Risselada Blog

Moral Tales, Filmic Issues

This one isn't in the Spout database but I thought I'd mention it because I enjoyed it.  You can see this on disc one of the Criterion Collection set of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.  The first film in the set The Bakery Girl of Monceau is so short at 23 minutes that it would have seemed kind of wasteful to have nothing else on the disc.  So we get this fantastic 84 minute long dialogue with Eric Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder.  These guys are as wonderful to hear talking to each other as it is to hear the characters in Rohmer's films talking to each other.  Even though I had not hardly any of the films he was referring  to I found it fascinating.  I will have to revisit this interview some day after I have seen more of his oeuvre.

Rating: 9/10

Under discussion:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  (1937)

Snow White  (1916)

Snow White

The final feature length film from the DVD set "Treasures From American Film Archives" is a classic tale, but set some of the future standards of cinematic interpretations.  Or at least it is known to have been a considerable influence on Walt Disney in his inspiration and execution of his own version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  My biggest complaint is that there seems to be moments that jump over major scenes or plot points.  I don't know if part of the film is missing or the filmmakers just assumed people were familiar with the story enough to know what wasn't being shown.  Otherwise it's a fun example of very early American fantasy filmmaking.

Rating: 7/10

Under discussion:

Film Name  Production Year

Burn After Reading  (2008)

A Serious Man  (2009)

This is the forteenth feature length film I've seen by directors Joel and Ethan Coen.  I chose to watch this film based on previous good ratings I've given other films by this director and to better my favorite directors by algorithm listing.

A Serious Man

It's a special moment that seems to have come around once a year in the fall season the last few years when I get to watch another new Coen brothers film.  Since they are my favorite filmmakers, and being a film lover, there are few moments of cinematic anticipation as big as this for me.

My love and admiration for their films always ends up being massive.  Sometimes immediately, and sometimes as it sinks in.  Last year's Burn After Reading was pretty much instantaneous.  A Serious Man I knew I liked just as much, but took me a while longer to figure out completely why.  The reason it took me a while, is actually the reason why it's so great.

It has a lot of the wonderful and distinctive Coen brothers characters and dialogue.  But in trying to make sense of the plot, the viewer is doing exactly what the protagonist is trying to figure out about his life.  A lot of things and events occur in Larry's life that either seem like they have some kind of meaning or otherwise at least incite a search for their meaning.  The same thing holds true about things and events in the film that incite the viewers to deeply question their meaning.  It's like the story within a story of the goy's teeth.  The Rabbi telling the story loves to tell it with enthusiasm, punctuating every detail, and seemingly building it up to a climax so that any average listener assumes there is some meaning behind the story that will be revealed.  When in actuality the point is never reveal as anticipated and the story teller's reason for even telling the story seems ambiguous beyond just enjoying telling the story.

I think the Coens see themselves as story tellers like this, and maybe they even sometimes see God as a story teller like this.  Either way, they will point out that life can be like a good story where certain events seem to stick out as if they have some kind of important meaning or foreshadowing that we are meant to investigate.  But a lot of times in life that meaning is never quite found, so why should a good story feel like it needs to give a clear answer or meaning in the end either?

As an extra comment about the film, all of the scenes where Larry is in his office are my favorite.  Be it either talking to the student Clive, or to his boss about his tenure, or on the phone with a representative from Columbia house.  These scenes should be added to the huge list of other sublime moments from the Coens' spectacular oeuvre.

Joel and Ethan Coen:
Total feature length films seen: 14
Previous average film score: 9.9231
New average film score: 9.9286

Rating: 10/10

Under discussion:

Film Name  Production Year

All About Eve  (1950)

This is the second feature length film I've seen by director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  I chose to watch this film based on previous good ratings I've given other films by this director and to better my favorite directors by algorithm listing.

All About Eve

I don't have too much to say about such a famous movie mostly because I feel like it must have all been said before, and I would tend to agree with the general sentiments surrounding it.  If you rent the DVD for this movie, you will get more special features than you can almost handle.  I watched them all because I'm compulsive.  I enjoyed them, but now I've heard so much about this movie, that I can't stand to take too much time to write much more about it.

