The Darjeeling Express

http://2.bp.blogspot.com

Recommended by my friend E.

I'm afraid I found the characters too unpleasant. Why didn't I find The Royal Tenenbaums, but the same director and with a very similar feel, similarly too unpleasant? there were plenty of characters to feel sympathetic with in the latter, especially by the end. Maybe these guys got more sympathetic, but I didn't make it to the end.

Metropolitan

http://thisdistractedglobe.com

Recommended by friend and movie student E.

This movie has a home-made feel, but not to the point of being a problem. I felt as if I were in a novel written by a late twentieth century Jane Austen, a high compliment for me to give. (The ironic structures aren't as complex as in her novels, nor is the dialogue conducted in sentences so gramatically so energetic and stately at the same time. But the premium on intelligence and values that make human interactions bearable, meaningful, and pleasurable--using satire and humor as major rhetorical weapons--was reminiscent.) A comedy of manners in a contemporary film that doesn't feel strained,that feels right, seems like a little miracle to me.

Roshomon

http://andrewsidea.files.wordpress.com

A classic I hadn't seen. In fact I hadn't seen any of Kurosawa's movies.

The meta-story-telling aspects are engaging, and the movie as a whole has an effective, Samuel-Beckettian absurdist feel. It's not that fun to watch, being a little slow, and without characters to sympathize with much (aside from the rape victim, who doesn't take on much humanity until the movie's half over, and even then--.) But as an adventure in film-watching, great.

Gigi

http://www.chicandcharming.com/2008/03/movies-with-style-gigi.html

I like to have a sense of musicals, at least back to a certain era, and this musical seems to come up. When I learned that it was by the same people who wrote and composed for My Fair Lady, I was still more interested.

I'm afraid I found Maurice Chevalier's performance unbearable, and had trouble warming up to Leslie Caron. A lot of the movie is spectacle, and if one is having trouble warming up to the female lead, the center of the spectacle of design, fashion, and mise-en-scene . . . . I didn't quite make it to the end.

The Big Lebowski

30daysout.wordpress.com/.../

Another movie I put into my queue after seeing Fargo.

I was totally delighted with this movie from beginning to end. The plot seemed a strong element to me, daffy as it was. I’ve read since that it’s reminiscent of The Big Sleep, and I see it, but really The Big Lebowski is more coherent and more satisfying. How is it that I found this movie so funny, from end to end, while I couldn’t take Raising Arizona, also by the Coen brothers, for more than about five minutes? I don’t know. Fargo is still my favorite Coen brothers movie, because that movie has a character—the Frances McDormand character—who has moral weight who fits seamlessly into the rest of its wild mix, and The Big Lebowski’s wild mix doesn’t have such a character. However, it does have “The Dude” who as a character I found just as delightful, if not moreso. Sheer chaotic life-force Falstaffian comedy.

L.A. Confidential

http://blogs.amctv.com/future-of-classic/2008/07/top-ten-neo-noir.php

The name of this movie seemed to keep coming up.

Although very grim at moments, I found this movie a pleasure from beginning to end. The plot was fast moving and challenging to follow in a pleasurable way. The entire texture—the sets, the lighting—was distinctive. It was nightmarish, but wit and intelligence, not violence and fear, seemed to be at center-stage.

The Lady Eve

sunsetgun.typepad.com

I had seen this movie with acute delight in college and wanted to see how I felt about it now, and in an attempt to know more of Preston Sturges work.

It didn’t work for me quite as well this time around. I wanted to care about the romantic lead, Henry Fonda, and I was having trouble liking him very much. Even at their most slap-sticky, characters should, to my taste, have an essential understanding, however unconscious, of what it means to be a human being (as Cary Grant seems always to have in his movies). Barbara Stanwyck seemed more melancholy than filled with life-force, leaving her machinations to seem more the stuff of melodrama than the stuff of delightfully-cynical, life-force-asserting-itself-type comedy.

Raising Arizona

http://redriverpak.files.wordpress.com

Thrilled with Fargo, I put other Coen Brothers movies on my Netflix cue.

I couldn’t watch for very long. The characters seemed too dumb, the jokes too bluntly prodding. The dumb characters in Fargo each had a terrific sense of intensity that the characters here lack. Nicholas Cage seemed miscast, to put it mildly.

