Worth re-watching at any length

I’ve been spending a lot of time watching films I’ve seen before, and they each seem worth the time, from the short and sweet to the very long and overpowering. It was fun to revisit Porpoise Spit, on the north coast of Australia, for P.J. Harvey’s Muriel’s Wedding (1994), and to see a young and blimped-up Toni Collette hook up with a young and slender Rachel Griffiths to do a karaoke duet of “Waterloo.” Together they make this slight but sly slice of life eminently re-watchable. And of course, the ABBA music is infectious -- I may have to take an antibiotic to get “Dancing Queen” out of my head -- and better integrated to the story here than in Mamma Mia!

For complete antithesis, I re-watched Woman in the Dunes (1964) as a longshot candidate for a Japanese film series at the Clark. It doesn’t really fit there, but I was very glad to see it again. My hazy impression had been that I don’t generally care for allegory or fable in film, but this film came as a shock in its intensely real specificity. It’s the story of a Tokyo science teacher on a specimen-seeking trip to the seaside, who gets tricked into joining a woman who is trapped in a house at the bottom of a huge hole and needs to ceaselessly (and Sisyphus-ly) shovel sand to keep from being buried. The sand itself is the third character in the drama, and it's photographed expressively in high-contrast black and white. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara renders the simple elements in the film -- sand, skin, wood, water -- with remarkable sensuous detail. He breaks down each of the man’s attempts to flee as diagramatically as Robert Bresson -- this could be called “The Man Who Didn’t Escape.” The distinctive electronic music and the acting of the two principals make this a complete package, and deserving of more thanks to the Criterion Collection, though the restored twenty minutes were perhaps unnecessary.

It wasn’t that long ago that I watched and reviewed Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary, Tom Petty: Runnin’ Down a Dream, but in the interim I have become a big Tom Petty fan and now know the songs, so when I saw it come around again on Sundance Channel, I tuned in to watch some concert performances, but stayed to watch the whole four hours all over again. The music is classic, and so is the film. Hear it, see it.

It was a long time ago that I watched The World at War. When it first appeared on tv way back in 1974, I tuned in obsessively. And recently noting its appearance on dvd, I have been making my way through all 26 hours all over again. Masterful. The archival footage from all sides of WWII, the interviews from the 70s (now scarily further removed in time than the War was then), the narration by Laurence Olivier, the haunting music -- all retain their power. And from the perspective of today’s crises, it’s reassuring to imagine that if the world could recover from such total devastation, then it can probably recover from its current grim outlook.