| Revieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeews |
[Sep. 8th, 2008|03:48 pm] |
Oh, oh, I am a million reviews behind and I have four DVDs to watch before they're due back at Scarecrow on Wednesday. <panics, flaps arm> Whistlestop of everything in the past week then.
Network (1976) is famously great, to the point where it won all the Oscars whether or not it made any sense: Best Actor went to a dead man, Best Supporting Actress to someone who was on screen for like four minutes. It's extremely well written, to the point of being a glorified stage play, but sadly the real fun is seeing how quaint it all looks a scant three decades on. That a TV network might give a man in the throes of mental breakdown his own show if it will pull in the ratings is no surprise after n seasons of Big Brother, and as for the "Ecumenical Liberation Front" terrorist cell, 21st century terrorists are a lot more scary than communist lesbian negroes, and sadly a lot less likely to be buyable-off. Also, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" is much less likely to become a sensational national catchphrase now that you can probably find 100 blogs saying the same thing just by visiting your LiveJournal friends page. Still, 8/10 easily, and if you haven't seen it, you should.
The Philadelphia Story (1940) is nothing to do with Bruce Springsteen trying to turn a gay battleship invisible, as I had been led to believe, but a charming comedy in which Katharine Hepburn has to choose between three men on the eve of her wedding, two of whom are Cary Grant and James Stewart. It's very pacy, filled with what I believe were known in the trade as "zingers". However, what really piqued my interest was the realisation that Cary and Jimmy are basically playing Batman and Superman: millionaire playboy and gawky but secretly cool journalist. See the movie and tell me it isn't the truth. Especially when you hear this anecdote: there's a scene where Hepburn and Stewart go off to disport in a swimming pool, and apparently Jimmy Stewart told the director point blank that he would not allow himself to be filmed without his clothes on, because that would be the end of his career just like that. I think he was just hiding a big red "S" myself. Anyway, this is a tighter comedy than "Bringing Up Baby" which was the last Hepburn/Grant vehicle I saw, but it's really just another excuse for the big names to clown around a lot, and I give it 7/10. At the very least is made me really enthusiastic about going to see:
Destry Rides Again (1939) starring Jimmy Stewart, opposite Marlene Dietrich this time. This is a comedy western, but not "Blazing Saddles" stooopid comedy, rather "Maverick"-style witty comedy, but even better done. This time though Stewart isn't playing Superman, he's playing THE DOCTOR! Called into town to be the new deputy sheriff, he emerges from his stagecoach a lanky, charming figure clutching a lady's parasol and a birdcage, who refuses to carry guns for fear of somebody getting hurt. The whole thing is about him using his wits and charm to clean up the town of Bottleneck, where everyone expects him to go in guns blazing. The other great thing about the move is the awesomely sexy Marlene Dietrich as the morally ambiguous saloon wench. Like Hepburn in the film above, apparently you could just take one of these actresses, throw them into any dodgy old plotline and costume, and watch them completely fill the screen with their personality and sex appeal. Where are the actresses like that nowadays? I can't think of a single one currently. 9/10, even if this is the film that made me realise I was getting old as I thought things like "firing guns into the air inside a saloon as a round of applause?" and "whittling napkin-rings inside a rapidly moving stagecoach?" Somebody might have gotten hurt!
Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is a curious and highly-regarded Spanish film, that I thought from the description would be like a perfect cross between "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Whistle Down The Wind"... a little girl in wartime Spain sees the movie "Frankenstein" and then mistakes a soldier hiding out from Franco's army for the monster. In fact though it's one of those extremely arty movies where the camera will linger on, say, a building or a man making a cup of tea for a minute at a time, and for the back of the box to claim that this is a movie in which things actually happen is kind of false advertising. Nevertheless, Ana Torrent (recently seen as Catherine of Aragon in "The Other Boleyn Girl") gives an amazing performance as the tiny, serious, huge-eyed little girl, and the film effectively creates the atmosphere of her world, a world filled with things like train tracks, deadly mushrooms, undead monsters and bottomless wells, things that in her very vague understanding are dangerous and fascinating. Also, there is a scene with a cat which is one of the squickiest things I've seen in a movie in ages, even if I didn't quite understand why it was there. All in all I give this 7/10, though I can only recommend it if you like cinema-as-sitting-in-front-of-a-painting-in-an-art-gallery, and not just cinema-as-big-budget-comic-book.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) is a Japanese anime that I knew next-to-nothing about going into, but wow! I haven't enjoyed one of these so much since Totoro, to which I think this compares: if Totoro (like Beehive) was about the secret worlds of little girls, this is about the secret worlds of teenagers. Makoto hangs out playing baseball with her male friends Kousuke and Chiaki in that last glorious summer before you have to decide what you're going to do with your life: but then, rather strangely, she is saved from a fatal accident by discovering she has the ability to jump backwards through time. With such great power naturally comes great responsibility, and she spends the next little while cheating on tests, getting to the pudding in the fridge before her sister did and singing karaoke for ten hours (subjective time) straight. All is not as simple as it was in "Groundhog Day", though: the mystery deepens, the plot thickens, and before the end we have a really quite clever bittersweet time-travelling sci-fi romance movie on our hands which I think could give anything by Audrey Niffenegger a run for its money. I really loved this, and I'm going to give it the full 10/10. Catch it if you can! |
|
|
| Comments: |
Hello, guess who didn't think much of the Girl Who Leapt Through Time!
Of anime movies, I like "The Cat Returns". One of these days I'll manage to mention something I liked that you'll spit at!
Oh, backwards-relatedly, I recently saw "Dance of the Drunk Mantis", which turns out to be the real Drunken Master 2, following the drunken master Sam Seed, rather than the drunken student Jackie Chan. As Sam Seed is awesome, I endorse this movie.
One of these days I'll manage to mention something I liked that you'll spit at
I hope so! But I think the problem is that I just like about 100 times as many movies as you do... so it's entirely possible that everything you like is just a tiny indomitable village in one corner of the map of everything I like, instead of on a different map. Let's both keep exploring though :D
Mm, I suppose I should poke at the most distant corners of my map to try to find something you wouldn't like. Perhaps Black Serenade [Tuno Negro] would do it, or Dead Man, or the Quiet Earth, or Night of the Comet, or Condor Man.
2 of those sound great, thanks for sharing. i rather liked Spirit of the Beehive, but i seem to have erased the cat scene from memory... i just recall mood and landscape and child's-eye-view looking out of the window sort of shots. the bits where the children are running in the dusty landscape and nothing much happens are good.
The cat scene doesn't seem on the surface to have much to do with the rest of the film - it doesn't involve Ana, even as a witness, for a start. Isabel, Ana's sister, is squeezing a cat which yowls and runs away. We see presumable cat blood on her fingertips, which she applies to her mouth like lipstick, before licking it off. Maybe it's something to do with the cruelty of little girls growing up into sexual women, I've no idea. There's a lot going on under the surface everywhere, isn't there, especially with the parents... which I guess chimes perfectly with the child's-eye-view theme of the movie, they know things are going on around them, but they don't know what.
Hey, if you liked Beehive you should check out a more recent Hungarian film called "Hukkle" (Hiccup) which uses a similar technique of setting a camera randomly down in front of events in a sleepy village one summer's day, like an impartial alien eye, and letting the audience work out what if anything is important to resolving the mystery of what's going on. It's really rather brilliant.
ooh i see that The Girl Who.. is on at the ICA for 2 weeks! i shall go see. although as the Boy pointed out when i said you'd described it as Totoro for teenagers, it probably doesn't have big fluffy things.... nevermind. it still sounds good.
I like the sound of The Girl Who, I shall look out for that.
You might have mentioned that The Philadelphia Story was travestied into cheesy musical nonsense in the form of High Society, with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the lead roles. But some people prefer it that way! | |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}