La Dolce Vita

I'm sure most of you are thinking that you have never seen or heard of Frederico Fellini's 1960 movie La Dolce Vita. You might not have seen it, but you have for sure been affected by it. A word we hear every day comes from this movie, was invented from this movie - paparazzi, taken from the character of Paparazzo. He is a  photojournalist, and Fellini used the word as it means an annoying sound, like a buzzing. I know this is sort of unexciting, but I really love things like this. Language is pretty incredible, and it's really interesting to me to find out where words come from. How odd, I thought, that paparazzi is a relatively new word! Bah, of course this is boring.

JFK

I've seen parts of JFK before, Oliver Stone's infamous 1991 movie. I've met and worked with someone who has a bit of a minor role in it (Michael Rooker, in a student film I helped make at DePaul). But I've never sat down and watched the whole thing from start to finish. I've heard a lot about it - everyone told me it was very controversial, because it isn't accurate to the real events. I'm too young to really understand the JFK assassination, but I understand what is presented in this movie - obsession, unrest, skepticism. I know these feelings from other tragedies that have happened during my lifetime. How people feel is not always accurate. Like when people are interviewed directly after a crime, their testimonies are usually wildly inaccurate. The point isn't that facts - the point is how we feel. I think that's the point of JFK. It's not trying to retell the events of the assassination, which most people are familiar with. It's trying to capture a mindset of doubt and unrest, and of the obsession with finding the truth.

It's a Wonderful Life

It seemed weird to watch what most people think of as a Christmas movie in February. Frank Capra directed It's a Wonderful Life in 1949. In Ebert's essay, he writes that, "The best and worst things that ever happened to "It's a Wonderful Life" are that it fell out of copyright protection and into the shadowy no-man's-land of the public domain. Because the movie is no longer under copyright, any television station that can get its hands on a print of the movie can show it, at no cost, as often as it wants to. And that has led in the last decade to the rediscovery of Frank Capra's once-forgotten film, and its elevation into a Christmas tradition. PBS stations were the first to jump on the bandwagon in the early 1970s, using the saga of the small-town hero George Bailey as counter-programming against expensive network holiday specials" (The Great Movies, 229).

Ikiru

There are a lot of movies in America about how people react when they realize that they have become frustrated and bored with their lives. More often then not, they react with violence, in movies like Falling Down. It's a bit of a cathartic fantasy - we all get frustrated with our bosses and people around us, and in our heads we think about lashing out. Today I watched Ikiru, a film made in 1952, co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. Here, the main character realizes that he has wasted his life, and that his life is been boring and meaningless. Instead of lashing out, he tries to fix things.

Hoop Dreams

I didn't realize how long Hoop Dreams was until I started trying to watch it on Netflix. It is about 3 hours long and I became immediately unhappy. "Sports documentary, ugh," I spat. I don't watch sports. I don't understand them. I'm a dork - I play video games and read and do stupid things in my free time. I definately didn't feel like watching a long documentary about basketball. Since I didn't know it was so long, I started trying to watch it at about 9pm. Netflix started screwing up and about an hour later, I was able to watch it on my dad's Xbox upstairs - neither blu-ray player would play the movie on Netflix instant without stuttering and buffering, and my Gold subscription for Xbox Live ran out. It was around 10pm when I was able to start the movie. Even though it was so late, I was so engrossed in this documentary! I was really shocked at myself, but I think part of it was how little I needed to care about sports to care about this movie. I felt like I personally knew all of the people, and I had to keep watching to see what happened to them. After the movie was over, my mom and I needed to know what happened to them since the film, so Anthony looked up the two boys to find out. I really cared for them, and I really felt for them during the movie.

Snowpocalpyse!

I promised some pictures of the snow disaster, so I of course, I have some for you! I'm near Chicago, so we got a pretty horrible amount of snow. Driving has been pretty stupid even still, since a lot of streets are down to one lane.

 

 

This was on Tuesday night - my car is starting to get buried and you can see lots of blowing snow.

Front door, covered with snow.

 

Wednesday morning. I used to have a car. :(

If it looks like there is an ungodly mountain of snow in front of my house, it's because there actually is.

 

 

Backyard. Fire pit it totally buried. The fence is about 6 or 7 feet high, for scale. Look at how covered it is in the back!

The snow and went bent our bird feeder in half and buried the gnome.

Big piles of snow.

One more of my lost car, since it is the best and worst thing ever. 

Since then, we managed to dig our cars out and makes paths, but it's still very snowy everywhere and it's been freezing cold!

A Hard Day's Night

Made it into work today. Meat-eating employees were rewarded for their bravery with Subway sandwiches that were purchased and assembled at about 7am, so by the time they ate them, they were gelatinous and gross. Traffic was disturbing and awful, and many people were stuck in all the snow. I was actually really excited to come home and watch the 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Victor Spinetti. I like The Beatles a lot, and I really love everything they revolutionized for music. I know some people who don't agree with me, though. My friend Tyler hates The Beatles, and that's ok, I understand. I don't really love Nirvana, but I really love what they did for music. It's like Citizen Kane - some people hate it, but some people can appreciate what it did for film despite how they feel about the plot. I hope that makes some sort of sense.:P

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.

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).

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.