OTB#72: The Seventh Seal

I’ve blogged about this movie before, and it’s not a new entry on the 2022 directors’ list, so I shouldn’t be re-watching it now, really. But I’ve gotten a newly restored 2K version here, so eh why not.

Bergman has four films on the 2022 top 100, which ties him with Coppola and Bresson for the most movies included. And this is, of course, and obvious Bergman film to include: It’s been widely shown since the 50s, and has become a sort of symbol of Serious Art Movies, with scenes that have been parodied a lot. (And the main characters are male; always a plus on lists.) So it’s a Pop Culture Phenomenon in addition to being, well, really good.

But it wouldn’t really be on my Top 4 Bergman list. Perhaps… Top 10?

It’s easy to make fun of this movie, but it’s just really powerful. It builds, almost unnoticably, to that final scene (and the coda) where no eyes are left dry.

I wondered what the age distribution of the people who voted for this was, and it does indeed trend towards higher ages (if I counted correctly, four of them are over 70). So this might be a movie that’ll slide out of the Top 100 by 2032. Or not.

Det sjunde inseglet. Ingmar Bergman. 1957. ⚅

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best 2022 series.

The Entire Kitchen Sink Redux

It’s done!

Man, that took a lot longer than I had planned, but after a year and a half, I’m done with the Kitchen Sink blog (wherein I attempt to read all comics published by Kitchen Sink Press and then natter on a bit about them).

And it’s not like it’s the first time I’ve done something like this, but it was the hardest one to do. And I was surprised by that, because I do like a lot of what Kitchen Sink published. But, for instance, with the Eclipse Comics blog, there were a lot of surprises — stuff I only had a vague idea existed, and turned out to be pretty entertaining — while there were few surprises (for me) doing this one.

So it got to be a bit of a slog for me towards the end, and I apologise for the sometimes brash tone that crept into some of the posts. (Old Man Shouts At Old Comics isn’t that much fun to read.)

But, hey, Kitchen Sink did publish a lot of great stuff! And it’s got a quite interesting history, I think. So there you go.

OTB#72: The Spirit of the Beehive

Huh. Is that how they spell 1940 in Spain?

So, this is a movie about watching movies? It’s a very, very popular genre among directors (Cinema Paradiso etc etc).

No, that was a fake-out… doesn’t seem to be about that at all…

I was going to say that this seemed like an outlier among the new movies on the list this year. I think that all the movies I’ve watched so far have been either 1) made by a woman director, or 2) made outside Western Europe/US, or 4) both.

But… there’s only one other Spanish movie on the list, so I guess this is another movie from an underrepresented country?

Hm… half the votes are from the British Isles…

Heh. I like Aki Kaurismäki’s list — only a single movie he voted for made the Sight & Sound top 100s. That’s pretty unique. And I’ve seen very few of these films myself. I think I’ve seen the Buñuel… and I’ve got the Walsh on bluray, but haven’t seen it yet. And everybody’s seen the Chaplin. I’m sure the rest of the films on the list are spiffy, too.

I dunno… This is a pretty good movie, but there’s also something a bit cloying about it. Like the sountrack bit that seemed to come out of nowhere in this scene, coupled with the foley “wind is blowing” throughout. It’s gilding the lily a bit (or doesn’t trust the viewer).

Right:

The film was Erice’s debut and is considered a masterpiece of Spanish cinema.

It has that feel — “a masterpiece of <country> cinema” — which means that it’s inoffensive, sentimental and “”says something deeply meaningful about <country>””. These movies usually suck, but this is kinda good. But not… you know… fantastic.

Of course, this movie the added attraction that it was made during the Franco years, but managed to work around the repressive censorship of the time. That always adds some caché.

El espiritu de la colmena. Víctor Erice. 1973. ⚃

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best 2022 series.