The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. The Devils (Ken Russell)
2. The Killers (Andrei Tarkovsky)
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
4. Red Beard  (Akira Kurosawa)
5. Green Porno (Isabella Rossellini)
6. France (Bruno Dumont)
7. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
8. Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
9. Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus)
10. Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes)

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1- When I think of Ken Russell, I think of a director with access to incredible resources – the best set designers, the best costumers, the best actors – but is completely unencumbered by restraint and good taste.  When I saw his movies when they first came out I was dazzled by their flash. They were shocking at the time. Now they just seem like tired exercises in Camp, which titillate absolutely no one. I had fond memories of his biographical films and hoped that they might have escaped his manic excesses, especially the early ones he made for BBC TV on subjects as varied as Isadora Duncan and the composer Delius.  I haven’t seen any of them recently, but if my viewing of his Mahler is any indication, no thanks.

It’s all just tired camp and tired camp is even tireder than tired Film Noir.

How did he get Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed to debase themselves so thoroughly? The novel it is based on is by Aldous Huxley. I bet it is more reasonable.

2- The Killers was a student project by the soon-to-be legendary Andrei Tarkovsky.  Based on a Hemingway short story, it is a tight little film with no flab at all.  If anyone is looking for a tolerable way to make a Film Noir, please have a look at this.

3- I had avoided Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Charlie Kaufman has such a fanboy base, that I was sure I would be rolling my eyes for the whole runtime. Reader, I loved it! Brilliant, of course, but what was surprising to me was that it was so heart-felt.   Often these films that are obsessed with multi-verse are too clever by half and the whole exercise become about dazzling the audience with their cleverness.  At least with me this always backfires.  If that’s all you got, then I’m not terribly interested (I’m looking at you Everything Everywhere All At Once). You put a lot of work into a complicate plot, bravo. There needs to be more, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has more in spades. The lead performances by Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey are so quirky yet understated and touching.   I think Carrey gets my award for the most undervalued actor.

4- Criterion always has interesting things on offer.  Lately they have been showing a series of very short films by Isabella Rossellini called Green Porno, explaining the reproductive habits of various living creatures.  She plays the creatures in question.  It’s all very DIY and very adorable and a little nasty.  I had a great time.

5- France is another great offering from Criterion. It is about that ever-interesting intersection between news and entertainment. Lea Seydoux gives a fascinating portrayal of a successful TV presenter at the top of her game, but who is knocked off her balance by circumstances for which she is responsible. I am sure that the political content would be more apparent to a French audience. The character’s name is France and in some respect, which I’ll admit goes over my goes my head, she must be a stand-in for the nation and its soul. It is not at brilliant as the similar Marriage of Maria Braun, but it is after different game, I think. It is a powerful and constantly fascinating character study. We don’t get epic statements like the Fassbinder too often nowadays. We get big but empty films, which brings me to……

6- Oppenheimer. No question this is a film with a huge amount of talent and dollars behind it. But…..so much bloat. Everyone was so busy rhapsodizing over this crowd-approved enterprise that no one mentioned that the central character is an undeveloped cipher. In fact the movie only came alive for me once the emphasis was off Oppenheimer and on Strauss, played ingeniously by Robert Downey, Jr. This was a character created with thought and artistry. Strauss is complex, appealling and constantly surprising. I couldn’t wait for the bomb to drop, so we could finally concentrate on the more interesting McCarthy era skullduggery. Once we got to this point I asked myself “Did they really want to make a film about the Manhattan Project? It seems that they couldn’t wait to get to the second part of the story considering how much nuance was lavished on it, compared to the way we had to barrel through Los Alamos with cameo appearances by Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein. It must be me, though. Christopher Nolan’s films are wildly acclaimed and usually they just rile me up to the point that I don’t want to play along anymore, e.g. Memento and Inception.

7- I happen to be teaching Coriolanus and I was very happy to come upon this lean and very mean film adaptation by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the lead role. For all the updating to some unidentified Eastern European locale, the film is very faithful to the source play. I was sad to see Menenius’ belly speech cut, but you can’t have anything. Vanessa Redgrave is mind-boggling as the mind-boggling Volumnia. Poor Coriolanus never had a chance with a mother like that!

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Altered States (Ken Russell)
2. Fitzwilly (Delbert Mann)
3. Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra)
4. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Michael Hoffman)
5. The Dead (John Huston)
6. In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai)
7. El Conde (Pablo Larraín)
8. Film, the Living Record of Our Memory (Ines Toharia)
9. Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
10. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar Wai)

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1- I am rewatching a lot of films that I saw at their premieres, but not since.  Thank you, TCM.   One such film is Altered States.   I remembered how handsome William Hurt was and that it was vaguely psychedelic. It’s directed by Ken Russell, so that is a given.  It’s a lot of raised-consciousess stuff that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.  Regressing to a primordial state by taking drugs and going into an isolation tank? OK.  It was fun to watch again once I stopped trying to make sense out of the plot.

