Le Bonheur (1965)
man this was done so wonderfully. i had never seen a Varda movie prior to this so i had no idea what to expect. the first ten minutes were so idyllic and bright and left me thinking just what the hell is this saccharine flowery shit? then the dude starts having an affair and things become very interesting but the tone remains light and breezy and then... whaaaat the hell man. never seen anything like the ending. so ostensibly happy yet so disturbing. i very much liked the seasonal shift that occurs with it. summer turns to autumn and the music and the colours of the environment and of the clothes change so suddenly and drastically to signify that shit is messed up. really left an impression on me.
Within Our Gates (1920)
generally considered to be a response to Birth of a Nation. as such it is superb and much more convincing and, needless to say, much more real. done with a muuuch smaller budget tho so no large-scale fight scenes to be found here. in and of itself it is still a very good movie. i liked the scene where the game of cards goes awry. tension builds up, the lights go out, shots are fired, the light turns back on and we see the results of the violence. how many times have i seen this done afterwards? great use of flashback near the end that provided several things: important backstory, moral message and a climactic ending.
an observation: the black people in this movie who are on the side of righteousness have much lighter skin than those who are the bad guys. it's interesting to observe how so much, yet so little has changed in approx. a century. i haven't seen it yet, but Precious pulled the same stunt not too long ago and was blasted for it. in Within Our Gates, this was probably a necessity because the target audience was in large part fearful, bigoted white people who had to be 'converted' one baby step at a time.
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
a children's movie and an uninspired one at that. i am not familiar with doyle's writings but i doubt they take as many cues from american superheroes and disney movies as this monstrosity does. it's fucking pirates of the caribbean set in fin de siecle London. it's abrasive and dumb. extravagant fight scenes that are about sloppy cgi 'decors' more than they are about the actual fights. everyone over the age of ten will know what's going to happen so tension and genuine excitement are nowhere to be found. sherlock and watson beat the baddies, add a few seconds of silence, punctuate it with a bad joke. HA HA. a children's movie.
one of the principal rules of formulaic shit like this is to give the baddie proper motivation. it's what makes them scary and it's what makes them such a baddie. this motivation only becomes clear in what probably is the third act of the movie, not sure because it was such a mess. apparently he wants to restore the british empire and kill a bunch of dudes. ooooh very interesting. it's not black magic after all? oh, you don't say!
none of it matters in the end because it's all just a giant setup for the sequel which seems to be The Thing To Do nowadays and which, unlike the motivation of the villain of the actual movie i was watching, was introduced waaay too early. i did not like this movie.
