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Spring Season: Weeks 19/20
WHAT A FUCKING (couple of) WEEK(s). Was supposed to go see The Empire Strikes Back last Tuesday, only to get a text from mom that she had to take my brother to the hospital instead, because his stomach hurt. About six hours and a whole bunch of scans later, it's his appendix and he'll be going into surgery in the morning. The next day (while I'm back at work), his surgery gets delayed long enough for his appendix to rupture, he finally goes under around 10pm, and will hopefully be released in the morning. The next day, his doctor has been exposed to COVID-19 by a colleague and has to quarantine, so he's been reassigned and his NEW doctor isn't able to get around to releasing him until Friday afternoon. IT ALL ESCALATED VERY QUICKLY BEFORE LINGERING STUPIDLY BUT AT LEAST HE SEEMS OKAY. Hopefully we don't all have coronavirus now. And we never even got to see Empire. >:[
I am very tired. Keep wanting to tag, keep trying to tag, keep getting about ten words in before getting distracted and wandering off.
The shiftwork remains... difficult, what with the lack of sleep and all, but those weeks off remain REAL nice. Still kinda conflicted!
Yeah, I haven't got much this week, my brother's bullshit has pretty thoroughly drained me. Movies!
Hamilton (2020): It's fuckin' Hamilton, we've all seen it, what do you want from me? It's good.
Pulp Fiction (1994): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #9! There's a lot here that doesn't hold up super great (remember when Quentin cast himself to randomly show up in the middle and say the n-word a whole bunch? GOOD TIMES), but a crappy MIDI of Misirlou was my ringtone through pretty much all of high school, so this was real special for me. :3
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972): Baby's first Herzog! Quiet and beautiful and surprisingly striking for something that's mostly just a bunch of raging assholes floating around on a raft for a while.
Une femme mariée (1964): I think my first Godard? Painfully pretentious and uncomfortably voyeuristic instead of feeling frank or intimate, but the fragmented style worked for me. Not my thing, will try him again.
Things Behind the Sun (2001): Real good performances from Dickens and Cheadle, and you can tell the subject matter is super personal, but it was heavy enough that I felt like it still could have used a few more years of experience behind the camera? Still, I've liked both Anders movies I've seen so far.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Slow to get going (and so very long), but once the actual trial gets under way, it's straight fire. Love the ever-so-slight moral ambiguities that just soak into every aspect of the case, tainting the whole affair, it's like the anti-12 Angry Men. Jimmy Stewart says 'panties' SO MANY TIMES.
Grand Prix (1966): Less talk-talk, more vroom-vroom, please. The racing scenes are SO GOOD, clear and dynamic and engaging, just great stuff, but the movie is almost three hours long, and all of the drama/interpersonal stuff between races is soooooo dull and uninteresting. Those races, though! Man alive! Also, Jessica Walter is so young that I straight up did not recognize her until I got to the intermission and thought to myself 'hey, I thought I saw Jessica Walter in the opening credits, I wonder where she w-OH MY GOD.' She's one of the main damn characters!
Stella Dallas (1937): "Tragically noble, self-sacrificing mother" is my least favourite stock Stanwyck character, and this one had a heaping helping of "you can never truly rise above your station, you will always be tacky and poor at heart" to go with it. Solid performances, though.
Stella Dallas (1925): Once again, I have watched the remake first, oops! Interesting to see which bits were expanded on and which were cut down, though. Slightly less 'a mother's love' inspiration porn in favour of doubling down on 'rich people are just better', but there were a lot of super cute moments that the movie really lingered on. Also, the silent format is a lot more forgiving to the more egregious melodrama moments, because it's so much more over the top in general? Like, there is NO REASON for her not to go to her daughter's wedding at the end beyond 'this is sadder,' but her just standing in the rain and getting ushered off by a cop instead reads a lot less goofy here, I found.
The Scarlet Letter (1926): Hits all of the beats that it needs to, but Gish is the real draw here, she's SO good.
Captains Courageous (1937): I straight up had to google what the fuck Spencer Tracy's accent was meant to be before the character told me, holy SHIT is it bad. PORTUGUESE? SURE, IF YOU SAY SO, MOVIE. Pretty fun little 'boys own adventure' kind of thing aside from that, though.