2- Fitzwilly is a film that makes me feel my age because it is a film that would never be made now, but I can recall a time when tons of films like this were being made and were showcased in places like Radio City Music Hall. The reason that it could never be made now is that there is no appetite anymore for sentimentality.  The plot here is very cute, the star is Dick Van Dyke who is very cute in the title role and as a bonus you get the grande dame of cute, Dame Edith Evans (‘A haaaandbag?!?!?!?).  There is steady sense of whimsy from beginning to end and it is totally disarming.   But is there any place for whimsy now?  I think it is an endangered cinematic species.

3- Platinum Blonde is a Frank Capra that does not get sickeningly sanctimonious.  It has an early performance by Jean Harlow.   I know she was from Kansas City, but am I the only one who thinks that she sounds like she comes from deepest, darkest Brooklyn?

What was most interesting to me was Harlow’s costar, an actor named Robert Williams.   This was his only starring role, and he was dead of peritonitis just days after the film opened.  It was the same disease that  would claim Harlow in just a few years.    What is interesting to me is Williams’ comic styling.  He is often mumbling, talking to himself or in aside.  If he had been around longer and had more starring roles opposite great comediennes like Harlow or Mae West perhaps what seems like mannerisms in this film would have become a kind of comic standard, like Cary Grant’s suave delivery or William Powell’s elegant comic styling.

4- I am currently teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This is an excellent version and the only major studio version I can think of besides the 1930s Max Reinhardt version with Mickey Rooney as Puck.   This is a wonderful version of the play with no outlandish ‘directorisms’ marring your enjoyment of the play.  The changes that are made are totally acceptable and enhance your enjoyment.  For example, during the Pyramis and Thisbe play, after being laughed at by the nobles for delivering his lines is an affected falsetto, Francis Flute drops into his ‘real’ voice and gives an extraordinarily moving reading of Thisbe’s lament over Pyramis’ body.    It really works and it shuts up those annoying, insulting nobles

5- I was reading The Dead for a book group discussion, so I rewatched this masterpiece.  John Huston’s career went out in an amazing one-two punch of Prizzi’s Honor and this film.  It is very faithful to the Joyce novella in mood and characterization, and that is perhaps its greatest merit, along with an amazing performance by Anjelica Huston as the complicated Gretta Conroy.  I can’t imagine a better adaptation of a James Joyce work

6- You are privileged to live in a time when you can watch  In The Mood For Love  when every you want.  Don’t even think we can be friends if you have never seen it.

7- El Conde satisfies every need I have in a horror film plus it is wickedly funny and outrageously gory (but I am sure you can handle it.) I won’t even divulge one iota of the plot because its unraveling is the joy (?) of watching it.   It is also, along with Citizen Kane and The Seventh Seal, the most stunning use of black and white photography I have ever seen.

8- Film, the Living Record of Our Memory is an excellent and informative documentary about the history and techniques of film preservation. These people are the equivalent of the Irish monks and the Islamic scholars who saved the great works of antiquity during the ‘dark’ ages. Special acknowledgment must be made to Martin Scorsese. I have mixed feelings about his movies, but that is my problem. I have nothing but reverence for his work in World Cinema Preservation.

9- Magnolia needs its own post to do it justice. It is so rich and powerful but at the same time fun and moving. The closest experience to watching this movie is watching my beloved Nashville. More to come on this magnificent, unjustly forgotten film.

10- While watching The Grandmaster I wished that I knew more about Hong Kong Martial Arts Films. But then I realized about halfway through that this is a Wong Kar Wai film masquerading as a Honk Kong Martial Arts film. The same sumptuous emotion that you feel in In The Mood For Love or Happy Together

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies)
2. Crybaby (John Waters)
3. Monty Python & The Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam/Terry Jones)
4. Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
5. The Executioner (Luis Garcia Berlanga)
6. The Exorcist (William Friedkin)
7. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges)
8. Walk Hard (Jake Kasdan)
9. The Rapture (Michael Tolkin)
10. Fanny and Alexander – Television Version (Ingmar Bergman) 

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1- John Waters is often referred to as the Pope of Trash or as a shockmeister.  Those labels might have referred to his early films from the Divine era.  His later films are actually sweet and funny.  The shocks are on par with a six year old making you look and them opening their mouth to show you a mouth full of chewed food.  Shocking? No? Cute? A little    Cry Baby is sweet and dopey in the vein of Hairspray. Fun to watch and Johnny Depp is beautiful with his glycerine tears.   I had fun watching it, but not a lot of nourishment here

2- I feel like I don’t need to write anything about Barbie. It’s all been said.  I certainly had a good time and laughed a lot, which I haven’t done in a contemporary movie in a long time.  But is it Feminism 2.0?  Not so sure, but it certainly isn’t the reactionary film that a lot of people are accusing it of being.  My big question is why was it such a phenomenon?

3- I am continuing my exploration of Berlanga’s movies (thank you Criterion Collection).  I was told that The Execution is among his most highly regarded works.  I see why. It is wickedly funny in the vein of Bunuel, but not as cruel 

4-  I saw The Exorcist when it first came out with another Jewish friend. We were both expecting to be terrified out of our wits.  Instead,  we found it engaging and interesting from an anthropological point of view but not terrifying at all.  When I saw that my Catholic friends were traumatized by the movie, I understood it was because as a Jew I didn’t have the idea of the Devil luring me into temptation leading to eternal damnation. Watching it again, I think it is extremely well-made.  The plight of Father Damian is particularly touching.  But as a whole I was more interested in the concept than terrified by it.

