father, which is poor in events but rich in emotional rewards. The dating interest of the Video Rental lady Maya (Liv Tyler) gets never more convincing than the wish of Ollie's father to live with his son and his granddaughter. After all, the movie excels at countering the modern paradigm of "family slavery" by the vision of responsible fatherhood being passed on between the generations. Consequently, the director dedicated it to his own father who died shortly thereafter. With the exception of the birth scene, the story always remains on the light-hearted side, and so could be watched with children of the fitting age.