Random viewing

As it approaches its fifth anniversary, this blog will be undergoing a number of changes. First off is to leave behind its original impetus. With the turn of the millennium, I began a filmlog to help keep track of all the movies I was watching, with a number grade to remind me how much I liked each, and a one-line summary to jog my memory. Gradually the summations became longer, almost mini-reviews, and when I began to post them online at the start of 2005, became more like a searchable film guide, geared toward recommendations for the reader’s Netflix queue, straight from my own.

What I will be abandoning is a complete record of my viewing. Some films require only a cursory notation as watched in passing. Films of particular current or retrospective interest will continue to get their 200 words or so, sometimes accompanied by short subjects -- documentary, animation, what-have-you. Films viewed in pursuit of a theme will be addressed together in longer essays. As for the rest, they will be lumped in a potpourri such as this.

On the domestic side, what assortment could be more random than Cash McCall (1959 – somehow lodged in my 12-year-old mind, led to revisit by relation to Executive Suite and Mad Men, features charming rascal James Garner as a corporate raider who slows down enough to woo Natalie Wood (yum!), daughter of a takeover target -- not quite as humorous or pointed as I remembered), Diner (1982 – heavily copied and no longer the novelty it seemed at the time, but not a classic in retrospect, this tale of a group of superannuated juveniles in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore introduced a lot of now familiar performers, and I watched largely to compare Mickey Rourke to his latest incarnation as The Wrestler), and Tropic Thunder (2008 – Ben Stiller’s funny-enough parody of making an Apocalypse Now-like movie is a self-referential comedy in the tradition of Airplane! and all its spawn, notable for the hilarious fake trailers at the beginning, lots of celebrity cameos, and Robert Downey in blackface).

As for imports, I would single out The Return (2003, MC-82), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued but intense psychological thriller, about the mysterious return of the father of two teenage boys, who were happy living with their mother, but now have to adjust to an incomprehensible authority figure they hadn’t seen in ten years. With no explanation, the father takes the boys on a fishing trip to the ends of the earth, a remote spot near the Arctic Circle. Tensions build as the elder boy is only too glad to have a dad, but the younger distrusts this demanding stranger. It all plays out with the economy of a fable, to the accompaniment of breathtaking widescreen landscapes.

I watched Nenette & Boni (1996) to fill in Claire Denis’s filmography, but you don’t have to – for a taste of this intriguingly elusive director, go straight to Beau Travail (1998) or her newly-released 35 Shots of Rum, which I notice has a Metacritic rating of 96, just about the highest ever.

As I was researching Vittorio De Sica’s career for my film club introduction, I noticed that even though Shoeshine is still unavailable on DVD, The Criterion Collection has issued an earlier film of his that I had never seen. The Children Are Watching Us (1943) is anything but neorealist, a child’s eye view of a wandering mother somewhere between Anna Karenina and a desperate housewife. The story transpires in an upper middle class milieu that gives no hint that a war is going on, but offers a well-done soap opera made something more by the brilliant “acting” of the five-year-old boy.

Speaking of the film club, I found Il Posto to be up to my exalted memory of it, The Flowers of Saint Francis to be slight but indicative of Rossellini’s genius, Umberto D to be impressive but not transcendent, La Terra Trema to be interesting but an hour too long, and La Strada to be less sentimental and more coherent than I remembered. In my other series, The White Sheik confirmed my view of Fellini’s first as one of his best, and one of the most deeply delightful comedies ever. What a comedown to the next film in the series -- I had never seen the whole of La Dolce Vita, and now I know why. Same for Fellini's Roma -- hard to see how an accomplished director can fall so far from grace.