Random Thoughts

*gasp* Shoes in bed!

La maman et la putain. Jean Eustache. 1973. ⚄

All the movies on the list of the best movies (officially) are readily available… except this one. The only legit source I could find it from was this $80 VHS tape, and since my VHS player i… somewhere… I bought a bootleg version of it instead. On DVD, but it looks like it’s been sourced from the VHS.

I mean, a DVD version has been released, at least twice, but it’s nowhere to be found for sale. Very odd, or my Google-fu is broken.

ANYWAY.

The main character where is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who looks very familiar indeed. But I didn’t know that he’d been involved with Nouvelle Vague movies since, well, before there were any. He was in The 400 Blows in 1959, when he was only 15. And then in basically all the Godard movies, and the Truffaut ones, and even in some of Rivette’s movies.

I initially had a bit of trouble connecting to the characters here… or even paying attention to the movie at all. Perhaps because of the crappy video quality? It’s easier to be rapt when looking at beautiful mise en scene. But I’m slowly being drawn in; getting fascinated by these mundane conversations. Because that’s what it seems like it’s going to be: Three and a half hours of people dating.

[time passes]

And then somebody reminded me that torrents exist, so after two hours I switched to a “HDTV” (i.e., 1.4K) version of this movie, and suddenly everything looks a lot prettier. It’s untitled, but there’s Subscene for that.

What would we do without pirates? Watch Netflix?

It’s odd that it’s not currently legally available:

The Mother and the Whore is considered Eustache’s masterpiece, and was called the best film of the 1970s by Cahiers du cinéma. It won the Grand Prix of the Jury and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. The film created a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival, as many critics saw the film as immoral and obscene or, in the words of the broadsheet Le Figaro, “an insult to the nation”, while Télé-7-Jours called it a “monument of boredom and a Himalaya of pretension”.

Or perhaps not.

I’m amazed that all the liqueurs for Widow’s Kiss hadn’t expired, but they tasted fine.

And so did this cocktail. Very boozy, though.

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

Beau Travail. Claire Denis. 1999. ⚅

Somebody described Denis as “the best living director today” a few years back, and that’s what it takes to get on the Official The Best list if you’re a woman. (At #91.) There are no further female directors on the list.

I’ve seen this movie several times before, and it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s got a camera (courtesy of Agnès Godard) that’s a very specific gaze, further amplified by cutting away to the locals constantly looking at the soldiers in bewilderment. It’s a chamber drama, but Denis refuses to let it remain that way by showing us the life outside the camp all the time.

It’s relentlessly tense.

It’s got the best final scene of any film ever, but it’s more than that: The use of Britten’s music interspersed with songs popular in 1999 is hypnotic. And it seems like it’s going to be a movie where not much happens, but it’s got a lot going on, only… subtly.

It’s one of my favourite movies. I tried getting it in 2K for this re-watch, but (SCANDALO) nobody’s released it on Blu Ray yet? What’s up with that?

If that happens, I’ll re-watch it once more.

Oh, I forgot to mention that it’s loosely based on Billy Budd, and if you’re expecting a naturalistic drama: This is not that. It’s slightly like an opera with less shouting. Or perhaps a ballet with extra shouting.

Today’s leftover cocktail is Alexander The Great…

… and I finally got rid of a bottle. Then again, this means that I can’t do any further cocktails that has to have creme de cacao… Is the final cocktail for this series going to be vodka diluted with more vodka!?

Anyway, it’s delish.

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

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.