5-  I don’t know how I missed Walk Hard.  It is the best send-up of a biopic I have ever seen.  All the cliches of a struggling musicians climb to the top are there.  Unlike This Is Spinal Tap it doesn’t mock the characters but it mocks the conventions of the genre.  The humor is quite broad and often ridiculous, but the whole enterprise is a sophisticated piece of film criticism

6- The Rapture is another film that I saw when it first came out.  It seems to be completely forgotten today, which is a shame.  In this un-nuanced time, a nuanced consideration of fundamentalist religion is exactly what is needed but we will never get it.  The character Mimi Rodgers plays is possibly the bravest character I have seen in a film

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey)
2. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
3. Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise)
4. Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson)
5. The Old Dark House (James Whale)
6. The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz)
7. Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur)
8. Carnival of Souls (Herk Hervey)
9. White Zombie (Victor Halperin)
10. Drums Along The Mohawk (John Ford)

1- My annual Halloween revels included many old favorites. I watched Val Lewton masterpieces – Cat People, Curse of the Cat People and Isle of the Dead and some pre-code Horror courtesy of The Criterion Collection. It seems like these early 1930’s horror films all have certain elements in common. Their look is heavily indebted to the German expressionism of the time, so they all look fantastic. Since we are in the pre-Code era, there is ample opportunity for women to be show running around in undergarments or tight-fitting dresses. One thing they also have in common is a very garish comic streak. The Old Dark House is more of an Addams Family creepy comedy than a pure horror film. The comedy in The Mystery of the Wax Museum comes from a pair of squabbling newspaper reporters, very reminiscent of the later His Girl Friday. The ‘pure’ horror film, White Zombie, is disaster in every sense except for art direction. Once again, a heavy debt is made to German Expressionism and the film looks gorgeous. But the plot! Yikes. The scenery chewing of Bela Lugosi is embarrassing. You wish that the young lovers could have remained zombies.

2- For me, the most satisfying Halloween viewing is always Carnival of Souls. I’ve written about it probably every year. Repeated viewing only makes me realize how miraculous a film it is. Shoestring budgets and non-professional actors give it a bit of an amateur patina, but man! What atmosphere.

3- I am a devotee of John Ford, as should we all be. I hadn’t seen Drums Along the Mohawk in years, but remembered loving it. I was not disappointed. It is unusual in Ford’s output, and the output of Classic Hollywood in general, in that it is set in the Revolutionary War. This is a theme that is not dealt with very often, certainly not with the frequency of films about The West or The Civil War. What makes this so different also is the depiction of the young marriage between Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda. They are both gorgeous here. Their relationship is strong and, unusually for Hollywood of the time, reflects a very strong, healthy sexual bond. Plus you get Edna May Oliver. Enjoy!

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmush)
2. Metal Lords (Peter Sollett)
3. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)
4. Man Wanted (William Dieterle)
5. The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman)
6. The Fall of the House of Usher (Roger Corman)
7. Murder at the Zoo (A. Edward Sutherland)
8. La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante)
9. Doctor X (Michael Curtiz)
10. In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter)

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1- I am determined to watch more Jim Jarmush, so I watched Stranger Than Paradise again. It is the first film of his I watched, at least 30 years ago. It is his first feature and surprisingly it is much more formalistic than the later films of his that I have seen. It is funny and sad and reminds me of a very ugly time in Brooklyn when everything was grimy and dangerous and no one would have though of going to Bushwick, let alone live there. I liked the rigor of the single takes, up to a point. The acting is phenomenal, especially the Hungarian aunt who for some reason is living in a dump of a house near a highway in Ohio.

2- The only reason I watched Metal Lords was because it stars a phenomenal young actor named Adrian Greensmith. He blew me away in a YA series on Amazon Prime called Harlan Coben’s Shelter. This show was ultimately unsatisfying and kind of poorly plotted but Greensmith was amazing. I hope he blossoms.

3- I dodged Donnie Darko for years because I thought it was going to be one of those exhausting “Try and figure me out but you will be wrong’ puzzle movies like Mulholland Drive or Memento or Everything Everywhere All At Once. Well, I was kind of right. That’s what it is and I did my due diligence after watching it and read a few articles ‘explain’ what it was ‘about’, so I felt like I gave it a fair shake. I will admit that I did enjoy watching it. It is beautiful to look at and just understandable enough to get (mostly) what is going on. But I just don’t like movies that make me feel like a prize is waiting for me at the end if I ‘get it’.

4- Man Wanted is a perfect example of a pre-Code comedy that seems naughtier that it actually is. If it were made in France of the time, it would have been a lot more risque. It stars Kay Francis who was an enormous star in the 30s and it all but forgotten except for the kinds of people who watch TCM. Opposite her is the very handsome David Manners, another actor of the time who is forgotten even though he played the romantic lead in Lugosi’s Dracula. The good thing about these pre-Code comedies it that they are breezy and almost always under 90 minutes long. Producers and directors of today’s elephantine films: Take Note!

