Gone With The Wind

There are a lot of things that I understand about Gone With the Wind, directed by Victor Flemming in 1939. I know that it shows a romantic version of the south. I know that it is an American epic. I know that Scarlett is supposed to be a strong woman. I understand all of the ideas behind the sexual politics of the film. But I really don't like it. I do like the first half - the characters feel rich and interesting, and I like the arc of the story. The second half, to me, feels like a soap opera that goes on for too long. I'm happy when it ends, because I feel like it drags. This is because I don't like any of the characters, and I don't feel anything when bad things happen to them. I get tired.

Blogging.

This is what I do in my free time - watch movies, and blog about them on my netbook. With Nikita. Life is good.

The Godfather

This post, for the record, is only about the first movie in The Godfather trilogy - I have to watch Part II in a few months, but never Part III, which everyone hates. The Godfather is the father of all good mafia movies, directed in 1972 by Francis Ford Coppola. It basically created the style of mafia movies that most of us are so familiar with - where we see the mafia from an insider's perspective, and we feel a lot of sympathy for the characters. Pretty much all mob movies that do this are indebted to Coppola's film. The characters are evil people, but we care for them, somehow. I'm going to assume, perhaps wrongly, that most people have seen this film and know the basis of the plot. If not, head over here to read it.

The General

Remember that migraine that I had on Thursday? I still have it. I spent a while today trying to decide if I was ready to brave the ER to relieve this pain, but the thought of sitting for what would basically amount to 3 more days with the migraine just waiting in the ER, I decided to stay home and turn the volume way down on my TV and the lights off and do what I was supposed to do - Watch The General, a 1926 silent comedy, starring and co-directed by Buster Keaton.

It was almost soothing to my headache. More so than just sitting around lolling about in pain. It was funny and charming and adorable and at least it was a really pleasant distraction. Buster Keaton got really poplar for a while in more recent times, because his silent comedy translates very well. He doesn't over-act or pull stupid faces for the camera. He is funny, but he really doesn't show too much emotion or facial expression. It works really well, and I think a lot of modern viewers really like this. It's easier to relate to it because it looks more like comedies we watch today.

Gates of Heaven

I first saw Gates of Heaven in a class about directors and their first feature films. We would watch their first film, and then a famous film, and compare their style. I had never heard of Errol Morris before, nor his 1978 movie about a pet cemetary. Over three days, I watched Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, and Standard Operating Procedure. I fell in love. I really like documentaries. I always dreamed of making them, even though I'm not a director. Nothing is more interesting or more strange than real life. Errol Morris knows this. He is fascinated by his subjects. His shots are long and they linger on as the people continue to speak. It's wonderful.

Floating Weeds

I wish I had the energy to write about this movie. I had to leave work today because I had such a bad migraine, and I still have it. I can't focus, and it's really hard for me to process this movie. Today's movie is Floating Weeds, directed by Yasujiro Ozu in 1959. It's a beautiful movie, and I know I'm going to watch it again if I can soon, when I can see it with a clearer mind.

Fargo

Like any girl who goes to a university, I took a class on women's literature. It's wasn't really a real women's lit class. We studied fairy tales and the roles women played in them, and read weird revisions of them. It was interesting, and it dealt a lot with women in the media. We were asked one day to talk about what women we admired in movies. My first thought was Clarice from The Silence of the Lambs, but someone said it before me, since she is always the first character to come to mind when you are asked these questions. No one took the one I thought of next - Marge Gunderson, from Fargo. "Why?" they implored. When most people think of The Coen Brother's 1996 small-town-murder-movie, they think of Minnesota accents and Steve Buscemi. "Marge was...the cop, right?" Right. I swear, my love of Marge has nothing to do with my unnatural feelings for the Coen Brothers. I even named two of my angelfish Joel and Ethan (only one is surviving today, and they were identical, so I just call him JoelEthan). There is something so great and new about her character. I love it. I love all parts of this movie, from the bumbling criminals and the weird tonal shifts from comedy to violence, sometimes coexisting in the same scene.

