Random Thoughts

This is very, very unrestored. And silent. I mean, totally — there’s not even any music. So I listened to banging house music while watching this.

Ozu had made several dozens of movies before this (churning out half a dozen per year in the 20s), but this is apparently considered his first really good one.

Did I mention how unrestored this is? But it varies wildly from one moment to the next.

I’m impressed by how quickly the titles pass by — Japanese people can read fast.

And there’s not a lot of them — Ozu manages to tell a lot totally silently without cheating by resorting to titles.

Grody toilets, dude.

Did they shorten the English translation? Hm…

Ozu continued making silent movies until 1936, when he finally bowed to commercial pressures and went talkie.

And… this is such a fluid silent movie? Usually with silent movies, I feel like there’s something lacking, but this feels kinda complete the way it is. (Cultured people in the 30s and 40s bemoaned the vulgarity of talkies, and longed for the pure artistic expression of the silent movies, until Cahiers de cinema went *pfffffft* to all that jazz, and convinced everybody that missing sound was a technical limitation while black-and-white vs. colour was an artistic choice.)

It’s the slogan for the ages.

This is such a good movie. It’s billed as a comedy, and it’s pretty amusing now and then, but it’s really a melodrama? It reminds me, strangely enough, of Douglas Sirk’s movies a couple decades later.

It got a light touch, and a feel for character, that imbues the scenes with a sense of importance, of poignancy.

It’s not quite a masterpiece, but it’s kinda irresistable?

The banging house music didn’t hurt, either.

Oh, that’s just here…

Lovely movie. Best I’ve seen in ages.

Tokyo Chorus. Yasujirô Ozu. 1931.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Heh heh.

Anyway, so this movie is three drunk, high guys pretending to be Italian mobsters and improvising, with D A Pennebaker filming.

I like Pennebaker’s camera work. It’s really cool. The three guys are kinda on the tedious side. They don’t say anything interesting — it’s like they have an idea that their prattle is fascinating — but they’re not saying anything, really. And they crack themselves up all the time without having really done anything funny.

But it’s like it almost works? If they’d planned things a bit better and had some interesting things to say? Instead it’s just some guys hamming it up.

That’s harsh:

The very urgency that Mailer has always tried to communicate makes it impossible to wade through so much rambling for a little art.

That’s harsh.

That’s harsh.:

This is likely the most self-indulgent, grating dumpster fire of a “film” I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through in its entirety. There might be worse movies out there, but I shudder to imagine the possibility of their existence.

Heh heh.:

This makes me even more confused as to why Criterion rejected my Eclipse set proposal Matt and His Friends Dicking Around.

Heh heh:

After the actors quickly exhaust their capacity for concocting witty repartee from thin air (Sacha Guitry, these guys are not!) there isn’t much else left when it’s just the three of them except resorting to primal caveman antics and locker-room level horseplay.

You may surmise from the amount of googling going on in this here blog post that I’m not riveted by this movie.

Hey! A hammer! Rip Torn should have been in this movie, too, and beaten some sense into Mailer.

Mailer’s so drunk.

I feel like Peter Falk and Ben Gazzarra should have been in this movie instead.

Halfway through the movie, it seems like they realise that they have nothing, so they start bringing in a series of … “characters” … none of whom can keep themselves from smirking at appearing in the movie.

Except for the dog. The dog’s the best actor here.

Finally! Somebody interesting.

The final ten minutes are kinda good? After that woman with the beehive arrived, things finally took off and became interesting.

The preceding 70 minutes aren’t very good. So:

Wild 90. Norman Mailer. 1968.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Chirp chirp.

OK, I’ve totally been slacking off on this blog series, and it’s mainly because I’ve been completely busy with other stuff. But it’s also because the Eclipse movies aren’t quite what I imagined they would be.

Criterion touts these movies as lost gems, and the Eclipse box sets I’d seen before this (the Chantal Akerman box, for instance) had indeed been incredible. So I thought these movies were basically movies that weren’t commercial enough to receive the full Criterion Collection treatment: Full restoration, 40 page booklets, interviews with everybody, extras…

Instead I suspect it’s basically movies that Janus Films had the rights to, for some reason or other.

Why Janus? Because Janus Films and Criterion have the same owners.

The selection criteria Criterion is using are basically: Does Janus have it? Nobody else wants it? Let’s put it in an Eclipse box.

It’s not that there haven’t been fantastic movies here and there… but they’re hidden between a lot of stuff that’s only of vague interest.

Like Guitry’s movies, which are quite interesting in many ways, and were huge box office smashes in France at the time… but…

They aren’t so much lost treasures as amusing artefacts.

I do covet those glasses.

This is definitely the least (and the last) of the Guitry movies in this box set. It’s basically a filmed theatre play… an extremely chatty one. They prate and they prate, but about nothing interesting. It’s occasionally quite amusing, but most of the scenes lack zip.

That’s a good ending, anyway.

Quadrille. Sacha Guitry. 1938.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.