Random Thoughts

Slaughterhouse Five. George Roy Hill. 1972.

Hey! I read this book when I was a teenager. And that was in the previous century! I’m amazed at how many scenes are familiar to me still, so it made a huge impression, apparently. Some of the scenes (like when the guy started talking about the dog and the springs) I knew exactly how would go when the character started in on it.

So I guess in addition to being memorable, director George Roy Hill must have made a pretty faithful adaptation of the book.

That said, I don’t think the film is completely successful. There’s so much shouting; as if Hill felt that the source material needed sprucing up by having the characters shout a lot. But perhaps the main problem is that the guy playing the protagonist is a total cipher. He’s had a charisma bypass.

Still, you have to give a mainstream film credit for being so quirky.

It seems like the book is a particular favourite of certain types of people.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Out 1: Noli me tangere. Jacques Rivette. 1971.

It’s a Saturday, and I should be working, but instead I’m watching this 12 or 13 hour movie from 1971. I’d read about it before, because it’s a pretty famous film (or perhaps infamous), and Carlotta released a really handsome collection of it on Bluray. 2K, but beautifully restored while keeping all the 16mm grain (i.e., an unusually high bitrate for a 2K bluray).

I usually avoid knowing anything about a film before watching it, but this time I’m happy that I did, because one of the articles about it said that it’s the kind of film that you don’t really have to pause while going for a pee, because not much will have happened in the meantime. That’s a liberating thought. On the other hand, there are some very short scenes between the really long talky ones that would be a shame to miss, so I’m not sure it’s good advice.

In some ways, this film exemplifies what Drew Daniel wrote in that book about Throbbing Gristle, and I’m paraphrasing from memory: Sometimes the avant-garde is the R&D division of the entertainment industry. Because this must have been such a statement in 1971, but now, after decades of Big Brother and other really long TV shows without overt scripting, it’s mostly a reasonable, interesting, good film.

But the actors here are better (even brilliant), and the editing and cinematography is on fleek. And the little drips of paranoia and conspiracy throughout are riveting.

I did find the improvisations with Thomas’s theatre troupe to be sometimes excruciatingly boring, but perhaps that’s the point, because Lili’s rehearsals are interesting.

OK OK, I didn’t finish the entire thing in one day. It’s now Sunday, but that’s fine because this weekend is Pretension… Ascension… Presumption… One of them there christian weekends, so I have tomorrow off! Hah! No Monday!

I made it to about hour eight yesterday before I had to take a break and watch RuPaul, so I’ve got… five hours left? Let’s go!

Despite not being an er information-dense film, there are so many characters here that intersect in various ways over so many hours that I’m going into an associative fugue. “Isn’t that the guy…?” “Is that the woman who…?” “That can’t be that guy, can it?” Since the plot is based on conspiracies and unknown connections, it makes it all a rather tingly experience.

OK, I wrote the stuff above mostly during the Thomas theatre exercises, but now the film is over. For such a long film, it goes past quickly. If I were to re-edit it, I’d just drop the Thomas sequences, because the rest aren’t really excessive. And the Thomas sequence don’t really seem pertinent to, well, anything. Is that the point? He’s a vortex sucking the energy out of everything?

But that’s only two or three hours. I wonder what they did to cut it down to the four-and-a-half version called Spectre.

Anyway, if you decide to see any thirteen-hour movies next weekend, it should be this one. Run out an buy it now; the box set is a large number of bluray discs and probably even more DVDs. Search for “Out 1” on popular shopping sites. It’s probably not going to be available forever.

But what’s the name of that beach where they retreat to at the end? Where the “Obade” is? I want to go on holiday there right now!

This blog post is part of the Century series.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Billy Wilder. 1970.

What a strange and awkward film. Is Wilder going for a 40s comedy but updating it embarrassingly with a gay panic storyline?

But it’s mostly just a cod-standard Sherlock Holmes story. Although slightly more irreverent than usual and not based on a Conan Doyle story.

It’s pretty entertaining. But it’s so… incongruous. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to find as a theatrical release in 1970. A TV episode; sure. A film; no.

Ah! It was conceived as a three hour extravaganza with an intermission; an entire evening at the cinema. The studio didn’t like the idea, so it was cut down to a more sensible two hours and several plot lines were edited out.

It failed at the box office, which I think is no great surprise. The bits that were edited out were discarded and there’s apparently no hope of recreating the original extravaganza.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Andrei Rublev. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1966.

This is officially the 13th best film ever.

It’s got the most classic casting problem: The casting director is really hot on a certain type, so we get about twenty actors that look pretty much identical. So I’m spending most scenes waiting for somebody to mention the other characters by name so that I can tell who’s in the scene.

The cinematography is purdy to the max. I wish I had this in 4K instead of 720.

I think this is meant as a very pro-Christian film, but whenever they do some bible readings, whatever they’re reading sounds so bat-shit crazy that I thought perhaps Tarkovsky was making fun of religion or something, but I binged it and those were real quotations. And the icons look pretty retarded.

So I don’t know!

Sure is a lot of animals getting hurt in this film.

I’ve seen most of Tarkovsky’s films, and I think this is by far the weakest, no matter what BFI says. Either the characters are silent or they’re shouting at each other. So much shouting. I wonder whether the attraction is that it was suppressed for a while (because Soviet Union), so it had a kind of mysterious cachet. Because I don’t get it.

Aren’t they supposed to tune the bell after casting it!?

*twirls*

The extra features on the DVD are hilarious.

“It’s not enough to recognize the harm that religion does. It’s necessary to be at the forefront of godless work!”

And then they show the horrors of evil atheists apparently burning reliquaries while the music playing in the background is apparently a Russian rock rip-off of Pink Floyd! Stalin would be rolling in his grave!

If he had one!

This blog post is part of the Century series.