5-The Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher are two low-budget Roger Corman ‘adaptations’ of Edgar Allan Poe stories which Criterion Collection was featuring this month. I watched them to get a jump on my annual Halloween horror film extravaganza. The latter was Corman’s first foray into these stories and he was able to use elaborate sets already at the English studio where he was filming. It is pretty good and kind of depraved in the way you want your low-budget horror films to be. The Fall of the House of Usher, however, was a holy (or unholy) mess. Watching it I kept saying to myself “This is fun, but it makes absolutely no sense.” Then I remembered that wise words of my beloved High School English teacher, the great Marion Freed. A while ago I read a bunch of Poe stories and just didn’t get them. So I asked Freed what she thought of them. Her reply: “Poe? He’s your decay guy. If it’s decay you want, he’s your guy.” So now I say unto you, if it’s decay you want, The Fall of the House of Usher is your film.

6- Criterion is featuring Pre-code horror for Spooky Season. This often means Universal Horror from the 30s. Beyond the expected Dracula and Bride of Frankenstein, they are offering lesser known efforts like Murder at the Zoo and Doctor X – a veritable Lionel Atwill festival of evil. An odd feature of these films is a wacky comic character, in this case Lee Tracy as a wacky P.R. man for the eponymous zoo. Inexplicably scantily clad women seem to be part of the genre, in this case Fay Wray a year before she meets King Kong. Neither are great in the way that the James Whale Universal films are great, but they’ll do the trick for a fix of Old Hollywood spookiness.

7- The film that La LLorona most reminds me of it The Devil’s Backbone, which is a great compliment to La LLorona. Both are films that are political indictments in the guise of horror films. In The Devil’s Backbone, the horrors of the Spanish Civil War are dealt with. In La LLorona it is the indigenous genocides in Guatemala under the rule of Rios Montt. In both cases, the supernatural provides the right atmosphere for the horrors done by humans and not otherworldly beings. Perhaps it is more powerful to understand these atrocities when couched in the tropes of horror film? Perhaps. In any event, La LLorona is a powerful political engagement with a horrifying period using the Maya legend of a crying women (a llorona) wailing for her murdered children as a stand-in for the Guatemalans whose loved ones were murdered or disappeared during Rios Montt’s insane purging of enemies, under the guise of purging the country of ‘communists’. There is a scene of an indigenous woman giving testimony at the genocide trial of the Rios Montt character that will be seared into my memory. Her face is ornately veiled and she is speaking in a subtitled Maya language. Her speech is slow and quiet. The result is devastating.

8- Compared to the horror films of the 1930s and 1940s the more contemporary films have absolutely no interest in reassuring the audience that all will turn out well. In fact, you can pretty much count on the opposite to be the case. When discussing Doctor X with my friend Aaron, he posited that if the film were made today, Fay Wray would never have emerged unscathed. I thought of this when I was watching In The Mouth of Madness. John Carpenter in many ways is the godfather of modern horror and with that comes the nihilistic world-view. The movie has a fascinating premise: a phenomenally successful horror novel is driving the world insane and unspeakable acts of cruelty are sweeping the world. The end is just about as bleak as you could imagine. I really liked it a lot, but I was sure ready for a little Lee Tracy when it was over.

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Secret Honor (Robert Altman)
2. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa)
3. Cléo From 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda)
4. One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Agnès Varda)
5. Night On Earth (Jim Jarmush)
6. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
7. Lokita & Tori  (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
8. I Know Where I’m Going (Powell/Pressburger)
9. King Creole (Michael Curtiz)
10. Suspiria (Dario Argento)

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1- The first time I saw Nashville was a seismic event in my movie life. I followed it all around New York that summer, dragging along anyone who would come with me. I hoped that I would have similar epiphanies with other Altman films, but that has not been the case. I diligently watch them whenever the opportunity comes up, but the addiction never sets in. I like most of them just fine, but I never go crazy. People talk about McCabe and Mrs. Miller with the same incantatory tone that I do with Nashville, but it always leaves me cold. I keep doing my due diligence, and when the Criterion Collection featured Secret Honor I tried it. It is not a film to be passionate about, but that’s fine. It is a fascinating filmed monologue of a deranged Richard Nixon about a decade after the event of Watergate making a sort of taped confession/explanation of what happened. It is mostly paranoid nuttiness as you would expect, but it is very much a piece of its time, before the revisionist views of Nixon started cropping up (“He was bad domestically, but a brilliant foreign policy president.”} . Was the coverup of Watergate that forced Nixon out of office, really a coverup for something much worse involving the State Department and China and heroin? Probably not, but it is fun to watch the increasingly nuts Nixon trying to convince himself and whomever he is talking to on the tape.

2- Most people only know the ‘samurai’ films of Akira Kurosawa but he has about as many ‘contemporary’ films that examine the same moral complexities. High and Low is a dizzyingly involving movie. Shot in wide-screen, the first half or so is disorienting since it takes place in a single room. The wide screen camera gives a sense of claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time. At the start, it presents itself as straight-forward thriller with a kidnapping plot. But that plot is unraveled by the mid-point of the movie. We then get a fascinating parallel portrait of tormenter and tormented. The end is overwhelming.

