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 It transcends time and genre - it's a romantic comedy, but it doesn't feel outdated in any way.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 Silent films are for sure outdated as a media, but they're still really fun to watch.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.

Citizen Kane

It's hard to write about a film as famous as Orson Welles' 1941 Citizen Kane. It's hard to join the discussion when so much has already been said about it. I had a professor who told us, when we were writing thesis papers, we had to read everything about our topic before we could even start join in on "the discussion". Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of being able to read everything about Citizen Kane, and  I don't want to waste time summarizing it or explaining what everyone knows. Orson Welles! Deep focus! Ceilings! The breakfast table scene! It's been said. Why repeat it? We've all heard it, yes? I want to keep this more about my feelings about it, and more about my experiences with other people and the film.

Chinatown

I want to just preface this post with a brief...something. I strongly dislike Roman Polanski as a person. However, I can and do separate him from his body of work. The fact that he is a horrible person does not render his entire body of work invalid. I do not want to really talk any more about Polanski as a person, though. If you have thoughts about Chinatown or his other movies, I'm happy to hear them and talk about them with you, but I don't really to want discuss Polanski. I know that Polanski's actions are a touchy subject for some people, so I just wanted to make it clear that I'm focusing on his work, not him as a person, and I hope that others can do the same.

With that out of the way, today's movie is Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown. It's an incredible movie, and I always love watching it. It feels so timeless, it never seems to age or feel outdated to me. The acting is incredible, the writing is outstanding, and it's an all around great movie.

Snow!

Lots of snow today - a constant flurry of huge clumps of it drifting down from the sky. I love it when it snows like this, I'm always in such a good mood the whole day because it's so beautiful. :)

Nikita is displeased.

 It's a nice cozy day for staying in, curling up under a blanket with Nikita to watch a movie. She is upset because she had to go out in the snow - which is pretty deep, mind you. Being lazy, I didn't shovel a path for her, so her ittle feets got cold, daaaawwwww. One last adorable picture, and then I have to focus and watch Chinatown, lucky for me. :)

Nikita, an intrepid snow poodle.

Casablanca

Ah, winter. It's such a wonderful time - it makes my ruined left shoulder ache, and it makes everyone ill, it seems. I'm still struggling to fight off a cold, so I'm not sure how much I can write tonight. Sick or not, it was really great to curl up tonight and watch Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz in 1942. I love this movie. I've seen it in and studied it in a lot of different ways - for film history, for cinematography, for lighting. Even having watched it a bunch of times and scrutinized it in various ways, it never gets old. It always seems emotional and real whenever I watch it. It seems like a lot of people I know haven't seen this film. It's sort of surprising, since it seems so accessible, even for an "old movie".

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.

Bride of Frankenstein

Today I watched James Whale's 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. I have never seen it before, but in his essay, Ebert mentions that it's the best of all of the Universal Frankenstein movies. I really liked it - it was funny, witty, and an enjoyable little movie. The plot, I think, is self-explanatory - Henry Frankenstein, coerced by both the Monster and Dr. Praetorious, tries to make a mate for his Monster.

Bonnie and Clyde

I'm not feeling so well today, I feel like I'm fighting off a cold, which is a possibility. My boyfriend is sickly, so I blame him. Or maybe I just had a bit too much fun last night - my friend and I watched Furry Vengeance followed by The Human Centipede, which explains what sort of mood we were in. Either way, with a hot mug of throat coat tea (surprisingly delicious) next me to me, I want to keep this a little short and easy, so I can get back to relaxing.

Today I watched Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn in 1967. It was, if I remember anything from college, the first film from the "New Hollywood" movement. This was an American film movement that includes movies like The Graduate, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and Midnight Cowboy. These movies were unlike anything that had existed in Hollywood previously. Audiences were growing bored of historical epics and musicals, and younger people were watching more foreign movies to quench their thirsts. It was shocking when Bonnie and Clyde came out - it got a lot of negative critical reviews. But younger audiences loved it. It spoke to them - they liked the shocking violence and disaffected characters that they could relate to.

