The River

 So happy to sleep in today and be lazy. I didn't accomplish anything important, but it was good to just have a nice, slow, easy day. I'm trying to forget that I have an obscene amount of work to do when I get back on Monday, which is all the more stressful since I've only had one work-free day to detox. Oh man I really need to stop thinking about work and relax.

I can't decide if I like today's movie or not - The River, directed by Jean Renoir in 1951. It's good - there were parts of it I really liked. But it's also really meh as well. There were a lot of things that didn't work so well for me either. I can't make up my mind. I sort of hated it the whole time I was watching it but after it was over and I thought about it a little, I liked it slightly more. Only slightly, though.

The Rules of the Game

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Today's movie is The Rules of the Game, directed by Jean Renoir in 1939. I kept putting off watching it all day. The title made it sound exciting, but the plot summaries I kept reading sounded boring - some dull comedy about rich French people or something.Then, suddenly, on the way back from some errands, I thought I remembered this movie. "Isn't this the one," I said frantically to Anthony, "where all those French people stay in a chateau together, and they go hunting, and there's this really extended scene of them killing rabbits?" I could not think of any other plot details other than "kill rabbits", and I could not, no matter what, remember the title. "I hope that what I'm thinking of is the movie for today," I mused.

And it was! I think I saw this in a history of film class, and I remember being shocked that something that sounded so blah could actually be so awesome. The movie is funny, sad, and totally engrossing. I don't really understand a lot of the social commentary, but I still find it to be so funny and interesting.

The Grand Illusion

I couldn't post this in a timely fashion since the snowOMGpocalpyse ruined our internet connection. I was able to finish watching Grand Illusion on Netflix streaming, and I hope I'll be able to watch my movie tomorrow :/

Grand Illusion was made in 1937, directed by Jean Renoir. It feels quite a bit like a film you are probably more familiar with, The Great Escape. But this film isn't about being a prisoner of war, or war at all, even. It has to do with, as Ebert writes, “a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the line subscribed to the same code of behavior. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War I” (The Great Movies, 205).