On DVD at home with Lucía, John, and Elizabeth on 3 July 2009 at around 22:00.
Not a very good movie. Ralph Fiennes plays three generations of a family and performs them in almost the same way. None of the characters are very appealing, and the dialogue is a bit tough to sit through. I doubt there is any movie in which you see as much of Ralph Fiennes as in this one.
On DVD with Lucía at home on Monday, 22 June 2009 at around 22:00.
I’m not as much a fan of Hitchcock as I used to be. I still like his films, and The Man Who Knew Too Much is no exception. There is one scene when Doris Day finds out her son has been kidnapped and her husband has drugged her (to prevent a heart attack? to prevent her from doing something stupid?)—it’s a dramatic moment that has a raw emotional power that I’ve never seen before in a Hitchcock film (more like something out of Douglas Sirk).
I don’t remember the original version of the film too well, though Lucía just saw it recently.
The story overall isn’t so interesting, but the execution is so nice that it’s just easy to go along for the ride, even though so many of Hitchcock’s masterful moments of suspense seem kind of transparent and a little silly now.
Jimmy Stewart’s character, and the decisions he makes throughout the film are probably the most interesting part of the film, in retrospect. His character is very enigmatic, and Jimmy Stewart really seems to play that up a good deal in his performance.
Jun-Dai: B
Lucía: B
On DVD at home with Lucía on 11 June 2009 at around 23:00.
A very bizarre film. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. A fair bit of moralizing. Not my favorite Claudette Colbert character. But the pure comedy and surreal behavior was enough to sustain my interest in the film.
What’s really strange is that I have no recollection whatsoever as to why I added this film to my Netflix queue. It must have come up somewhere.
One thing I noticed during the film was that a character in the film, Carlo, is the basis for a similar character (also named Carlo) in Cradle Will Rock. A sort of genius composer protégé that hangs around the house and does nothing.
24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)
On 35mm at the IFC Center with Lucía and John on 10 June 2009 at 21:50.
I think I have to see this film over again, although it’s pretty painfully slow and not very visually appealing. I spent the first half struggling to stay awake, and by the time I figured out what the film was about, I’d already missed most of what had been talked about already.
The film is about the closing of Factory 420 in order to build 24 City, a modern apartment complex. The entire story is told through interviews, in between which there are some mostly dialogueless scenes of the factory, its demolition, and various areas around the factory. Each interview captures, through the interviewee’s personal narrative, some essence of both the history of Factory 420 and the generational changes in China as a whole from just after the Cultural Revolution to the present day.
I remembered, luckily, to sit towards the back of the theater as the movie is shot on consumer video. Unlike Still Life, which has a pleasing aesthetic sensibility that makes the camera seem to be wistfully pondering the last days of a soon-to-be-flooded world of life, 24 City has a sort of anti-aesthetic that makes the film all the harder to watch. There are a few nice scenes in the vacant areas of the factory, and Jia Zhangke captures certain details that lend a certain mood to the film (rain hitting a pane of glass sitting on a windowsill).
On DVD at home with Jun-Dai and John on 05 June 2009 after dinner.
I was impressed with the skill and economy of storytelling and characterisation in this film.
On DVD at home on 05 June 2009, while somebody worked until 3:30 a.m.
I liked The 39 Steps quite a bit more.
On DVD at home with Lucía on 2 June 2009.
I should really be more disciplined and jot down my thoughts soon after watching the film. Ratcatcher is one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, but my thoughts on the film have become a little fragmented in the 10 days since I saw it.
I do remember that the film is thoroughly enveloping as a child’s perspective, and the child acting in the film is brilliantly captured, no less so than in films like My Life as a Dog, Le 400 coups, and Le vieil homme et l’enfant.
The film is from the perspective of a young boy named James, living in Scottish public housing building during a garbage collectors’ strike. On one side of the building there is a large, growing pile of garbage infested with rats. On the other side of the building there is a large, open canal. This canal is constantly present in the background of the film (frequently visible through windows in interior shots), and it is along (or in) the canal that many of the scenes in the film take place. Drowning in the canal seems to be an important theme in the film (it opens with a child drowning).
There is a lot of repetition in the film, sort of illustrating the cyclical life in a limited environment. One recurring activity is hunting around the garbage bags looking for rats. Another is watching older boys get off on mistreating others and bullying an older girl.
