Raging Bull (1980): review: 10/10

 *

The story of Jake LaMotta, boxer, then nightclub owner and stand up comedian.

The film describes the Italian community in New York, its tastes and social structures. It presents the individuals and commercial systems supporting  LaMotta`s rise, as well as his jealousy, inclination to domestic violence, courage, determination and self-pity.

Startling performances wonderfully shot in black and white throughout, maintaining sympathy for the lead: somehow one cannot not dismiss LaMotta despite his huge lapses in character.

Everybody's Fine (2009): review: 3/10; table manners in American films

A retired widower attempts to visit his grown children, travelling across the USA, to discover that he has been given a false immpression of their lives.

The films contains elements of the road movie, and is a sort of right of passage film, showing shifts in attitude and expectation  taken by different generations.  The film is also, I suspect, about American decline and disappointment, as Americans learn to live with diminished world status and reduced  individual chances of achieving the American Dream.

The film offers glimpses of these themes, but does little to grapple with them, instead washing us over with sentimentality, providing lazy solutions to the various relationship crises described. All this is underscored by syrupy music.

 *

As so often in American films, the characters have terrible table manners, speaking with their mouths full and biting food off the prongs of their forks with their moths open, leaning over their plates or slouching with their elbows on the table (Julia Robets is particularly guilty of these offences). In "Everybody's Fine" the dismal manners of a brattish child become a focus for one of the conflicts in the film.

These atrocious table manners can be seen in films showing Americans of all social classes, but seem most striking among their middle classes. It's a form of arrogance: they think that because they are wealthy they are above regarding the feelings of others and has a sartorial equivelent in the way they inisistantly dress casually even in formal situations. However, they haven't yet started, I think, to swear as is now common among the British upper middle classes (see the Guardian Newspaper)- or maybe they have, but it is censored from films.

Angel Heart: (1987): review: 9.5/10

In the fifties, a private detective, more used to low level investigations, is hired by a mysterious client to pursue a debter, believed to reside in a mental hospital.

In the process of this investigation we are taken to the deep south, specifically Lousiana, to explore its religious subcultures.

The film succeeds in combining elements of Southern Gothic with film noir and is beautifully shot, with exquisite scenography and use of colour. The acting is rivetting: the story is told with just the right balance of melancholy, wit, sensuality and horror.

Great Expectations (1998): review- 2/10

2/10 (one star for Gwyneth's bottom)

A Floridan painter, of low social origins, is romantically fixated by a snooty rich girl he met as a child.

He goes to New York to succeed as an artist, and where he tries to get her to have sex with him. Apart from being snooty she has no personality whatsoever but that doesn't bother him because she is good-looking in that insipid way that seems to entrance some people...

A contemporary US take on Dicken's novel, laboured in all scenes.

WARNING: some scenes in this film feature Francisco Clemente's paintings.

Taxi Driver (1976): review- 10/10

An insomniac Vietnam vet turned taxi driver takes objection to the moral condition of his New York and, wearing a new "Mohican" hairstyle, shoots several people.

Hauntingly filmed with mesmeric performances.