#49 Jules and Jim, #67 Greed, #51 The Wild Bunch

In this one I try to get out brief writeups of all the ones I've watched but haven't written up yet.

Jules and Jim (Traffaut, 1961)

Jules and Jim is more or less the exact movie you think of when you think of 'Arty French film'. All the characters are symbolic of something, they all follow their personal impulses in ways that comment on social conventions paying little attention to things with outside consequences. This sometimes causes characters to behave in random confusing ways that make them less believeable but more symbolic.

The plot is about two (heterosexual) men who have a very close friendship. They go on vacations together, date women together (Both of them and one woman), and so on. They want the women they meet to conform to iconized statuesque images of femininity. They meet a woman Catherine who looks exactly like a statue they liked. She doesn't want to conform to any image of the good wife, but wants to be in control of her relationship with both of them. They go off to war, fighting for opposite sides, and spend the war in terror that they'll kill the other. They both survive, and when they get back, Catherine has married Jules. They have a child, and her relationship sours with Jules, so she starts dating Jim, and they all live together in the same house. Catherine tries to tame Jim the same way she tamed Jules, but Jim still wants that culturally mandated image of femininity and family, which Catherine won't give him, always trying to control the relationship on her own terms.

It's very well directed, acted, and scripted, but the whole commentary on gender can make the plot seem arbitrary and characters seem weak.

Rating: *** 1/2 / 5

Greed (Von Stroheim, 1924)

Greed is an early silent film with three major versions. The ten hour version Von Stroheim originally wanted to make, the four hour version he produced when the studio made him cut it down, and the 140 minute one the studio made against Von Stroheim's will. The version I saw is the four hour one. It covers a story called 'McTeague' about a man who marries a woman he loves, but then when she wins the lottery and becomes miserly, and everybody is driven to hatred by jealousy and greed, wanting to get their hands on their share of the loterry winnings. A lot of sequences aren't in full motion, but are instead a montage of photographs explaining the story. The jumping back and forth from photographs and motion has an awkward effect on the pacing. Both elements were done well, but it's weird seeing them coexist. Particularly since the film was made in a time when the quality of actors willing to appear in films was limited. Also, there isn't really enough in the story to justify it being four hours long. Greed is kind of like what happens when a director is so in love with his idea that he doesn't listen to editors.

Rating: *** / 5

The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)

A classic western that follows the anti-hero formula better than anyone else in the genre except Leone. The characters are a bunch of aging outlaws who want to make one last big score before they retire. Although they say they want to retire, you get the impression they'd never be happy in idleness, and they've got a secret desire to go out in a blaze of glory that manifests later in the film. The railroad hired a contract to kill them, and the man in charge forces a member of the gang who was caught to help kill them or else go back to jail. Throughout the movie the portrayal of the characters leads you to root for the bad guys. The outlaws are loyal to each other, and they're always respectable, manly, and competent, save for the fact they'll kill people if they have to in order to make a steal. The 'good guys' on the other hand exhibit even less regard for human life than the bad guys. They plan massacres in the middle of public squares where civilians are guaranteed to get caught in the crossfire. Except for the former member of the gang who is the only competent one and the only one who behaves respectively, all the other hunters are incompetent, impulsive, and greedy. Everyones a murderer so you root for the ones who are nicer and more respectable when they're not murdering. It's a very fun, very well acted movie with a really incredibly choreographed train heist scene.

Rating: **** / 5

67/101

Others:

The Best Of Youth: **** 1/2 / 5

A six hour film. Okay, that should scare away all the people who won't like it. The movie covers two brothers across fourty years of Italian history. They're both idealistic but express their idealism in different ways. Matteo can never accept that the world doesn't meet his expectations, so he keeps running from place to place and from job to job. When the world fails to meet Nicola's standards, he compensates by lowering his expectations. Many of the characters in the film start out with blond hair, but later in the film randomly have brown or black hair. It's only brought up by one character in the entire six hours. I believe the blond hair represents a blank slate, and the brown hair represents the real world manifestation of that person.