3- The best thing about the Criterion Collection is having the complete or almost-complete filmography of great directors. I am particularly grateful for the huge collection of narrative and documentary films of Agnes Varda. I didn’t know much about her until I watched her early masterpiece Le Bonheur. I have been playing catch-up with her this month. I watched Cleo from 5 to 7 and One Sings The Other Doesn’t. I had seen the latter when it first came out, but remembered nothing about it. It was a delightful watch. It was refreshing to see a sweet feminist fantasy where men are largely irrelevant. It has a kind of hippy vibe to it. The life choice that the overt feminist, the one who sings, makes are questionable, but she is very happy with her decisions and so is everyone around her. I found the whole thing a little loopy and dated but endearing. I missed the scathing feminism of Le Bonheur, but that isn’t what this was about. Cleo from 5 to 7 came out at the beginning of the New Wave in France. I never took much to those films, I find them quite adolescent and undisciplined. Some find that refreshing. I find it tiresome, like listening to a teenager rant about their view of the world. I must say that Cleo is quite a different experience. Rigorously designed but totally accessible. The ‘real time’ gimmick of the film is subtle but works. You even get to see Michel Legrand as Cleo’s pianist.

4- I’m continuing my tour of Jim Jarmush’s films. I just adored Night on Earth. The gimmick of four separate taxi rides on the same night in Los Angeles, New York, Rome and Helsinki was exhilarating. We wind up with four very different genre. The only one I couldn’t wait to be over was the Rome section mostly because of the insufferable Roberto Benigni. I find his kind of comedy insufferable. I once described Robin Williams’ comic style as “I am going to keep throwing everything I have at you until you laugh, goddammit!” Benigni is like that, but in Italian. The Helsinki vignette was especially touching. Just a beautiful film. Looking forward to the next one.

5- The first night after the horrible heat wave last month reminded me of Halloween with its cool winds and darkness. I had to celebrate the coming Spooky Season a little early by watching Psycho for the thousandth time. Watching it now for me is like listening to a favorite symphony. It is so perfectly constructed. The alternating moments of horror, humor and pathos are deftly handled. This time I was so impressed with Anthony Perkins. His performance is so beautifully modulated. If it is possible to watch the movie now without knowing how it ends, one will marvel at his portrayal of Norman Bates goes from sad, sweet loner to monstrous son without ever losing our sympathy. I always am amazed at the scene when he is sinking the car containing Janet Leigh’s body in the bog. At one point it stops thinking and everyone in the audience is thinking “Oh no! Norman is going to get caught” Then there is the relief when it finally sinks all the way. Hitchcock is NOT the master of suspense. He is the master of audience complicity.

6- I Know Where I’m Going is exactly the kind of Romance I like. Quirky, edgy characters in almost-fantasy settings (here the far north of Scotland). Wendy Hiller is a goddess.

7- I always heard that King Creole was the best of all the Elvis Presley films. That must be a pretty low bar. I found it stilted and cliched. Apparently Elvis was brought in as a substitute for the recently deceased tortured young Method Actor James Dean. I am sure that Elvis did as good a job as that scenery chewer would have done. But the whole thing is sluggish. Amazing since the film is directed by Michael Curtiz who directed the most unsluggish of all Hollywood productions, Casablanca.

8- I think I saw Suspiria a long, long time about, but I didn’t remember a thing about it, which is unusual for me. It is so stylized and so over the top that the plot, what little there is, becomes incoherent. But plot is not the point here. 1970s sex and violence are what is paramount here, and don’t you forget it. The murders are gory and unforgiving. And the whole thing just kind of ends. It boasts the great Alida Valli and the not-so-great Joan Collins in major roles. I liked it better than the other fever dream from 1977, the Japanese House.

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Carl Laemmle
2. Sing And Like It (William Seiter)
3. Godland (Hlynur Pálmason)
4. People on Sunday (Siodmak/Ulmer)
5. A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir)
6. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
7. Tár (Todd Field)
8. Christmas in Connecticut (Peter Godfrey)
9. The Hasty Heart (Victor Sherman)
10. Lan Yu (Stanley Kwan)

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1- One of the great things about The Criterion Collection is that beside classic films, they often offer new films that aren’t available elsewhere. They were heavily promoting Godland, an Icelandic film about a very unpleasant pastor send from Denmark to build a church and parish for Danish emigres in a remote coastal city in Iceland. The film is painfully slow and the pastor becomes more and more miserable to spend time with. As you could imagine, Iceland looks breathtaking. I don’t completely understand this movement of slow cinema. I get it in the case of Tarkovsky. He is inducing a trancelike state in the audience which is an integral part of viewing his movies. Here the slowness creates exhaustion only. I keep contemplating watching one of Bela Tarr’s marathons, but frankly I’m scared.

