Movie Update 16

I've built up a huge backlog of movies I haven't talked about yet. This post doesn't even cover all of them.

Blowup

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni made his transition to English-language films with this, a combination of a look at the culture of "swinging London" in the 60s and a The Conversation-esque plot about a photographer who slowly realized that he accidentally shot evidence of a murder. That part of the movie takes a long time to really get going though, and a lot of the focus is definitely on just seeing what this guy's life of shooting models and buying strange antiques for his apartment is like. Much like the director's previous L'Avventura, I appreciated the visual style of the film more than I enjoyed watching it. It's also notable for being one of the movies involved in the industry's transition from a restrictive code to a rating system, which is something.

A Hard Day's Night


This is sort of an early prototype of a mockumentary. It stars the members of The Beatles as themselves, on the road during a tour. They crack jokes, use a variety of techniques to escape from their ravenous hordes of young female fans, and pretend they're playing a lot of the songs from the album of the same name. There's not much substance to the movie, it's just a fun little romp with some talented guys at the peak of their popularity. Of course, they're more talented musicians than they are actors, but none of them are bad enough to really make the movie hard to watch, and they're not exactly going for Shakespeare here.

Nosferatu


F.W. Murneau cements his status as my favorite silent drama director with this, an unofficial adaptation of Dracula set in his native Germany that is easily the earliest example of actual horrific imagery in a film that I can think of. Max Schreck as Count Orlok in full vampire makeup is a truly creepy and interesting sight. The movie drags a bit in places, but mostly it's 80 minutes of remarkably watchable 1920s filmmaking. I don't know how much of the plot was taken directly from Dracula, but it's a cool little story.

Raise the Red Lantern


Zhang Yimou has been known recently for directing historical action movies like Hero, but before that he worked on period dramas. I disliked To Live when I saw it in school, but I wonder if I might appreciate it more now, because I really loved Raise the Red Lantern. Anytime a movie can get banned in its own country for how it depicts life, it will probably be interesting. It stars Gong Li as a young woman who is forced to leave school and become a wealthy man's fourth mistress when her father dies. It made me once again glad that I wasn't born as a woman more than forty years ago. The film's strongest asset is its cinematography, which makes brilliant use of color throughout, and helps make the interrelations of the several wives of one man fascinating. Just a gorgeous movie, and Li is fantastic in it.

Rebel Without a Cause


I didn't like this very much. I guess it does say something about teen angst, but that's just not a subject that really interests me, and the rest of the movie isn't entertaining enough to make up for it. James Dean did have a real screen presence, but he honestly wasn't the best actor in the world, either. I don't know. I found myself unaffected by the whole thing. Some good scenes, but it never came together in a way I appreciated. It's a real tragedy how none of the three leads lived to see 45, though.

Sophie's Choice


At times this movie felt too obsessed with being a tragedy, like it got in its own way somehow. I liked all three central performances a lot, especially Meryl Streep's, who had to do some of the most emotionally devastating scenes any actress would ever have to do, on top of having to do some of them in a language besides her own. Really amazing work. A lot of the horrible stuff in this movie is self-inflicted though, and I wasn't quite sure it justified itself in these instances. The only thing worse than an unearned happy ending is an unearned sad one. Again, I mostly thought it was good, I just had a few problems with it.

Swing Time


Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made a bunch of musicals together, and this is the most famous. I felt like the industry still hadn't fully figured out how to do the genre yet though, less than a decade after the first talkie. There's some really good dancing and a couple of the songs are good, there's just something a little awkward about the whole production. It also has one of those really annoying romantic comedy plots that can only continue going forward because one or more characters refuses to actually discuss the situation honestly for no real reason. I find that stuff to be less realistic than movies about aliens or something, if they're written better.

Yankee Doodle Dandy

America: the Musical. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a combination biopic and musical that does both pretty well. Dandy was Michael Curtiz' film directly prior to Casablanca, and while it doesn't reach the heights of one of the best movies ever made, it's still worth watching. James Cagney was known for playing tough guys, but here he does brilliant work playing George M. Cohan, a man who made the theater his life and composed a number of famous patriotic songs like "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". The movie was timed perfectly, coming out only a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and reminding people how cool America is I guess. Lots of solid song and dance numbers, and it's a nice little story about one of the country's musical heroes.

