Month: January 2009

Note: This is #4 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

I didn’t even get past the subtitle of “A Song of Two Humans” to suspect that this 1927 silent film was going to be more art house wankery that was ahead of its time. And once I read in the Netflix summary that it had characters like “The Man” and “The Wife” all doubt was pretty much gone.

The plot is pretty simple, almost like a fable: The Man is seduced by The Whore From The City, who convinces him to drown The Wife in The Lake so they can elope. Only he can’t go through with it, and when The Man follows the fleeing The Wife to The City they fall in love again. The balance of the movie is mostly them having adventures in the metropolis, including getting a new haircut and chasing The Drunk Pig around a restaurant.

Like Intolerance, Sunrise strikes me as a movie that’s only interesting as an exercise in film history. From what I’ve read about the movie it was marvelously ground breaking in how it was made, with tracking shots, forced perspective, and camera technology that allowed cameras to move smoothly over rough terrain. And apparently it’s a wonderful example of German Expressionism, whatever that means. So, rah rah. That’s all fine and dandy as a lesson in film history, but the it didn’t do much for me personally.

I think this trailer should give you a pretty representative sampling of the film:

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

• Jeremy reviews Five Minutes of Heaven

Note: This is #3 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

Another silent comedy, but this week it’s from Buster Keaton, who was Charlie Chaplin’s contemporary and I can only assume box office rival. I imagine that “Chaplin vs. Keaton” debates are all the rage among movie critics and aspiring film students desparate to show their sophistication, so I’ll just say that based on my extensive viewing of one movie by each, Keaton is no Chaplin.

The plot of The General is pretty straight forward and, oddly enough, based on actual events. Keaton plays Johnnie Gray, an engineer for a Confederate railroad during the U.S. Civil War. In order to woo his sweetheart, Gray tries to enlist in the military, but is rejected. Heartbroken, Gray returns to his life as the engineer for his engine, The General, until it is hijacked by Union spies intent on blazing a trail for a Northern army to strike at the heart of the South. From there, hijinks ensue as Gray steals the train back, flees from the Union soldiers, and tries to protect his sweetheart (who just happened to be on The General when it was hijacked).

There were definitely some funny and impressive gags in The General, and a lot of credit has to be given to Keaton. The protracted railroad chase scene is surprisingly inventive and amusing, with Keaton coming up with an amazing number of stunts in order to elude and slow down his pursuers. This is all the more impressive for the lack of special effects and the fact that Keaton did all his own acrobatics.

In contrast to Chaplin’s brand of smooth, precise, and charming physical comedy, though, Keaton is all about big movements and stunts. He’s chopping through wood with an axe, hurling boxes off moving boxcars, hefting firewood around, clobbering people with rifle butts, scrambling over moving train engines, tossing rail road ties into each other, and more. The athleticism and daring on display is impressive, and while it’s very different from Chaplin, it’s often used to get some good laughs or surprised grunts.

What bugged me about Keaton, though, is throughout almost the entire movie he wore a still mask almost completely devoid of expression. It was like a clown and a mime fell in love and Keaton was the result. It robbed the movie of any human element or warmth that it might have had, since Keaton didn’t really seem like he was there during any of the parts that didn’t involve slapstick action.

Still, amusing enough and worth it for all the railway shenanigans.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

• Jeremy reviews Slumdog Millionaire

Note: This is #2 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Netflix sent me the 1942 re-release of the original 1925 movie, which included voice overs, music, and slightly different editing.

Having never seen a Charlie Chaplin movie before, I was only familiar with his “Little Tramp” character in so far as it had permeated popular culture –certainly a lot less in 2009 than in Chaplin’s heyday. I knew he was kind of a lovable sad sack, that he was played by Chaplin himself, and that he sported a signature cane and bowler hat. That was about it. The Gold Rush is supposed to be one of Chaplin’s best silent comedies in that series, telling the story of The Little Tramp (or “The Little Fellow” as Chaplin’s voice overs in the 1942 re-release call him) heading to the Alaska frontier to try his hand at prospecting for gold. There he runs afoul of an unscrupulous claim jumper, makes friends with another prospector, eats his shoe, and finds romance. Unlike last week’s Intolerance I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked this one.