2- What a serendipitous pleasure to watch People on Sunday and A Day in the Country one after the other. Both films are about middle class people enjoying a day off in nature, one is a contemporary picture of Berlin in the early 1930s, the other is late 19th Century by way of a story by Guy De Maupassant. Both short films have astounding pedigrees. People on Sunday was created by Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann and Billy WIlder, all of whom would be fleeing the Nazis and having great success in Hollywood during and after the war. Ulmer was a creator of great B-pictures like Detour. Zinnemann was one of the great directors, with films like High Noon. Billy Wilder first made hits writing scripts for Ernst Lubitsch, and eventually directing and writing masterpieces of his own like The Apartment, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. This short film is a fascinating combination of narrative filmed in a documentary style. The four protagonists are enjoying a day off from work at a waterside park in Berlin. The ‘extras’ are ordinary people who are actually enjoying a day off and are not a part of the film. The ‘real’ background is a setting for the ‘story’. Even at this early stage we see Wilder’s familiar snarky observations about male/female relations that he will bring more to the forefront in his Hollywood movies. A Day in the Country is by the great Jean Renoir taken from a story by Guy De Maupassant. Renoir had to leave the film unfinished to go work on another feature. He came back to it some years later and tacked on a very melancholy ending. It has the feeling of an incomplete masterpiece. Many say that if he had completed it, this would have been one of Renoir’s greatest achievements

3- Tár is a classic bait and switch. It starts off as a depiction of world-renowned conductor at the top of game being interviewed by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker. She is strong, powerful and smart. Since her upcoming recording is of Mahler’s 5th, I was ready to settle in for an interesting study of a genius at work accompanied by great music. Unfortunately, from this high point the character of Lydia Tár spirals down into what can only be called a monster. She is responsible for destroying the happiness, and in some cases the lives, of the people closest to her and who trust her most. She approaches this all with a detachment that can only be described as amoral. Do we really need another film displaying the predatory Lesbian? The film became so bleak that I came close to turning it off a few times. I checked what else Todd James directed. The last film I saw by him was In The Bedroom, another film that draws you into the lives of initially appealing characters, who ultimately become amoral monsters. My late husband often said a great failing of certain works of art is when evil and immorality is not identified as such. Thank you, Bob.

4- I remember The Hasty Heart from my long-ago youth in the 60s and 70s when channel 9 in New York ran a show called The Million Dollar Movie which would show the same film for a week at 7:30PM, like at a movie theater. I guess this where I developed the habit of watching the same film innumerable times. I remembered loving this film but all I remembered was that it told the story of a handsome Scottish soldier who is dying of some unknown disease in a Burma army jungle hospital, even though he seems virile and healthy. Seeing it now, it made me feel like I was going to a Broadway drama of the 40s or 50s. Often, when movies are described as ‘a filmed play’ it is meant as a disparagement. Here, I felt it was kind of a time capsule. Richard Todd is quite handsome and it was constantly disconcerting to see Ronald Reagan in the role of Yank, the American GI with a ton of decency and a heart of gold, Patricia Neal is on hand as well. She is an actress who never got her due, who unfortunately married Roald Dahl.

5- Lan Yu is another film that the Criterion Collection was showcasing during Pride Month. It is a gay love story that was shot in Beijing and takes place at the time of the Tiananmen uprising. Apparently it was shot in secret. No wonder. It is a very erotically told story and the characters are compelling. But, of course, a tragic ending is cobbled on to the story that really seems out of place. This is one Gay movie that I felt had a good potential to have things work out for the lovers, but no. I can’t really invoke The Celluloid Closet here because the film was based on an anonymous internet story that was floating around China. But is that an excuse? I guess that is why there was the awful ending of the awful Brokeback Mountain and the even more awful Call Me By Your Name. But we live in the era of Heartstopper now. How about a story about interesting Gay men who don’t die and who are not plot devices in a silly romcom? I know I’m breaking one of my Cardinal rules of criticism by faulting a feeling for not being what it isn’t, but, come on!

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
2. Julius Caesar (Joseph Mankiewicz)
3. Scandal: The Trial of Mary Astor (Alexa Foreman)
4. No Bears (Jafar Panahi)
5. Father Takes a Walk (William Beaudine)
6. Baby Face (Alfred E. Green)
7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
8. Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges)
9. The Last Command (Josef Von Sternberg)
10. The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman)

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1- Mysterious Object at Noon is the second film I have seen by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is more playful and experimental than Uncle Bonmee. I was totally engrossed by it once I realized that it was based on the ‘exquisite corpse’ game where one person starts a story and the next person continues it, and so on. I have also played it by giving everyone a piece of paper and telling them to draw a head of some type, then fold it down by the neck then pass it to the next person who draws the torso, the next who draws the legs, etc. When the movie started I thought the story being told and depicted was the main plot, not realizing that people he interviews all over Thailand where creating this very strange story on the fly. Just wonderful

2-I was teaching Julius Caesar and watched the Manckiewicz version for homework. It is an excellent adaptation of the play without a lot of the directorial fripperies one sees today in staged or filmed version of Shakespeare {don’t even start me on opera!} What was interesting was the presence of Marlon Brando as Marc Anthony. Seeing this uber-Method actor go up against the likes of John Gielgud as Cassius and James Mason as Brutus was fun to watch. For the most part, Brando reins it in, especially during the famous funeral oration when he gives a sly smile to us when he realizes that his irony is winning over the crowd. I wonder if having him in the movie was a box office calculation, the same as having Greer Garson as Calpurnia. Well, both calculations work out well. All in all, a good textbook filming of the play.

