Cinema

Norm has “posted the results”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/favourite_movie.html in his top movies of all time poll. My “own two favourite movies”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001053.html got absolutely nowhere and fifteen people (10 per cent of the total!) were deluded enough to vote for the Shawshank Redemption (4th= best movie of all time? — you must be joking!). Still, it gives us something to talk about and has been a lot of fun. So thanks to Norm for his efforts.

I went to see “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058450/ at my local cinema yesterday afternoon. An extraordinary banal story, real soap-opera stuff, but so strange and wonderful when every line is sung to French semi-jazz music. And the final scene when Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo meet again is so moving. Wonderful multicoloured wallpaper in every room too! The poignancy was accentuated by the mentions of war in Algeria: ambushes, comrades killed and so on. If I’d seen this a year ago these would have been little more than words but now it is easy to imagine the scenes.

I watched “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA–Expo 67–white-heat-of-technology–007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.

Since CT has a decent-sized readership, I’m appealing for help to try to get hold of a copy of a biopic about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the Swiss director Claude Goretta. The title is “Les Chemins de l’Exil”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077322/ and it appeared in 1978 and was, I believe, broadcast on the BBC. All my googling has drawn a blank, and contacts have come up with nothing. But if someone out there has a copy or knows how to get hold of one, drop me a line at chris-at-crookedtimber.org.

Today is the centenary of “Cary Grant’s”:http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Grant birth. Grant was born Archibald Leach in “Bristol”:http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol, the city where I live and work and attended Bishop Road School, the same local primary school where my own children went many year later (and which Nobel-prize-winning physicist “Paul Dirac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac also attended). There’s a “statue of him”:http://aboutbristol.co.uk/sta-06.asp in the new Millennium Square (near to Bristol boy-poet and forger “Thomas Chatterton”:http://www.bartleby.com/65/ch/Chattert.html ). His best films? I’d vote for “Bringing Up Baby”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029947/ and “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ .

On a slightly lighter note, if you’re a moviegoer and you just happen to be in London over the next couple months or so, this “series”:http://www.theword.org.uk/DOCS/0203.htm at the British Library looks excellent. The audio/transcripts in the “archives”:http://www.theword.org.uk/DOCS/0102.htm are pretty good, too. (The organizers of some academic conferences would do well to follow suit–but that’s for another post.)

I went to see _Love Actually_ last night. My vote was for _Master and Commander_ , but since that meant getting in the car and driving to a mulitplex whereas LA was showing at the end of the street, it was a battle I was never going to win. Two reactions: first, the intellectual in me was saying “this is utter crap” throughout; second, my eyes watered at various points during the evening. Now it isn’t hard for a film to engage my emotions — I always find it hard to stay composed during the closing scenes of _Crocodile Dundee_ — but for what it’s worth the film does work pretty well on that level. Hugh Grant’s as Prime Minister really is awful, but Bill Nighy as the ageing rocker is really funny and both Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson put in fine performances. It isn’t that I want to recommend it as such, but it did overcome my determination not to enjoy myself.

Just went to see The Return of the King, which opened in Australia today. As the Nazgul were dive-bombing the crap out of everything during the battle of the Pelennor Fields, I found myself wondering whether there was a deputy assistant undersecretary from Gondor’s Defence of the Realm Department hiding under his kitchen table somewhere on the fifth level of Minas Tirith thinking, “I must have written dozens of memos about Mordor’s air superiority, but would they listen, oh noooo! Just like every other year, the whole goddamn budget was blown on horses, silver filigree and whitewash.”

I just saw the movie Good-Bye, Lenin! It is about a young man in East Berlin struggling to make it seem to his sick mother as though the Berlin wall hadn’t fallen and nothing had changed since when she fell into a coma (just before the political changes) in order to make sure she doesn’t have a relapse. It was a good movie, I recommend it.

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Norman Geras is running one of his polls again. The latest one is for “favourite films of all time”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2003/12/movies_today_ye.html (deadline January 18th). So get over to “Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ and cast your votes (up to ten). Here are mine, in no particular order except that the first on the list is my all-time favourite (with All About Eve probably my second choice):

The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Third Man (Carol Reed)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton)
Diva ( Jean-Jacques Beineix)
Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle)

I adopted a private one-entry-per-director rule, though, which limited my Hitchcock nominations, and I was really conflicted about which Louis Malle film to choose (Milou en Mai gets one aspect of France so right). And I’m puzzled that Stanley Kubrick didn’t end up on my final list.

My friend Charles Kuffner has his list of the ten worst motion pictures that he’s actually seen. Here’s mine in no particular order, borrowing heavily from people who are funnier than me.

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I went to see _Mystic River_ last weekend – strongly recommended. Sean Penn is outstanding, Tim Robbins very nearly as good, and there isn’t a single bad, or even middling performance. It’s the best movie that I’ve seen in the last two years. However, I still reckon that you should read Dennis Lehane’s original book too. The movie concentrates almost exclusively on the individuals and the moral choices that they make. It thus misses out on one of the richer aspects of the novel – the relationship between honour, community and assimilation among immigrant groups.

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Did you know that Rita Mae Brown, who wrote Rubyfruit Jungle*, the frequently-assigned novel about growing up lesbian, also wrote the screenplay for the slasher movie The Slumber Party Massacre? (She also writes a popular series of mysteries.)

If I was a professor of cultural studies, my head would be spinning. Accurately measuring the brow altitude of American culture is a job for braver souls than I.

UPDATE: Just Rubyfruit Jungle, not The Rubyfruit Jungle. Thanks, Patrick.

My favorite spoof of movie cliches is right here, but the good people at Fametracker are having some fun with them in this discussion thread.

Highlights from the comments:

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