#31 - Great Expectations

And so we come to the first of two Dickens adaptations directed by David Lean - (who we last saw in Summertime - #22) -

This was filmed right after the end of the Second World War, and has Alec Guinness in his first speaking role on screen - This seems like a classic of 1940's cinema - the music, the scenery, the characters - it all feels like it's in the right time and well done -

I just wasn't terribly interested - I have no terrible desire to rewatch movies or stories I've seen before and while Ethan Hawke and Gweneth Paltrow made a terrible Pip and Estella, by that point I knew the story well enough.   The Actress playing Estella did manage to come across as a detached lady of refinement.   She was probably my favorite character after the portly lawyer, Jaggers

It's not a bad film - many think it's one of the best ever - it just wasn't that interesting or exciting to me - I guess there was an inferior 1934 American version of Great Expectations (with the same actor playing Jaggers) but that this is regarded as the classic interpretation - so I'm glad I saw it

but truth be told - I coulda gone either way -

RB

Side Tangent - Library rents Criterion streaming

thought this was interesting

https://lifehacker.com/now-you-can-stream-criterion-films-with-a-library-card-1797516428

side note:   Having just left a city with 50 libraries and moved to a small town with one, I'll be having to netflix or borrow stuff in the future - which means sadly fewer of the special features...

I did get a Roku recently and will add filmstruck after a period of studying where I'm working on a work certification - it'll be my reward if I pass - I've been upset ever since they dropped the collection on Hulu

#30 - M

If that ain't the shortest movie title ever, I don't know what is :)

We have here a Fritz Lang film - his first with sound - (He had done Metropolis just 4 years earlier, and that was silent as were the ones that he did in between) - it's a masterpiece of German Cinema, and on most top 100 lists of great film watchers.  There are some early strains of film noir here - and I guess it's not that unusual a film for what was called the Weimar era, the Republic that was leading Germany right before the Nazi's came in

So I didn't quite know what we had here - There are virtually no protagonists - just a child murderer on the lam from both the Police and the Criminal Underworld - the plot is simple enough - but one of the great things about this film was Lang's use (or lack thereof) of sound as a painter using it for the first time - it reminds me a bit of how Kurosawa got to use color for the first time in a Samurai film (Kagemusha) - you get a LOT of it

Some scenes are shot without sound - I guess it was partially because sound equipment was expensive, but Lang uses it to great effect (Police sneaking around setting up an ambush for example) - and the work of Peter Lorre, especially in his closing monologue, with the camera lingering on him for extended takes is one of the most famous monologues of cinema.  There is also a musical theme (whistling) designed to lead you to understand when the main character is close even when not on camera

The Blu-Ray extras were fascinating - one included a documentary of the physical history of the film - this film was banned 3 years later in Germany after the Nazi's came to power - and there were French/English versions of the film, that quite frankly, didn't do Peter Lorre's final monologue justice with the extra cuts in it.  No one knows 100% what the initial director's cut was cause it was sliced and diced a few times and when the original negative was found, it was missing a reel

But it's a classic and good to see finally - it was Peter Lorre's breakout role and the one that jumpstarted his career - and he and Lang would both go on to flee Germany and have strong careers here in America for many years.

#29 - Picnic at Hanging Rock

Wow - could the blog finally be updated?   Yes it is - finally -

After 6 weeks of more or less getting moved and getting a house ready to rent, I had two hours tonight to sit in my new living room, and watch this blu-ray on my TV on a new stand several feet above the floor elevated like a real movie screen -

And what a movie it is - a 1975 Australian ...I don't know whether to say Mystery, Thriller, or Horror film - Right off the bat the film tells you - several schoolgirls go missing at a Picnic at Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day 1900 and are never found.   The rest of the film is that day and the weeks that follow, the effect on the townspeople and those who last saw the girls.

The two cast members that  stand out are Miranda, played by Anne Louise Lambert.  I don't (and probably never will) know her for any other roles than this one, but as the teenage angel of the group, her performance, especially the unspoken parts, are entrancing and enchanting.   She is, as one review puts it "Venus coming into being" -

This is in stark contrast to the other main character......the site of Hanging Rock itself - a stark foreboding place (made much more so by the music of Zamfir, the pan flute virtoso in the soundtrack) - This is an outcropping of volcanic rock teeming with dangerous life and wonder, and it is in the maze of volcanic caves and rocks that the women vanish without a trace

The contrast between these Victorian (and virginal) women in white to the stark towers with ancient faces that seem to stare back at you is almost terrifying - suddenly you find yourself having the heebie jeebies in the dark and having to turn on the light to finish the movie :)

Peter Weir directed it - and he also directed three of my other favorite films, two of which I keep in my DVD collection - Dead Poets Society and Master and Commander:The Far Side of the World - (the other film was Witness) - This was one of the masterpieces of his early career, and a masterpiece of Australian cinema, from what I understand.   Def. worth your time.   The Blu-Ray I saw had several special features, and I heard there's even a copy of the novel in one of the most recent releases as it's out of print.

