New year's wishes are too belated to express now, but I don't care, Happy New Year 2009! Already one twelfth of the year has gone by. To commemorate the month I begin below with the year's first monthly recap, all of the movies that flickered before my eyes in January 2009.This is a fresh start to a year using the monthly-recap format that was adopted halfway through 2008. Before the format of Seen was a jotting down of thoughts on every film on my queue; the trouble with the old idea comes in its sheer volume. There simply was not enough time to complete a mini-review of every movie that I saw. By April of 2008 I had converted to monthly lists that considered my movie queue as a collective.
In the next 11 months my aim is to make those collectives a little meatier than they have been in the past. Many previous films received only a simple mention of their title accompanied by a still image; and while this was an easy way to complete a list of lackluster movies that did not give me much to contemplate (The Incredible Hulk, 2008; Sex and the City, 2008; La Vie en Rose, 2007), it diminished the status of movies that deserved attention and considered thoughts (Advise and Consent, 1962; WALL-E, 2008; Coming Home, 1978; Step Brothers, 2008).
If there is anything to take away from this little film journal, it's that it is a work in progress. I refuse to absolutely resolve to fuller thoughts on all movies--I'm already feeling the constraints of time--but I do promise to try. Especially for the cinematic gems that incite real viewing pleasure.
One note on the contents of the January 2009 movie queue. With the new class I am teaching on Film History (at the U of Chi. Graham School), you will notice an influx in the viewing of early cinema and silent era films. Not only do these screenings alter the usual, that is more contemporary, landscape of the Seen queue, each has served as a fantastic refresh on my perspective of movies overall. Some of these early silent pictures I had not seen in years, displacing my memory of them to what is written in popular film history texts. Seeing them again with fresh eyes turned out to be a real joy and an affirmation of my love for movies then and now. A delightful way to ring in the new year!
Oh, and by partaking in multiple viewings of the same films (in preparation for each week's class, then the in-class screening itself) I watched 30+ whole movies this January. Thank you, 15 second Thomas Edison short films!
The First of the Month
Chungking Express - (1994) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, January 1, 2009
Many moons ago I met a good friend at the Telluride Film Festival who wrote about this movie in an essay that answered, "If you could bring one movie into the future, what would it be?" He, among a short list of other friends I met at the festival's Student Symposium, each swapped the titles of our topic films so we could watch them on our own. Six-and-a-half years later I have done that, and my goodness I should have done it sooner. Wong Kar-Wai's curiously intimate picture of fate and love was another one of those blocks of consecutive hours where you don't have a single complaint about life (maybe this is why I like the movies so much); and is a nice retrospective on the director's now rather lustrous career. It has great energy. I can see why my friend would want to bring that to the future.The Secret of My Succe$s - (1987) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, January 3, 2009
Yes, the title is actually spelled with a dollar sign for an "s." Remember how much you loved Alex P. Keaton? Trust me when I say Brantley Foster's version of Michael J. Fox's popular capitalist character will wear off much of that bloom. The movie is almost completely unwatchable. In my defense, my boyfriend's parents gave this to us as a stocking stuffer, so I was only giving the movie the justice it deserved a la the thoughtfulness of relatives.But let's take a look at this poster! Okay, downtown New York City skyline circa mid-1980s, so that means Wall Street, subtext: money. Second, a magnificently bloated phallus, the champagne bottle; hands with vampy red-painted nails are wrapped firmly around its shaft, and who is this at the top, riding the wave of ejaculatory discharge? Oh! It's Brantley Foster (Michael J. Fox), the country boy turned cunning businessman in tennies. Male-centric, women-objectifying, money grubbing, sex hungry. And that is all you need to know about this movie. If you ever do watch it, look out for the particularly pornographic closeup of Helen Slater taking a drink at the water fountain. Kind of backpedals on the whole women progressing in the workplace thing.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - (1985) - DVD (new Criterion edition!)
