Alien (rewatch)

For some reason, I didn’t enjoy watching Alien as much as the last time.  I love the atmosphere created by the Giger designs and the dark, dripping, techno-industrial sets.  I think it’s a wonderfully constructed plot with perfect casting.  But it wasn’t that tense or scary.  Perhaps I’ve become too familiar with it… or maybe I’m just being too hard on it.  Rating: 9

IMDb

The Birds (rewatch)

Hitch’s most enigmatic film.  In every other movie (at least the other 31 I’ve seen), the enemy is human, and the mystery always has an explanation.  But there is no reason given for the bird attacks.  Are they protesting the arrival of Melanie Daniels (the kind of flighty, flirtatious, unattainable blonde that Hitchcock always obsessed over) at Bodega Bay?  Perhaps they don’t want the lovebirds there… or perhaps they wish to liberate them.  Or is it just, as Peter Bogdanovich suggests, a chaotic event symbolizing everything that is beyond our control?  It’s that sense of the unknown which makes The Birds so terrifying.  They can’t be stopped, they can’t be reasoned with, you can’t find their psychological weakness or track down the evidence to put them away.

The premise is a bit silly, I suppose, and the effects now look terribly dated, but it’s still thrilling.  Rod Taylor is stiff as a board, but Tippi Hedren is wonderful.  Rating: 9

IMDb

Dancer in the Dark (rewatch)

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about America.  But at least I’ve lived here.  Lars Von Trier doesn’t live here, and in fact has never been here, but this film reeks with misguided anti-American sentiment.  He has zero understanding of our legal/penal system, and Dancer in the Dark suffers terribly for it.  This movie is absurdly contrived and manipulative, the story would never play out in this fashion in reality.  Von Trier makes you swallow at least a dozen highly improbable events, all for the sake of bringing the story to its tragic conclusion. It’s infuriating.

I also think that the Dogme 95 rules, although LVT breaks many of them here, are simply excuses for lazy filmmaking, and his new “100 cameras” technique sounds like the work of a director who simply isn’t thoughtful enough to know what shots he wants. 

So why do I like it?  Because it’s incredibly powerful emotionally, but mostly because of Bjork, who turns in not only an astounding musical performance, but a truly impressive acting performance as well.  Catherine Deneuve and Siobhan Fallon are also excellent.  But it’s not enough.  I got so annoyed at the implausibilities that halfway through I decided to just watch the musical sequences and skip the rest.  Rating: 7

IMDb

Videodrome

I’m not really a Cronenberg fan.  In fact, Cronenberg fans kind of annoy me, I think they tend to over-intellectualize his films.  Cronenberg discussions always seem to be laden with meaningless mumbo-jumbo when the movies are really just weirdo fetish fantasies/nightmares.  Anyway, about Videodrome… I don’t like that all this crazy stuff is happening, but it’s just hallucinations.  That’s a cop-out to me, like saying “It was all just a dream!”  It was pretty interesting, I guess, but like I said — not a fan.  Rating: 7

IMDb

All These Women

After my 32nd Hitch comes my 27th Ingmar.  Sandwiched in between the bleak, impenetrable dramas The Silence and Persona is… a wacky comedy.  Knowing looks at the camera, jokey title cards (“Do not take the fireworks symbolically”), sped up action, zany ragtime music (a Woody Allen trademark).  Part sex slapstick, part vicious satire of critics, and part comment on Bergman’s own attitudes towards women (at this time he was on his fourth wife) and his art.  Occasionally amusing, nice photography (Bergman’s first color film) and has some interesting experimental touches, but mostly it’s horribly awkward, broad and sometimes even obnoxious.  Contains little of the charm present in Smiles of a Summer Night.  It’s a small comfort to know that Ingmar also hates the film.  Rating: 3

IMDb

Stage Fright

Since we’re keeping score with Woody, I should mention that this is my 32nd Hitchcock film.  Certainly not on a par with his classics, but quite watchable and entertaining.  Hearing Marlene Dietrich sing “The Laziest Gal in Town” makes Madeline Kahn’s performance in Blazing Saddles even funnier.  Rating: 7

IMDb

Porco Rosso

Offbeat, fun, and surprisingly sweet.  There’s some debate over whether you should watch anime dubbed into English or with subtitles (“subs or dubs”).  I normally wouldn’t think of watching a movie in anything other than the original language, but the arguments for dubs are convincing (with animation you really want to look at the visuals; the voices are over-dubbed anyway; English dubs have improved over the years) so I gave it a shot and it was acceptable.  A couple of times I turned on the subtitles to see what they changed and most of the time it wasn’t that bad, not nearly as horrible as Castle in the Sky was… just little things like a reference to smoking removed.  Rating: 7

IMDb

September

This was my 30th Woody Allen film.  Too bad it’s so mundane.  A loves B, B loves C, C loves D, and D kinda loves C but doesn’t want to hurt B blah blah blah.  I take it this is some kind of Chekhov thing, but I wouldn’t know… to me, it felt like an attempt at Autumn Sonata in parts.  But the dialogue is awful, really really awful.  There’s a boatload of shallow philosophizing, unrealistic emotional frankness and just plain whining.  The actors did not appear to be into their roles, and who can blame them?  I’ve liked Allen’s other pure dramas (Another Woman and Interiors), but this one is empty and worthless.

No cocktail party in September, but it comes pretty close to having one.  Rating: 4

IMDb

Life is a Miracle

Another remarkable film from Emir Kusturica, bursting with the great joy of life and the tragedy of war.  The entire cast is superb, the music is wonderful, and Kusturica’s trademark pandemonium is as enchanting as ever.  At times the comedy tried too hard, and I thought the main character could have been a little more interesting, but I still loved it a lot.  Rating: 10

IMDb

Dolls

Three stories about people scarred by heartbreak.  The main story is the saddest and most intriguing, about a young man who has jilted his fiancée, which plunges her into emotional isolation.  At first he tries to bring her back to reality, but gradually he joins her in her bleary-eyed silence.  Much of the rest of the movie consists of the pair (now tied together by a red rope) trudging aimlessly through assorted lovely nature scenes, occasionally bumping into characters from the other two stories.  I’d have preferred more fleshing out of all three stories and less trudging, but the combination of gorgeous colors, striking nature images and elaborate costumes helps to mitigate the somewhat unnecessary slowness of the film.  Rating: 7

IMDb