Month: August 2011 Page 1 of 2

50DMC #27: Iconic Movie I Haven’t Seen

The 50 Day Movie Challenge asks one question every day, to be answered by a few paragraphs and a clip, if possible. Click here for the full list of questions.

Today’s prompt: What’s an iconic movie you still haven’t seen?

This is basically a List of Shame question, and I’m slowly working my way through what I consider the most shameful omissions in my cinematic vocabulary; knocked two of them, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Grapes of Wrath off my list within the past couple of months. I think the one I’d consider the most iconic that I still haven’t gotten to yet, though, is Aliens – an omission that my friend Nathan Chase won’t let me forget!

I have seen Alien, several years ago, and I didn’t care for it as much as I’d hoped – but I’m far more into hard sci-fi and horror now than I was then, and I expect a rewatch on that would improve it greatly for me. But I do blame my apathy towards the first film for not having yet moved on to the second, which most people say is better. Aliens is definitely in my watching plans for sometime in the near future.

50DMC #26: Most Embarrassing Movie I Own

The 50 Day Movie Challenge asks one question every day, to be answered by a few paragraphs and a clip, if possible. Click here for the full list of questions.

Today’s prompt: What’s the most embarrassing movie in your personal collection?

It took me a little while to think about this one, not because I don’t own any potential guilty pleasures, but because I don’t tend to think in those terms. If I like it, I like it, I don’t care if I’m supposed to or not. Also because I purged most of the ones I would consider embarrassing from my collection a while back. But I know I owned Daredevil at some point, so I’ll go with that one.

I actually didn’t dislike Daredevil the way most people I know seem to. But then, I haven’t seen it since it was in theatres (no, I never even opened my previously-viewed-from-Blockbuster-for-$5 copy), and I was in a pretty “yay shiny costumed things and girls with martial arts moves” phase at that point. Whatever. I enjoyed it at the time, but I’m pretty sure I either sold it the last time I purged or it’s on my current purge shelf.

Yeah, okay, I just watched this clip, and it’s pretty nauseatingly ridiculous. Good choice, then, for this topic.

50DMC #25: Best-Scripted Movie

The 50 Day Movie Challenge asks one question every day, to be answered by a few paragraphs and a clip, if possible. Click here for the full list of questions.

Today’s prompt: What’s the best-scripted movie you’re ever seen?

My excuse for falling so far behind getting to this entry is that I was totally stumped by the question. And it’s true. Like Favorite Male and Female Performance, this ends up being an almost arbitrary choice, because there are so many movies with amazing scripts, and how do you even go about picking among them? I toyed with choosing The Social Network for a bit, because Sorkin is, let’s face it, incredible. I thought about choosing a Coen script for a while, because they’re all wonderful, but I decided I didn’t want to choose a writer/director for this question. That let out the Coens, Tarantino, Wilder, Sturges, Godard, and whole raft of other people which frankly made choosing a lot easier. But I was still left with a lot of choices, especially back in classic Hollywood when there were far fewer writer/directors. Is His Girl Friday great because of its script? Well, it has a great script, but it’s most memorable because of the rapid-fire delivery of its script. Maybe a Robert Riskin script, like It Happened One Night? Certainly tempting. What about Casablanca, it’s more dramatic than comedic, like most of the quip-heavy films that first sprang to mind, but it certainly has a lot of great lines.

Of course, a script is much more than just dialogue, but dialogue is the most noticable thing. I couldn’t quite pry myself away from thinking about dialogue when trying to answer this question, so movies like The Thin Man came up, but I did ultimately turn away from that because as awesome as the dialogue and the relationship between Nick and Nora is in that movie, there are some parts of the mystery that admittedly drag a bit. I still think all the films I mentioned and many more would’ve been fine choices, but I’m ultimately going with The Women. Again, largely because of the wonderfully witty and catty dialogue all throughout, but the narrative is also strong (aside from a bit of sentimentality that’s more due to Norma Shearer’s acting style than anything else) and clever. Though The Women was directed by a man, George Cukor (who is nonetheless known for his adeptness at working with casts full of women), it was scripted by two women, Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, and they capture the competitiveness of this group of women perfectly, working from the play by Clare Booth Luce. Female screenwriters were not quite as rare in Hollywood at the time as female directors, but they still weren’t plentiful; The Women is very fortunate to have three great women writers behind it, and such a fantastic all-female cast to bring the words to life (including Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Mary Boland, Marjorie Main, and more).

