- Carl Laemmle
- Sing And Like It (William Seiter)
- Godland (Hlynur Pálmason)
- People on Sunday (Siodmak/Ulmer)
- A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir)
- Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
- Tár (Todd Field)
- Christmas in Connecticut (Peter Godfrey)
- The Hasty Heart (Victor Sherman)
- 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 Discreet Bourgeois 