What i've been up to

Right.  Okay.  Movies.  Let's go.

i've watched many more movies over the last couple of weeks than i will mention here.  the ones i do choose to bring up are because of the director, others because they have a classic status i should at least acknowledge, and still a couple more that i mention because i loved them, because they had some effect, because they were meaningful on some level.

to begin with: Alfred Hitchcock.  i cannot say it enough.  go watch his movies.  they are wonderful.  i've just recently seen several from his...i think "British period" is what some people might call it.  from the silent period up until about the movie Rebecca, which won the best picture oscar, and after which he got into his more famous style, with more distinct "Hitchcockian" elements, either in camerawork or other visual production values.  Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Strangers on a Train, and Marnie are the ones i've seen most recently.  they're all good, but the best are probably The 39 Steps and Strangers on a Train.  To save time, i'll just tell you again to go watch them, and let the joy of them speak for themselves.

i've also continued watching several more Woody Allen movies -- i'm understanding more and more what all the fuss is about, and he's quickly becoming one of my favorite directors.  it's fascinating to see him go from his earliest films, which are completely absurd (his very first, What's Up, Tiger Lily?, is nothing more than a japanese spy movie with dubbed over voices creating a new story, not unlike Mystery Science Theater 3000), to his more mature, serious works in the late 70s and 80s, taking his comedy to existential levels.  i've not seen anything from the 90s, and the most recent decade saw a back and forth, hit and miss sort of thing happen (Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona among the successes).  one of his best movies, Crimes and Misdemeanors, manages to somehow be a comedy while very seriously dealing with questions of adultery and murder and making something meaningful out of our lives, all with an underlying question of just what God has to do with it. 

This all says something awesome about comedy, that one of its fundamental elements essentially is tragedy.  comedy is about pain, but with a different perspective on it.  either a schadenfreude thing, or perhaps just a more hopeful look at it, but it finds light in bad situations.  there's something here that i haven't quite tapped into just yet, but i'll be sure to write something incredibly profound and publication-worthy when i do.

Let's see, what else?  The original 1932 Scarface, a pretty awesome film noir gangster movie.  it's one of those things that laid groundwork that allows us to subsequently have other things like, well, large chucks of the film noir period, The Godfather, The Sopranos, Martin Scorsese, and more. 

Doctor Zhivago - 1965, directed by David Lean, who's easily one of my favorite directors.  i read somewhere that he puts internal characters and internal stories onto a large scale in the midst of very externally driven circumstances.  This movie's greatest strength is easily its visuals -- the movie just looks so breathtaking at times.  the story, though, is essentially a bit of a soap opera about finding true love (outside of preexisting marriages, of course) during Russia's Bolshevik Revolution.  so the story, while essentially trite, is fine given the feast for the eyes that Lean manages to make of it (it helps that is also acted well, with enough passion from Omar Sharif to make the soap opera elements digestible).  definitely worth the 3 1/2 hours if you're looking for a movie that'll absorb your attention and lose you in its world.

Catch-22 -  one of the best books ever (and definitely one of my favorites), is unfortunately just a little too immense, and takes up too much of its story inside the characters than outside them, to work well as a movie.  that said, Mike Nichols does about as good a job as someone can do with it.  definitely gets some of the comedy, and some of the travesty of war, and almost captures the frenetic chronology of the book, but somehow just can't pull it all together just right.  i think a big part of the problem lies in the portrayal of Yossarian by Alan Arkin (a very good actor).  something about the character is just too...weak, i suspect.  Yossarian is by his own admission, a coward, but he stands by the sanity of his cowardliness so steadfastly and with such conviction, that one cannot help but believe him to be both a coward, but also deeply principled, and also quite the badass.  in the movie...he was just kind of pathetic.  so, all in all, the movie is a noble, worthwhile failure.

Finally, Titus, directed by Julie Taymor, easily one of the few true visionaries in the film and theatre world today.  Aside from the fact that it is an original and exciting interpretation of Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus, it is visually one of the most awesome things i've seen in a very long time (except, in different ways, Doctor Zhivago).  by blending Ancient Rome with Mussolini's Italy with various other historical elements, Taymor creates an entirely independent other-world, both tangible to us and distant from our own reality.  She then take Shakespeare's most violent work, and puts it over the top so as to be both affecting and alienating.  i am already head over heels in love with Taymor's work in Frida and Across the Universe, not to mention the stage version of The Lion King (which i believe to be one of the absolute best creative achievements in film or theater in the last several decades), and with Titus (her first film) Taymor demonstrates again that she is a creative powerhouse.  We lament so frequently nowadays that we are losing originality in our creations.  Adaptations of adaptations of adaptations are all we see, not to mention the sequels and franchieses.  And then there's Julie Taymor, who, even when she has source material in an animated film, or a Shakespeare play, or the paintings of Frida Kahlo, or the music of The Beatles, never stoops to the level of imitation or re-presentation - she uses this preexisting works as muses for her own creative juices, not ripping them off or cheapening the value of the originals, but reworking them into something new and visceral and phenomenal.  (NOTE: Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes did something of similar newness and originality, but with comparatively less gravity than this film.  Where R&J made me go, "man, that's cool...i like what they did there...interesting take on that!...etc etc," this one made me go, "hey wow that's....i mean, it's just....gah, that's so...!!! ...jeez, that's freaking awesome...what the WHAT?!")

Check out the trailer (with awkward Polish subtitles) HERE.

i'm not sure if that part about the "ultimate sacrifice of love" is really accurate...

but anyway, that's where i've been lately.  i know, Titus could have had it's own post, keeping this one more trimmed, but whatever.  If you've read this far, way to go!  you get a gold star :)


peace.