3- Jafar Panahi boggles my mind. He was recently released from house arrest and is still technically under a 20-year ban on making films by the Irani government. Yet he continues to make quite pointed films which win prizes all over the world. Many of the films he is making now star a character named Jafar Panahi who is a filmmaker who is not allowed to make films. Yet the films he makes are wonderful, funny and powerful. The title No Bears comes from an anecdote someone tells the filmmaker about village elders who keep the population contained in the village by telling them in vivid details about the powerful and terrifying bears that live on the perimeter of the place. Of course, he says, there are no bears, but the peoples are successfully contained. I love the ironies of contemporary Iranian films!

4- Father Takes a Walk, or Mr. Cohen Takes a Walk as it was originally billed, could never be made today. but was the kind of film that was very popular in the 1930s. The main characters are Jewish in a way that would scream ‘stereotype’ nowadays, but which I found rather endearing. The intention of this kind of film was not antisemitic. It was more ‘let’s make a movie about sweet Jewish people” kind of like The Goldbergs of early radio and television. I was happy to see this curiosity.

5- I know it is heresy to say this but I find Sullivan’s Travels neither funny nor successful. It is often pointed to as Preston Sturges’ masterpiece. Excuse me. Have you not seen The Palm Beach Story?

6- Being able to watch The Last Command is another reminder of how invaluable TCM is. Emil Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar for this picture and I had no idea I would ever be able to see it. Thank you TCM. Jannings is directed here by Joseph Von Sternberg, who will direct him to glory in The Blue Angel a few years later. This is powerful stuff.

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre)
2. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (Anthony Fabian)
3. Everything Everywhere All At Once (The Daniels)
4. Women Talking (Sarah Polley)
5. The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch (Michael Steiner)
6. Shanghai Express (Joseph von Sternberg)
7. The Ninth Gate (Roman Polanski)
8. Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami)
9. Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel)
10. All I Desire (Douglas Sirk)

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1- Watching Argentina, 1985, I was reminded of All The President’s Men. Both films deal with a significant political event which most adults living at the time would know very well. I remember being glued to the radio during Watergate, so watching All the President’s Men was like a recap of recent history. I was only vaguely aware of the military coup and ‘dirty war’ that happened in Argentina, but I am sure my counterparts in that country viewed Argentina, 1985 as a recap of their recent history. The horrors that the Fascists wrought on the Leftists in Argentina is terrifyingly close to the rhetoric that the hard-right conservatives are spouting in the US today. The film is a good history lesson for someone like me who only knew the general facts about la guerra sucia. But it also gives hope that no matter how frightening the extreme politics get, there is always the hope and possibility that justice will win out. And, by the way, I am sure that Argentina considers Ricardo Darin a national living treasure. An extraordinary actor!

Ricardo Darín

2- It does my old-fashioned heart good to know that movies like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris are still being made. unapologetically sweet and charming, happy ends all around. And Lesley Manville can do anything.

3- Where do I begin in discussing Everything Everywhere All At Once? I feel the need to recuse myself from judgement because I am so baffled by its TikTok aesthetic. For me watching more than two TikToks in a row begins to anesthetize my brain. After the first hour of this film I was exhausted by the cascade of disjointed images and ‘clever’ meta-story telling. I had to stick with it because I made a pact with myself to watch every film that won Best Picture. I can’t say it is a bad film, because I do not have the tools to watch such a video-game-like film. People are crazy for it and chacun a son gout. But I can say it is a bad film because of the puerile Capraesque ‘moral’ that is tacked on to the last part of the film. I audibly groaned when it dawned on me that the message was to be nice to people, especially your family. It occurred to me that this awkward shoehorning of a ‘message’ at the end of two hours of violent chaos was perhaps a sop to the audience to let them think they hadn’t wasted their time on exhausting special effect. Definitely my most unsatisfying Best Picture watch since the awful The Shape of Water

4- What joy to watch Women Talking after the grinding experience of Everything Everywhere All At One. The title describes this film perfectly, but also deceptively. These women talk and talk, but they are fascinating. Sarah Polley’s script is so masterful in the way it slowly gives the audience the details of the horrors these women have endured at the hands of monstrous men. Rooney Mara is amazing, as is Claire Foy. But my heart leaped for joy seeing Sheila McCarthy, my beloved Polly of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. She needs to be in EVERY movie.

Sheila McCarthy

5- The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch is a silly but fun German film about the trials of a young, Orthodox man who so far has succeeding in dodging the superhuman efforts of everyone around him to find a shidduch for him. Yes, there are the cliches of the overbearing Jewish mother and the monolithic Hasidic community, but it is all portrayed cartoonishly, so it doesn’t hurt to much. The ending is quite unexpected. No reconciliation in sight.

6- It is interesting to look at how women are portrayed in Pre-code Hollywood. The freer sexuality often gives us depicitons of very strong women who don’t need a man to be all they can be, but at the same time are still overwhelmingly sexual. Of course one things of Mae West in this sense, but there is also Jean Harlow, Garbo and early Barbara Stanwyck. Mightly women all, who somehow outshine any of their male costars, often with strong sexuality, with a side order of waspish humor. Shanghai Express stars another of these celestial women, Marlene Dietrich. Under the guidance of her mentor, Von Sternberg. Every camera angle, every lighting setup is in place to offset the magic of Dietrich. Her costumes, ludicrous for a grueling train ride from Beijing to Shanghai, are perfect in setting her apart as something different from her fellow travelers. Every man in this film is insufferable with embarrasingly easily bruised male egos. This is pointedly contrasted with the complex emotions of Dietrich and Anna May Wong. They are both so strong and so effective that they male presence is laughable when viewed next to them.