Body Heat

Today's movie is Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 film  Body Heat. It's a neo-noir, which I feel like I have to say since I took so many classes on noir where I had it implanted in my brain that noir is a historical genre, that only exists between the 1940s and 1950s. Which isn't really important, of course.

The movie is about Ned Racine, a sort of dopey, greedy lawyer who meets this incredibly beautiful woman, Matty Walker. She says she is married, but of course they start having an affair. She lets it slip that she isn't happy with her husband, but she signed a prenuptial, so she wouldn't get any money if they divorced. Ned realizes the only solution is to kill her husband, obviously, so she can have all the money, and they can carry on together. It's a classic, pulpy sort of plot, and it's pretty predictable and trashy. That's what I love about noir films, though. They're a lot of fun, and you generally know what to expect going into them.

Blowup

Do you ever have days were you just feel like you are at a loss for words? That is so my day today. I don't know if it was too cold out for my brain to function, or what, but I really am struggling to think and articulate myself in any way. It doesn't help that the movie I watched today only muddled my thoughts even more. It was like, "The plot was pointless, the characters were boring and unlikeable, but for some reason I liked this film, and now I have to explain that? Ugh!"

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks in 1946, is known for being confusing and frustrating to watch. The plot, adapted from a novel by Raymond Chandler, is hard to follow and heavily censored due to the Hays Code. I've seen the beginning of this movie many times in classes I have taken (I took two classes on film noir and hard-boiled fiction in college), but never the whole thing. I've read Raymond Chandler, but never The Big Sleep, not that it matters. The Big Sleep, as Ebert says, "...is about the process of a criminal investigation, not its results" (The Great Movies, 70). The plot takes a back seat to the romance between Bogart and Bacall, and their chemistry is more engrossing than anything else happening on screen.

The Bicycle Thief

I have to admit, I was really dreading watching this. I have bad memories of Italian neorealism from film history classes. When I studied this genre, we had to watch Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini, which I didn't really love. We also were screened The Bicycle Thief, directed by Vittorio de Sica (1946). The classroom was slightly cold, where to get warm you had to curl up in your comfy, plush theater seat to generate body heat. As I watched the students around me one by one fall asleep, so did I.
Remembering this, I was not excited for trying to watch it again. My boyfriend knows all about my history of sleeping during any Italian neorealist films, so before he left last night, he put a Red Bull he had bought for himself into the fridge. "This is if you have an emergency during the movie," he told me seriously. I nodded solemnly. I tried to psyche myself up during the day. "If you go downstairs to watch this movie, you can eat the veggie sushi you bought and have a diet Mountain Dew!" I told myself. Not out loud. I promise. So, equipped with some treats, I tried to not get too comfortable to attempt to watch this film once and for all.

Belle du Jour

I spent the whole day shopping for picture frames and Blu-rays, which is about as exciting as it sounds. It was nice to come home and watch a surprisingly good movie - although I could see it's "good-ness" being very debatable. Luis Buñuel's film Belle du Jour (1967) is the story of a 23-year-old woman (named Severine, but who goes by Belle du Jour when she works) who grows bored of her husband and works at a brothel during the day. She is a masochist, and often has fantasies relating to this. It's billed as a very infamous erotic film, and although it doesn't feel dated, I was surprised at how...not graphic it was. Not that it would bother me if it was, I was just surprised to find how much of the film ended up taking place in my own imagination. I think that's what makes this film so sensual, in a way - you are left to create your own scenarios and ideas, since most of it takes place behind closed doors.

Beauty and the Beast

This is not the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, but a film by Jean Cocteau made in 1946 in France. It's black and white, with stunning practical effects and costumes, and was pretty incredible. I loved the atmosphere of this film - it was eerie and haunting, It seemed so magical and enchanting, and it felt like I was looking into a new world. It seemed to be more convincing as a fantasy, for some reason, than the animated version I saw as a kid. I think there was something about the huge, rich sets and the costumes that made it seem more fantastical and mystical.