Random 10: Random Films for Comment - Week 4 (with a Bonus 10!)

The Devil Is a Woman - absolutely perfect von Sternberg/Dietrich form. Screw what everyone says about films like The Scarlet Empress and so on, this is their greatest collaboration. An interesting film that easily can be read either as pro or anti-feminist.

Fishing with John - Matt Dillon's episode sucks, Jarmusch's is fun, Willem Dafoe's is classic, and Dennis Hopper's two are just typically okay Hopper craziness. But it's the Tom Waits one that takes the cake. This show is like watching the ancestor of I'm with Busey.

Philadelphia - Ah, the beginning of the end for Tom Hanks. Wherein he leaves his comedic greatness for the aspiration of a "serious" actor. He succeeds well here - the Oscar for Best Actor remains a good pick after ten years - but from here we go on to suffer all the pretentious self-important stuff afterwards, with a few exceptions. It's not worth discussing which ones fall into the pretentious or exception categories, b/c everyone will call them differently, but nonetheless I think we can all agree that there's a lot more pretentious crap in that grouping...

Wings of Honneamise - it's been a dozen years since I've seen it, and 1) I can't remember a speck of the plot, 2) I remember the artistry being really amazing, 3) somehow the phrase "Japanese Right Stuff" popped into my head. Tuomas is right - I can't think of another anime offering like it.

Trust - the only Hal Hartley movie I've seen. It's okay. I guess moody teens/twenty-somethings are supposed to relate to the cynical repairman, but he's really kind of an asshole. I don't think I agree with the central theme, though, that "admiration, respect, and trust equal love."

The Red Balloon - it's only 30 minutes long, it's ridiculously twee (being French, involving lots of children, and being balloon-themed fer crying out loud), it has almost no dialogue (yet it won the Oscar for best original screenplay! No kidding!), and the balloon special effects are state of the art. After you see this, you must see the Don Hertzfeldt animated short film Billy's Balloon.

I am confident in this, despite not seeing most of his films.

I remember reading John Waters's comments on the film in his books - Waters loves Castle b/c he was the "king of gimmicks". For The Tingler, every theater seat was rigged with a device which would, well...tingle...seat back at certain moments during the film. Hence the whole idea with the screaming. Worked a charm, I hear.

have seen. is startling but a little too "quirky" for my tastes.

3216. Pakeezah, 1971 (dir. Kamal Amrohi)

awesome. i own this on dvd. everyone should see this.

3202. Out of the Inkwell, 1918 (dir. Max and Dave Fleischer)

the first fleischer cartoon? these are very great.

1272. The Devil Is a Woman, 1935 (dir. Josef von Sternberg)

stunningly designed but i found it kind of uninvolving. same material later used for buñuel's "that obscure object of desire."

4382. Trust, 1990 (dir. Hal Hartley)

one of the great american films.

4085. Sweetie, 1989 (dir. Jane Campion)

an amazing film.

i am lazy so that is all.

This and Dishonored are the only two Sternberg-Dietrich films I haven't seen yet. It's only a matter of time. How do they compare? Though the films all seem like chapters in an anthology, there's a startling amount of stylistic variety among them.

Rollover For some reason we were riffing on this around the office the other day. I don't remember much about it except Kris Kristofferson, Jane Fonda, and yet another failed attempt to make business and finance exciting on film.

Trust I remember really liking this at the time, but I was a lot younger then. Based on his more recent films, I think I would find it too mannered and backed-up now. Perhaps someday I'll find out.

Philadelphia That acting-out-the-opera-aria scene is just plain embarrassing.

Sweetie I remember loving this movie, but haven't seen it since it first came out on video. I remember being particularly amused by a character who looks and acts a bit like mid-'70s Iggy Pop.

Unfairly passed over because it was a flop, but it's pretty great and absurd. Lots of "what were they thinking?" moments

4260. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 1974 (dir. Michael Cimino)

One of my fave movies. Crabby road/heist movie and one of Eastwood's best 1970s roles (next to The Beguiled)

3589. Rollover, 1981 (dir. Alan J. Pakula)

One of the petrospolitation movies that was released in the early 80s that seemed important at the time but is probably laughable now. I'll take The Formula for my oil company conspiracy flick.

4282. The Tingler, 1959 (dir. William Castle)

William Castle + Vincent Price + LSD = ULTRAUNBELIEVABLY CLASSIC

4382. Trust, 1990 (dir. Hal Hartley)

Enh, other people will comment on this.

i watched it with someone yrs later who described it as 'wistful' - a word i feared was a bit too swoony but is actually pretty accurate -

Merriam Webster: wistful
Etymology: blend of 'wishful' and obsolete English 'wistly' intently
1 : full of yearning or desire tinged with melancholy; also : inspiring such yearning [a wistful memoir]
2 : musingly sad : pensive

plus plus plus the music over the opening titles (ryuichi sakamoto, i think ?) = great

(i love that some films initially fail to excite/please (or may even disappoint) but then seem to have planted a seed in yr mind that subsequently develops into an appreciation you can't quite explain/justify even to yrself - i guess this is maybe basic 'that's how good stuff works' to some ?)
though i find it happens very rarely :(