19th Five Films, 2007
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Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) at home on DVD. I mostly listened to this away from the television, but I don't think it really suffered much. I've got nothing to say about it, but I wonder what might Linklater's next project(s) be?
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Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard) at BAM with Kevin. As I said afterwards, actually watching Godard's movies is an exhausting experience because they're so crammed with ideas, but that just means they're more fun and more fruitful to think about afterward than almost anything else.
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Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice) at MoMA. I mostly watched this because I needed to kill some time in Manhattan before Panda Bear played at the Bowery Ballroom, but I also thought I saw that it starred Greta Garbo and John Barrymore. It turned out to be Garbo and LIONEL Barrymore, who I've really never liked much, and this did not sway my opinion.
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The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh) at MoMA as part of the John Wayne 100th Birthday series. This is an interesting film mainly because it's Wayne's first starring role and because it was one of three movies shot in Fox's experimental widescreen process, Grandeurscope, way before that sort of thing became standard. However, neither Wayne nor the other actors are all that interesting, and basically Walsh just sets the camera up far enough away to capture all members of a scene and lets them play it out within the frame. This is not a case of particularly artful use of the long shot, but rather an inability to provide much interest with the camera. The lack of close-ups or really any variable viewpoint hurts an already kind of wooden film.
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The Proposition (John Hillcoat) at home on DVD. I think this is as good an example as any of why I'm often hesitant to bother with contemporary westerns. The visual focus is on the grime and the gore and the general filth of frontier living, although there is a bit of attention paid to landscape. Generally, I take pleasure in the laconic and taciturn nature of the western heroes, the aestheticized western landscape, and the interesting variety of male companionship rarely done as well in other genres, but there's also something about the tone and the pace of, say, My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, or Monte Walsh, to name a few I've watched this year, that isn't often by shared by more recent projects, although Kevin Costner's Open Range is a notable exception.
I was surprised by how little the characters were developed over 104 minutse, although there were a lot of them. Thus, the final shootout felt more like another in a series of gruesomely mundane events, rather than a climax. It did include one hilarious quote, however: "<1> A misanthrope is someone who hates humankind. <2> Are we misanthopes? <1> Lord no, we're a family!"
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Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) at home on DVD. I mostly listened to this away from the television, but I don't think it really suffered much. I've got nothing to say about it, but I wonder what might Linklater's next project(s) be?
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Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard) at BAM with Kevin. As I said afterwards, actually watching Godard's movies is an exhausting experience because they're so crammed with ideas, but that just means they're more fun and more fruitful to think about afterward than almost anything else.
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Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice) at MoMA. I mostly watched this because I needed to kill some time in Manhattan before Panda Bear played at the Bowery Ballroom, but I also thought I saw that it starred Greta Garbo and John Barrymore. It turned out to be Garbo and LIONEL Barrymore, who I've really never liked much, and this did not sway my opinion.
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The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh) at MoMA as part of the John Wayne 100th Birthday series. This is an interesting film mainly because it's Wayne's first starring role and because it was one of three movies shot in Fox's experimental widescreen process, Grandeurscope, way before that sort of thing became standard. However, neither Wayne nor the other actors are all that interesting, and basically Walsh just sets the camera up far enough away to capture all members of a scene and lets them play it out within the frame. This is not a case of particularly artful use of the long shot, but rather an inability to provide much interest with the camera. The lack of close-ups or really any variable viewpoint hurts an already kind of wooden film.
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The Proposition (John Hillcoat) at home on DVD. I think this is as good an example as any of why I'm often hesitant to bother with contemporary westerns. The visual focus is on the grime and the gore and the general filth of frontier living, although there is a bit of attention paid to landscape. Generally, I take pleasure in the laconic and taciturn nature of the western heroes, the aestheticized western landscape, and the interesting variety of male companionship rarely done as well in other genres, but there's also something about the tone and the pace of, say, My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, or Monte Walsh, to name a few I've watched this year, that isn't often by shared by more recent projects, although Kevin Costner's Open Range is a notable exception.
I was surprised by how little the characters were developed over 104 minutse, although there were a lot of them. Thus, the final shootout felt more like another in a series of gruesomely mundane events, rather than a climax. It did include one hilarious quote, however: "<1> A misanthrope is someone who hates humankind. <2> Are we misanthopes? <1> Lord no, we're a family!"
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Posted on Saturday, June 23, 2007
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