A word about film club

By / / Bit Parts / Leave a Comment

Our Criterion Channel film club kicked off with a discussion of The Chase (1966) on Jan. 8, 2021.

Criterion Channel charter membership card and discs

The nine of us in that initial group had been in COVID lockdown since the spring of 2020. The Zoom get-togethers on Friday nights were a wonderful way to safely socialize during the pandemic and to talk about great movies.

After the most recent discussion on April 14, 2023, about Breathless, our film club is going on hiatus. (That also explains the lack of a post last week.)

Our group lost and gained members during those two years and three months. And now that the world has opened back up, it’s been harder for the latest group of seven to carve out time on Friday nights for everyone to log in for the discussions.

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Breathless (1960)

By / / 1960, 1960s / Leave a Comment

In the early 1960s, a movie — like this week’s Breathless — that pushed the boundaries and aesthetics of cinema had a much easier time breaking through.

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Breathless (1960)

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With the availability of high-quality filmmaking technology — think 4K cameras (or mobile phones), digital audio recorders, small but bright LED lights, fast computers with editing software — you’d think that anyone with a modest amount of talent, skill, and interest would be making movies. Maybe they are and the market is just too saturated and they are sidetracked with YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Tik-Tok, and such.

It’s a good thing director Jean-Luc Godard faced a different media environment.

From the opening dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the low-end studio that churned out low-budget films of action and adventure, to constant references throughout Breathless (a young woman hawking Cahiers du Cinéma on the street, movie stills of Humphrey Bogart, cinema visits, the cameo by Jean-Pierre Melville and mention of Bob Montagné, and the multiple iris shots), Godard’s love of the movies is obvious.

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The Blue Lagoon

By / / 1980, 1980s, Re-Released Review / Leave a Comment

Originally published: Sept. 2, 1980

Every year, it seems, a movie is released that should never have been made.

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Last year, it was The Amityville Horror; the year before, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This year, it’s Columbia’s remake of The Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is totally useless. The plot (what little there is) muddles along at a pitifully slow pace. Too much time is spent on Wild Kingdom-like scenery. We see chirping birds, slithering snakes, swimming squids, and turned-on turtles. Basically what you might see on the television show.

The Blue Lagoon ends up about one-and-a-quarter hours too long. It moves along fairly well at the very beginning and at the very end, but in between, the story pokes along unmercifully.

Though the plot touches on some philosophical views of religion, it simply mentions them with no attempt made to explore them.

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Woman in the Dunes

By / / 1960s, 1964 / Leave a Comment

Watching this week’s movie pick leaves you feeling as if you need a shower to wash off all the gritty sand and the mundane existence clinging to every pore of your sweaty body.

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Woman in the Dunes

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Woman in the Dunes keeps you scrambling to understand what’s going on.

For the first 30 minutes or so, I thought director Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s Woman in the Dunes involved a Town With a Dark Secret. I expected something along the lines of The Wicker Man or Get Out. It was more than that.

School teacher Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) goes to the dunes in search of a new species of beetle, hoping to make a name for himself in the field of entomology. However, after missing the last bus home, he accepts an offer from villagers to stay the night at the home of a woman (Kyôko Kishida) at the bottom of a sand pit. The next morning, he discovers that he’s been trapped and is expected to shovel sand in exchange for rations.

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Shanghai Express

By / / 1930s, 1932 / Leave a Comment

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Shanghai Express

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If there was ever a “star vehicle,” Shanghai Express is it.

Marlene Dietrich is the centerpiece of this movie. And director Josef von Sternberg makes it clear from her first veiled appearance to the final embrace.

Dietrich, as well as her co-star, bulldog-faced Clive Brook, deliver their lines rather stoically; her expression and screen presence is more important and tells more of the story than the tone of either of their voices. Her looks speak volumes.

Shanghai Express is a road-trip story. While Dietrich is the draw, there’s still an interesting story going on as the train travels through civil-war-divided China.

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The Tarnished Angels

By / / 1950s, 1957 / Leave a Comment

It was my turn to pick the week’s movie, and it was harder than expected.

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The Tarnished Angels

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I had a few in mind — a 45-minute Florida documentary, a three-hour Russian science-fiction film, the first in a series of Japanese samurai pictures — but none seemed right this week.