For me it didn't start to wear out it's welcome until about four and a half hours in. If you're willing to spend the time to watch it, it's a great movie.

New movies:

The Kids Are Alright: 6/10

A movie that tries to show a lesbian family with two kids as having the same highs and lows as any heterosexual family unit. It's got a good script and great acting, but it wears it's political intentions a bit too obviously on it's sleeeve, which can sometimes make the characters feel like symbols rather than individuals. And they kind of cheat at the end by making it too easy to hate the sperm donor father. If they made the sperm donor father a nice guy they would have had to deal with the ethical dilemmas in a more nuanced way.

Here's a list of the movies I haven't watched this year yet:

8 1/2
Godfather
The Seven Samurai
Battleship Potemkin
Godfather: Part II
Casablanca
Rashomon
Raging Bull
Touch of Evil
The Grand Illusion
The General
Children of Paradise
Dr Strangelove
Apocalypse Now
The Night Of The Hunter
L'avventura
Blade Runner
The 400 Blows
Persona
Rear Window
It's A Wonderful Life
La Strada
The Seventh Seal
Au Hasard Balthazar
The Conformist
The Wizard Of Oz
Amarcord
Ikiru
Barry Lyndon
Journey To Italy
Sansho The Baliff
Last Near In Marienbad
Blue Velvet
On The Waterfront

There aren't any left that I both haven't seen and don't own. The only problem remaining is whether I really want to spend money or Netflix time on the ones I don't necessarily like. Battleship Potemkin, The General, Wizard of Oz. For Wizard of Oz I was hoping it'd come on TV so I could put it on in the background and pay half-attention to it. When I get toward the end I'll see if I really want to watch these ones again.

#82: Letter From An Unknown Woman

Letter From An Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948)

I'm falling behind on these writeups. Maybe I'll stop trying to write long ones and just give a blurb unless it's one of my absolute favorites and I want to write a lot about it. (I don't think many people are reading these things anyway.)

Letter From An Unknown Woman has a pretty cliche romantic plot. A man gets a letter from a woman he doesn't know. The letter says that she will probably be dead soon, and she wants him to know that she's been in love with him her entire life. She met him when she was a teenager and he was a famous piano prodigy. She worked as a maid in the building he was living in, and her room was next to his. She fell in love with him listening to him play the piano. At this point she fixates on him. She defines herself according to who she thinks he wants her to be, and refuses to be courted by any other man.

At the beginning I referred to the plot as 'Romantic', but it's really anti-romantic. All the time he spends with her, he's really just skirt chasing. She's so fixated on him that she spends her entire life pining for her image of him. The movie takes a lot of romantic cliches and shows them lead to nowhere except a lot of opportunities -- not missed -- just not pursued.

The beauty of the movie is in the ambiance of the scenes and the cinematography. It's directed so beautifully that you're pulled into and entranced by a story which in and of itself is very cliche. Every scene is memorable, and every image is purposeful.

Letter From An Unknown Woman is not in print in the US. I'd like to thank the country of Korea for printing a lot of NTSC-ALL region coded DVDs for english speaking movies that aren't in print in the US. You can turn off the Korean subtitles, and get them a lot cheaper than their US counterparts. I also got Voyage and Italy on a Korean DVD, as well as about ten Chaplin movies.

Rating: **** 1/2 / 5

64/101

New movies:

Toy Story 3: 9/10

The adventure component of the film is oriented at kids, but the emotional themes are oriented at the people who were kids when the first movie came out. The movie is character-driven and genuinely funny, and hits home with the themes of the dread of being thrown out when you're not needed anymore. It's possibly the best kids' film I've seen since Lion King.

Inception: 7/10

Great visuals, great multi-linear storytelling, good enough acting, average script. An enjoyable movie, but has some plausibility issues at points, and spends too much time explaining the physics of the dream states. The movie would have been paced better and made a little more sense if they just told us minimally what we needed to know to understand the plot and threw us more quickly into the main dream.

