God, I love blogging.  I don't have to kiss anybodies ass.  You can either agree, disagree, think I'm stark raving mad, or make a mental note: this might be something I'm looking for.

     It's only March and I've already seen two great movies in 2011.  This is rare for me.  I can go years without one to apply that adjective, or anything close to it.  I pay no attention to the box office draw, awards, advertisements, the reviews of others, or publicity stunts by the "stars." Call it selfish, narcissistic, "guru-like" as I was castigated earlier this week, but for God's sake don't call it dumb.  It's still my blog and I control the delete button.

     The first movie is POETRY.  Yes, it has subtitles, no, it has no chase scenes, no romance as it's ordinarily portrayed, no gratuitous  sex, no  broad panoramas of sun kissed isles and firm sweaty buns.  It's the story of a single grandmother who's raising her grandson.  She's poor, yet dresses in bright colors with flowing scarves--no victim of her circumstances.  She decides to take a poetry class because, "she's always been a bit strange."

     Then of course all hell breaks loose.  Her grandson is involved in a crime, the rape of an innocent girl and her subsequent death.  She learns of it when the fathers of other boys involved in the crime tell her they want to pay the girl's mother off to silence her.  It's all underplayed by Yoon Jung-lee, who you will probably never hear of again since she's Korean--as is the movie, which means nothing since the story is so universal.

     It's not a happy story.  The director, Lee Chong-dong takes no prisoners.  He doesn't sweeten it up for the melodramatists among us.  (I come from a long line of them and love them all, so take no offense.)  It just moves along inexorably towards it's sad but revelatory ending--poetic to be sure in thought, word, deed and imagery.  Ah, this is life POETRY says.  Now, go home and be glad it isn't yours.

     The second movie is  BIUITIFUL just as the title says--"beautiful" but not spelled out in the way we're used too, the perfect metaphor, forever ingraved in the cranium of those who take the journey.  Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem is pretty much a member of the underworld in Barcelona.  He runs a bunch of scams selling bogus merchandise and slave labor.  I could say it nicer, but won't.

     The genius of his performance and the directing of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is that he is a somewhat reprehensible character who you grow to love more and more with each passing frame.  He has enough problems for ten lifetimes.  His wife is a nutjob, she's fucking his brother, she beats the kids, and he's deathly ill--and that's only part of it.

      The opening and closing scenes are as haunting as any I've ever seen.  As much as I've said I'm not giving away half of it.  How do they think of it?  How can anyone's imagination be so fruitful, so poignant, so expressive?  With this movie Inarritu, already a major contender, unmistakably enters the pantheon of the greatest filmakers alive, comparable to his fellow Spanish-speaking Pedro Almodovar in a mere decade of making feature films.

     The "density" (how much material is in a frame) of Inarritu's imagery is more than we're used to, but it's not experimental.  His pacing is meticulous.  With all the subplots and use of "magical" imagery i.e. bodies clinging to the ceiling, black spots growing on the walls, I was never confused and don't think most viewers will be.  Inarritu is clearly a "director's director" as he takes us to the depths of a personal vision. 

     Uxbal is the exponent of something greater than the sum of his parts--a link to an imaginary world, a creation in his own right, not without hope and dignity.  BIUITIFUL is quite an achievement.  Nothing is left to chance in the making of the movie, though everything is in the story it tells.  Fate has a role in the hands of Inarritu and one can only wonder at what's to come.   

     Yes, I know, such exceptionalism is tricky--tomorrow it could also not be true, but this is not my concern.  I suspect images  from this movie will always linger in my mind and that's my personal test.  Damn the others.  There's an odd faith dramatised in BIUITIFUL infrequently shown, hard to conjure, and utterly redemptive for those who one day find they can no longer run away from something. 

     I could go on, but think I've made my point.  It's late and the trolls are waking from their crypts smelling the blood of ideas that are not their own.