Movie Update 8

I watched half of these in a single day when they were about to expire from Netflix streaming. That was pretty wacky.

L'Avventura


Although I didn't particularly enjoy watching it, this was a pretty interesting film. The focus on the actual composition of the images a lot of the time seems unusual for the period, and the way the plot changes away from what you'd expect it to do over time does as well. A woman goes missing during a get together, and her fiancee and friend grow close as they look for her. Monica Vitti is certainly a beautiful woman, and she manages to keep the movie from getting boring mostly by herself. Apparently Italy can do low-key stuff after all.

Cleo from 5 to 7


It starts out pretty great with an overhead color shot of a tarot reading, but I thought the rest of it didn't quite live up to that inventive beginning. Still, a pretty good movie despite the lack of real action. Cleo is a singer who is afraid that upcoming test results will show she has cancer, and the film follows about an hour and a half of her life in real time as she meets with a few people and deals with the possibilities of the future. Very simple, but mostly watchable nonetheless.

Jules and Jim


A French film about a friendship between a man from France and one from Germany, which is disrupted and poisoned over many years by a woman who enters their lives and turns out to be a pretty significant nutcase. It's amazing how generally enjoyable the movie is to watch despite the amazing amount of dysfunction that's put on screen. It's almost hard to believe that the book it's based on was at least somewhat autobiographical. But still, a well acted, interesting film. Francois Truffaut plays around with a lot of different techniques, and his use of things like freeze framing is pretty innovative. The kind of movie that makes you glad foreign cinema exists, because I have trouble imagining it getting made here.

The Kid


The first full length film directed by Charlie Chaplin is a pretty enjoyable one, though I don't think it had the skill of some of his later work, and there just aren't a ton of comedic set pieces of much note. The tramp finds an abandoned baby in an alley, and instead of doing the proper thing, he ends up trying to raise it himself. Years later he uses the kid as an accomplice to commit crimes for petty cash, and forces him to fight another child. Later when the proper authorities try to return the child to its mother, he kidnaps him and tries to keep him from his biological family. I know it's a comedy and there's a very sweet, loving relationship between the tramp and the kid, but hey, that's what happens in the movie.

King Kong


The original film, which it turns out Peter Jackson was quite faithful to. After seeing that this seems like kind of a student project summarizing a bigger story, but it is pretty noteworthy for the effects, which must have been pretty impressive in 1933, because I haven't seen much from a long period after that that looks significantly better. The combination of stop motion and compositing has a lot of obvious flaws today, but still manages to sell the dangerous adventure everyone goes on pretty well. There are some aspects of the movie that it could do without, like casual sexism and racism, but it's pretty darn watchable for when it was made. And the ending really is pretty affecting, even if Jack Black managed to deliver the final line better than the first guy.

Love in the Afternoon


The first film from Billy Wilder I didn't truly like. I mean, it's not bad at all, and it's remarkably successful for what it is. The problem is that it's a romantic comedy that's not very funny or romantic. When it goes for laughs it usually works, but the film is mostly preoccupied with the central relationship between Audrey Hepburn (who I can confirm is gorgeous but probably as responsible as anyone for the trend towards ultra-skinny women) and Gary Cooper. The problem is I don't know why I should be rooting for them. Cooper seems like a fine actor, but he's too old here for me to understand why she's attracted to him, and his personality doesn't help at all, with him being an aloof womanizer for the vast majority of the picture. Just kind of a weird movie.

Pickpocket


Not quite as good as A Man Escaped, but Robert Bresson shows a lot of the same skill at creating a ton of tension and excitement out of very quiet protagonists performing perilous yet otherwise simple tasks. Several of these movies were kind of existential, and this definitely fits that. There's a certain dryness to the movie, but it lends it an air of realism that works well with the simple plot. A very well put together film, with a few lasting images throughout.

Rebecca


This is pretty easily the earliest Alfred Hitchcock movie I've seen, and for some reason my expectations weren't that high. In some ways, it's very much a product of its time. But I ended up loving it about as much as my other favorite Hitchcock films. The story takes a while but eventually goes to some pretty unexpected and shocking places, Judith Anderson is totally creepy, and George Sanders is as always amazingly slimy. Really good stuff.