Seen: Saturday, January 3, 2009
Quite a different look at 1980s cinema we've got with Paul Schrader's '85 masterpiece following the M.J. Fox pic. I have lightly written about Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters before, so I will let those posts suffice in the place of anything here. At left is the cover of the new Criterion Collection DVD (released last June) that I can proudly say brightens up my still-growing DVD library. I would like to publicly thank my great friend in West Hollywood for giving this to me at Christmastime. (I adore it, Ms. Knox!)Woman Is the Future of Man - (2004) - DVD
Seen: Sunday, January 4, 2009
Woman Is The Future of Man became my second experience in the Hong Sang-soo filmography, and is it possible to call something emotionally wrenching and peaceful simultaneously? If so, that's the shorthand description I'd like to give this 2004 movie about two old friends fighting over one woman. The South Korean director has an eye for everyday spaces that convey intimacy like you are watching a home movie; there is something about the settings in his film overall--spaces, props, costumes, and the ultra-bright light of day/florescent interior lights--that for lack of better phrasing, have a tangible look of the world I know.Bear with me as I try to elucidate this idea more. Looking at the still above, the table is littered with items specific to the characters' national culture, and some that I recognize first-hand: the green liquor bottle and a Pringles potato chip can, respectively. The table itself is like none at which I have ever dined, low to the ground with its characters surrounding it on the floor. There is both symmetry and chaos in this frame. The characters are equally balanced in the shot, but they surround an asymmetrical mess below. I look at my desk at which I write this, the monitor stands in the middle, a lamp at left, a file organizer of similar dimensions at right. But while there is balance with regard to the primary objects atop the desk (like the characters surrounding the dining table in the still shot above) there are papers, books, pens, cords, and more, cluttering the area in between. I guess what I am trying to get at with this humble analysis of space, is simply that Hong Sang-soo's settings look very real and very relatable, to the extent that even the objects that I have never seen or touched before (i.e. the small green liquor bottles) have a sense of importance about them; there is a universality to their mere existence in the frame just as they are, completely unstylized. And that is sort of what it's like to watch a Hong Sang-soo film.
Frost/Nixon - (2008) - Film
Seen: Thursday, January 8, 2009
If you know me you know I am a Nixon junkie; if you don't know me, let me introduce myself: my name is Pamela and I am a Richard Nixon junkie. My feelings on old Tricky Dick are well documented on this site and finally (one of the greater feats of 2008), in book form, "Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema" Ed. Christina Lee, by Continuum Press. You can find my piece "Zero Percent Chance of Rain: The Watergate History and All The President's Men" in chapter 3. I think that book has gone down in price on Amazon.com, but if you're still strapped for cash, wait for the cheaper paperback.Anyway, to touch on the movie at hand, Frost/Nixon, I have a few ideas about this movie that primarily concern the question of "why?" I'm currently developing more formal thoughts on this and the greater topic of Nixon, so stay tuned for that. We'll see what happens with it. At the very least I'll post it here for your reading pleasure at a later date.
The Red Shoes - (1948) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, January 10, 2009
For years dancer friends would remind me of how no movie about dance is ever really about dance, in either rehearsal or production form. Though I can think of movies that have been stamped with the dancer's satisfactory approval (The Company, 2003), I can think of many more that dancers despise for its untruthful portrayal of the process (Center Stage, 2000; Save the Last Dance, 2001). For me, a mere wanna-be ballerina twirling on her living room floor in tube socks, the task is simpler; and I have to be frank when I say that movies starring dancers as characters in a narrative have been, for me, less about dance than they have been about love, politics, social class, or the exuberant expression of emotion; dance is usually just the occasion from which a story or character evolves.Before I watched Powell-Pressburger's ballerina film The Red Shoes (1948) I had one expectation: color, bright, vivid Technicolor, an expectation that it met and exceeded. Its chromatic aesthetics aside, it's a movie whose dance is analogous to the rises and falls of its characters; in other words, it's a story as much as it is a story about dance. Perhaps it does not present you with a display that says it is an exact replication of the day in the life of a dancer, but it describes it subtly enough to satisfy, and then bombards you with a love story as magical as its filmic reconstruction of staged ballet sequences. Mwah!
