#96 - Aparajito (1956, Satyajit Ray)

The second in Ray's Apu trilogy picks up where Pather Panchali left off, with Apu's family picking up and moving from their rural village to the city of Benares along the Ganghes River. Tragedy strikes the Roys again and Apu, now a teenager, gets a scholarship to college in Calcutta, where he gradually grows distant from his mother.

Aparajito is a bit more narratively focused than Pather Panchali, but I liked the debut's wide-eyed wonderment more than the more mature Aparajito, which kind of felt like a lot of coming-of-age films I've already seen (granted, most of which were probably copping Ray's steez). I am excited to see what The World of Apu has in store for me. Tune in next week!

new #100: The Kid

#24 - Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica)

After watching Ray's rural South Asian take on neorealism, I thought I'd view one of de Sica's Italian classics. Umberto D. is the story of an old man who has nothing - money, health, family - except his lovable pooch, Flike. We watch Umberto struggle to raise enough money to pay off his debt to his landlady and keep his apartment.

I'm constantly reminded of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru from the same year. Both directors utilize a symphony of tiny violins to tug at our heartstrings but Kurosawa's hero is trying to achieve something grand, while Umberto is just trying to survive. Ikiru is a movie I admire, but it gets pretty sappy at times. Umberto D. doesn't quite go quite as all out in the melodrama but I dunno, I like melodrama anyway. So, eh, good movie but not great.

new #100: Tristana

#3 - Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)

Charulata and Jalsaghar whet my appetite for this, the main course in Satyajit Ray's filmography, the Apu trilogy. Pather Panchali is the first, and Ray's first film overall. This may be one of the most accomplished debuts in all of film and certainly one that elevated an entire national cinema.

Ray was inspired by Vittorio de Sica and the other Italian neorealists. One senses that influence in the realistic portrayals of poverty and the use of non-actors, but Ray adds a calm, contemplative pace reminiscent of contemporaneous Japanese cinema, which suits the serene forest atmosphere well.

new #100: The Great Dictator

#10 - Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)

Watched this on the Kino double-bill with Our Hospitality, which seemed like a dry run at The General, but Sherlock Jr. blew me away. Best Keaton film I've seen yet and infinitely better than any Chaplin (I rewatched Modern Times last night and it didn't hold up to Buster). Amazing how much humor and imagination can fit into just 45 minutes of screen time.

I'm not sure if this is the first reflexive film-as-dream film ever made, but it seems to anticipate such supreme Mike Ouderkirk favorites as The Wizard of Oz and Mulholland Dr. in structure. Plus the slapstick is just plain funny like when the men try to murder his dream self. Buster keaton was quite the pool player! The obligatory train sequence was an amazing physical performance by Buster or his stunt double. A+++ will watch again and again and again.

new #100: A City of Sadness

#51 - The Music Room (1958, Satyajit Ray)

Nobody watches Satyajit Ray movies anymore. Only the Apu trilogy has been released on DVD in America and those are out of print (supposedly really bad quality too... we'll see, I just rented Pather Panchali today). No news about anything on the horizon, nor any touring retrospectives so I guess we're just stuck with VHS for now.

The Music Room I actually saw on a bootleg DVD that my local library stocked for some reason. It was VHS-quality but with badly-synched subtitles that were always at least one line off. Honestly, I'd have been better off watching a VHS with burnt-in subs. Anywho, thankfully it's not a film I needed subtitles to enjoy as much of the appeal is through the performances of Indian classical music and the magnificent cinematography, reminiscent of Kenji Mizoguchi.

The Music Room is about a feudal lord whose land has eroded from a flood and with it left his wealth and prestige. The new generation is taking over, more westernized, but Roy will have none of it. He basks in past glories and then throws the grandest performance his friends have ever seen with the last rupees he has left. A wonderful film that I would love to see in a decent print with decent subtitles. Dammit Criterion, get your ass in gear!

new #100: October

#9 - Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)

Anyone who follows this blog (which may well be nobody) knows I've been learning to love westerns over the past few months. So yet again, it's another week, another new favorite western. Hawks and Wayne intended this to be a response to High Noon, which they felt was a poor representation of the spirit of a true western sheriff. What could be a reactionary dirge (see: any Duke movie after this), is a fun, character-driven romp. What I love about Rio Bravo is the looseness to the proceedings. There is next to no plot, just a bunch of guys hanging around drinking and smoking and trying not to drink and smoke.

As Sheriff John T. Chance, John Wayne is the straight man amongst a rag-tag gang protecting the town, always responsible and sensible though he can take a joke. Dean Martin is the other lead, a sheriff's deputy struggling with sobriety after a two-year bender. Ricky Nelson is way out of his league as the scrappy young gunslinger taken under Chance's wing. He finally makes himself useful in a totally unnecessary but totally entertaining pair of musical numbers with Martin.

new #100: Aparajito

#55 - Performance (1970, Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg)

The greatest film to come out of the 1960s counterculture, Performance blew me away like few films ever have. A look into the myriad ways of presenting masculinity and male sexuality, Performance starts out as a blistering gangster film only to morph into an extended mushroom trip after macho Chas hides out in Mick Jagger's house, trying to fit in with the weirdo hipsters it houses.

