Word: bunuel
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FOUR men spend a weekend eating themselves to death in a grim, overdecorated mansion: the conceit has the imprint of an allegory by Bunuel, the echo of wild house parties in Italian movies of a decade ago, the teasing metaphysics of a "Last Year at Marienbad." Four men tied to a brotherhood pact that tests endurance --the premise is also a kinky Continental variation on "Deliverance...
Marco Ferreri's "The Grande Bouffe" trips over prize-winning foreign films of the sixties, tickles us with memories of Fellini and Resnais and Bunuel, of Antonioni and claustrophobic chamber works by Bergman. But the movie's greatest debt is not to the preceding era's prestigious portraits of European decadence but to the laws of the universe--the ways of the world--as the porno movie sees them. Ferreri's is a porn epic in the grand manner, a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie that, for sheer audacious lubricity, out-tangoes "Last Tango in Paris" and almost gives...
Whatever symbolic or ideological potential the story of La Grande Bouffe might have had, whatever opportunity for Swiftian outrage or the savage surrealism of a Bunuel, is extinguished by Ferreri's obstinate insensitivity. It could conceivably be argued that the film is a metaphor for the fate of a society sated by its own prosperity, obsessed by its own comforts. It is difficult, however, to credit such subtleties to a director whose idea of a good visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with...
...Chien Andalou (1928), at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, was the first film made by Luis Bunuel. A silent short partly planned by Salvador Dali, it was the first surrealist film and is probably the most powerful short film ever made. Bunuel's surrealism was abstract in the 20s, became a savage vehicle for social criticism in the 40s and 50s, and mellowed into a means for joking about the upper class in last year's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeousie. Un Chien Andalou was its first expression...
...Again Sam (Woody Allen's best film, with excellent parody inserts of film styles), Bad Company (a Western by the authors of Bonnie and Clyde), Bed and Board (a witty film by Truffaut), Exterminating Angel (pointed, vicious, yet entertaining surrealism at an upper class dinner party by Luis Bunuel), Yojimbo (a samurai Western by Kurosawa), The Hireling (a deficient companion piece to The go-Between), and finally, those two theaters wading in stagnant ponds...