La Religieuse (1966): Beautifully bleak. Or bleakly beautiful? Religion! Kinda frustrating until the end when I finally realized that all of those frustrations are 100% intended to be baked into it, it comes together really well.
Le Livre d'image (2018): More than an hour of pretentious artsy voiceover clip show is toooooo muuuuuuuch 4 me. It did make me want to watch most of the movies there were clips of, though (not you, Arabian Nights, sit back down).
The Big Knife (1955): A whole bunch of brilliant actors doing their best with a whole lot of horribly overwrought, overwritten dialogue. One of those play adaptations, you know? Rod Steiger devouring every piece of scenery in sight ruled, though.
The Big Country (1958): A little dry, but breathtakingly beautiful; story-wise, this did NOT need to be so long, it's all pretty straightforward stuff, but I never tired of just looking at it for an instant. The way Wyler builds out compositions and staging, layering elements and drawing the action THROUGH the screen instead of just across it is just... gah. It's like watching a 3D movie, there's just so much depth to everything, fucking wild.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #10! It was the fucking extended edition. Nearly four fucking hours. Zero regrets. I will be very sad if we never get the other two now!
Adieu au langage (2014): More tedious, experimental bullshit from Godard. That he's still struggling so mightily for (and largely failing to find) any scrap of profundity all the way into his 80s doesn't bode SUPER well for what I'll make of his earlier stuff, but I guess we'll see!
The Champ (1931): Pretty by-the-numbers, but so sweetly sad and earnest, it's pretty impossible to fault, and that ending is EXACTLY as devastating as its reputation. Jackie freaking Cooper, man!
Cynara (1932): One of the main characters in this dull infidelity drama is named CLEMENCY WARLOCK and I'm going to be obsessed with that fact until I die.
Le Mépris (1963): Pretentious and horny and full of itself and Bardot's character is fucking insufferable (if only women would just say what they meeeeeean a bloo bloo bloo), but I kinda loved it in spite of all that? Does lots of fun stuff with space and colour and language. Whole scenes where characters don't share a common tongue, so all of the dialogue gets repeated by an interpreter between lines! Fritz Lang as himself! Still doesn't feel like Godard ever had much of interest to say, but I like how he says it here.
Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood (2000): Short and on the shallow side of talking head docs, but the subject matter is interesting enough and the focus on female friendships was real nice.
The Matrix (1999): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #11! I can't get over how well this shit holds up when every single frame of it completely saturated pop culture so thoroughly and it's all so era-specific to such a brief window where Rob Zombie was perfectly legit club music??? It fucking rules, though. Just veers wildly from techno thriller to body horror to bonkers action sequences that still suck you right in no matter how many times they've been parodied and referenced and paid homage to and ripped off over the years to high concept sci-fi to mystic nonsense to religious allegory with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and somehow makes it all work??? HOW.
Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970): It's a really strange feeling, to watch a movie that you've never seen before but whose score you've listened to and loved probably hundreds of times over the years. This was quite good, and I really miss my Maestro. :(
La Chinoise (1967): *makes jerking-off motions for 100 minutes* Fuck, this was a slog. At least I learned the word 'fantoche', which I had never heard before, so that's something.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019): OKAY, 10-WEEK CAR X-MEN REWATCH OVER, CAN I HAVE A NEW MOVIE NOW PLEASE? Please. please
Ocean's 11 (1960): One of those movies that would probably be one of my favourites if it were about half an hour shorter. Fun once it gets going, it just... takes a while to do so while the Rat Pack fuck around with each other.
The Pride of the Yankees (1942): I didn't think man was capable of creating a film too hokey for Gary Cooper to pull off, but by god, I may have been wrong. Truly astonishing.
Raging Bull (1980): BOY did this make for a weird black-and-white sports biopic double feature. Probably should have spaced those out more. ANYWAY, I think my favourite part of this movie is the physicality, and how the hits look so fake and stagey at the beginning, until the vibe of the fights just sucks you in about half an hour in. I'm the boss.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): "It's been emotional."