Fargo

http://www.cinematical.com

A movie well-reviewed in its time that seemed to keep being mentioned.

At last a movie that filled me with pleasure and kept selling me more and more full. The Francis McDormand character is irresistible, in part because of her hugely pregnant belly, which has an effect similar to that of the bandage on the nose of the Jack Nicholson character in Chinatown: it ratchets up the sense of the character’s vulnerability in a visceral-feeling way. Her relationship with her semi-hapless husband is an exquisite touch. Here’s a movie involving both murder and comedy that doesn’t go too slowly or prod the viewer too bluntly. The two kidnapper-murderers are hilarious, as is their relationship. This is a movie that believed in itself in all its complexity, and as a result the characters glow, and the tension, constantly tempered by surprising laughter, keeps getting higher and higher.

Funny Face

http://clouddragon.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/audrey_hepburn-funny_face.jpg

A movie featuring Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Gershwin’s music seemed too good to be true.

For me, a movie that seemed way less than the sum of its parts; a movie that may have been put together by committee. It’s as if it can’t get the tone right, and doesn’t really respect itself or its subject. I didn’t find myself blaming Hepburn, Astaire, or Gershwin.  As in the case with Charade, and Gigi (but not To Catch a Thief, that almost crosses this line but doesn't) the movie seemed thrown by its own felt need to be visually striking and visual, as if Hepburn’s overpowering and idiosyncratic beauty made the moviemakers want to chase after some visual correlative (because they thought it was what the audience of Hepburn’s fans would want) to the detriment of having a story to tell that they really believed in.

Mulholland Drive

http://dearcinema.com/mulholland-drive-a-lynchian-ode-to-the-city-of-dreams

I hadn’t seen a movie by David Lynch before and something that I can’t recall made me think that this was the one to start with.

On the one hand, it didn’t seem to insult the viewer’s intelligence, and it wasn’t insecurely attached to manipulating the viewer just so at every moment. On the other hand, what did it come to beyond being an exercise in manipulating the reader’s feelings this way and that? As the Naomi Watts character goes from being the moral center of the movie to being a dark, creepy presence, it’s as if Lynch’s auteur-ial persona goes from having a moral center to being a dark, creepy presence.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

http://thisdistractedglobe.com/2006/08/08/mr-smith-goes-to-washington-1939/

A classic I hadn’t seen.

What is with my irrational irritableness when confronted with Jimmie Stewart (particularly his voice and vocal rhythms)? Frank Capra’s paean to democracy despite the brutal foibles of humanity seems grotesquely over-simplified, unless one takes things lightly, but the movie’s issues are hard to take lightly, corruption in a democracy seeming such a serious issue. I read that Sturges The Great McGinty was a cynical response to/parody of this movie, and as such I sympathize with it.

I was/am going through a curmudgeonly phase.

It Happened One Night

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claudette_Colbert_and_Clark_Gable_in_It_Happened_One_Night_film_trailer.jpg

I found this movie magical when I saw it in college. That there could be such a thing in the world! The silver, moonlit glow of the movie, juxtaposed with the comic, unsentimental harshness with which characters treat each other, was a wonderment, a mystery to figure out.

On re-seeing, it becomes another in a series of old comedies that I find myself more critical of than before. Maybe the surprise element, the sense of discovery, is a potent part of a movie’s pleasure? The Clark Gable character now seems a little too chronically grumpy, the Claudette Colbert character a little too confused and ineffectual. I found myself thinking, just sleep together already—you’re drawing this out! It must be me.

Singin' in the Rain

https://www.greencine.com/central/guide/musicals?page=0%252C2

A classic I hadn’t seen, except for the eponymous song-and-dance number.

Such a beloved, honored movie—and I had trouble liking it very much. It seems to me that one can see the actors acting. That the joke of the silent movie star’s voice being too low-class is laid on too thick, and that her character is too cartoony, too broad—just as Debbie Reynold’s ingénue is too innocent and unassuming. In other words, the movie isn’t too complimentary to our intelligence, a feature of some ‘50’s movies. Gene Kelly—I know this is my limitation, not his—always seems to me to be more of an athlete than a dancer, and one who is dancing because he can, as if it’s his day job. As if he has to hold urgently on to his identity as a full-blooded male. Compare Astaire, whose skinniness, relative femininity, and his resembling a magical sprite of some kind he doesn’t try to escape, with the result that his lightness on his feet allows him to escape gravity, metaphorically speaking. The movie does at times have “what could possibly happen next?” quality, and adventurousness (that ballet sequence) that gives it at times an odd but admirable non-linearity of approach.

