Margie (1946), Atomic Cafe (1982), Il Divo (2008)

Margie

Sweet, charming little story about an awkward teenage girl named Margie ( the adorable Jeanne Crain) and the crush she has on her French teacher (Glenn Langan). Made just after the war the film is set during the 1927-1928 school year (premature Hoover posters cause small chronological gaff), and is very nostalgic for this simpler time. It's amazing to think how much changed in that 19 year period, and how quint the late 20's seemed to audiences by the mid-1940's, could you achieve that same effect today with a film set in 1993? Anyway this feels like it could have been a radio program, and is populated with lovable-type characters played the likes of Esther Dale, Hobart Cavanaugh, and Alan Young in his film debut. Really not much to the plot, which is part of its charm. Great payoff to the running Nicaragua gag. Good


Atomic Cafe

Documentary without a narrator consisting of a long string of clips from newsreels, army propaganda films, television interviews ect., which tell the ever escalating story of atomic obsession and paranoia in the United States from 1945 until roughly 1960 (the film never makes it to the Cuban Missile Crises). Punctuated with a surprising number of period songs with atomic or cold war themes, the film is a collage of sorts, but takes a largely chronological approach to its subject matter. From the intal tests in the American south west to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on to the H-bomb and the arms race with he Soviet Union, the film feels like its building to an inevitable nuclear confrontation, even though we know its not. The film ends with a depiction (again using only period footage) of what the start of a nuclear conflict with the Russians might have looked like. There is a surreal Lynchian quality to an apocalypse played out against Eisenhower era banality. An effective and evocative work. Good

Il Divo

Loosely translated 'Il Divo' is Italian for 'the Divine male perfomrer', and the il divo of this picture is Giulio Andreotti. Andreotti ruled as something of a God figure through much of the post-war period in Italy. Entering government service in the late 1940's Andreotti would hold countless government positions over a fifty year career, including three non-consecutive stints as Prime Minister, in 1991 he was named a senator for life (a position he still holds at the age of 93).
Andreotti was a divisive figure, even within his own party the Christian Democrats. Pious, even fatalistic, he was non the less exceptionally cold and Machiavellian. If the anecdote is true were Mao told Nixon that they worked so well together because they were both evil, then Andreotti could well have been added as a third member to their club. Andreotti was indicted but never convicted of a vast ary of crimes, including the deaths of a disconcerting number of close associates, as well as members of the mafia and officials of the Vatican Bank. Toni Servillo plays Andreotti (under heavy makeup he looks kind of like Geoffrey Rush in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers) as essentially Richard the Third, heck the man even had a bit of a hunch back. The real Andreotti walked out of a screening of his bio-pic, and admittedly its hard to know what really happened, even watching the movie its hard to know what's really going on, the system of Italian government is so complicated and the alleged conspiracies so complex, but there is an exquisitely rendered sense of foreboding and menace throughout and its an effective, Godfather- like piece of work. The cinematography and eclectic score also add much to this movie. Great