Sunday, April 1, 2007

March, 2007 Film Viewings

march the first: God grew tired of us
march the third: raiders of the lost ark
march the seventh: the passenger
march the eighth: superstar: the karen carpenter story
march the ninth: hiroshima mon amour
march the twenty-seventh: muriel's wedding

5 comments:

  1. Russell, I am curious to hear your thoughts regarding your viewing of march the ninth.

    Also: I meant to get back to you about Marie Antoinette. I'm honestly surprised that I liked it as much as I did.

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  2. Hi, Diane.

    I can't believe I waited so long to see Hiroshima Mon Amour. I'm so glad I waited so long to see Hiroshima Mon Amour.

    The upside to having a spotty experience of the great films is that there are still things out there waiting for me to find them. That's always the case, of course, even for people who've seen the things I haven't, but nevertheless...

    The film really blew me away, and then I turn to the essay among Criterion's liner notes and Eric Rohmer's calling the film the culmination of cinematic art and history or something to that effect. I'll be watching it again very soon.

    Re: Marie, yeah, there's a lot to like in the film. Coppola's clearly very talented, and she and Dunst create a character whose personal frustrations and political significance have poignance among all that merrymaking. Still, though, I couldn't help but think about something that Roger Ebert said about, coincidentally enough, her dad's Godfather films; specifically, that our ability to sustain an open judgment and rooting interest in the characters' decisions and lives depended in part on the films' tight focus on the Corleone family and the heads of the other crime families, and that the effect would be lost if any significant time or scope was spent on the shopkeepers who were squeezed for protection money, for example, or on any of the other little people who suffer the ill effects of organized crime. I think Marie requires a similar tight scope to sustain our engagement, and I can see where the final scenes in general, which refuse to give the mob any particular humanity and the last shot in particular, which seems to linger sadly over the Queen's trashed and formerly- ornate bedchamber, might strike one as insulting.

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  3. Ah, so if you were still with Netflix, Russ, Hiroshima might stand a chance of getting one of your rare 5-star ratings? :)

    You know, I really need to see the film again, and you're tempting me to do so soon. I saw it about a year and a half ago, and I remember feeling pretty bowled over by it. It packed such an emotional punch. Wow, that's some high praise from Rohmer--very cool.

    Those are fascinating thoughts about Marie. Thanks for sharing those. I am definitely inclined to agree with everything you've said.

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  4. Russ, I checked out the 1938 version of Marie Antoinette from the library. Certainly not the greatest film, but I thought it would make an interesting comparison to Coppola's version. I'm about halfway through (and this one goes through the execution, I believe), and it's been interesting to notice how much sympathy Marie has been given here. In fact, Marie's lover, Count Fersen, spells it out for us dim-witted viewers by saying something like, "Your frivolity is only your way of dealing with your frustrating and lonely life--it's perfectly understandable!" Aw, it's so sweet when your lover "gets" you like that. Anyway, there's been one montage of nameless, angry citizens--the backdrop for a voiceover of someone telling them to revolt--and it sounds like the voice of a nobleman who was previously using Marie's affections only to further his own political ambitions, the dirty rat. Oh, and the mob threw rocks at Marie's carriage--while her children were inside! Though we, of course, know how this will all play out, it will be interesting to see, well, how it all plays out in this film.

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  5. Ha. Yeah, I think Hiroshima would have got to five stars.

    Thanks for your comments on the earlier Marie film. It's certainly an interesting question to think about how a queen who was apparently as removed from policymaking as Marie was (from the little I know) could end up being the representative face of the monarchy's failure to promote the common good.

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