The Phantom of the Opera

I think I have car fever. It's becoming difficult to focus on anything other than reading car reviews and looking up cars in my price range. I'm in love with one car, but I want to take some time to test drive some other ones that are around the same cost. I don't know too much about subcompact cars, but I really like them, and I think that they'd be a perfect fit for me - good commuter cars that are low on gas. Blah blah blah cars cars cars. I've learned more about cars this last week than I've probably known my whole life. That's how bad I've got it. I want to test drive more cars tomorrow, and if it goes late, I might not be able to post about tomorrow's movie. We'll all survive, right? Right.

Enough about me. Today I watched The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian in 1925. I'm not a huge fan of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. I mean, I hate it - the movie version and the actual musical itself. The music is really basic and boring and the more recent movie version is all kinds of  awful. Maybe I loved the silent version because it wasn't...that one. I also really love silent movies, and this one was really cool looking. The sets and makeup were really cool, and the music in it wasn't stupid and dumbed down. I liked it much more than some of the other Phantom movies that I've seen, personally, but I'm pretty unpleasant.

Faust

So you know yesterday I was a whole bunch of whine about how bad I felt and I couldn't focus. Today I watched a movie that, despite my mood, I was totally engrossed in and focused on. I watched Faust, directed by F. M. Murnau in 1926. It's silent - which I know is off-putting to many, but not to me. I think I've written pages about how much I like silent film. "Dreamlike!" I always say. "Otherworldly!" I'll try not to, uh, say that too much this time. :)

This was one of the coolest looking silent films I've seen - tons of really neat practical effects and fantastic costumes and makeup. The story is interesting, but it's pretty blunt and the characters are sort of just...symbols? That's not the right word. They're like...caricatures. They don't have a lot of development, they mostly just exist to represent something and forward the plot. I don't mind, though. I loved how this movie looked and felt, and that alone made it really incredible for me, however shallow that might be.

Cabiria

It's been a long day, and I am so tired! Please pardon my lazier posting as a result. I've been having a lot of issues with a project at work and it's been really frustrating. I was actually ready to cry over some labels today, I was so irritated with them. Yikes. Anyway, I think all the problems are finally fixed, so I can relax a little bit.

Today I watched Cabiria, directed by Giovanni Pastrone in 1914. It's a silent epic - probably the first epic ever made. It's sort of hard to follow. The intertitles are really complicated and strange, and there are a lot of characters to keep track of. It really requires you to work with it, which I was not so up to doing today. No fault of the movie, though. Really, what I loved about it was that it was from 1914 and it had incredible sets, huge amounts of extras, and a lot of cool costuming. It was a really ambitious project, and I have to respect it for that. It might not have fit my mood, but it really is an interesting film.

Sunrise

It's hard to write about a silent film that did something groundbreaking with visuals. Today's Movie, directed by F.W. Murnau in 1928, did just that. It did a lot of things that were new and exciting, but they are so commonplace now that it's hard to ever catch them. Ebert does a great job writing about the cinematography, and his essay is a good read.

Not knowing any of that before I watched it, I was surprised at home awesome this film is! I loved the story, and there were many scenes that were really impressive. The camera seemed so light and full of movement, which I'm not used to seeing in silent films. Sometimes (all the time, in my experience), silent movies can make people fall asleep or feel really tired. This sometimes happens to me, too. This movie really kept my attention and even with barely any intertitles, it was so easy and engrossing to watch.

The Man Who Laughs

Man, it's really humid and gross out right now. I didn't realize this until just a few moments ago, since I was down in my nice, icy-cold basement watching today's movie. I spent most of my day running errands, and everywhere I had to go was over 40 minutes away! Lots of driving, but that meant lots of loud music on the expressway. :)

Today I watched The Man Who Laughs, directed by Paul Leni in 1928. It's a silent movie, but made during the time when sound was just coming into play. It has some little crowd noises and such, but it is pretty typical otherwise. My mom came down during the end of the movie, and at first decided that it looked boring, but ended up sitting and watching the last 20 minutes or so with me. I really like silent film, so I was happy that she gave it a chance -  and when it was over, she said she really enjoyed the parts that she saw.  I definitely think that more people should at least give silent movies a chance, they can be surprisingly fun to watch (well, for me, at least). 