Something Wild (1961): This is a lot better on the rewatch, when I'm not busy being horrified by the batshit plot and spending the entire back half whispering 'what the fuck' at my screen. It's still all super messed up, but knowing what's coming freed me up to pay attention to the setup and the subtleties and all of the stuff that it does well. But seriously, what the fuck.
Gloria (1980): Fun premise, Rowlands absolutely kills it, but WHAT ABOUT THE CAT??? Crazy that Buck Henry was second billed just to immediately die, and that kid was a particular breed of movie kid where he's awful but... has pretty good reason to be so you can't fault him for it TOO much? Always nice to see a female protagonist with absolutely no motherly instincts or urges whatsoever, it's too damn rare. Where the FUCK did her cat go though.
West Side Story (1961): One of the best parts of growing older is slowly realizing that my childhood crush on Russ Tamblyn is never gonna fade, even a little.
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963): Kinda can't believe that it took me so long to get to this, considering how many times I watched Rat Race as a child (so many times). Also, more comedies should be long enough to warrant an intermission. Just in general.
Britannia Hospital (1982): Finally finishing off the Mick Travers trilogy and... I think this is my favourite of the three? Even though it seems to be widely considered the worst? I dunno, I never really clicked with if... and the single location contains the wacky satire a lot better than O Lucky Man!, which just wandered for so damn long. Sucks that Mick himself is pretty sidelined in the end, and I'm still not entirely sure if the ending with the robot brain was meant to be super lame or not, but it's got a big gory climax, which I quite appreciated.
Blondie of the Follies (1932): Harold. Harold. Starts off really stiff and awkward before blossoming into a seriously fun, charming little melodrama, oh also it's SUPER GAY.
Their Own Desire (1929): 45 is the new 25, this plot is nonsense, and Norma Shearer fuckin' rules, that is all. Also I finally twigged while watching this to how much Evan Rachel Wood looks like her, and it's a Brolin/Bale-level mindfuck.
Tourist Trap (1979): I have decided that this is the month I stop wasting my Shudder subscription on background noise.
The Facts of Life (1960): What a weird surprise of a movie this was! It's Lucille Ball and Bob Hope, both firmly in middle age, getting a... whirlwind adulterous romance comedy? That's actually fairly light on the comedy?? WHAT. I kinda loved this, they had MAD chemistry and it was played totally straight, so bewildering.
A League of Their Own (1992): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #12! Well, we didn't get to see The Empire Strikes Back, but there's no crying in baseball, so here we are.
Just one more day and I'm free. One more day of this.
ffffffffffffffffffffffffff
I am very tired. Keep wanting to tag, keep trying to tag, keep getting about ten words in before getting distracted and wandering off.
The shiftwork remains... difficult, what with the lack of sleep and all, but those weeks off remain REAL nice. Still kinda conflicted!
Yeah, I haven't got much this week, my brother's bullshit has pretty thoroughly drained me. Movies!
Hamilton (2020): It's fuckin' Hamilton, we've all seen it, what do you want from me? It's good.
Pulp Fiction (1994): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #9! There's a lot here that doesn't hold up super great (remember when Quentin cast himself to randomly show up in the middle and say the n-word a whole bunch? GOOD TIMES), but a crappy MIDI of Misirlou was my ringtone through pretty much all of high school, so this was real special for me. :3
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972): Baby's first Herzog! Quiet and beautiful and surprisingly striking for something that's mostly just a bunch of raging assholes floating around on a raft for a while.
Une femme mariée (1964): I think my first Godard? Painfully pretentious and uncomfortably voyeuristic instead of feeling frank or intimate, but the fragmented style worked for me. Not my thing, will try him again.
Things Behind the Sun (2001): Real good performances from Dickens and Cheadle, and you can tell the subject matter is super personal, but it was heavy enough that I felt like it still could have used a few more years of experience behind the camera? Still, I've liked both Anders movies I've seen so far.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Slow to get going (and so very long), but once the actual trial gets under way, it's straight fire. Love the ever-so-slight moral ambiguities that just soak into every aspect of the case, tainting the whole affair, it's like the anti-12 Angry Men. Jimmy Stewart says 'panties' SO MANY TIMES.
