Random Thoughts

Opening Night. John Cassavetes. 1977. ⚅

Gina Rowlands! I love her.

I’ve had my doubts about Cassavetes before. I mean:

But this is brilliant.

Everybody behaves so awfully towards the Rowlands character (including the Cassavetes character (her husband, after all) slapping her), that it starts getting… is like Cassavetes trying to say something to her?

I hoped there would be a twist and Rowlands would just pull out an AK-47 and go Rambo on them all, because it’s relentless.

And mesmerising. Such a weird movie. You think you know what it’s about, and then it’s totally not. So I guess you may suspect that it’s unstructured, but it’s just… It all fits together, sort of, in a way that’s difficult to express.

It was really disliked when it was released:

Opening Night was critically panned in the US on its release. The review in Variety that appeared after a press screening concluded, “One must question whether more than a handful of moviegoers are interested in the effort, whether audiences have not already seen enough of Cassavetes’ characters … He’s made these films before and not many seemed interested in them.” When it opened in New York, the film was not reviewed at all in most newspapers and magazines.

But then Euros re-discovered it, and now everybody loves it.

Today’s leftover cocktail is Liquorice Whisky Sour, and the liquorice liqueur hadn’t gone off, but I had to use some pliers to get the cap off. Sugar, man. It hardens over the years.

Hm! I love liquorice, so I think this didn’t have enough, really. It’s just a slight hint, but it basically tastes like a normal whisky sour. And that’s never a bad thing.

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

The Gold Rush. Charles Chaplin. 1925. ⚄

Man, this has been beautifully restored by Criterion. It’s a 2K release, and it looks super sharp. OK, some of the shots are a bit blurry, but it generally looks great. Much better than the transfers I saw back when I was a child.

Because I think it’s been a while since I’ve seen this. Like a decade or four?

And wasn’t this silent?

Oh, I’m watching the re-release:

In 1942, Chaplin released a new version of The Gold Rush, modifying the original silent 1925 film by adding a recorded musical score, adding a narration which he recorded himself, and tightening the editing, which reduced the film’s running time by several minutes.

This is really good, though. I know I’m stating the obvious, but it’s been a long while since I’ve seen early Chaplin, and I didn’t remember it being this… ambitious? I mean, the sets look to great! That intricate picaresque cabin, for instance, with all those planks going every which way, for instance. The recurring gags, getting funnier all the time. That wonderful over-the-top acting.

It’s very watchable still, and I totally get why Aki Kaurismäki voted for this movie.

I again tried to get rid of the creme de cacao, so I went with a Brandy Alexander.

But it really should have had the two different types of creme de cacao like the recipe specifies. With just the white creme de etc, it’s too one note.

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

The Deer Hunter. Michael Cimino. 1978. ⚂

This won all the Oscars, which immediately makes me suspicious. And I have seen it before, but I was probably… twelve…? at the time (probably got it on VHS some years after the release). And I remember absolutely nothing about it except that it’s sweaty and there’s some Russian roulette.

Let’s see what happens!

This movie makes me realise that I’ve always gotten John Savage and Christopher Walken confused… and that this movie is probably where the confusion comes from. And this picture makes me realise that Cimono cast two versions of himself:

Only prettier.

Cimino leans really, really hard into the whole garrulous working class thing…

Cimino famously drove a film studio onto bankruptcy with his next movie, so I wondered whether that made people reevaluate this one:

Sarris added, “I was never taken in … Hence, the stupidity and incoherence in Heaven’s Gate came as no surprise since very much the same stupidity and incoherence had been amply evident in The Deer Hunter.”

But apparently not much, even though there’s this:

More recently, film critic Mark Kermode challenged the film’s status: “At the risk of being thrown out of the ‘respectable film critics’ circle, may I take this opportunity to declare officially that in my opinion The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films ever made, a rambling self indulgent, self aggrandizing barf-fest steeped in manipulatively racist emotion, and notable primarily for its farcically melodramatic tone which is pitched somewhere between shrieking hysteria and somnambulist sombreness.”

It’s kinda clumsy and indulgent. Like the drop of red wine of the bride’s white wedding dress. COULD IT BE SYMBOLIC! There’s not much plot to talk of: It’s mostly just coincidences (like Nick and Michael both happening to be in the same roulette… bar).

OK, I’m whining too much. There’s a lot of very pretty shots in here. And Robert de Niro, for once, doesn’t play his usual character, and he’s fascinating to watch here.

Heh. The only scene I did remember almost didn’t make it into the movie:

According to Deeley, Cimino questioned the need for the Russian roulette element of the script

As “get rid of some booze” recipes go, the Funky Monkey is fantastic: It’s all stuff I need to get rid of. I bought that rum on a whim because they suddenly had twenty different single plantation rums in the shop. And it’s… it’s… harsh. It’s harsh, dude.

But it’s wonderful here! I cuts through all the heavy and sweet flavours here, and it ends up being amazingly balanced. Nom nom nom.

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

Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège. Jean Vigo. 1933. ⚃

Since there are 16 movies tying for “last place” on this top 100 (all at #91), it means that I’ve got some leeway in choosing the order of movies. So the next film alphabetically was The Deer Hunter, but that’s over three hours long!? And I’ve got things to do tonight. So I’m watching this Jean Vigo movie instead, which is only 44 minutes long.

The only other Vigo thing I’ve seen is L’Atalante, which was spiffy… but so weird.

And again, this is weird. I know, Vigo isn’t going for naturalism or anything, but it’s so odd.

Oh, it’s historically important:

Though the film was not an immediate success with audiences, it has proven to be enduringly influential. François Truffaut paid homage to Zero for Conduct in his film The 400 Blows (1959). The anarchic classroom and recess scenes in Truffaut’s film borrow from Vigo’s film, as does a classic scene in which a mischievous group of schoolboys are led through the streets by one of their schoolmasters. Director Lindsay Anderson has acknowledged that his own film if…. was inspired by Zero for Conduct.

I don’t know… It feels like pretty undigested disgust for Vigo’s school situation (presumably) vomited onto the screen.

I wonder whether this would have been as famous as it is if it hadn’t been banned for over a decade in France. I mean, it’s good, but…

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

L’Argent. Robert Bresson. 1983. ⚅

I blogged about this movie here. I should probably re-watch it, but I’m not.

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