I mentioned yesterday being obsessed with Paris lately; a good chunk of that is watching more French films, most of them set in Paris (Godard‘s Band of Outsiders and Une femme est une femme, Melville‘s Bob le flambeur, the recent Avenue Montaigne and Paris, je t’aime). Also, trying to learn more about the French New Wave, which grew up in Paris, around the Cinematheque Française. When considering the question of what historical time and place I would want to go back to if I could go back in time, I always used to say the Old West, around the time the railroads were being built. I’d still like that, but I think now I might choose 1950s-60s Paris, so I could attend the Cinematheque Française and witness the revitalization of American genre film and the birth of the New Wave. Not to mention getting to see all those classic films on the big screen with other cinephiles! This video clip is from a documentary about Bernardo Bertolucci‘s film The Dreamers, which is set in the mid-1960s, when the Cinematheque founder Henri Langlois was removed from its administration by the French government, much to the outrage of the film community. I’ve reedited the clip a bit to highlight the Cinematheque more than The Dreamers. ;) The first male voiceover is Bertolucci, and the color clips are from The Dreamers; Matthew is the main character of the film. The rest is documentary footage from the 1960s.
I’m going to go ahead and post the recap now. I’ll add video hopefully tomorrow. They’re all so good, y’all, picking a bottom three is basically impossible.
edit: now with competition videos! Here’s the best one tonight, in my opinion: Jaimie and Hok dancing Wade Robson’s jazz number.
I actually heard The Bicycle’s “Paris Be Mine” on you ain’t no picasso, because they posted a video of it. But I had to search around to find the mp3 version since I liked the song so much (what with my current obsession with Paris…which has probably been slightly more visible on my Facebook account than here, I guess, but take my word for it, I’m currently obsessed with Paris). I finally located it on Bars & Guitars, along with another couple from the band.
I don’t really know much about this band. But they were featured on…probably you ain’t no picasso…several months ago, and every time they popped up on my iPod, I was like, I love this band! So last time I was in Austin I picked up their CD and it’s been in my CD player ever since. Plus I like the name.
I am not skipping Music Monday this week; it’s just going to be late on account of the presentation I’m writing for tomorrow. Hopefully there shall be musics up tomorrow sometime.
Also, on the subject of movie list responses to AFI’s new Top 100, Eddie Copeland’s got a great one. He doesn’t follow AFI’s rules, though, and includes a generous helping of foreign film. Which is a good thing. I think I’ll do that sometime, but it’s going to be difficult and not as good as his, because I haven’t seen nearly as many films as he has. Ah well. Something to aim for, right?
Also also, on the subject of things that make me laugh, Book-A-Minute is awesome. A friend mentioned it to me right at the start of class this morning, so of course I looked it up, and it was all I could do not to bust out laughing as class started. “When even the Cliff’s Notes are too long…” I just wish they had more of them.
I have pondered before whether the French New Wave was perhaps when Modernism hit film, after it hit literature in the 1920s…there still might be some things to support that, but having now seen a few more Jean-Luc Godard films, it’s clear he’s very much postmodern in his reappropriation of earlier film, hugely self-conscious techniques, etc. I’m working on a paper comparing Modernism to Postmodernism in the literary sphere, and the more I read about, the more I think that in a way, Modern vs. Postmodern is a mindset, almost…there were writers doing Postmodern things in the 1920s, and there were Modernist writers in the 1960s–certainly I’m having trouble believing that Postmodernism is as much a rejection of Modernism as Postmodernists would like us to think; it seems to me much more an extension and enlarging than a rejection. Anyway, here’s my new pondering: Is it possible that François Truffaut, with his detached yet subjective philosophical realism which owes more to the high art Italian Neorealism than it does to American B cinema, is the Modernist side of the New Wave and Godard, with his self-reflexivity and dependence on intertextual tropes from low-art crime film, is the Postmodern side? I’m not sure that wholly holds up, either…I’m about to rewatch Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, which is more heavily influenced by American genre film. This pondering is stemming from the differences between The 400 Blows (Truffaut’s first and arguably most important film) and Breathless (Godard’s equivalent masterpiece).
Guess what! I finally finished April’s recap! I know, right? April was the month in which I rediscovered Turner Classic Movies during a few weeks of relative dead time at school and, between that and an active month of Netflixing and theatre-going, watched a total of 24 movies. I think that’s a record. And that’s not even including the four or five rewatches. So without further ado, here are my reactions to Marie Antoinette, Band of Outsiders, Kiss Me Deadly, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Lives of Others, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Through a Glass Darkly, Hot Fuzz, and many others. Plus some books.
I’ve stopped doing the trailers for opening movies every week. It just entailed far too much time thinking about films I don’t want to see and finding trailers for obscure films that may or may not ever come anywhere near me or anyone I know. So I’m going to do trailers on a much more haphazard, as-I-see-them basis. Here’s one I ran across via Anne Thompson and Karina Longworth. It’s Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jack Black in Margot at the Wedding, from Noah Baumbach, who directed the well-received-but-as-yet-unseen-by-me The Squid and the Whale. It looks good. And it looks like it’s the good side of Nicole Kidman, who I swear has schizophrenic acting tendencies (i.e., the dumb, annoying one from Bewitched and The Stepford Wives and the actual good one from The Hours and Dogville), which makes me happy because I always want to love her, and then she does stupid roles and disappoints me.
(It hurts my soul a little to use anything associated with AOL, but the player is actually pretty nice…and at least they have embeddable media–I’m looking at you, Yahoo!Movies.)
You guys need to be watching this show. Seriously, EVERYBODY was good this week. And this week, I have video to prove it! I’ll tease my favorite routine outside the cut; click through to see all the rest, complete with very subjective commentary as usual. This is Lacey and Kameron, dancing Broadway to “All That Jazz”. I love Broadway, which you know. I also have decided that Lacey and Kameron are, as of this moment, my favorites (since their contemporary routine last week was also incredible).
Cinephile, music lover, internet junkie, gamer, and recovering academic (English Lit).
Currently I live in Los Angeles. I moved here for the low cost of living. Somehow that is not working out so well. Actually, I moved here to be in a big city with plenty of stuff to do. I needed lots of film stuff, lots of music stuff, and lots of warm, preferably dry, weather. LA met all the criteria, and so far I still completely love being here.
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