The Thin Man

www.greencine.com/static/primers/screwball.jsp

This movie had given me pleasure in college and I was curious to see how I would react to it now.

It seemed like a screwball comedy set at a slightly lower speed. The have another drink joke became tiring quickly. Asta wasn’t as entertaining as the dog in The Awful Truth. Sigh.

I seem to be getting more negative as I go along.

p.s. the site from which I took this picture had a helpful discussion of screwball comedies by Gregg Rickman, a film studies professor.

The Grapes of Wrath

www.johnmariani.com/.../2007/070513/index.html

A classic I hadn’t seen. Plus I’ve never been able to get myself to read the novel and I thought at least I would have a better idea of what I was missing.

Had the air, it seemed to me, of a movie that knew too well that it was important, and that wanted its characters to have iconic status, and strived for them to be worthy of such. The rhythm of the plot wasn’t too satisfying. The happy ending was welcome, but also seemed odd. Hollywood’s need to make a commercially palatable product may have gotten in the way of the movie’s being great. Still it was full of interest.

Stage Door

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews10/stage_door/stage_door_PDVD_00601.jpg

My daughter had a role in the stage-play version. The movie version was very different.

Seems to lack a center, or to put it another way, it seems not entirely coherent. It’s part comedy, part-tear-jerker, part journalism. Katherine Hepburn, much as I want to like her, is annoying.

Metropolis

www.ectomo.com/index.php/category/metropolis

A classic I hadn’t seen.

Unlike any other movie I’ve seen, especially because of its sets. There are swtirring effects, one after another. It’s a little exhausting. The acting seems operatic in not such a good way, and the plot takes a lot of effort to follow. But a movie one is glad was made.

Unlike any other movie I’ve seen, especially because of its sets. There are stirring effects, one after another. This succession of effects is a little exhausting. The acting seems operatic in not such a good way, and the plot takes a lot of effort to follow. But it's a movie I'm glad was made.

The 39 Steps

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=4572944656503512466

Another Hitchcock classic I hadn’t seen.

Reading over its plot in Wikipedia, I’m struck by how similar the this movie is to North by Northwest. Same rhythms, same basic idea, same way of working the romantic interest in. I enjoyed the detailed, gritty look of London in this early film of the director’s.

The Producers

www.geekshow.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/prod006.jpg

I went to see this in college. It had that too silly with too slow pacing formula to a mild degree, and I couldn’t understand the moral perspective, at least within the first five or so minutes, and I went out, though as I heard increasing roars of laughter I wondered if I was making a mistake. So finally I rectified my having walked out too hastily, unfairly.

The moral standpoint settled into place, and I found this movie watchable this time, and certainly I could see it was funny even if for the most point I couldn’t match myself up with its comic rhythms. Sorry, Mel Brooks.

Christmas in July

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Christmas_in_July_screenshot.jpg

Because I so enjoyed The Lady Eve when I was in college, and because people write admiring things of its director, Preston Sturges, I put this movie, plus The Great McGinty, and Miracle at Morgan Creek on my Netflix queue.

Maybe my problem is that if there isn’t romance, in the sense that if a movie doesn’t have a relationship with a loving/sexual/emotional charge it’s hard for me to be as interested as I might be. Maybe these notes have made that obvious. This movie doesn’t have such a charge. And the humor has a bit of that crowbar to the ribs quality. The narrative pace—despite the narrative high jinks and verbal gusto—also seems a little slow. It’s still full of interest and well told.

The Pink Panther

http://www.channel4.com/film/media/images/Channel4/film/P/pink_panther_1963_xl_03--film-A.jpg

Enchanted by Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove, I ordered this movie, also wanting to visit a pop culture semi-phenomenon of my youth. I was always attracted to Mancini’s Pink Panther theme song.

I made it about two-thirds of the way through. The too-slowly paced + too silly formula that I find irritating prevailed. It’s probably just me. I should come up with an abbreviation to refer to this “it’s probably just me.” proviso.

Romance and Cigarettes

www.filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/...

A NY Times review interested me.