The Criterion Channel had a relatively new collection of four movies by director Douglas Sirk that looked interesting. The Tarnished Angels, in particular, caught my attention.

The Tarnished Angels was based on one of William Faulkner‘s lesser-known novels, Pylon. Faulkner’s novel was well-reviewed by The New York Times, but not well remembered by most of us.

As expected, the movie takes liberties adapting the 1935 novel to the screen. In the novel, racing pilot Roger Shumann, parachute jumper Jack Holmes, and Schumann’s wife, Laverne, are a love triangle, with the father of Laverne’s son uncertain. Mechanic Jiggs plays a pivotal role but isn’t involved romantically with Laverne. And there’s the unnamed reporter, described by Faulkner as six feet tall and 95 pounds.

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The Long Goodbye (1973)

By / / 1970s, 1973 / Leave a Comment

Despite being based on Raymond Chandler’s last book, The Long Goodbye is not a film noir or hard-boiled detective movie. It’s a Robert Altman film, which means it’s anything but straightforward.

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The Long Goodbye

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Altman was known for his satirical approach, and The Long Goodbye is no exception.

Instead of relying on voice-over narration, Altman’s version of Philip Marlowe (played by Elliott Gould) frequently mutters to himself and offers commentary on the situations he and others find themselves in. Marlowe is more concerned with finding his missing cat (Morris the Cat) than with solving the case or dealing with the topless yoga vixens next door, or even the $5,000 banknote he’s received from the missing man. He’s a private eye who drifts through his cases.

Set in 1970s Los Angeles, The Long Goodbye is a far cry from the film noir-ish LA of the 1940s. However, this Marlowe is a man out of time, always wearing a suit and tie (even on the beach) and driving a 1940s Cadillac, all the while chain-smoking.

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Dogtooth

By / / 2000s, 2009 / 1 Comment

Inscrutable was the first word that came to mind after watching Dogtooth. As the closing credits rolled, I sat there wondering what I had just witnessed, similar to the first time I saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

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Dogtooth

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Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos‘ conundrum of a film is a hard one to pin down.

Dogtooth poses a lot of questions and answers almost none. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou leave it up to you to parse everything you’ve watched and decide what it all means.

Why are the parents keeping their almost-grown children isolated — essentially captive — from the world beyond their small rural compound? Why are they teaching them alternative meanings to words of things outside their compound (e.g., sea: a leather armchair with wooden arms; motorway: a very strong wind; excursion: a very resistant metal used to construct floors)? Why is the son allowed conjugal visits, but the daughters aren’t?

Your list of questions grows and grows.

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Clara Sola

By / / 2020s, 2021 / Leave a Comment

Costa Rican/Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén tweaks the coming-of-age genre in her feature film debut, Clara Sola.

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Clara Sola

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Unlike in most such movies, Clara (played by Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is older, a 40-something-year-old woman from a small Costa Rican village. She’s different, mysteriously different.

Her mother (Flor María Vargas Chavez) has overly sheltered Clara because of her severely curved spine, but also because of Clara’s ability — thanks to a vision of the Virgin Mary — to heal others, though apparently not herself.

Clara’s monotonous, lonely life is thrown into turmoil when a young man, Santiago (Daniel Castañeda Rincón), arrives to take care of her horse. Santiago is quickly attracted to Clara’s 14-year-old niece Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza), which fires Clara’s repressed sexuality.

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

By / / 1940s, 1944 / Leave a Comment

I’d watch a movie starring Edward G. Robinson any day. He’s one of my favorite actors, always turning in nuanced, mesmerizing performances.

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The Woman in the Window (1944)

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Pair him with director Fritz Lang, and toss in Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea, and you can’t go wrong.

That’s the lineup we get in this week’s club pick, The Woman in the Window (the 1944 version).

There’s little of the Expressionist light and shadows of many of Lang’s other films or of other films noir, but he layers on the genre’s moral ambiguity in The Woman in the Window. It’s a solid thriller.

Robinson plays psychology professor Richard Wanley brilliantly. In one day, Wanley goes from sending his wife and kids off to visit family to hiding the body of a man he’s killed in a mysterious woman’s apartment. And, Bennett is alluring as Alice Reed, the unintentional femme fatale.

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