Is it the best? Couldn’t say. Probably not. But it is a film I return to again and again, and a large part of that is due to the script. None of the clips from the film on YouTube are embeddable, but the image below links to a montage clip of several of the best scenes.

On Row Three: The Future in Print and Podcast

I forget sometimes that not everyone who follows me here may read Row Three as well (and vice versa, but that’s a different thing), so I’ll try to remember to put up a note whenever I post something major over there. Mostly all I’ve had time to post over there are the weekly Film on TV and DVD Triage posts anyway, which I crosspost here as well. But this week I guested on the Row Three Cinecast, one of three podcasts the site hosts, led by Andrew and Kurt. We talked about Miranda July’s The Future, Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block, John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, as well as various other things we watched over the past week. It’s a pretty lengthy, informal podcast – nice to throw on in the car or on the train if you have a long commute.

I also wrote a full review of The Future published last week; here’s an excerpt of that.

For some reason it’s difficult to believe that The Future is only Miranda July’s second feature, and that it’s been six years since her previous one, Me and You and Everyone We Know. That film gathered huge success on the festival circuit and among indie film audiences with its particular brand of twee quirkiness – a quirkiness that fits in with the Sundance crowd but rings a little truer, a little deeper. She’s been busy with short films, performance art, short stories, and spoken word recordings in between, and even though I haven’t seen or heard a whole lot of that work, you can feel it in this film. It feels like an organic outgrowth of July as a writer and performer; not like a long-overdue follow-up to a successful film but merely the way this particular story needed to express itself, so she made a film rather than a book or a performance piece. Because though it would be easy for naysayers to dismiss July as merely quirky, she’s tapping into some very real and meaningful places in the lives of the now thirty-something middle-class artistic-minded people she writes about and to some degree represents.

The Future begins with a narrative framing device that’s likely to offput many – it was my least favorite part of the film, though I did like much of the actual narration as written. The narrator is a cat, voiced by July in the most gratingly annoying voice she could come up with and visually represented by a pair of paws. Paw-Paw is a stray cat that July’s actual character Sophie and her boyfriend Jason rescued and are planning to adopt when he’s out of quarantine at the vet’s. But Sophie and Jason aren’t sure they’re ready for the responsibility and decide they need to do everything they always wanted to do in the thirty days before they go to pick Paw-Paw up. On the surface, it seems like a fairly silly plot, but July is deep in metaphor in this film (and will get deeper), using Paw-Paw as a catalyst to energize Sophie and Jason out of their complacency in decent but unfulfilling jobs with the realization that they’re getting into their thirties and haven’t really even started to do the things they’d always planned to to in the future.

50DMC #24: Most Beautiful Movie

The 50 Day Movie Challenge asks one question every day, to be answered by a few paragraphs and a clip, if possible. Click here for the full list of questions.

Today’s prompt: What’s the most beautiful movie you’re ever seen?

I guess you could answer this beautiful-looking or beautiful-sounding or beautiful-spirited or any number of other interpretations of “beautiful,” but I’m a bit of a cinematography whore so I went with visual beauty. Even with that, there are so many choices, and I had a number of others in here first, like The Tree of Life and other Malick films, or Sunrise and its moody Expressionism, or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or The Double Life of Veronique or any number of others. But I decided to go for the black and white stunner The Night of the Hunter. I love this film for many reasons, but one of the main ones is its gorgeous painterly photography, which makes nearly every shot screencappable. It’s basically Expressionist like Sunrise, but with sharp contrasts and angles compared with Sunrise‘s softer, dreamier approach. I’ve seen the film several times, but I still gasp at many visual moments scattered throughout it.

Here’s a clip of my favorite part.

And what the heck, some favorite stills.

Page 1 of 2

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén