gosia_rybak Reviews

Traffic (2000)

Troublesome awareness

[10/10 · 9 October 2005]

It is all true: the film structure, with three interweaving plots, the dialogs, reduced to the absolute minimum, the way the movie has been shot – all that contributes to its status of a masterpiece in cinematography. If someone says it is boring, I'd like to reply: it is so condensed with the content, that if you have enough gray cells under your skull, they will not stop working even for a second during the perception of the film.

Personally, the film has overwhelmed me. It was a short peep into another world – the world of which existence it would be more convenient not to know. Not that I hadn't, before I watched the movie. Perhaps I was more absent-minded on that theme. The film's documentary-like quality made me feel, even more than think, that while I eat my meals, look after my family, sleep or work, somewhere in the world the whole death-machine runs non-stop. Some young girl with their whole life in front of her prostitutes herself for two centimeters of heroin, some driver's palms sweat when he crosses the frontier with drugs hidden in his car, someone falls out of the game with a single shot in his forehead, maybe having wetted his pants out of fear before he died. And, first of all, the money and power continues fluctuating, both between the prominent ones – the drug-businessmen, who tenderly love their children, and between the marginalized – the people who, through drugs in that or another way, get their own piece of power and control. E.g. the black people ("black" emphasized, to stress their marginal position) successful at dealing the drugs to white students, thus getting back the sense of domination they wouldn't have been able to attain in the white-privileged society by any other means.

So, even now, someone is getting stoned, maybe for the last time in his or her life. I cannot say if this consciousness is going to carry me from the sense of powerlessness to any sort of a constructive counter-action. As you are reading this, I know that you smile and say: so idealistic, naive and banal. I don't care. A single lost life is an undeniable fact that lays some weight to my shoulders. After watching "Traffic", try as I may, I cannot shake that weight off.

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Congartulations for not being 100% Hollywood infected

[9/10 · 15 March 2005]

The film is only in 50% Hollywood like: the exchanges about "mummy" and "daddy", so straightforward and psychologically simplified, are disadvantage. As if Eastwood didn't have enough trust to the audience - he had to make all the father-figure metaphors, hints and parallels so evident... "American Dream", fabulous for a European like me, in this film becomes a probable option - maybe because the possible interpretations of the "success" that the film gives are not all too one-sided (see "Scrap's" or Danger's" story, for example, although Eastwood is not resolute to explore the theme of a seeming failure as some sort of personal success to the end. At times he even lets us believe that what really matters is the "title" or having one's moment of glory. ) What I loved about the film was its anti-Hollywood features: minimalistic scenery, meaningful play of shadow and light - at times poetic and speaking volumes, when the faces emerge from the darkness, plus quintessential language (except for the "psychoanalytic" utterances, fortunately, not abundant in the film). Very interesting and deep study of the relationship between the master and the apprentice - subtle, complex, moving and, thank God, not melodramatic as the Hollywood filmmakers would typically have it. A good movie, amazing even for a European taste brought up on Kieslowski's or Stuhr's films...

G.I. Jane (1997)

A film with a presupposed thesis

[5/10 · 24 February 2005]

I enjoyed watching G.I.Jane as a picture disclosing and undermining stereotypes on femininity (and masculinity). In a way it certainly gives the voice to the "fairer sex" or "weaker sex" and lets a woman speak for herself. What I didn't, however, like about it was the "propaganda" attached to it. The film at the very beginning poses a thesis, which is clear to everybody ("Let's prove that a female may be an efficient soldier, at times better than the male ones"), and the story unfolds only to back up that thesis. I would say, an overtly political one. I guess it would be more interesting to watch G.I.Jane on her way to passing the mental and physical test without the "global", "political" background. The allusion to - perhaps - male dominated and male produced - discourse and politics of gender would still remain, but it would be less strident and more subtle.