Showing posts with label Bernardo Bertolucci. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernardo Bertolucci. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Best Movie Death Scene


My thesis and schedule are eating me alive lately. Sorry for having so few reviews up. There are plenty of films I've seen that I want to review, and hopefully will at some point. But for now...let's just roll with a question of the day.

What do you think is the best movie death scene of all time? Oddly, my selection would be from a movie I think is pretty overrated; nevertheless, its murder scene in the woods near the end is one of the most gorgeously shot and amazing sequences in cinematic history. You got it...I pick (off the top of my head) Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist as the film with the best death sequence. Commence with your opinions in the comments...

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Overlooked DVD of the Week: "Partner" (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1968)


Partner is Bertolucci at his most playful, yet the film is just as formally stringent and manneristic as any of his most popular and works. I have mixed feelings about most of Bertolucci’s films, but Partner, for me, is one of his best, and least seen, works. Clearly inspired by the French New Wave, “Partner” seems overwhelmingly Godardian and is certainly a far cry from his earlier works, such as La Commare Secca or Before The Revolution. Based on a story by Dostoyevsky, Partner spirals into anarchy as a created identity deconstructs the life of Giaccobe, a drama teacher. Any New Wave fans will find clear parallels in Partner and Brecht should weigh heavily in any kind of close analysis, especially considering its release year (1968) and the events that were going on in Europe at the time. Whether Partner achieves what it sets out to do is debatable (I took a Bertolucci class as an undergraduate and most of the class thought it failed), but it is a wild film that everybody should experience.

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