On a side note - this has been remade into a 6 part television series for Australian TV which I understand is going to star Natalie Dormer and will also be released in the United States - THAT will be interesting - there is a small degree of Freudian sexuality that slips out here and there and I suspect the remake will like most films, make the innuendo and sly hints ridiculously overt and explicit but hey, what the hell - Maybe I'll watch it when it comes out

RB

Side Tangent - Celluoid Man

I haven't updated the blog in a few weeks - those freaking Warhol movies threw me off my game - I tried watching Flesh for Frankenstein a couple times and just gave up - ugh.   Add to that me working on a professional certification and moving to Eau Claire, and time of two hrs a pop just hasn't been there.

But in the meantime, I came across another gem on Netflix called Celluloid Man - it is a documentary about a film archivist called P.K. Nair who almost single handed built up India's National Film Archive.   In the process, he saved several Indian films destined for recycling shops where the silver nitrate would be taken off the film stock and sold.   Of course, there's also the age old enemies of moisture, damage, rust, etc.

It was great to see a film again about a guy who loved films so much he'd watch them four or five times a day - he worked out of the Film and Television Institute in Pune, and was building up the archive one reel at a time.  Apparently there were times where if a film on loan came in, he made a pirate copy - (we archivists don't like that word, he said) - and he built up a library of almost 12k films, 8k were Indian.   Some were incomplete or were cut up and had to be figured out how to be reconstructed

He would watch them with students who wanted to be directors, cinematographers, actors, writers, and had a projectionist who wouldn't quit till the last roll was sometimes shown at 3am.  They'd show up at 630am to watch a series of clips for films that had been censored - it was just something to see what a love for film archiving looks like.  Who knows how many times he saw Rashamon or Bicycle Thieves and got to discuss it with other people.

We also saw a bit of the cost - his daughter telling us he wasn't a father in the traditional sense, but now that he was old and slowing down they had a relationship like friends - (not father and daughter) - and you get the sense he isn't a fan of digitizing images - He thought something was lost in that - but of course, we can't all have temperature controlled archives of film canisters lying around.

He wanted to make films but never made a single one.  Arguably he had a bigger impact on film, and certainly Indian film than any one director.   He SAVED these images.  What a wonderful treat.

RB

#28 - Blood for Dracula

see entry #27 for why this is here and empty right now

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EDIT - 3/30/19 - I knocked both this and Flesh for Frankenstein out while playing a game just to have them and get them done - I guess they were shot back to back to a degree that Udo and one of the other main characters from Frankenstein basically finished that movie, cut their hair shorter, and went right into this one.

very similiar to Flesh, this one features some gratutious sex, gore, horror, and humor.

when watching movies with accents this thick I almost want subtitles but evidently they weren't even on the Criterion disk I had scrounged up back two years ago - (I made a temp copy which I will now delete - I know I got it from the Library system but neither of these were easy to find - of course now I'd probably Amazon Video films that I can't find that are still out there like "The harder they fall"

It was a pretty weak take on the Dracula theme as a whole - but so was Frankenstein - but they're done and the blog is updated -

I have one more I'm sorta not looking forward to but I will get on with it shortly I suspect

#27 - Flesh for Frankenstein

Honestly I don't think I can watch this or Dracula (#28) right now

They're just BAD....

I'm going to put "placeholder" blog entries in here - at some point I'll get to them but I'd rather move on for the time being

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UPDATE 3/30/19 - in an attempt to clean out the baffles, as it were before #100, and because I'm 3 days away from my next film coming in, I finally watched this one -

I didn't know whether to be repulsed or laugh at this thing - I remember it being called a cult classic growing up - (and I had no idea who Andy Warhol was - basically he had nothing to do with this but as a presenter.  Basically we have a gorefest of a sexually explicit film.   The Baron is played by the well known actor Udo Kier - (Lord, his IMDB is crazy big) - but as a whole, this is one I wanted to just get out and get it done - then I gotta do Dracula and probably the unspeakable one but I will get thru it. 

not even gonna update the twitter - LOL