Couldn’t watch for very long. Self-conscious, over-acted in a way I think that was supposed to be ironic but just seemed over-acted, and over-the-top silly. Maybe I should have given it more of a chance, allowed a narrative pulse to establish itself, but I couldn’t.

Charade

I probably wanted to see this in order to get to know more Audrey Hepburn movies.

Too silly for me. Cary Grant seems old and stiff. Audrey Hepburn and he both seem as if they’d like this movie to go well but can’t do anything but pretend to be acting as opposed to act. (When she goes after him, romantically/sexually, it feels very strange, and neither of them seem at all as if they’re enjoying themselves.) The extremeness of the sense that one of the most important aspects of the movie is to show off Hepburn’s beauty and as a clotheshorse I found annoying. (In the best Audrey Hepburn movies, her beauty seems like a miraculous bonus; essential to her character, but also somehow incidental; and the effect, in total, is magical. Not here. It’s as if we’re aware that the movie is exploiting her beauty.) The pace seems to slow. In fact, this had the too-slow pace plus silliness formula that sometimes makes me stop watching a movie before its end, although that didn’t happen here. In case anyone ever reads this who likes this movie, I apologize if I seem rudely negative.

North by Northwest

thisdistractedglobe.com/.../

A classic I hadn’t seen.

I just read a plot summary in Wikipedia to remind myself of this movie’s goings-on, and it’s surprising how absurd this plot is. The movie is satisfyingly full of tension and surprises, and the scene at the house near the Mt. Rushmore memorial, up to the closing shot goes satisfyingly from extreme tension to comic resolution. I'm afraid that the older my hero, Cary Grant, gets, the more more dignified and less comic his roles become.

The Jerk

forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=10668163

An old friend loved this movie, and I have positive feelings about Steve Martin.

The question seems to be can Martin, through his timing and presence, play someone who is so dumb as to be potentially very irritating in a non-irritating, successful way? And the answer I would say is yes.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20215825_23,00.html

In my friend’s book of 1000 important films, and it’s in the category of high-school-life movies that fascinate me. Uncomfortable-making movie that always seems to be on verge of falling into incoherence, but doesn’t quite. The characters seem unbelievable, and the Mike Damone character is creepy, so old-looking and creepy that no one in real life would go near him. And yet, the other characters are somehow appealing, the movie is prurient in a somehow effective way. Somehow it believes in itself.

The Philadelphia Story

casadelogo.typepad.com/.../wheres_my_wande.html

A classic comedy I hadn't seen.

I must have been more tolerant and open of sensibility when I was in my early twenties, because I delighted back then in more than one Katharine Hepburn movie (Holiday, Morning Glory) and in at least one one Jimmy Stewart movie (It's a Wonderful World). Now I find myself finding the voice of each annoying and affected, their temperaments grumpy; Hepburn seems too bullying, Stewart too resentful and sullen, as if he's not enjoying himself on any level. Not that they aren't great and all. I found this movie funny and fun, but somewhat in spite of two out of three of its big stars. Cary Grant never seems to fail for me, except in Charade.

Broken Blossoms

film-at-11.blogspot.com/2007/06/personal-alte...

On a list of important movies from a friend’s book describing one thousand important movies.

The Buddhist part seems unlikely but it kind of winning; the narrative heartbeat is rather slow; but it never lost my interest. It felt operatic, despite the intimacy and simplicity. The acting was nuanced, and the extreme juxtaposition of extreme innocence and brutality never tipped over into too much-ness.

Wordplay

www.cbc.ca/arts/film/wordplay.html

Loved by a friend, discriminating as to movies, very partial to crosswords.

I fell asleep within ten minutes, which says more about me than about the movie I’m sure. There are only two documentaries among these movies I’m commenting on and I fell asleep early on in both.

The Royal Tenenbaums

www.ew.com/ew/allabout/0,,20000712,00.html

My friend E. liked it, it was reviewed well, and I’m always interested in Gwyneth Paltrow, at least in theory.

This is the kind of movie that might easily feel like it was bashing me over the head with each scene, maybe even speech. However, I caught the narrative rhythm, and found the Gwyneth Paltrow role funny. Her relationship with her brother Richie I found riveting, and the conclusion concerning the relationship satisfying.