Grand Prix (1966): Less talk-talk, more vroom-vroom, please. The racing scenes are SO GOOD, clear and dynamic and engaging, just great stuff, but the movie is almost three hours long, and all of the drama/interpersonal stuff between races is soooooo dull and uninteresting. Those races, though! Man alive! Also, Jessica Walter is so young that I straight up did not recognize her until I got to the intermission and thought to myself 'hey, I thought I saw Jessica Walter in the opening credits, I wonder where she w-OH MY GOD.' She's one of the main damn characters!
Stella Dallas (1937): "Tragically noble, self-sacrificing mother" is my least favourite stock Stanwyck character, and this one had a heaping helping of "you can never truly rise above your station, you will always be tacky and poor at heart" to go with it. Solid performances, though.
Stella Dallas (1925): Once again, I have watched the remake first, oops! Interesting to see which bits were expanded on and which were cut down, though. Slightly less 'a mother's love' inspiration porn in favour of doubling down on 'rich people are just better', but there were a lot of super cute moments that the movie really lingered on. Also, the silent format is a lot more forgiving to the more egregious melodrama moments, because it's so much more over the top in general? Like, there is NO REASON for her not to go to her daughter's wedding at the end beyond 'this is sadder,' but her just standing in the rain and getting ushered off by a cop instead reads a lot less goofy here, I found.
The Scarlet Letter (1926): Hits all of the beats that it needs to, but Gish is the real draw here, she's SO good.
Captains Courageous (1937): I straight up had to google what the fuck Spencer Tracy's accent was meant to be before the character told me, holy SHIT is it bad. PORTUGUESE? SURE, IF YOU SAY SO, MOVIE. Pretty fun little 'boys own adventure' kind of thing aside from that, though.
La Religieuse (1966): Beautifully bleak. Or bleakly beautiful? Religion! Kinda frustrating until the end when I finally realized that all of those frustrations are 100% intended to be baked into it, it comes together really well.
Le Livre d'image (2018): More than an hour of pretentious artsy voiceover clip show is toooooo muuuuuuuch 4 me. It did make me want to watch most of the movies there were clips of, though (not you, Arabian Nights, sit back down).
The Big Knife (1955): A whole bunch of brilliant actors doing their best with a whole lot of horribly overwrought, overwritten dialogue. One of those play adaptations, you know? Rod Steiger devouring every piece of scenery in sight ruled, though.
The Big Country (1958): A little dry, but breathtakingly beautiful; story-wise, this did NOT need to be so long, it's all pretty straightforward stuff, but I never tired of just looking at it for an instant. The way Wyler builds out compositions and staging, layering elements and drawing the action THROUGH the screen instead of just across it is just... gah. It's like watching a 3D movie, there's just so much depth to everything, fucking wild.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #10! It was the fucking extended edition. Nearly four fucking hours. Zero regrets. I will be very sad if we never get the other two now!
Adieu au langage (2014): More tedious, experimental bullshit from Godard. That he's still struggling so mightily for (and largely failing to find) any scrap of profundity all the way into his 80s doesn't bode SUPER well for what I'll make of his earlier stuff, but I guess we'll see!
The Champ (1931): Pretty by-the-numbers, but so sweetly sad and earnest, it's pretty impossible to fault, and that ending is EXACTLY as devastating as its reputation. Jackie freaking Cooper, man!
Cynara (1932): One of the main characters in this dull infidelity drama is named CLEMENCY WARLOCK and I'm going to be obsessed with that fact until I die.
Le Mépris (1963): Pretentious and horny and full of itself and Bardot's character is fucking insufferable (if only women would just say what they meeeeeean a bloo bloo bloo), but I kinda loved it in spite of all that? Does lots of fun stuff with space and colour and language. Whole scenes where characters don't share a common tongue, so all of the dialogue gets repeated by an interpreter between lines! Fritz Lang as himself! Still doesn't feel like Godard ever had much of interest to say, but I like how he says it here.
Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood (2000): Short and on the shallow side of talking head docs, but the subject matter is interesting enough and the focus on female friendships was real nice.
The Matrix (1999): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #11! I can't get over how well this shit holds up when every single frame of it completely saturated pop culture so thoroughly and it's all so era-specific to such a brief window where Rob Zombie was perfectly legit club music??? It fucking rules, though. Just veers wildly from techno thriller to body horror to bonkers action sequences that still suck you right in no matter how many times they've been parodied and referenced and paid homage to and ripped off over the years to high concept sci-fi to mystic nonsense to religious allegory with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and somehow makes it all work??? HOW.
Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970): It's a really strange feeling, to watch a movie that you've never seen before but whose score you've listened to and loved probably hundreds of times over the years. This was quite good, and I really miss my Maestro. :(
La Chinoise (1967): *makes jerking-off motions for 100 minutes* Fuck, this was a slog. At least I learned the word 'fantoche', which I had never heard before, so that's something.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019): OKAY, 10-WEEK CAR X-MEN REWATCH OVER, CAN I HAVE A NEW MOVIE NOW PLEASE? Please. please
Ocean's 11 (1960): One of those movies that would probably be one of my favourites if it were about half an hour shorter. Fun once it gets going, it just... takes a while to do so while the Rat Pack fuck around with each other.
The Pride of the Yankees (1942): I didn't think man was capable of creating a film too hokey for Gary Cooper to pull off, but by god, I may have been wrong. Truly astonishing.
Raging Bull (1980): BOY did this make for a weird black-and-white sports biopic double feature. Probably should have spaced those out more. ANYWAY, I think my favourite part of this movie is the physicality, and how the hits look so fake and stagey at the beginning, until the vibe of the fights just sucks you in about half an hour in. I'm the boss.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): "It's been emotional."
Something Wild (1961): This is a lot better on the rewatch, when I'm not busy being horrified by the batshit plot and spending the entire back half whispering 'what the fuck' at my screen. It's still all super messed up, but knowing what's coming freed me up to pay attention to the setup and the subtleties and all of the stuff that it does well. But seriously, what the fuck.
Gloria (1980): Fun premise, Rowlands absolutely kills it, but WHAT ABOUT THE CAT??? Crazy that Buck Henry was second billed just to immediately die, and that kid was a particular breed of movie kid where he's awful but... has pretty good reason to be so you can't fault him for it TOO much? Always nice to see a female protagonist with absolutely no motherly instincts or urges whatsoever, it's too damn rare. Where the FUCK did her cat go though.
West Side Story (1961): One of the best parts of growing older is slowly realizing that my childhood crush on Russ Tamblyn is never gonna fade, even a little.
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963): Kinda can't believe that it took me so long to get to this, considering how many times I watched Rat Race as a child (so many times). Also, more comedies should be long enough to warrant an intermission. Just in general.
Britannia Hospital (1982): Finally finishing off the Mick Travers trilogy and... I think this is my favourite of the three? Even though it seems to be widely considered the worst? I dunno, I never really clicked with if... and the single location contains the wacky satire a lot better than O Lucky Man!, which just wandered for so damn long. Sucks that Mick himself is pretty sidelined in the end, and I'm still not entirely sure if the ending with the robot brain was meant to be super lame or not, but it's got a big gory climax, which I quite appreciated.
Blondie of the Follies (1932): Harold. Harold. Starts off really stiff and awkward before blossoming into a seriously fun, charming little melodrama, oh also it's SUPER GAY.
Their Own Desire (1929): 45 is the new 25, this plot is nonsense, and Norma Shearer fuckin' rules, that is all. Also I finally twigged while watching this to how much Evan Rachel Wood looks like her, and it's a Brolin/Bale-level mindfuck.
Tourist Trap (1979): I have decided that this is the month I stop wasting my Shudder subscription on background noise.
The Facts of Life (1960): What a weird surprise of a movie this was! It's Lucille Ball and Bob Hope, both firmly in middle age, getting a... whirlwind adulterous romance comedy? That's actually fairly light on the comedy?? WHAT. I kinda loved this, they had MAD chemistry and it was played totally straight, so bewildering.
A League of Their Own (1992): RETURN TO THE THEATRE #12! Well, we didn't get to see The Empire Strikes Back, but there's no crying in baseball, so here we are.
Just one more day and I'm free. One more day of this.
ffffffffffffffffffffffffff
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ONE MORE DAY, THEN YOU CAN CHILL <3
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Oof, I hope your brother is doing okay, and also that you do not all have coronavirus now. Hopefully that doctor was super cautious?
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