Movie Update 26

Sometimes movies are all you really have to talk about, you know? You've got other stuff going on, but there they are. Movies.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari


One of the original horror movies, and a pretty good one. Dr. Caligari is notable for its early use of a twist ending and famous for the abstract design of its backgrounds, but it would be pretty effective even without those. The story is a bit slight, but the movie tells a fairly entertaining tale about a Frankenstein-esque mad scientist and his murderous somnambulist creation. Some nice creepy images, and just a solid mood that would help lead to more sophisticated takes on the genre concept. An important silent movie that manages to be watchable.

My Darling Clementine


Another black and white John Ford western, though I really didn't like this one as much. It had some nice scenes, but it was mostly just kind of slow. Henry Fonda plays an amiable Wyatt Earp, but that's about it. It's the story of the OK Corral, with a lot of inaccuracies and changes that don't really improve the drama of the story or make it more interesting. Ford knows how to shoot movies, and for its age Clementine is well shot. But sometimes he just forgets to make a truly entertaining movie, and this is one of those times. I think Westerns are among the genres most hurt by being confined to 4:3 black and white boxes, and while it didn't bother me much with Stagecoach, I think it definitely was to this film's disadvantage. I would have liked to have seen how it would have turned out ten years later.

The Palm Beach Story


Like the other Preston Sturges movies I've seen, Palm Beach Story is kind of weird. It's more overtly weird though, in that the plot ends up being completely silly. It's a pretty normal screwball comedy featuring the guy from Sullivan's Travels and the girl from It Happened One Night, only their story is one of a marriage falling apart rather than one coming together. Of course things end up about how you'd expect for them, but the ending kind of throws that away with a kind of bizarre plot twist. Like other Sturges movies it has solid actors delivering a lot of fun dialogue very quickly, but there's not much else besides that.

Pierrot le Fou


Sometimes I wonder who determines whether a film will be internationally known by its original title or a translation. It took a few tries, but I found a Jean-Luc Godard film that I really like. Fou combines some elements from other work by him that I've seen, like the vibrant yet natural cinematography of Contempt and the existentialism and fourth-wall breaking of Breathless, but puts them in a story I actually found interesting. The star of the latter film and Godard's eventual ex-wife play a couple that runs away from their responsibilities and some Algerian gangsters with a bunch of their money. It's not quite as exciting as that sounds, but the course of their relationship is intriguing and it's just kind of a fun movie to watch. Definitely very French, but not in a bad way.

Movie Update 24

Would you believe I've seen a few more movies since the last time I wrote about a few movies? The first three of these are the second film I've seen by their well-regarded directors, and the last is the first by another.

All About My Mother


This is a movie that could have gotten unbearably depressing, but something about the colorful way it looks or its deeply human characters or the faith it has in humanity or something kept it watchable, and made me really like it a lot. Pedro Almodóvar seems to be a director's who's a lot more in tune with women than many men in his profession, and even dedicated the movie to them at the end. It's about a woman who loses her son, and then journeys back to her old stamping grounds, where she meets some old friends and makes some new ones. Penelope Cruz is the only one I remember seeing anywhere before, but they almost all instantly become likable, even if they're flawed as people, and it's an interesting movie just to watch. A lot of bad things happen, but hope never completely runs out. At least that's what I took from it.

Chungking Express


Wong Kar-wai employs a very unusual structure with this film. It's not that weird to split a narrative between two different and only tangentially related stories, but it's a good deal weirder to separate them almost completely in editing, with one going through all its paces and then wrapping up before there's a quick transition to the second. They're both love stories featuring lonely policemen and a snack bar, and they both have thematic similarities, although there are definite differences as well. I don't like all of the choices Wong makes, such as the low shutter speed effect when things are happening quickly, but it's mostly a well made, well acted drama. Wong impresses me about as much as any Asian filmmaker who's still working.

Contempt


Made only a few years of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Contempt sure looks a lot different. It's in widescreen and color, and the differences don't really stop at an aesthetic level. It's a very natural film, examining the breakdown of a screenwriter's marriage while he's also struggling with his current project. He's rewriting a script for an adaptation of The Odyssey (why hasn't their been an actual legitimate film version yet?) which is being directed by German auteur Fritz Lang (playing himself), and he finds himself disagreeing with his boss and then his wife after she meets him. A lot of the film is just the writer and his wife talking, evading the issue of what's really going on while being cruel to each other. It doesn't sound that exciting, but Godard does some really interesting things with the presentation of the material that makes up for it. You can read a lot of symbolism and analogy into it, or you can just enjoy the impressive cinematography and Brigitte Bardo's figure.

Written on the Wind


In the past, critics have looked at Douglas Sirk's work in two different ways. When he was contemporary and his films were making money in theaters, he was criticized for making old fashioned, overwrought melodramas. Later though, others saw a certain irony in what he did, like he was prodding at the falsehood of the American dream without calling too much attention to it. Watching the movie, I could see it both ways, but I would tend to agree with the more recent interpretation, because I have a hard time believing someone  who was so good at creating images on film could be so bad at depicting human interaction in the world of 1950s cinema. Maybe he just lucked into great directors of photography, but in any case, the irony is there, whether he intended to have it or not. Written on the Wind is a big movie with big emotions, and it's interesting to look at the absurdity of rich people at any point in history, so I had a good time watching the film and wondering about its real intentions. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty sure I liked it.

Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard is another big name from that French new wave period, and I think this is his best known work. It's about a French guy who spends a lot of time with an American girl while on the run from the cops after he kills one for finding him in a stolen car. He doesn't seem to care very much about the crime or the chances of getting caught, and is much more interested in getting the girl in bed again. It's a pretty nihilistic movie, one where the two main characters seem unrealistic but are often pretty fascinating to watch as they just talk for minutes on end or ponder their next moves. Lead Jean-Paul Belmondo as an easy charm despite his despicable actions, though the real highlight of the film is Jean Seberg's performance as the girl. I couldn't tell if she was using her regular voice or intentionally putting on an American accent, which was sometimes distracting. But the character and her allure were still very strong.

The editing style is pretty unique for the time period, using jump cuts within a shot in a way that feels very modern. I'm not sure if it was a deliberate style choice from the beginning or a way to get past small mistakes on a cheap budget, but either way it gives the movie its own feel. The ending is very suitable for the film's bleak tone, and it's a pretty quick film that brings the audience into its own harsh world view before ending and letting them go on their way. I didn't find it to be a very likable movie, though it had funny moments and does what it attempts effectively. It doesn't really want to be likable, which for me limits how much I can really care about, but is a somewhat admirable stance to take.