Specifically, it was funny. This was surprising because I expected the cultural gap between today and 1925 to neatly squash any humor that tried to make its way from Chaplin’s sensibilities to mine, but strangely I was wrong. It was a lot like being cracked up by some archaic joke that your grandpa tells you, and genuinely so. It wasn’t bust-a-gut funny, but I did laugh out loud several times and smiled a lot more.

What I came to realize is that most of the humor in The Gold Rush is physical, but not the kind of full-body physical slapstick akin to the Three Stooges. Instead, many of the laughs owe themselves to Chaplin’s precise, dexterous, and fluid execution of so many visual gags. It’s the way he walks, the way he lifts his hat in greeting, the way he savors a dish of boiled shoe, the way he sticks two forks in dinner rolls and makes them dance across the table (see below). There are also some great set pieces involving a tilting cabin that surprised me with both the simplicity and effectiveness of its special effects given the year it was made.

So, good stuff. I’ve got another Chaplin movie or two in my list, and I’m looking forward to it.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

• Jeremy reviews An American in Paris

Note: This is #1 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

Wow, what a movie to start this thing off on. Released in 1916, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages is film pioneer D.W. Griffith’s sprawling silent movie epic about how much intolerance really totally sucks. The film actually combines 4 different stories and links them together through transitions. This includes a “modern” story set in 1914 about a bunch of puritains trying to ruin everyone’s fun through their intoleance for anything but their brand of morality, a story set during the French Renaissance where religious intolerance between Protestants and Catholics leads to a massacre, the story of Christ’s crucifixion during the Judean era, and the fall of ancient Babylon brought on by conflicts between worshipers of different religious sects.

Instead of presenting each story sequentially, Griffith weaves the stories together and draws on common themes to show how humanity’s best must suffer and withstand humanity’s worst. In the beginning of the movie, the transitions are more measured and far apart as the filmmaker sets the stage (literally) for each of the four stories. He even does this weird thing where some woman is rocking a cradle symbolic of human civilization or something, which to me seemed like so much art house wankery. He even includes snippets of poetry by Walt Whitman, and as everyone knows, I HATE WALT WHITMAN. As things reach their climaxes the cuts become more frequent and you can see how the events of each of the stories run parallel to each other and otherwise relate.

Sounds grand, but I don’t see how Intolerance could be a movie anyone would recommend except as an academic exercise in film history. It’s mildly interesting the way looking at a Bronze Age tool or an ancient sandal in a museum is mildly interesting. You think “Huh, that was probably pretty cool at the time, sure is old now” and you shuffle on to the next exhibit. Only I couldn’t do that, because Intolerance was almost three freaking hours long.

And indeed, I can see how this movie was a groundbreaking achievement that served as a template for decades to come. I get that. While I was amused at how the actors and director were often shackled to the traditions of stage plays (e.g., wildly exaggerated facial expressions, florid and almost spastic body movement, extreme lighting, etc.), if you kept in mind that this thing was made in 1916 you start to notice things that were probably novel and even ingenious, like close-up shots of pocket watches or crane shots of city streets. Even the transitions between the four parallel stories would have been something utterly impossible to do on a stage. And apparently Griffith even bankrupted his own studio by financing huge wardrobes and set scenes replete with authentic looking buildings and exotic animals like camels, elephants, and ducks. I can imagine viewers really being amazed by that stuff at the time.

But I wasn’t. The fact is that I personally found it practically unwatchable, thanks in no small part to how the quality of the surviving footage gave me a huge headache. Entire areas of scenes are blown out to the point of being burning white blobs, the quality of the rest of the picture is grainy to the point of distraction, a lot of the text in the intertitles is completely illegible, and honestly I found that the stories were goofy at best and incoherent at worst. I appreciate Intolerance as ground breaking film making, but it was a complete pain to watch in 2009.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

• Jeremy reviews Eagle Eye
• Paul reviewed City Lights
• Neil reviewed Revolutionary Road

In 2008 I did the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge in which I attempted to read a book a week and write a review about it. Instead of repeating that exercise again, I’ve decided to do something a little different by taking in 52 movies during the 52 weeks of 2009.