Milk - (2008) - Film
Seen: Sunday, January 11, 2009
I wrote, as a good film scholar friend has dubbed it, a "brain dump" on Gus van Sant's late 2008 release Milk at my other blog, Scarlett Cinema. I want to talk more about this in the scope of the wider biopic genre (is it technically a genre?), but for the sake of time I have to hold off on that until a little later.Let's Watch Lumiere!
Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday, January 17, 2009
The wonderful compilation of early cinema pictures on Kino's The Movies Begin, Vol. 1 disc is essential to watch and rewatch, then rewatch again. Come on, almost all of these movies are a matter of seconds in length, I know you've got the time. I watched each Louis and Auguste Lumiere film on the disc, but the ones below are favorites, a few of which were shown in class (all released from 1895-1896):- Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory
- Baby's Breakfast
- Swimming In The Sea
- Children Digging For Clams
On the same disc are whole swaths of Thomas Edison/W. K. L. Dickson shorts too. Here are the predictable highlights (all released between 1894-1897):
- The Kiss
- Serpentine Dances
- Sandow
- Seminary Girls
I also caught up with George Melies's short film fantastique, A Trip To The Moon (1902). My first acquaintance with this movie was made sometime in 1996 with the Smashing Pumpkins music video that is based on it, "Tonight, Tonight." It's a great song, and a fantastic contemporary reproduction of a movie long forgotten and erased from popular memory. Of course, when my own film school days came later it hit me like a ton of bricks that the MTV video wasn't an original idea. But looking at Melies's movie now in 2009 for the first time in a number of years I found it easier to watch and had a greater appreciation of its inventive stop-motion technique. Previous versions of the movie were screened for me in classes sans voice-over narration, which is one of the original elements of the film when it was screened in 1902. So this truly was a moment of seeing a movie again for the first time.And Then There Was Griffith
Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday, January 17, 2009
Griffith, Griffith, Griffith, oh, D.W. Griffith--what is it about you, how did you just get cinema right off the bat? You just got it. Here we are now, almost 100 years out from the time your movies were made, and your depth of composition is jaw dropping, your actors magnificent (especially the sublime Gish sisters), your subject matter so provocative. You did it, David Wark!Also from Kino is an equally important and well-put-together DVD of Griffith's Biograph films. Below is a list of those that I watched, and one--A Corner In Wheat--that was screened in class:
- Those Awful Hats (1909)
- A Corner In Wheat (1909)
- The New York Hat (1912)
- The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
And a Picture Diary of the Rest
Silent Clowns
Police - (1916) - DVD
Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday, January 17, 2009
Cops - (1922) - DVD
Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday January 17, 2009
Silent Ford!
3 Bad Men - (1926) - DVD (from the "Ford at Fox" set! Wow!)
Seen: Sunday, January 18, 2009
Ah, this is Johnny Ford. (I couldn't find a decent still of 3 Bad Men...)Dancing on Air
Swing Time - (1936) - DVD
Seen: Wednesday, January 21, 2009
It's so surreal...
Un Chien andalou - (1929) - DVD
Seen: Friday, January 23 and Saturday, January 24, 2009
MONTAGE!
The Man With A Movie Camera - (1929) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, January 22 and Saturday, January 24, 2009
Somnambulistastic
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - (1919, 1920) - DVD
Seen: Friday, January 23 and Saturday, January 24, 2009
Old Story/New Western
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - (2007) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, January 24, 2009
A Biopic Masterwork
Che - (2008) - Film (double-bill roadshow version!)
Seen: Sunday, January 25, 2009
More thoughts to come quickly on this...Good Mornin'!
Singin' In The Rain - (1952) - DVD
Seen: Tuesday, January 27 and Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Portraits of the American Land
The Plow That Broke The Plains - (1936) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, January 29 and Saturday, January 31, 2009
Stagecoach - (1939) - DVD
Seen: Wednesday, January 28 and Saturday January 31, 2009
See you at the end of February!
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