Random Thoughts

Paris When It Sizzles. Richard Quine. 1964.

This cocktail was surprisingly delicious. The ingredients seem kinda meh, but all together they resulted in an amazing cocktail.

Hay! I had two films from 1963 lined up, but it turned out that my DVDs of Les Carabiniers and Le petit soldat had no subtitles whatsoever, so that’s a scratch.

But whyyyy! Just put English subtitles on the DVDs you release, people! It increases the potential audience by several magnitudes!

So here we are in 1964 instead with a film that’s a weird cross between a 40s mannered comedy and a 60s Nouvelle Vague film. It’s even made explicit in the film: Audrey Hepburn says that her last assignment was with a New Wave director who made a film “about people who go to this party and decide not to play Scrabble”. Weirdly enough, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville was released the next year.

This is the most meta film ever! It’s about a guy who makes a film about a girl who knows a guy that’s doing a film. It exhilarating! But it’s so weird: It’s also a 40s romantic comedy.

I can totally understand why this film was apparently universally panned, but I think it’s rather fun. Films about making movies have never been wildly commercially successful, so you have to wonder why they keep making them, but I guess it’s tempting to making movies about what you know. Which is making movies.

I think this is a really fascinating and fun film.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Some Like It Hot. Billy Wilder. 1959.

Another Monroe film!

This one’s pretty much on fleek. Can’t really fault it much, other than that I seem to remember the repartee being snappier? And I would guess that if I were to google around a bit I might find thought pieces about this being a transsexuals-as-predators-by-proxy film or something…

So I didn’t.

But while there’s elements of that, I think it manages to be non-creepy by focusing so much on the sexual harassment the girls receive from, well, everybody around them. Even the bell-hop who tells Josephine that she doesn’t have to leave the door open for him, because he’s got a skeleton key.

I mean, it’s funny as fuck, but there’s plenty of films that are funnier. I think what makes the film is really Monroe’s performance as a slightly dim girl, but one who has a depth and melancholy about her. She’s the emotional centre of the thing.

The extras on the DVD are slightly frustrating. It’s a half-hour interview with Tony Curtis by Leonard Maltin. Curtis is spilling the beans like crazy, seeming like he really wants to tell us everything that he knows and feels about the making of this film, but Maltin rarely follows up on anything. He’s got a script of questions that he’s following, no matter what interesting things Curtis is saying. Such a wasted opportunity.

The DVD extra thing with the women from the band is fabulous, though.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

The Tarnished Angels. Douglas Sirk. 1957.

Yay! Another Douglas Sirk film!

I just watched the documentary on the DVD of There’s Always Tomorrow, and the was asked what his favourite film was (of his own), and he said that he doesn’t think like that. But he’d recently seen Tarnished Angels at a MoMa thing in New York, and he thought it still stood up.

I can see why Sirk got no respect in the US in the 50s. Sirk is interested in light, shadows, mirrors, faces. The over-the-top emotionality probably felt embarrassing: How do you respond when every scene has so much meaning, so much emotion?

I think that’s it brilliant, and Sirk is intelligent and subversive. He has a distinct point of view and an agenda (see Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows, for instance), and he’s a propagandist that wants the audience to feel the truth of these stories.

I don’t think this is Sirk’s best film by any stretch of the imagination. It’s still pretty great.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Hm… is that the right aspect ratio? Isn’t the Earth supposed to be, like, round?

Oh, that’s better! This is an anamorph DVD. You don’t see that very often – they usually just letterbox it, which means fewer pixels. Nice.

There’s Always Tomorrow. Douglas Sirk. 1956.

I’ve been looking forward to watching this movie: I’m such a great fan of Douglas Sirk’s weepies that I bought the DVD twice.

And it’s a flawless melodrama. It’s such a small, contained story; just about relationships and emotions and stuff. Nothing Earth-shattering, but kinda perfect.

I should watch all of Sirk’s films one of these days. Of course, Sirk was rediscovered a few years after this and hailed as an auteur by the French, which is totally understandable. He’s got a way of making you feel the tiniest bit of emotion in the material. It’s overboard, but it’s fantastic.

The DVD also has a French documentary from 1982 (filmed on VHS). It’s fascinating. Sirk seems, to no great surprising, to be smart and interesting.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

The Seven Year Itch. Billy Wilder. 1955.

I’ve seen this before, of course, but it’s been a while, I think. I wondered whether I would find it creepy this time over. I mean, it’s an entire film about some nerd creeping on Marilyn Monroe.

And there certainly are some icky scenes in here, but Monroe is splendid, as usual.

It’s enjoyable, but I think Billy Wilder did more successful variations on the theme in a couple of other films.

This blog post is part of the Century series.