Movie Update 11A

Life goes on, and I continue to watch a number of films that I have never seen before. I'm running out of "classics" in the instant queue at this point, and I don't know if I'm going to keep that when Netflix switches up the plans in a couple months. But I'll keep watching movies. 11B goes up tomorrow.

The Conversation


Sandwiched between the first two parts of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola made this film, a much more intimate and inward-looking affair. Gene Hackman does a great job (I find it amazing he was already 44 when this was made, but I hadn't realized he retired years ago either) as a surveillance expert who becomes worried by the content of a conversation he is hired to record, and reluctant to hand it over to his client. He's surrounded by a great cast, notably a young Harrison Ford as his main contact with the client, John Cazale as his spurned partner, and a brief appearance by Robert Duvall. It's mostly a character piece, and the script and Hackman's work do a great job of bringing a quiet by interesting man to life. Things do get hairier later on, with some surprisingly shocking moments as it reaches the climax. Nice anti-Hollywood ending, too.

The Hustler


I feel like Paul Newman was sort of a singular talent that came into his own in the 60s, and since he didn't have any direct competitor like Robert De Niro versus Al Pacino, some people my age overlook how amazing of an actor he is. There's no ongoing debate around him, he's just an amazing actor. Could be making crap up, though. In The Hustler he plays a pool shark, and while there are extensive pool scenes in the movie, it's more about the turmoil of the character, who realizes he's not who he thought he was after a game against Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats goes bad. George C. Scott is also great in the movie, and it's just a fun film to watch despite some pretty dark material towards the end. The good kind of sports movie that's not really about sports.

MASH


All I really knew about Robert Altman before seeing this was he made movies with ensemble casts that talked over each other, and that's certainly the case here. It's a Korean war movie that's really about the Vietnam war, and showcases funny actors rather than comedians trying to act. The three main characters are military doctors played by Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, and Tom Skerritt who don't care much for proper chain of command or behavior for their positions. It's not really realistic how cavalier they are with their mistreatment of other officers in the movie, but it's a satire, and it works. I didn't think it was an amazing movie, but I did enjoy watching it go through its paces, and there are a number of memorable scenes, even if some don't quite pay off or go on too long. I can definitely see how some producers looked at it and saw a way to make a series out of it, after removing some of the racier stuff. I assume I'll continue to never see it, but you never know.

Play Time


One of those movies that I didn't really love, but I appreciated the immense amount of care and craft behind. It's hard to say what Jacques Tati's deal is, beyond a lot of wide shots filled to the brim with little bits of physical comedy in every corner of the screen. Play Time is a film where dialogue isn't very important, and I could easily see the whole thing working almost as well with no subtitles at all (it's already a mix of French and English), or even as a silent film. It's about a tragic future version of Paris, where all of the famous landmarks people love have been replaced with plain buildings filled with sterile cubic offices, steel floors and chairs with squishy cushions. Humanity still shines through though, as Monsieur Hulot and an American tourist bumble around the trade shows and turn a disastrous restaurant opening into a heck of a party. I think the whole thing could have greatly benefited from chopping as much as half an hour off, but there's nothing wrong with any individual scenes. You can just only take so much whimsy and clever visual comedy before it all seems like the same stuff. Still a solid film.

The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter is possibly the most restrained epic I've ever seen. It tells a story about war and how it can destroy lives, and about love, and is a sweeping three hours long. But there are fewer than ten characters of any real significance, and for the most part the story is contained to a small blue collar town in Pennsylvania. None of this makes it bad, it's just interesting how they decided to allot the running time to the different aspects of the story. Vietnam is the crux of the plot and all of the things that affect the main characters, but the movie probably spends less than an hour total there.

So five friends work at a steel mill, and three of them are leaving for the war soon. One of them is getting married before they ship off, and except for the groom they're all going to go deer hunting one last time after the ceremony. A bearded Robert De Niro is the one who most loves the thrill of the hunt, obsessed with bringing down the deer with one shot, and he's also in love with Meryl Streep, who happens to be in a relationship with his best friend played by Christopher Walken. And that's really everything from the first part of the story, which takes up the first hour. It then cuts quickly to Vietnam, and it's an abrupt transition from people having a good time at a wedding and on a hunting trip to people getting shot and burned alive in a war-torn village. They're captured by the enemy, and then the film introduces its infamous element of Russian Roulette. It might not be a historically accurate depiction of what happened in the war, but that hardly matters when it provides so much great material for the story. The game is an apt metaphor for the pointless, random violence of war, and is a nice way to show that without throwing too much money into huge battles. It also provides from some thrillingly intense scenes of drama.

None of the friends are killed in the war, but they are all deeply affected by their experience, and they don't all make it back to Pennsylvania. The third act is about the post-war life, and focuses mostly on De Niro. All of the central performances are great, including John Cazale's final role as one of the friends who stayed behind, and Walken's, which won him an Oscar. De Niro really holds the end of the movie together though, and without him supporting it it might not have worked. It's a complicated story where nothing is easy or black and white, and as a depiction of what trauma can do to people and how it can wreck plans and affect people who didn't even go, it's a powerful piece of filmmaking. I didn't like everything about its choices in pacing and a few other things, but still definitely deserving of its status as a great film.

The Godfather: Part II

The Godfather might be the best made film I've ever seen, and the sequel does plenty to live up to that standard of cinematography, editing, and acting. I don't think it's an insult to say it doesn't quite live up the the original's standard of storytelling, because it's still an outstanding film and that's a hell of a thing to live up to. I had no issue with any individual element of the movie, I just don't think the overall character arc is quite as fascinating as in the first. In Part I, Michael Corleone is a war hero who slowly gets sucked into his family's criminal business due to loyalty to his father and a decade of desensitization to the wrongs he's committing. He eventually finds himself as don of the whole family. It's a transformation that's fascinating to watch. in Part II, Michael's the godfather. And he's the godfather for the whole movie. Lots of interesting stuff happens to his character, including some pretty brutal personal things in the second half. But while he descends deeper into the role of ruthless crime lord, the arc is just less distinct. It felt more like watching a few episodes of a brilliant crime show than a self contained, fulfilling story.

Again, I don't want to undersell how good this film is. It's one of the best of the decade. It just didn't quite match the first, to me. There's a lot going on, and it's definitely a movie that gets better the closer attention you pay to it. Bit characters from the first film show up to play important parts, there's a dense web of deception and backstabbing that's quite a bit of work to keep up with, and it's as interesting a straight gangster tale as I've ever seen. The flashback segments featuring Robert De Niro as a young Vito Corleone, depicting his rise to power in 1920s New York, are pretty brilliant, and I might have gotten more out of the film as a whole if they got a bigger share of the 200 minutes rather than feeling like a distinct B story to the main one of Michael's struggles. The mostly returning cast is brilliant, Al Pacino further proved himself to me as a master of the craft in his younger days, Robert Duvall continues to make Hagen one of the most sympathetic characters despite his somewhat thankless role, and Diane Keaton has a lot more to do this time, showing she deserved to be in several of the 70's best films. I don't really know many other actors here by name, but no one would have made it into the movie if they didn't know what they were doing. There's not much else to say about it without going into the specifics of the story, which I feel would be a disservice. I don't have to tell anyone this, but the Godfather movies deserve to be seen by anyone who likes the medium for more than just a few laughs and explosions.