I usually tend to shy away from movies about backstage theatre drama, especially involving selfish divas.  People tend to write about what they know, so there are a highly disproportionate amount of backstage subject matters in movies and plays.  But when the writing, acting, and everything else are the best, I guess it doesn't matter what the subject is, as long as it's the best for what it is.  Mankiewicz loved the theatre yet was one of it's most its most harsh and savvy critics.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz:
Total feature length films seen: 2
Previous average film score: 10
New average film score: 9.5

Rating: 9/10

Under discussion:

Man of Aran  (1934)

This is the second feature length film I've seen by director Robert Flaherty.  I chose to watch this film based on previous good ratings I've given other films by this director and to better my favorite directors by algorithm listing.

Man of Aran

I've heard him called the "Father of the documentary" (although a quick search of the phrase shows more hits for John Grierson), his films are actually more constructed and narrative than in a method that required a lot more effort than filming what we would consider to be more of a strict documentary today.

The locations are real.  The people are usually native, but their relationships may not be.  And while their actions may be inspired by the more interesting parts of reality, they are still acted out for the camera.

The most exciting part of this film, the shark hunt was a recreation of a practice that had been abandoned for a generation or more.  People still had all of the equipment, but didn't exactly know what they were doing.  It was all constructed for the camera and for editing.  (When the kid found the basking shark though, I found that to be some creepy shit!)

There is a documentary on the DVD called "How the Myth Was Made" which revisits the Aran islands decades after the film was made.  It includes conversations with some of the crew, reactions from natives to how they view the film today, and interesting stories about how stuff was shot.  It also notes how a lot of aspects of life on the islands were intentionally not shown or mentioned at all in the film in a kind of manipulative way, but that's Flaherty's way.  People said he was more of a visual poet than a documentary filmmaker because he honestly wasn't trying for reality as a kind of cinematic poetry inspired by reality.

Robert Flaherty:
Total feature length films seen: 2
Previous average film score: 9
New average film score: 8.5

Rating: 8/10

Under discussion:

Hell's Hinges  (1916)

Hell's Hinges

This is available through the DVD set "Treasures From American Film Archives".  The western has always been such a distinct genre with it's own clichés, and for that reason it has always been a great genre to subvert.  I think this was probably one of the earliest really subversive westerns.  And the star William S. Hart was probably the first real star of the western genre.  This is probably one of my new favorite pre-1920s feature length films, although I haven't seen too many.  They are sometimes hard to appreciate, not just because equipment and technique seem primitive by today's standards, but most of the times the film has degraded so bad that we cannot appreciate what it originally looked like.  Hell's Hinges looks fairly good here though.  And sometimes you can be surprised by the great and gritty stories from these early years, especially since there wasn't too much censorship at that time, compared with a couple decades later.

Rating: 8/10

Under discussion:

Pather Panchali  (1955)

This is the first film I've seen by director Satyajit Ray.

Pather Panchali (Song of the Road)

I actually had watched most of this one a while ago on my computer, but got interrupted and never finished it.  Not because it was bad, but because I just don't prefer watching movies on my computer and also there was not as much urgency to finish it as there would be to a movie I rented and needed to return.

Quite a famous movie in the world of cinema.  It's the film that put Indian cinema on the global cinema map, and is often considered one of the greatest films ever made.

There's not any stand out aspect of the film.  It's great because there is no central character, but we get to see the interactions between many different members of a family from different generations.

For myself, it was also wonderful to see different cultural aspects of this particular rural part of India.  From the architecture, to the clothing, and the games, food, work, recreation, theatre, commerce.  It's immersing.

The primary conflict comes from the issue of poverty.  There are no real solutions to the issue, but people in these situations need just as much if not more of a portrayal in cinema than the fancy and often shallow upper class lifestyle.

Rating: 9/10