Sweeney Todd

http://owlpellets.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/aaasweeney.jpg

Fight Club

http://thesituationist.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/fight-club.jpg

The romance of Astrea and Celadon

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/Romance_of_Astrea_and_Celadon_03.jpg

Malcolm X

http://m.blog.hu/ko/kobli/image/malcolmx.jpg

Taste of Cherry

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/protectedimage.php?image=NoelMegahey/tasteofcherry2.jpg

This seemed like a twenty-minute movie made feature-length by having things go slowly and lots of shots of the setting.  The main character struck me as a little too stalker-like and creepy.  Probably my bad.

Dresden

http://www.dw-world.de/image/0,,1903746_1,00.jpg

I found the female lead powerfully attractive, and in an unusual way, but that's my idiosyncrasy.  I had a distinct feeling that I was getting a window into the way German people see themselves--knowing that this was a German production, and knowing that it had been popular in Germany--and for some reasons that was thrilling.  The movie itself seemed too emotionally manipulative, too condescending.

War and Peace

http://www.scribd.com/doc/440783/audrey-hepburn-Movies-War-and-Peace-1956

A Room with a View

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_IvCb5SKMez2ogkZbgGukDMerlRR4K82VoiahKlzpcw4p4ukk1pNJ68atMGrv_TdQH-B-5C3M-yxEitZWmBGrqq6lboDw2i60QU2H8DEP4I1Vcs2LaXkR5LootVkXzBYLiec9OH21veR0/s400/a-room-with-a-view_l.jpg

La Jetee

http://artsci.case.edu/bakernord/lib/exe/fetch.php?w=100&h=&cache=cache&media=programs_and_events:jetee.jpg

A Midsummer Night's Dream

http://wadelhardt.eu/B/s4/Pfeiffer1.jpg

To Live

Treeless Mountain

www.jjmurphyfilm.com/blog/?p=179

Must have seen it described in the New York Times. I wanted to show a Korean movie to a class of mine called "Art and Community" because . . . (long story).

This movie, like Wendy and Lucy, requires patience and is utterly non-sensational. I found it more rewarding than than the latter. Wendy and Lucy's bleakness seemed highlighted to a slightly pushy extent (as with Lady with the Dog, in a very different, and much more extreme way), whereas in this movie the director let the situations and characters speak for themselves. The characterization of the two very young girls felt amazingly deep by the end, deeper maybe for actors this age than any I've encountered.

Lady With the Dog

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/68/1231996248_1.jpg

A movie version of a Chekhov short story? How irresistible a concept. However, I couldn't watch more than fifteen minutes or so. Chekhov lets his situations and characters speak for themselves, and if the ending result is bleak, so be it--and I think the result is always much more complex than simply bleak. The Bleakness was turned up to high right from the start and it felt somewhat root-canal-like, not that I've ever had root-canal surgery.

Wendy and Lucy

http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/wendy_and_lucy08.jpg

A whole, profoundly admiring essay in the New York Review of Books had this movie for its subject.

Certainly worthwhile, and I think I get how it captured something important about our bleakly dehumanized and atomistic culture; I get how uninterested in following Hollywood conventions the movie was. On the other hand, I didn't find it so fun to watch. My bad, probably.

The Oyster Princess

http://pics.livejournal.com/mediadiary/pic/003dkfr7

I read a brief CD-review in the New York Times. I've seen highly recommended Ernst Lubitsch comedies and have felt non-plused--I must not have gotten their rhythm--but I loved this early movie of his. It was so zany, so like the cartoons I remember from my youth (probably also the product of Eastern Europeans, only ones who had come to America), so giddily exuberant. Marx brothers movies have a similar, almost apocalyptic zaniness and subversiveness vis a vis the politically-controlling class. I notice about myself that if there's a compelling central female figure and/or a love story I am much more open to silliness than if there isn't.