uhmartinez-phd

After seeing "A Single Man" a film for which Colin Firth will, most likely, get his first and richly deserved Oscar nomination, I felt the urge to see "Apartment Zero" again. I remembered it as a film that opened my eyes to certain aspects of my own nature and thought/felt that Colin Firth was actually playing me. I hadn't seen the film since because that kind of experience is unrepeatable and I could never imagine that the experience could live up to my memory of it. Well,it did. More than that, I discovered so much more than I didn't remember or that, possibly, I didn't get at the time. Colin Firth's performance is infinite. Strange word to describe a performance but seems very apt to me now. He moves within his closeted universe like someone who knows every inch of it and therefore we become as familiar with it as he is. Frightening, sad and, at times, hysterically funny. A masterpiece. Now years later I can actually call it that. A masterpiece. A film that has revealed other layers with the passing of time. I'll be rooting for Colin Firth at the Oscars 2010 and I'll be thinking of his Adrian LeDuc.

An fun, engrossing, beautifully crafted piece of nonsense, the likes of which we hadn't seen in a long long time. The silliness of the story is marvelously camouflaged with great dialogue and some superb performances. Christoph Waltz must be thinking already about his acceptance speech. What a performance! The civilized monster, polyglot, refined and deadly. He gets us going from the first, sensational scene. Brad Pitt is also wonderful. Was he putting a Mussolinni chin while impersonating (hilariously) an Italian? I thought so. His character's name sounds like Aldo Ray and I'm sure that's no accident. The film is full of movie references. Another character is named Fenek, as an homage to his 1970's sexpot, Edwige Fenech. What is already one of Tarantino's trademarks is his sure step along the most immediately recognizable bits of pop culture. He's clearly not a cultured man but a pop expert, king in a world where people get their news from TV, don't read, other than magazines and comics, etc. That's how it happens, to be in the right place at the right time. For better or worse this are Tarantino times.

Yes, it is funny. Just like when Bill Maher is funny. Often but not always. One of the things I like about Maher is that behind every derogatory outburst there is, usually, a real thinking process. In his "Religulous" he commits a startling mistake. He doesn't allow the possibility of "faith" as a positive not even by mistake. Agree that organized religion has been monstrous in so many different instances that it is a bit of a miracle that it survives but there is also the other side, the positive strength that faith provides and it does in so many different and powerful ways. The one sided views are always annoying and "Religulous" sins of that. I did laugh though, God forgive me.