ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

is so low-key that I find myself questioning whether he's actually doing anything.

best kind of acting imo

I am undecided between "best" and "not best" - certainly he would be at home in a Roy Andersson film, so that sounds like I should come down on the side of "best"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/La_Strada.jpg

La Strada, Federico Fellini, 1954

Morbsies #648
Sight & Sound Directors #38

This one is on youtube in its entirety with English subtitles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPefZ8cZCl0

brilliant film

I liked it but I suspect Fellini thought it was about how sex is evil and makes you subhuman

So Gelsomina is supposed to be autistic, right?

Just finished this, quite a bleak ending and I'm not sure what to take away - but the world conjured up on the way was certainly worth it.

I do find it a little hard to get over what a complete dick Zampano is though, just not really interested in his internal life, he's so despicable.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Rear_Window_film_poster.jpg

Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

Morbsies #22
Sight & Sound Critics #38

This was always by least-favourite of the a-tier Hitchcocks, however my exposure to it was on my Film Studies degree while being introduced to "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" so the heavy-handedness I remember may just be the lecturers.

Obviously this isn't freely available on Youtube - anyone know where it is streaming?

I know it's tempting to hold the movie's easy pedagogical meta elements against it. But I wouldn't, it's maybe the most sheerly entertaining movie he made between The 39 Steps and Psycho.

I feel fortunate to have seen all those classic Hitchcock movies like Psycho and Rear Window on tv when I was a kid and have my appreciation further deepen for them as I get older.

The 1998 remake starring Christopher Reeve is apparently free to stream on youtube. Probably not going to bother with it.

Obviously this isn't freely available on Youtube - anyone know where it is streaming?

It's on Bezos-Prime

If you don't mind hard-coded subs: https://archive.org/details/rear-window-1954_202007
gear icon -> HD

Eric otm. When Stewart, Kelly, and Ritter plot together, it'direction. point of Hitch's ensemble directing.

Yeah, Rear Window rocks. Has overtaken North By Northwest as my fave Hitch.

some of the early relationship scenes drag
otherwise it's great

i find that "heavily foregrounded meta but glommed onto pure story-telling thrills" is the core of Hitchcock's attraction tbh

Whoa -- I apologize for my phone-posted post. I meant: "best Hitchhock-directed ensemble."

Forget Vertigo -- Stewart never played a better Pure Acting moment than when he watches Thorwald assault Lisa.

Forget Vertigo

I will not

Just rewatched RW for the first time in ages because of this thread. Agree, hugely entertaining and well conceived and executed. It’s also so perverse of Hitchcock to cast Stewart in two different parables of impotence. (Tho he let him have TMWKTM in between I guess.)

Something there obviously about the WWII generation of men becoming redomesticated and incorporated into bland American life.

Yeah, they give a little more shading to the conventional wisdom about ‘50s America

The domestication of the American male was fodder for thinkpieces in the 50's - a lot of talk about "a crisis in masculinity". Pretty funny when now you hear mra types say we need to get back to that era.

Grace Kelly cooing about seeing him in a grey flannel suit a couple years before the infamous short story.

I love the shot at the end where she puts down her Himalayas travel book and picks back up Harper's Bazaar. She's not going anywhere, and neither is he.

My memory is so terrible. I spent this whole rewatch convinced thorwald didn't do it.

Poor miss lonely heart! What a damning indictment on Jeff and Stella, ignoring the potential suicide happening in front of them multiple times for the simple thrill of the chase.

Think I might be in love with Grace Kelly. Hope to get a date when I meet her up in the stars one day

Sorry, very slow right here. Yes, this was much better than I remembered, love the construction of a particular space and a time, just so vividly conjured. And the story is so self-contained, doesn't feel like it's just under two hours at all. Parallels with Vertigo are spot on, when he falls at the end, that's basically the start of Vertigo, isn't it? The exploration of viewer as voyeur is fine, but it was good not to think about it too much.

Still prefer Vertigo though

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Seven_Samurai_poster.jpg

Morbsies #97
Sight & Sound Critics #20
Sight & Sound Directors #14

Another biggie! For context here are the next five in the list

Johnny Guitar
Journey to Italy
Sansho the Bailiff
Ordet
The Night of the Hunter

LOL, perfect timing: Male weepies: Pick the "best," I guess

Every single one of the next five movies in line is a flaming goddamned masterpiece. I love all of the next five movies in line. They are great. Yep, love 'em.

Ordet happens to be your particular abnormality

(j/k I can understand loving it)

xps

Greatest film ever made IMO

Hm, guessing you mean Seven Samurai?

mibbes aye mibbes naw

Can be found here - https://archive.org/details/seven-samurai - it is quite long, isn't it?

The length of it feels fine

should explain that I somehow haven't seen it before

It flies by. Not a second overlong.

I wouldn't rank Seven Samurai in my Kurosawa top five.

I probably wouldn't either, but that's more about how many great films the dude has.

It is a bit sad that this is The One because there's a lot of more accessible intros - Yojimbo, Stray Dog, Ikiru.

The samurai film genre is interesting because if you compare it to the western, even though Ford and Hawks and etc certainly had moments where they questioned the myths there are a few decades' worth of films that mostly celebrate those myths, and so when the revisionist western rolls around we know what it's revising. But the samurai film, for a western audience, only comes into vogue in the postwar era, and so it's a generation of writers and directors who grew up with the samurai sprit being part of govt wartime propaganda and so it's pretty much all revisionism, very few movies come to mind where bushido is seen as anything other than a sick joke. At some point it just becomes part of the trope.

Donald Richie's book on Kurosawa is essential reading, and not surprisingly the chapter on Seven Samurai is great. (It may have been his favorite Kurosawa film - he usually listed it as one of his favorite films, period.)

I think it's very compelling to look at how WWII impacted Japanese films and how Japanese films grappled with the aftermath, especially now in light of the current rise of nationalism in certain parts of the world (like ours). Generally speaking, I never found comparisons between Japanese period epics and American Westerns all that interesting, but comparing The Seven Samurai to the American films it inspired (not just The Magnificent Seven but also Saving Private Ryan) does seem edifying in highlighting the differences in history and culture. The Seven Samurai always seemed like a great war film to me - nine years isn't that far removed from the end of WWII, and I was left with the impression that a defeated country was far more likely to re-examine and interrogate the culture surrounding war in ways that a proud and jingoistic country would not like to do. The myriad class conflicts and moral hypocrisies are either watered down or stripped away in something like The Magnificent Seven (turning samurai/military officers into "gunfighters" will do that), but they're always there in The Seven Samurai.