The Last Laugh

I got a lot of good news today, and much celebration followed. I went out for a big, nice meal with my parents and Anthony. I watched this movie before we left, so I'm going to try to post before I fall into a food coma.

The film, directed by F. W. Murnau in 1924, is a really interesting and great silent film. I wasn't really in the mood for a silent film at first. I was antsy and unfocused, and I wondered if that is how everyone else I know feels when they try to watch a silent movie. Once it got going and I settled in the plot, I was totally hooked. I loved this movie. It is really different from other silent films I've seen, and although it was a first at little sad, it didn't dampen my excited mood at all. I never would have found this movie on my own, so I'm really happy I was able to watch it for my project. The poster for this looks scary. It is not a scary film,. I promise.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Such a fun day today - got my hair did, and of course, it looks amazing. I love my stylist, she seems to understand what I want even though I always think I describe things really vague and badly. I keep getting it a little lighter and blonder each time I go in (it was basically black, or has had black mixed in, up until a few months ago). I only think that's worth mentioning because the movie I watched today reminded me a lot of the many years of my life I spent dressed in gothy clothes. I still listen to the same horrible goth and metal music (some of the time) but my style has changed a lot form the days of huge platform boots and smudged black eyeliner.

Today when I got home, I watched The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Jean Epstein in 1928. It's obviously based on the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name. Not only do I love morbid, dark, things, I love literature - and predictably, I am a pretty huge fan of Poe. When I was in high school I'd listen to music, light candles, and read Poe or Lovecraft in my bedroom. Their fascination with twisted dark, and often sad things seemed to match my own obsessions. With Poe, you can just feel his torment seep from the pages of his writing. Not that I was anywhere near as tormented, but yunno, 15-year-old girls think they are.

Buster Keaton/College

Well, my migraine-addled mission tonight was to watch a Buster Keaton film. I seem to get bad headaches and then watch silent films, and end up feeling sort of soothed by them, since they are easy on the eyes and ears. I didn't have to watch a particular film - Ebert simply had an entry in his book for Buster Keaton. I really like him, though, so instead of just skipping it, I decided to watch one of his films. I sort of just selected on at random that was streaming on Netflix, and I ended up watching College, directed by James W. Horne in 1927. It seems that according to IMDB, "In an interview with author Kevin Brownlow, Buster Keaton said that he directed almost all of this film and that credited co-director James W. Horne did virtually none of it. Keaton said that his business manager talked him into using Horne, but that Horne proved "absolutely worthless to me... I don't know why we had him."  Something interesting to consider.

For this, I'll write a tiny bit about the movie I watched, but I'll give more time to Keaton himself. Thus the famous picture of him from The General :)

The Birth of a Nation

Today's movie is the infamous Birth of A Nation, directed in 1915 by D.W. Griffith. This is, as it is for all people-who-write-about-movies, a really hard movie to write about. Ebert mentions in his essay that he didn't pick this movie for the first book because he was avoiding it. Look at the art for this move. Can you tell why?
The film is legendary for not only it's contribution to cinema, but for it's abhorrent racism. It's a difficult line that many film historians and fans walk. Do you laud the racist film for how great it is technically? Or do you condemn the entire thing for it's misguided plot? I think most people tend to fall somewhere in the middle - before they write about how many new and interesting things it did, they attack the plot. For me, I feel similar. I have a hard time stomaching the racism, but I do understand how huge on an impact it had on modern film. It is great for it's technical aspects, not at all for it's plot - and I have to sort of take the movie for what it is, however personally uncomfortable I might feel.

Un Chien Andalou

Today's movie fit my mood perfectly. My body, apparently sick of running on little to no sleep, decided to just...sleep. I would get up and walk around and become so tired that when I'd sit back down on the couch to read I'd fall asleep again. I didn't really mind - I had really strange and vivid dreams, and I love that, as stupid as that sounds. It was far more entertaining to me than anything else I could have been doing. I apparently share this obsession with one of the directors of today's movie, Luis Bunuel. Ebert quotes him in the beginning of his essay, writing, "Luis Bunuel said that if he were told he had 20 years to live and was asked how he wanted to live them, his reply would be: "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other 22 in dreams -- provided I can remember them"' (The Great Movies, 466). I couldn't agree more.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

