What! Oh, right, I’ve been watching some really bad movies lately. I want to get back into watching, you know, actually good movies, and I think a way to force myself to do that is to… watch all the Eclipse movies from the Criterion Collection:
Because if I don’t, that stack is gonna topple! It’s like a couple meters high now! EEK!
So I’m starting at the top, with a Julien Duvivier movie, who I’ve never heard about at all before.
So this is gonna be a long blog series.
How come basically all good movies from the olden days were distributed by Janus? It’s so two-faced.
Criterion’s really into making these elaborate presentations of film, with a lot of extras and restorations and etc, but that shit’s expensive. So it means that they basically can’t release movies that don’t have a certain commercial appeal.
The Eclipse series is a response to that: It’s a series of box sets, dealing with a director or a theme, but without any extras, and with minimal restoration work being done. It’s like their underground series of stuff that they think won’t sell.
So I’m assuming that this is gonna bee all the best movies ever.
Oh my fucking g! This is insane! Is this really from 1931!? It’s got cinematography that looks like it might have been from Hollywood a decade later.
This is some kind of genius!
If somebody had said this was from the 50s, I would have totally believed it.
Except for the aspect ratio.
I have no idea what this movie is about, but I’m riveted by the performances and the cinematography.
It’s just amazingly gorgeous, with a roving camera.
But… I’m not sure this is actually a good movie? I mean, the plot is kinda… hard to care about?
This looks amazing, but I feel like I’m missing something? Is the point of his movie the anti-semitism or something? It just seems kinda impenetrable.
David Golder. Julien Duvivier. 1931.