Wild Grass: 3/10

There's some beautiful images in the film. But, the plot is paced awkwardly and the characters motivations are not interesting, nor do they make any sense. I haven't seen Resnais' earlier famous work, but I probably should just to repair my opinion of him.

On the plus side, it gives hope to stalkers everywhere. "Never give up! She will someday return your affections!"

#14: Bicycle Thieves

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

I'll say before I get started, Bicycle Thieves is on my short list for greatest films of all time. A lot of people like to talk about the accomplishment of the film, that De Sica used nonprofessional actors and produced the film for only $50,000. But that kind of talk can mislead you into thinking the film only has historical merit. The film is a realistic, simple, and universal look at the emotional impact of extreme poverty, and every single scene of the movie is memorable.

The movie starts out with a mob of unemployed workers waiting outside a work agency to see if they have any work for them today. You get the impression they do this every day, and usually only a few of them if any are given jobs. The main character is given a job hanging posters around the city, but he can only get the job if he has his bicycle, which he sold for grocery money. So to keep the job, he has to sell his bed sheets to buy the bicycle back. But his first day on the job, his bicycle is stolen. He goes to the police, and they tell him there's nothing they can do for him. All they can do is take the serial number of the bicycle so if he finds it on his own at a pawn shop or something he can prove it's his. He goes off in search of the thief, but it's a big city and he didn't get a very good look at him, so his chances are slim to nil from the beginning. Along the way he accuses and threatens people of being involved in the theft. The job represents his escape from helplessness and his ability to support his family and give them happiness like a man is supposed to, and his helplessness at losing his bicycle causes him to lash out at everybody, eventually putting him on the same level as the thief. The film is beautiful and completely engrossing the whole way through. It's short and simple, with no wasted scenes or excess dialog. There may be a few films on the same level as this one, but none that are better.


Rating: ***** / 5

63/101

Next: Letter From An Unknown Woman, Jules and Jim, Greed

New films:

The Girl Who Played With Fire: 5/10

The movie is good 'further development' for the characters established in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But it doesn't have much to offer that's new of it's own.

#98: Rome, Open City

Rome, Open City (Rosselini, 1945)

Rome, Open City is a postwar film about the resistance against the Nazis in Italy. I just happened to see this film right after Army of Shadows, a movie made in the sixties about the resistance against the Nazis in France, and the contrast in styles unfortunately colored my perception of the movie. Where Army of Shadows is dark, emotional and realistic, Rome, Open City is unapologetically cinematic. Characters are split neatly along the good/evil dichotomy and everything is idealized. This is fine, but it was weird seeing it right after a movie that took the opposite approach.

It's hard for me to talk about my feelings about Rome, Open City without comparing it to Army of Shadows. In Army of Shadows when a man is torutred he looks utterly disfigured and mutilated. The man in Rome, Open City who is tortured looks like he's just been in a bar fight. In Army of Shadows, the characters have to murder their friends for naming names to the Nazis. In Rome Open City, nobody ever folds under torture, and Nazis are willing to debate you about the morarlity of giving them information. They're very upset that an Italian can resist torture. It means Italians are equal to Germans! Rome Open City is a great movie, but the unavoidable contrast to a far more realistic account of Nazi occupation makes it hard to see it on it's own merits.

Trying to be objective, the movie has great acting, great directing, and a lot of really good dialog. The movie came out right after World War II, so I figure it's intent was to heal some of the national wounds left by the war. (Whereas the intent of Army of Shadows was for a director to show the audience a difficult period of his life.)

Rome, Open City: **** / 5
Army of Shadows: **** / 5

62/101

I've gotten a little behind on reviews. I've also watched Bicycle Thieves, Jules and Jim, and Letter From An Unknown Woman. I'll try to catch up in the next few days.

