Well, I suck. I still have not solved my personal laptop problems, which hampers my ability to update this blog just as I would like. But, I still watch a lot of movies, take a lot of notes, and still want some sort of activity on this thing, so as a sort of compromise I am going to start listing the films I have seen on a recently, with some short and very tentative comments as appropriate. Your comments are welcome, don't forget to leave a comment, so here is some of my viewing over the past week.
Dracula, (dir. Tod Browning, 1931). Introduced Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi to the film public and defined to generations how a vampire should look, act and speak, and also inaugurated the classic era of Hollywood horror. The strange cadences of Lugosi's speech owed to his being taught his lines phonetically; the cape, evening dress, and old-world blueblood demeanor came from the popular stage play on which the film was based: Lugosi created the part on Broadway, but other actors originated the style when it toured Britain in the twenties. However, the strange charisma that Lugosi brought to the role was entirely his. Modern audiences may find the film a little creaky, Lugosi's performances a little hammy, but there is still a sense of dread, muted eroticism and the excitement of new ground being broken.
Solaris, (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this brings the pace and sensibility of art film to the genre of science fiction. Based on the novel by Stanislav Lem, the title refers to the distant planet being studied from a station over the planet's vast ocean, which may be an alien intelligence. A psychologist is sent from earth to the Solaris station to find it in disrepair, the remaining scientists prey to odd behavior and delusions, and discovers that the ocean is materializing his own thoughts and memories. More obscure by several degrees than 2001; Solaris is somehow also more humanly approachable; like a still-life painter, Tarkovsky shows the surroundings and the inanimate objects scattered in them as more eloquent than the characters themselves, giving this account of contact with alien intelligence a strong element of loss and nostalgia.
Zigeunerweisen (dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1980). Suzuki made his name directing action programmers for the Japanese studio Nikkatsu in the sixties until he was fired, after the release of 1967's Branded To Kill, for making films that, to paraphrase Nikkatsu execs, made neither money nor sense. A ten-year blacklist from the industry followed, broken in 1977 when he made A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, which was a critical and box-office flop, for Shochiku. But Zigeunerweisen, an indie project, turned Suzuki's fortunes around and inaugurated his "Taisho Trilogy," films set in the Taisho period (1912-26), Japan's tumultuous "jazz age" of radical political changes and rapid assimilation of Western culture. Based on a story by Hyakken Uchida, a writer of the time, the film follows two intellectuals, a staid professor and a bohemian wanderer, through their increasingly tangled webs of sexual betrayal with each other's wives. In his post-Nikkatsu career, Suzuki pushed his penchant for style and visual brilliance over narrative sense in ways Branded To Kill could only hint at, but the film is grounded in the atmosphere of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical), a current in literature that had its start during Taisho and much drawn upon since by many Japanese filmmakers, most famously Yasuzo Masumura and Teruo Ishii.
The Joke (Jaromil Jires, 1968). From the heady days of the Czech New Wave comes this dark comedy based on a story by Milan Kundera. A student's life is turned upside down when he sends a politically irreverent postcard to a girl he wants to woo and ends up spending six years at hard labor, and as a middle-aged man he attempts to revenge on the man responsible by seducing his wife. Bitter, gritty depiction of the Stalinist 50s in Czechoslovakia with an absurdist twist.
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