A lot of the characters are sort of mysterious. It’s not always clear why the parents are acting the way they are, and James’ older sister in particular seems to have a whole other life that he’s not a part of. Similarly, the garbage strike is sort of a peculiar background event that seems only relevant in that it gives James a large pile of garbage in which to look for rats, and later a number of soldiers (they come to break the strike and clear up the garbage) that children are given free rein to taunt, impede, and hit. The housing inspectors (or social workers or whatever they are) that come to investigate his family’s living conditions are clearly important to James’ father, but to James the gravity of the visit only becomes apparent after they’ve left.
But the most effective part of the film’s portrayal of James’ perspective comes in the littler things. There are two scenes where James’ parents are asleep in their clothes, and James reaches out to pull his mother’s stocking over her toe (it’s sticking out through a hole). There is a scene where James pours salt onto the table into a pile and plays with it with a toy car while none of the other characters seem to notice.
On DVD at home with Lucía on 1 June 2009 at around 22:00.
Criterion’s DVD of Le Corbeau was of pretty poor quality, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying this fine film.
Twenty-Four Eyes (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)
wikipedia
On DVD at home with Lucía on 31 May 2009 pretty late at night.
Twenty-Four Eyes was a very interesting film. It really drags on at times, and I got pretty tired of the gossip => cry => sing routine that the film employs throughout. On the other hand, it’s a pretty amazing portrait of a particular place (Shodoshima) through the hard times of the early thirties, the overseas expansion and surge in ultra-nationalism, the war, and defeat.
The acting was not great. There were a lot of child actors playing somewhat contrived roles, and that resulted in a fairly amateurish feel. On the other hand, when the actors were doing more ordinary things—walking about, rowing, attending class—they seemed very much to fit the parts. The film seemed to straddle traditional drama and realism in a fairly awkward way. There was, among other things, a sort of constant appeal to tragic emotion that made the film seem sort of endless.
The cinematography in the film was memorable. There was a lot of long, super-long, and super-super-long shots that provided a lot of context in the way of scenery. Most of the film was fairly low contrast, and brought out the surrounding environment in tremendous detail. After the film, I felt that I knew that little corner of Shōdoshima intimately. To use a cliché: the setting was so thoroughly felt throughout the film that the island itself was as much a character in the film as any of the people.
Twenty-Four Eyes is a sort of flawed film that through its earnestness, careful construction, inclusive photography, and capturing of a historic moment is elevated to a sort of special realm in cinéma—it’s not a masterpiece, but it is an important and unique work.
On Blu-ray at home with Lucía on 30 May late at night.
I don’t think Baraka is quite the profound film it wants to be. It is a remarkable collage of footage from around the world, showing the very developed side of some developed countries (e.g., Park Ave. and Grand Central Station in New York, Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo) and the very undeveloped side of the developing and underdeveloped nations (e.g., scavengers at a dump near Delhi, homeless in Brazil, a cigarette plant in Indonesia), along with various religious ceremonies and a few locations of great natural wonder (e.g., Ayers Rock, Iguazu), archaeological significance (e.g., the Pyramids, Angkor Wat), and at least one place of particular politico-historical import (Sonsam Kosal Killing Fields). There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the selection of footage—it’s more a sampling of what humanity and the Earth has to offer.
The footage itself was very uneven. The night shots did not come off well, and while some sequences were brilliant short films in their own right, others didn’t seem like they belonged at all. There seemed to be an emphasis on the busyness and inhuman nature of Tokyo and New York as well as the poverty of Brazil and India, which, while certainly being very noticeable things about those countries, seemed to de-emphasize the incredible range of each. Perhaps I’m reading into it too much, but in some ways the film felt like it was revealing the incredible variety on this planet by diminishing the variety within each location and emphasizing the difference between them. This felt a little false, but perhaps it was the only feasible option given the scope of the film and its short running time. Also, showing the destitute in New York and the more developed parts of India might have contributed to a sense of homogeneity that I imagine the filmmakers were trying to avoid.
The film was definitely at its strongest when capturing religious ceremonies and architecture, as well as in capturing portraits of individual people. There’s something very reverent about the film’s approach to capturing rituals, and its coverage of religious settings is far more comprehensive than the coverage of nature, industrial, urban, etc. settings. And the portraits are just great.
Lucía: B-
Jun-Dai B+