Of course, just watching 52 Will Ferrell movies would kind of miss the point. I want to use this as an opportunity to see some of those movies that I’ve always thought I should have seen, but never did because I picked up something with guns and tight clothes. Any such list of “classic” movies would be arbitrary, so when building my checklist I took the easy way out and decided to just use the 2007 edition of the American Film Institute’s “100 Years… 100 Movies,” which you’ll see reprinted below in chronological order. I’ve gone ahead and crossed out the movies that I’ve already seen.

1916 – Intolerance
1925 – The Gold Rush
1927 – The General
1927 – Sunrise
1931 – City Lights
1933 – King Kong
1933 – Duck Soup
1934 – It Happened One Night
1935 – A Night at the Opera
1936 – Modern Times
1936 – Swing Time
1937 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1938 – Bringing Up Baby
1939 – Gone with the Wind
1939 – The Wizard of Oz
1939 – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
1940 – The Grapes of Wrath
1940 – The Philadelphia Story
1941 – Citizen Kane
1941 – The Maltese Falcon
1941 – Sullivan’s Travels
1942 – Casablanca
1942 – Yankee Doodle Dandy
1944 – Double Indemnity
1946 – It’s a Wonderful Life
1946 – The Best Years of Our Lives
1948 – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1950 – Sunset Boulevard
1950 – All About Eve
1951 – A Streetcar Named Desire
1951 – The African Queen
1952 – Singin’ in the Rain
1952 – High Noon
1953 – Shane
1954 – On the Waterfront
1954 – Rear Window
1956 – The Searchers
1957 – The Bridge on the River Kwai
1957 – 12 Angry Men
1958 – Vertigo
1959 – Some Like It Hot
1959 – North by Northwest
1959 – Ben-Hur
1960 – Psycho
1960 – The Apartment
1960 – Spartacus
1961 – West Side Story
1962 – Lawrence of Arabia
1962 – To Kill a Mockingbird
1964 – Dr. Strangelove
1965 – The Sound of Music
1966 – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
1967 – The Graduate
1967 – Bonnie and Clyde
1967 – In the Heat of the Night
1968 – 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969 – Midnight Cowboy
1969 – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969 – The Wild Bunch
1969 – Easy Rider
1970 – MASH
1971 – A Clockwork Orange
1971 – The French Connection
1971 – The Last Picture Show
1972 – The Godfather
1972 – Cabaret
1973 – American Graffiti
1974 – Chinatown
1974 – The Godfather Part II
1975 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1975 – Jaws
1975 – Nashville
1976 – Taxi Driver
1976 – Rocky
1976 – Network
1976 – All the President’s Men
1977 – Star Wars
1977 – Annie Hall
1978 – The Deer Hunter
1979 – Apocalypse Now
1980 – Raging Bull
1981 – Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982 – E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1982 – Tootsie
1982 – Sophie’s Choice
1982 – Blade Runner
1986 – Platoon
1989 – Do the Right Thing
1990 – Goodfellas
1991 – The Silence of the Lambs
1992 – Unforgiven
1993 – Schindler’s List
1994 – The Shawshank Redemption
1994 – Forrest Gump
1994 – Pulp Fiction
1995 – Toy Story
1997 – Titanic
1998 – Saving Private Ryan
1999 – The Sixth Sense
2001 – LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring

What I plan to do is start at the top of the list above and work my way down, watching at least a movie a week and writing up a short blog post about each. There’s more than 52 movies on that list that aren’t already scratched off, but if I don’t get ahead I’ll probably carry it over to next year until I’ve made it through.

And again, like with the book challenge, I’ll invite you all to participate as well. I believe we have Jeremy and Paul (a.k.a., “Yotsuya”) from PlanetCrap.com ready to go already, plus a few other folks who are going to do one or two movies a month. If you want to play along, let me know and I’ll include links to your weekly updates.