I heard about this movie before I watched it. The Passion of Joan of Arc, a boring title for an incredible movie, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1928. The first time I saw it was in a class, and our professor told us some stories about it first, so we would care about the film. For some reason, I always found the stories she told disturbing - and thinking about them and watching the film is haunting. The first thing she told us about was about Renée Jeanne Falconetti. The actress suffered so greatly during the filming of the movie, both physically and emotionally. She only watched the film once, and afterward, she was so traumatized by her own suffering that she never acted again. Her own image upset her that deeply, we were told. Then, we heard about the prints of the film being destroyed. It was thought lost for years, never assembled as the director intended - until it was found in closet in a mental institution, and the version we watch today is from this print.

Pandora's Box

I saw Pandora's Box when I was in high school. I was obsessed with Louise Brooks and was spending a lot of time researching her for a stupid reason. I was running a Call of Cthulhu role playing game, set in the 1920's. The only players were my guy friends, so I rolled up a female NPC to make things less of a sausage festival. I picked Louise Brooks to be the character, and I had enough pictures of her and personality that soon my friends were as obsessed with her as I was. I remember Tyler (who played the resident "archelologist" as he called it) was pretty much dating her in the game, and he came over one night all cracked out after watching Pandora's Box in film class. Such nerdy, happy memories.

So I'm always happy when I see Louise Brooks, since she reminds me of all of the fun, long nights with my friends. The movie was directed in 1929 by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. It's a German silent film, and although I really like to watch it, I understand that it's meh and off-putting to most people. It's also pretty long - 2 hours and 11 minutes was the version I watched tonight, so it takes a commitment to focus during it.

Nosferatu

I've seen Nosferatu a few times in the last two years, it seems like, and for some reason it sticks out in my head that I've seen it too often. It felt so fresh in my head from watching it almost a year ago that it was boring to sit through this time around. I don't think this is a bad thing. I mean, it was for me tonight, but overall, it points to a good sign - the images in the film are so memorable that they got really stuck in my head.

Nosferatu, the first film to be made from Bram Stoker's novel, was directed by F. W. Murnau in 1921. It follows the book in a sense - after it was made, Murnau got sued by Stoker's widow, who correctly realized that they were ripping off the plot of her husbands book without giving him any credit. Names were changed in the move (The vampire is Count Orlock, not Dracula) and everyone was sort of happy. Otherwise, the plot is pretty similar.

Metropolis

It feels over-dramatic to go on and on about all of the things that Friz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis inspired. How can one film have done so many things? Plus, to most people, it sounds sort of dull. A strange, nightmarish silent movie – but it inspired so many famous science fiction movies, and even, as Ebert, points out, Batman. So many things, from the look and plot of Bladerunner to C3PO in Star Wars owe inspiration to this film. It seems unbelievable, but it's true – Metropolis, truly visionary, came first, and if you search enough, you'll find that most directors and writers of these works credit Lang. 



Greed

Seeing as the front door of my house was barely able to open this morning, and I literally could not see my car, I didn't go into work today. It took literally hours to snow blow everything and dig out three cars that were buried. Everything is closed around here, even grocery stores. I'll have to post some pictures of how much my car and everything was buried, I've never seen anything like it! (Pictures will be coming tomorrow!) Chicago Public Schools haven't had a snow day since 1999, but they had today off and they also have Thursday off as well, since that's how bad everything has been.

City Lights

City Lights (1931), written, directed, acted in, and produced by Charlie Chaplin, is the best sort of silent film. It transcends time and genre - it's a romantic comedy, but it doesn't feel outdated in any way. Even without speaking, the characters are easy to understand and emphasize with. It's easy to follow and fun to watch. I always feel sort of like silent movies have some sort of stigma, like they're just something that smarmy hipsters watch to be pretentious. Silent films are for sure outdated as a media, but they're still really fun to watch. I think comedies like this are the most accessible, since they hold up so well still.

Broken Blossoms

D.W. Griffith's 1919 film Broken Blossoms was the first silent movie that I ever saw. I had seen bits and pieces of silent films before, but I never sat down to watch one all the way though. I think I rented it and watched it for a film history class, the first one that I ever took. My boyfriend was over today and he sat down to watch this with me, admitting that he had never seen a whole silent movie before until now.