Jagger plays Turner, a reclusive retired rock star who lives in a delapitated mansion in a menage-a-trois with Anita Pallenberg and a little French runaway. The shots of his house are breathtaking, such a seemingly modest-sized home has an endless supply of rooms and corridors to hide in. Nicolas Roeg films always look amazing and this is the best-looking of them all.

This film has been running through my head all day and unfortunately nothing is coming out onto the ol' blog. But trust me, this is top 10 all-time for me.

new #100: Great Expectations

#23 - Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles


Wow, I really thought this would be one of the very last of the movies on my list that I would ever get a chance to see. Thank you Shakespeare in Washington celebration for bringing this to the AFI Silver with Keith Baxter as special guest.

This film is Welles' adaptation of several Shakespeare plays (Henry IV parts 1 & 2 mainly, with bits of Richard III, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor) all featuring the character of Sir John Falstaff, the jovial corpulent companion to Prince Hal. It's the role Welles was born to play, or at least one he had grown into by this time. The man is ENORMOUS in this film. Welles relishes the role, commandeering the frame and wringing out every fat joke and sexual double-entendre from Shakespeare's dialogue.

Welles is such an engaging personality, and such a funny guy, it is surprising he never made many film comedies. Four of the five Falstaff plays are tragedies, with him as comic relief. By centering on Falstaff for the main narrative, Welles has created a comedic version of the Prince Hal/Henry V saga but when the film takes a turn for the tragic near the end, it's all the more heartbreaking.

Keith Baxter played Prince Hal in the film and was in person to discuss working with Welles. He was grateful for the role, which he won in an open audition and launched his career as a respected thespian of stage and screen. He lamented that Chimes at Midnight is so hard to see (a Spanish DVD exists and there is an OOP VHS tape in the U.S., though that may be from a public domain source). He said there is a legal battle over the rights and that the sound must be restored before it gets a rerelease (I concur). He's in Beatrice Welles' camp, as he blamed Oja Kodar for holding up the restoration although it was Bea who caused a big stink over Othello and the recent announcement of a 2008 DVD release of The Magnificent Ambersons implied that she was the road block on that project. Anyway, I'm glad to have seen it on the big screen and I hope it gets a R1 DVD release sooner than later because I want to see it again!

new #100: Limelight

#76 - Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson)

Poor, poor Mouchette. One of my friends once described this film to me as "tearduct porn" and I can certainly see it. The companion film to Au Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette tells the story of a girl with an incomprehensibly bleak existence. Her alcoholic mother is dying and she must care for her constantly bawling baby brother. Her father beats her in public, her music teacher shoves her face into a piano, her classmates tease her and her clogs are about four sizes too big.

One night, Mouchette attempts to break free of her world and gets caught in a downpour in a forest. While there she comes across two men hunting each other and finds herself as both men's alibi in this attempted murder case.

Like Balthazar, it seems to be set in a part of France that time forgot, with Mouchette's father's ancient automobile appearing before any 1960s cars show up. Balthazar feels like the most Bressonian in its acting, at least of the half-dozen or so films of his I've seen. I'd assumed his models became chronologically more statuesque, but Mouchette isn't quite the blank slate of the previous film's Marie. Well, she is and she isn't. Although tears come down Mouchette's face quite often and we even see her laugh at the carnival, her stoic face feels like a reaction to thousands of nights like the one we just witnessed.

Sound always plays an important role in Bresson's films and Mouchette had a different approach in this area than he had previously employed. Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket both utilize first-person narration as well as diaries being written. Mouchette, though having a single tragic protagonist, never explicitly allows her thoughts to be heard. It provides a distance to the character that, rather than isolating us from her, gives the viewer a different approach to her suffering. Furthermore, she rarely speaks and the film has minimal dialogue overall, so one must follow her actions and interpret them as one would.

new #100: Salvatore Giuliano

#92 - Shane (1953, George Stevens)

I watched this one in conjunction with an article I read for a class about structuralism in the western film. Shane was used as the example of the "classic classic western," that exemplifies the genre's conventions to a T. For younger audiences, westerns are often the hardest genre to fully absorb aside from the Leone and Peckinpah anti-westerns. It all comes down to how we view westward expansion in a post-'60s politically correct worldview. It's hard to take Indians as villains and lone gunslingers as heroes, at least not without reservations.

As my blog has shown, I've been watching a lot of the classics of the genre, mainly Ford but I've also begun checking out some Anthony Mann pictures lately too. While I consider myself a fan of westerns these days, I still wasn't too pumped about Shane. Every time I've seen clips from it it seems to be a particularly conservative look at the west and hero worship. But upon seeing it for myself, Shane is not only top-notch genre filmmaking, but a wonderful reflection on how we watch westerns. Joey is every member of the audience watching Shane fight Starrett, shoot up the Riker gang and save the town. And then two hours later he is gone forever, just as we get to know him.

new #100: The Young Girls of Rochefort