A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923)
lots of Chaplin movies on Belgian tv lately. good stuff. this is special in many ways. Michael Powell said that when he saw it upon release, he felt he witnessed the medium grow up. there's no slapstick here, merely a few select moments of comic relief. there's no chaplin in front of the camera, and there's none of the epicness and grandiloquence that silent movies were prone to. just a thoughful, psychological character study; a precursor to many, many other films.
The Reckless Moment (1949)
My 3rd Ophuls movie and the third masterpiece. he's such an immensely interesting director. his direction, as per usual, is sublime. his visuals are uncanny but never glamorous & without the usual synthetic air of hollywood movies. Joan Bennett disposes of a corpse and no sounds are heard save for some ambience. there is silence when there normally would be a melodramatic score. only Ophuls and Ford at the time had the good judgment not to drown out such momentous scenes by sweeping music.
anyway, the movie is basically a more interesting and inverse version of Mildred Pierce, which is a noir that turns into a family drama, whereas this is a family drama that turns into a noir. both explore the role of women in society at that time, and both have some feminist facets to them. James Mason plays a character who is a great take on the noir villian. just an extraordinary movie in all respects.
Walkabout (1971)
this is the kind of movie that imprints itself into your memory, thanks to the sheer visualness of the movie. a completely delirious ode to primitivism & discovery in the spiritual and sexual sense of the words. hard to find the right words for this one since it's such an emotive experience.
Love is Colder than Death (1969)
Fassbinder's first feature and he was obviously still trying to find his own voice here as he basically made a Godard movie. i enjoyed it, but i'm not entirely sure what Fassbinder was saying with it. the best i can think of is that it's a portrait of the emptiness and emotional and physical violence in people's lives... or something like that.
Tumbleweeds (1925)
I don't intend to make a habit of watching movies on youtube, but but for something as old and rare as
Tumbleweeds i was willing to make an exception. it's the first pre-Stagecoach white hat, black hat western i've seen and it left me mightily impressed. William S Hart as a western hero is up there with Wayne and Eastwood. and while the western denomination is basically an excuse to cram in as many genres as possible - action, adventure, romance, comedy - many of its themes would work their way into westerns for several decades to come.
Wild at Heart (1990)
typical Lynch mindfuckery with an added touch of absurd comedy. it doesn't approach the quality of his best work, but it's a hell of a ride and never boring to watch. not entirely sure what the point of it all was, but i took it as a sort of deconstruction of pathetic adolescent male fantasies like Leaving Las Vegas (also starring Nick Cage, incidentally).
and one rewatch
La Dolce Vita (1960)
nearly just as good as when i first saw it, though obviously not as much as a revelation. i think there's a bit of Marcello in most people... that is, until the last half hour. he's always observing, hyper-conscious of his surroundings and his disposable place within them, never sure when to take the reins and never sure what direction to move in, until his anomie finally overcomes him. any movie that has a character representing an angel who is at one point told flat-out that she looks like an angel is a good movie (see also: Groundhog Day, or, for that matter, Grim Fandango). and nearly every movie that ends with or at the sea has a good ending, because the sea is a metaphor for everything.
