It's Autumn! The October Movie Wrap-up

Cheers! To another great month of movies--two autumn months in a row.

I started to go crazy toward the end of October when lo and behold a rented video projector landed itself in my living room, which meant nothing less than as many 8-foot wide screenings on my blank, white wall as I could muster. The apex of the movie addiction struck on the 24th, and ended four days later when the video projector was overdue at the U of Chicago library. In that time span I caught eight movies. Yes, no world record, I realize, not even a "personal best" (that still stands at nine movies in two nights. What?), but to be honest, as nerdy as I can be in matters of the movies, I wasn't aiming for a record anyway. No, these screenings sprung from pure exuberance and curiosity--imagine, a veritable movie theater in your own living room!

Hmm...

Maybe this doesn't mean much to the folks who have mega-sized plasma screens hooked up to a screaming sound system, but it meant a lot to me, for it meant seeing Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973), Anthony Mann's The Furies (1950) and various clips of Chaplin, to name the finer points of the four-day lock-in. The lesser flicks of that long weekend were surely Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and In Bruges (2008), both of which left me feeling underwhelmed. By the 29th the projector was gone and it was back to the 19" TV. A fitting transition for the final three episodes of Entourage, season 3 (2006-2007), but not so for Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007), which visually stuns within the first frame of the film.

And so, the October movie list. One day the five of you who read this site will forgive me for not writing more. I don't really do New Year's Resolutions, but I might be interested in a late-season 2008 resolution in which I pledge to update this bugger before '08 is out. Did anyone hear that? (echo-echo)

Well, in any event, October kicked ass.

Thus:

Running Out of Time - (1999) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, October 4, 2008
Johnny To! Where have you been all my life? Oh, you were there all along....


The Duchess - (2008) - Film
Seen: Sunday, October 5, 2008
Icky. I wrote about this here.


Stroszek - (1977) - DVD
Seen: Monday, October 6, 2008
On the Herzog queue, per this mention.


Risky Business - (1983) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, October 9, 2008















Wow. I love this movie. Thank you, Dave!


24 City - (2008) - digital projection
Seen: Saturday, October 18, 2008 (at the CIFF)













Jia: clearly one of cinema's all-time finest.


W. - (2008) - Film
Seen: Sunday, October 19, 2008
Stone returns! For all of my grievances, I delighted in watching this. A bit about it here.


Fulltime Killer - (2001) - DVD
Seen: Monday, October 20, 2008
More To! Loving this guy. This is my favorite so far...


Harakiri - (1962) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, October 23, 2008

















Upon the recommendation of a great acquaintance outside of the film world, I saw this. And loved it.


La Bonheur de Dames - (1930) - on 35mm
Seen: Friday, October 24, 2008

















What a movie, what a movie. My heart pourings here.


Collateral - (2004) - DVD
Seen: Friday, October 24, 2008















I could watch this again and again...



High Plains Drifter - (1973) - DVD projection!
Seen: Saturday, October 25, 2008










Superb. Scary. Surreal! Clint Eastwood, please don't ever stop making movies. I love you.



Team America - (2004) - DVD projection!
Seen: Saturday, October 25, 2008
A nice American parody following the scathing, scary commentary from the above feature. It turned out to be a nice balance, actually!


In Bruges - (2008) - DVD projection!
Seen: Sunday, October 26, 2008
Underwhelmed with this! But loved the scenery, the performances, and the *idea* of the story. Something about it fell flat for me though.


Buffalo Bill and the Indians - (1976) - DVD projection!
Seen: Sunday, October 26, 2008
Maybe the 26th was just a bad day for movies, because this one from Altman left me pretty listless as well.


Wonder Boys - (2000) - DVD projection!
Seen: Monday, October 27, 2008
It had been years since I watched this and just as long since I put down the novel. Definitely an overdue screening.


The Furies - (1950) - DVD projection!
Seen: Tuesday, October 28, 2008






















Barbara! Go to it, sister. And did I mention anything about it here? Just more pictures, eh? Ah, well. I'll circle back to how fantastic Anthony Mann is. For now, suffice it to say, Anthony Mann, you're awesome.


Entourage, Season 3, final 3 episodes - (2006-2007) - DVD
Seen: Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Boo.


Paranoid Park - (2007) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, October 30, 2008
Gus Van Sant, another of the best living directors. Perhaps more? The opening shot of this movie alone might persuade me towards the latter judgment.

Letters from Iwo Jima - 2006 - Film

Friday, February 09, 2007



There were two films I anticipated more than any other last year, and both were from Clint Eastwood. Flags of Our Fathers made my top ten of 2006, and the second installment of the Iwo Jima battle films, should I be allowed to revise my 2006 list 2 months into 2007, ranks even higher.

Flags has been criticized for being too patriotic, while Letters is less so. But I have a feeling the "patriotism" of the second is shadowed by the fact that it's a whole other national brand. Letters is done almost entirely in Japanese with subtitles. From an American standpoint I don't know enough about Japanese history and culture to label it patriotic, though it won't surprise me if someone from Japan thought it was. For me, Flags is easy to label as a salute to our soldiers, to our military past. Eastwood's not apologetic about that, nor should he be; he's from a generation that came of age in the War and post-War years, so you bet he's got an emotional attachment to the story, but I still don't think it's an empty patriotic nod. If it was such a flag-waving American myth that's come back to give us context for the war in Iraq, why the hell would he waste his time creating the same story from the Japanese perspective?

It's clear Eastwood is more interested in the all-around perils of this story, after all, taken together the two movies make either side out to be the enemy. I'd have to flip through my mental Rolodex of war movies to know for sure, but I believe Letters was the first time I was rooting against the Americans on the battlefield.



War movies are a tough sell to a lot of people because they're turned off by the violence, whether it's stylized or realistic. My big sister, for one, won't go near a movie where she might see blood. Surely this limits one's options, particularly nowadays when violence isn't violent unless we see the full motion of a limb being torn off, or blood spurting from the jugular. I for one prefer war movies and Westerns from the 30s, 40s, and 50s where if a character was shot up or stabbed, it was staged in a way that excluded a picture of their guts spilled across the sidewalk. What happens in many John Ford movies, for instance, is a shot of a character's face as he (or she—but usually he) looks at the massacre. The horror expressed on those characters' faces tells us a lot more than if we were to see the mangled body with our own eyes; gore takes on a deeper meaning when we see how characters react when they're looking at it. It means there's consequence to the imagery, rather than blood for the sake of blood.

Some of my favorite films happen to be some of the bloodiest: Taxi Driver is practically a gore flick as it climaxes, and continuing with Scorsese, The Departed was one of my highest ranked films of 2006. These are films, though, where the violence is not gratuitous; its characters are emotionally involved with the violence they see, or even participate in.

Likewise, Letters from Iwo Jima is violent enough to make your stomach turn, but it's not a hack 'em and slash 'em flick, it's an historical tale. War, by nature, is violent, bloody, putrid; in between the scenes of bombings, missile attacks, and soldiers set afire by flame throwers there is a very personal story that can't be told without it. Both Letters and Flags are personal memoirs as much as they are battle films. The flashback sequences in Flags to me, means just as much as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi's (Ken Wantanabe) words scrawled on paper in the letters he writes to his family during battle.

In Flags, the flashback is used for its characters to contextualize the victory at home against the nightmarish battlefield memories they can't shake. In Letters, the General writes letters home to help him walk though the hours of impending death. Neither side of this war story is emotionally victorious. Everyone's fucked up from the war. That's Eastwood's point, and it sure as hell transcends the real flag waving bullshit of post-9/11.