The Exterminating Angel

Luis Bunel is a fantastic surrealist director. He directed, if you recall, Belle du Jour. The first movie I ever saw by him was one of his first movies, Un Chein Andalou, which he directed with Salvador Dali. Just mentioning that he worked with Dali should explain something to you. As Ebert says, "Those seeking reason or explanations are in the wrong theater" (The Great Movies, web, below). Bunel directed The Exterminating Angel in 1962. It's a bizarre movie. If the mention Dali, surrealism, and lack of meaning or explanations are off putting to you, you will hate this movie. I like all of these things, so of course I found myself enjoying it.

E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial

After watching this movie and reading Ebert's essay, I feel like a bad movie...person. He writes about how his grandchildren are such good movie critics because they liked the Stephen Spielberg's 1982 movie E.T. and understood it. I didnt't really like this movie and when I saw it, I guess I was too stupid to understand it. It made me really sad, like watching The Lion King where I'd turn around and not look at the screen when Mufasa died and Simba curled up under his dead body. I remember a disastrous time when a 3rd grade teacher I had thought to show her whole class The Lion King, and then had sobbing, upset children on her hands for the rest of day. This is how I remember children reacting to sad movies. When I saw E.T., I was too upset by it to really like it. Why was he sick and dying? Who were those bad men? I wasn't really able to get it.

Duck Soup

Duck Soup is a Marx Brothers film from 1933. I guess I don't really understand the Marx Brothers. I don't really like comedy with puns, and physical comedy makes me sort of tired. I don't really like The Three Stooges either, there's just something about this sort of style that makes me exhausted. I think it's just personal taste that this fell sort of flat for me. I mean, it sort of grew on me, and I found a few moments funny, but otherwise I was sort of "meh". I'm sure this is movie blasphemy, but I wasn't in love, or even really in like with this film.

Dr. Strangelove

When my parents brought  home a 62" inch DLP TV, and got a DVR for the first time, I had mixed emotions. It was so large. My friend stood back and saluted the TV, saying, "Welcome to our lives, you big behemoth." Later, I sat down and looked through the free on demand movies. I found Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, and it was the first thing I ever watched on the giant screen. To be honest, I don't remember if I had ever seen it before then. I just remember being in awe - this shockingly funny and beautiful black and white movie taking up half of my basement, while I sat huddled up and small in the corner of the couch. I think it was a perfect way to watch a movie like this. Not because you need a big TV, but a sense of wonder. I was pretty astonished at how funny it was and how great the acting was. I remember laughing at General Turgidson chewing endless amounts of gum, the antics of Dr. Strangelove's gloved hand. I was skeptical of the TV at first. "Why would anyone need something so large?" For movies like Dr. Stranglelove. For masterpieces. Now, watching a Blu-ray of the movie, I'm happy to have access to the TV, to be able to watch this and all the other films of Ebert's books in full high definition.

Dracula

It's hard to talk about a movie like Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula. I keep starting this entry and deleting everything that I am writing! Am I sick of both the book and the movie? Has the 1931 film lost a lot of the shock that it had, now that modern audiences are more seasoned and used to horror? I love Bela Lugosi, but I don't feel afraid of him. To be honest, I mostly watch this movie for Renfield, the character who goes mad and becomes Dracula's servant. I love this movie, and I feel creeped out by it, but not nearly as unsettled as when I read Let The Right One In. What does this mean? I'm not quite sure, apparently. I think it's a great movie and I think Bela Lugosi is incredible. I'm not quite sure, I guess, how it holds up in our vampire-saturated culture.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity, written and directed in 1944 by Billy Wilder, is an early and classic noir film. Like all noir films, I saw it first in a class. Our class was an hour and a half long - the movie is almost two. My professor fast-forwarded through the parts he thought we ok to cull, explaining them to us as he did it. We also had to read the book, so I feel like I didn't ever really miss that much. Somehow, this is true. Watching it again, I felt like I had seen it really recently. I really like this movie, though, so I was happy to watch it again.

Do The Right Thing

Embarrassing confession - I really don't know Spike Lee. I often heard professors mention his production company, but to be honest I can't think of anything I've seen by him. I'm really glad that I watched this. I don't know if I ever would have picked it out on my own without this project, although if it wasn't for this project, I'd just be watching "My Strange Addiction", so...


Do The Right Thing was written and directed by Spike Lee in 1989, and the plot is a bit too elaborate to summarize. I'm not sure I can, without just going on and on. It is, I guess, in a sentence, the story of a one city block in Brooklyn, and the racial tensions and conflicts that go on there.