#65: The Leopard

The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)

The Leopard is about a rich family over the time Italy changed from a monarchy to a democracy. At the beginning, when the revolution is going on, everybody is in complete denial that anything significant is happening. They all live their sheltered lives as normal assuming everything will go on as normal. Later in the film when democratic elections are introduced, they continue to live their lives as if culture still revolves around them, as if nothing has changed. The only one who displays any actual awareness of any change is the main character played by Burt Lancaster. He's just as arrogant and self-important as everyone else at the beginning, then at the end becomes cynical and starts to see his ignorant, sheltered life for what it really is. He says "We were the leopards, and they are the jackals", referring to the demagogues who are now in power.

But through a majority of the film, the focus isn't on any of the political intrigue. The camera focuses on the internal melodrama of the main character's wealthy family, and the politics are in the background, reflected on by the characters. His daughter is courted by a soldier who is the son of a friend, and his wife says he's not good enough to marry into the family. She wanted their daughter to marry a rich cousin. He's going to give the soldier a big estate along with his daughter. As they explore the big empty house he remarks "Any mansion where you know every room isn't worth living in". He's been drawn into the same sheltered self important world as everyone else.

The movie can be a little bit dry and conversational at times, over three hours, but the dull parts are carried by Lancaster's performance. The dialog can be very clever, but it's a hard movie to get all the way through in one sitting.

Rating: *** 1/2 / 5

New films:

I Am Love: 8/10

This film I wouldn't recommend to anyone but big film buffs. The core plot is a little bit weak, and the strength of the film lies in the visuals and cinematography. It follows the Reicchi family, a rich family obsessed with the importance of family traditions and the family name. At the beginning the elder of the family dies and leaves the family business to his son and grandson. Through the story we see that everybody is really in it for themselves and only talk about the importance of the Reicchi name to make themselves feel important. The wife of the son who inherited the business is a Russian woman who married into the family young and changed her name to an Italian one. Gradually she rediscovers her identity outside the Reicchi name and becomes liberated from it. The problem with the plot is it's often arbitrary and random. If the entire film weren't so well presented, it would be a big problem.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work: 6/10

A documentary about a year in the life of Joan Rivers. What makes the film worth seeing is it strips away all the exaggerated presentations of her in the media, and instead presents her as an insecure workaholic, who's a great comedian but terrified of criticism. If you like stand up comedy it's worth seeing.

#55: Modern Times

Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)

There's not much to say about one Chaplin film that doesn't apply to the other Chaplin films. He's a master of slapstick comedy and has a grudge against the upper class. He's so good at the former you don't care whether or not you agree with his political commentary.

In Modern Times he portrays working in a factory as unbearable and dehumanizing. The boss is looking for ways to eliminate lunch breaks, so he experiments with a contraption to feed employees automatically, without taking their hands away from the production line. He then dismisses it not because it treats human beings like animals, but because it's 'Not practical'. He meets a seventeen year old girl who's on the run because her father was arrested and she ran away from social services. Every time the two of them try to carve some kind of living out for themselves, the dehumanizing system bears down on them and forces them away.

It's a good thing Chaplin came up in the era of silent films. If his earliest movies had words, he probably would have had more of his socialist political commentary and less of his slapstick.

Rating: **** / 5

60/101

Looking down the list, the only ones I haven't seen that aren't on Netflix are Letter from An Unknown Woman, Greed, and Voyage In Italy. If it comes down to it I may have to get expensive used compies on Amazon or Ebay.

Others:

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: ***** / 5

This is easily my second favorite silent film. It has the best score I've ever heard in a movie, and some beautiful visuals. The movie is black and white but the film is heavily tinted in various colors. The music has a lot of jazzy sax and guitar, some of which sounds like stuff that didn't popularize until the sixties. It sounds impressively ahead of it's time, and always fits the scene perfectly. The acting is a little too exaggerated and pantomimic, but that's the case with almost all movies of that era. The plot is as simple as the other movies of the era, but it has psychological horror movie elements also way ahead of it's time.