To hear Dietrich deliver the immortal line, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily’ is to wonder how her character could ever been besotted with the lunkhead played by Clive Brooks. A more interesting angle would have been the relationship between her and the great Anna May Wong, soon to be on a US Quarter near you.

Wong & Dietrich

7- The Ninth Gate is just the kind of slightly incoherent occult movie I love and usually watch around Halloween It has all the classic tropes of Roman Polanski’s paranoia and a super-seedy but still attractive Johnny Depp. Fun

8- I was glad to revisit Belle de Jour. I saw it years ago and I’ll admit that I just didn’t get it. Now I see that sly wit that Bunuel is so famous for and was struck by the super sophisticated use of meta-fictional techniques. I guess I need to watch Viridiana, another of his films that left me baffled in my callow movie viewing days

9- All I Desire is far from a great film. My sister-in-law aptly described it as a little sappy. Unlike the titanic soap operas that Sirk was going to direct a few years later, I don’t see much of the middle-class subversion we see in masterpieces such as All The Heaven Allows or my candidate for the wackiest film of the Fifties, Written on the Wind. But this film does give us a chance to enjoy my fellow Brooklynite, Barbara Stanwyck, and that is always a good thing.

The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. David Copperfield (George Cukor)
2. Where is the Friend’s House (Abbas Kiarostami)
3. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker)
4. Slacker (Richard Linklater)
5. Coda (Sían Heder)
6. Life Goes On (Abbas Kiarostami)
7. The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
8. Osama (Siddiq Bakman)
9. The Third Man (Carol Reed)
10. She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman)

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1- With David Copperfield we have a sublime example of the MGM ‘tradition of quality It was the biggest, richest studio of the time, with the largest stable of great actors under contract. Making a film of Dickens’ novel already gave the project a cachet of greatness, but MGM was able to load it with big stars of the day like W.C. Fields, Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Lionel Barrymore and Una O’Connor. The casting is uniformly perfect. I feel that Dickens knew that someday there would be a genius comic actor named W.C. Fields so he wrote the character of Wilkins Micawber as a gift to the future. The direction of George Cukor is solid as always. What struck me this time around is that there is no ‘take’ on the novel that the film is trying to champion. It is just a straight-forward illustration of the classic novel. No agenda, just phenomenal resources in the service of telling the story. Something I fear we would never see today.

2- I deeply admire Chris Marker’s La Jetee. I have heard about Sans Soleil and became interested in seeing it especially since it made the top 100 of the recent Sight + Sound poll (more about that in another post). Sans Soleil is a flood of documentary footage from Japan and Guinea Bissau, among other places, held together by a narrative of a woman reading letters she received from a fictitious director from his travels to these places. My critical faculties were overwhelmed trying to tie the letter content with the film of the various locales. I failed utterly, but I didn’t care. I was along for the ride. The narrator reads the letters with such conviction and the visuals are so gorgeous, that I felt that even if I don’t know what the point of the whole thing is, someone does/did.

3- Slacker for me was an absolute joy. Linklater’s first feature kind of reminds me of La Ronde, except spread over 100 characters and minus the syphilis. And it is infinitely more diverting than La Ronde. The is no appreciable link as we follow one character to the next, but I didn’t care. Everything is so engagingly portrayed. I haven’t seen a film that gave me such as sense of place (Austin, TX) since my beloved Nashville. Please do yourself a favor and spend time in this very satisfying world.

4- Coda was a must-see for me because I have this project to watch every Best Picture Oscar winner. It confirms my feeling that recent Best Picture winners have been average at best. This really felt like an Afterschool Special Movie, except with more dirty words. It was fine and uplifting as expected. Best Picture? The same category as The Bridge on the River Kwai or Casablanca? OK, I guess

5- The Fabelmans seems like such a personal film illustrating Spielberg’s childhood, that I feel I have no business passing judgement on it.

6- Osama is a film that needs to be better known. It is from pre-Taliban Afghanistan filmed in Dari. I didn’t realize that Dari is the language of an educated sector of the Afghani population and that it is almost identical to Farsi. It came as no surprise then, that the film was very similar to a lot of the New Iranian Cinema I have been enjoying. In many ways it is a real-life A Handmaid’s Tale.

7- In his book The American Cinema Andrew Sarris defined the concept of auteurism to the American film lover. He define an auteur as a person whose mark on a work is immediately recognizable. This has most often been taken to mean the director. However Sarris also points to Greta Garbo as someone whose mark on a film is the most recognizable element of the film. I would definitely put Mae West up for consideration as the auteur non pareil. She owns the universe she moves in. She is brilliantly hilarious and sexy and self-deflating at the same time. If you have any doubt about her mightiness, just watch as she very sexually eyes Cary Grant up and down, and then declares, “You can be had!” I am honored to have her as a fellow Brooklynite.