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