My So-Called Life

www.boston.com/.../toptvrescuefantasies?pg=5

I had seen references that had made me very interested, being interested in high-school dramas (because I teach in a high school? because I’m a perennial teenager at heart?) and especially because the lead seemed to be consistently praised.

Sadly, I found the first one and a half episodes melodramatic, insufficient as to sense of humor and stagey in a tense way that I associate with the word dated. But probably an honorable enterprise.

Match-Point

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.24.05/gifs/movies-0534-matchpoint.jpg

My friend E is a Woody Allen fan—despite his being of a younger generation than I—and helped motivate me to catch up on Woody Allen’s movies. Then I saw a couple of accounts that made out Match Point to be one of Allen’s best.

I found the movie amazingly dry and devoid of humanity, of humane-ness. I found the Scarlett Johansson character uncomfortable, predatory in feel, and the male lead (JonathanRhys Meyers) a sociopath. To what was it all tending? I didn’t find out, because I couldn’t keep watching it (I got about half-way through).

Paprika

www.catsuka.com/news_detail.php?id=1153480868

Reviews.

For me, a satisfying cocktail of bold-premise science-fiction, dense animation, and a lovable, sexy heroine. And very trippy.

Victor/Victoria

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/images/2002/09/08/juliePlayingVictorPlayingVictoria.jpg

Made it onto the Classic Comedies bracket in The Enlightened Bracketologist.

Very funny, very satisfying, farce aspects delightful, characterizations diverting. What a pleasure to see Julie Andrews in a role not involving children and remaining compelling, and how fun to see Robert Preston as someone besides the Music Man and remaining compelling.

Knocked Up

http://thevoidmovies.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/knocked-up.jpg

Good reviews in the NY Times of a romantic comedy aren’t that common, and are enough to get me to put the movie on my Netflix cue.

Funny, crisp enough, and humane. The sub-genre of super-attractive woman getting together with a schlemiel is an interesting one to contemplate: Annie Hall (and other Woody Allen movies,) Shallow Hal, The School of Rock, this one: it’s a fantasy genre of a rather pathetic kind, yet the ones I’ve seen I’ve liked, and what does that say about me?

Buena Vista Social Club

http://thomas734.vox.com/library/audio/6a00e398bf8cb3000200e398bfc0fe0001.html

I liked what I read about it, and a friend who’s a jazz musician said it was a movie I had to see.

Sadly, I was falling asleep after ten or fifteen minutes. My bad, not the movie’s, I’m sure.

Capote

http://www.popentertainment.com/tobyjones10.jpg

Not long ago I used the book (In Cold Blood) on which this movie is based as a text in my teaching, and I was curious.

I’m not one, I hope, to say in a knee jerk way that a movie isn’t as good as the book. I think of movies made from books as being two separate things to be viewed and enjoyed on their own merits. The movie I found engrossing, and the performance of Capote’s character by Philip Seymour Hoffman especially so. However, the character of Perry and of Dick (though the latter doesn’t come through as being as important) don’t come across with the power they do in the book, and the Perry character is at the center of the book’s energy. The movie ends up “telling” the way Capote exploited Perry where the book “shows” it.

The Shop Around the Corner

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.10.98/shoparndcorner-9849.html

Another Lubitsch movie (cf. To Be or Not to Be in an earlier post) that I saw highly praised somewhere in print . . .

. . . and another Lubitsch movie I couldn’t find a way into. James Stewart seemed so irritating and he made me tense in a not-good way. Maybe the tension between the leads not getting along as fellow sales-clerks, and their ardently romantic feelings expressed through their correspondence, was just too uncomfortable for me. A failure of my sense of humor, it must be, and I am sad to admit it. I only watched about the first third.

The Awful Truth

www.sheilaomalley.com/archives/004992.html

This was a finalist in the category of Classic Comedies in The Enlightened Bracketologist.

There’s something about a screwball comedy, or at least the kind where the characters speak so quickly that the audience needs to strain to keep up, with this dialogue combined with broadly comic situations and all kinds of physical comedy, and characters who we care about that, taken all together, make for a very satisfying movie. The dog scenes are my favorite ever. Physically, Cary Grant is like a fire cracker about to go off--and then he does. The fact that much of the movie apparently was improvised makes the movie seem almost miraculous. One of my favorite surprises to come out of this catching-up-on-movies-via-Netflix process. And I had never even heard of it.