Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Sorry Sexington, I was just more emotionally engaged by Valley...



(shrug)

*Tears apart bedroom in iconically dramatic fashion*

How Green is My Valley is a puddle of piss next to Kane.


But, with two or three exceptions, I also think that maybe Ford isn't for me.

Columbus - Finally got a chance to watch this. Being a fan of John Cho's work in the Harold and Kumar and Star Trek franchises I'd been set on seeing this since it first came out. But then after catching After Yang it only made me want to watch it more.

Cho plays Jin Lee, the son of Jae Yong Lee, a celebrated professor of architecture visiting Columbus, Indiana to lecture on it's abundance of postmodernist buildings. While there with his longtime assistant Eleanor (Parker Posey) the professor falls ill and into a coma. Jin flies in even though he and his father are estranged. He eventually makes the acquaintance of Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young woman with aspirations of becoming an architect herself. She refuses to leave her hometown however, fearing that her recovering addict mother will relapse.

This is a slow moving and meditative film. Not a lot happens but it's charm lies in the slow unfolding of a friendship between two seemingly disparate characters. Two people who happen to meet at a point in their lives that provides each with a unique perspective into each other's circumstances.

Director Kogonada has only done the two films but they're both such beautifully and painstakingly wrought creations that I'm really looking forward to his future projects.

85/100

I think it's unfortunately on apple tv+ (ie the service no one has), but he's directing episodes of Pachinko on there. I don't know anything about the series other than Kogonada is directing a episodes of it.


I'm still kicking myself for not catching up with Columbus when I had the chance when it was on the Criterion Channel, and that was even after hearing it was really good for a couple of years.

I was going to mention Pachinko but the one review I read complained about the subpar subtitles. I hope he does more movies.

Aw, really? I like How Green Was My Valley quite a bit. It's definitely one of my favorite Fords. It's not as great as Citizen Kane, but that's an unfair comparison for most films, tbh.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

What are the exceptions?

It's fair when the Academy voted for it as the superior film.

News of the World, 2020

Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks) retired after serving in the Civil War and now makes a living traveling from town to town and reading news from around the country and the world. Kidd ends up reluctantly tasked with returning a girl named Johanna (Helena Zengel)--the child of German immigrants who was captured by Kiowa Indians when she was very young--to her surviving extended family. But political tensions and stretches of wild landscape make their journey a dangerous one.

Right off the bat this film was at a bit of a disadvantage with me because I'm one of those people who can say I read and loved the book. Obviously adapting a book faithfully or making major changes can both be valid strategies. And I acknowledge that judging a movie against a book is not necessarily fair. But I couldn't really separate the two, and it definitely left me feeling like there was a missed chance here.

On the positive side, Hanks is a warm and engaging presence. You can really believe that a frightened kid would come to trust him and quickly grow fond of him. Zengel is also really good as Johanna, a young woman who has witnessed more violence in her first ten years of life than anyone should every have to see. The best moments in the movie come when it slows down and lets the two characters play off of each other. Sometimes those moments are comedic, as when Johanna decides to sample all of Kidd's food rations and discovers his tin of sugar much to her delight. Other times they are more serious. In one of the best moments in the whole film, a conversation about language (Johanna speaks in Kiowa, Kidd only speaks English) takes a sudden turn when Johanna blurts out a phrase in German. Her face suddenly goes blank. It takes Kidd a full beat to realize that the language has brought with it memories of her family and their fate. Kidd can do nothing for her but keep the wagon moving.

I also liked the way that Johanna's cultural otherness is shown. Too often, the trope is to show a person from a tribe as being uncivilized, and we the audience and the characters in the film get to goggle at their bad and strange manners. But here we get a much more respectful portrayal of cultural difference. It's Johanna singing songs in the Kiowa language, or her style of caring for the horses. My favorite of these touches was simply the way that Johanna points at things. Not palm down with her index finger, but palm up and using her pinky finger to gesture. It is a way of showing difference without judgement and I really liked it.

The film does also manage to capture the wild lawlessness of the different locations they must traverse in order to get to their destination. There are stretches of lonely road between the different towns, and some of those towns are full of people who are still angry and embittered about the events of the Civil War.

There's also something really interesting in the way that Kidd's job works. He acts as a curator of information, deciding which stories to highlight and how to present them to the crowd. While I think that this dynamic is illustrated with a bit more subtlety in the book, there's no denying the pointed commentary of a man who rules over a small town who decides to print his own newspaper glorifying himself. The sequence where Kidd navigates dealing with this man is interesting and tense, even if it lacks nuance.

I understand why certain changes were made from the book, but I feel that it ultimately makes for a less potent narrative. In the book, Kidd is elderly, I believe in his 70s. While the word "passive" isn't at all right, he is a man who picks his battles very carefully and works hard to avoid conflict. As he and Johanna travel on their journey, they are witnessing a nation in the throes of trauma and rapid change, something that echoes Johanna's own identity crisis. The film tries to make the main characters a lot more active, and while I understand this impulse, it makes the story feel very episodic. In the face of the gentle power of the scenes between just Hanks and Zengel, the sequences where they interact with others feel kind of cluttered and busy.

I'm sure that a more faithful adaptation of the book would have been criticized for its simplicity, but it's frustrating to see how many changes were made to make it more "exciting". Too often those changes un-center the delicate development of the relationship between the two main characters. It also makes certain plot points seem incredibly improbable. Kidd is obviously a very smart man, but are we really to expect that he would pick up such grammatically correct and complex Kiowa just from his time with Johanna? Similarly, the characters are repeatedly shown surprising kindness in locations and situations where such actions seem unlikely.

Not bad. Honestly, I suspect I'd have liked it a bit more (not a lot more) if I didn't have such fond feelings for the source material.

Three Bad Men, Stagecoach, The Informer, The Searchers

It's something I need to revisit, because I remember the time I watched it, it was only because it was literally the only movie I hadn't seen out of a pile of free DVDs my friend gave me. I might not have been in the mood.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)


I decided to pause my restriction to only watch Spanish-language movies, and so I decided to watch something GOOD.

So what could be better than re-watching some classic Miyazaki? It has been almost a decade since the last time I re-watched Kiki, and I think this is like the 5th or 6th time I watched it; it is without a doubt one of the most well-executed films (animated or not) ever made. It also is perhaps Miyazaki's most Miyazaki film featuring all his typical subjects except his (obnoxious) environmentalism, this was the 5th film he made, and it represents Miyazaki at the peak of his creative powers. Despite the fact the film contains no attempt at heavy drama at all the emotions portrayed in this film feel so genuine that I even cried a little bit when it ended.

The fact he produced this timeless piece only a year after his other masterpiece (Totoro) is an amazing testament to the artistic powers of Miyazaki himself, as he is the one who almost single-handedly made animation into a fully developed art form. Miyazaki is, without a doubt, one of the greatest artists in human history.

I guess. From what I've seen though, Citizen Kane is pretty much always ranked higher than How Green Was My Valley on GOAT lists and is generally considered to be the better of the two films (it's also often considered by some to be the single best movie of all time). I don't think the same applies to Ford's film, and I wouldn't say the two films are rivals in the 'they're held in roughly the same level of regard' sense.

Tough to pick a quote when a short film is entirely silent. Still, that quote from Roman emperor came to mind as I was thinking about this. I doubt it is what director and co-writer Simon Staho had in mind when writing and filming it, or choosing a title, but it is what kept coming back to me. The choices we make *now* will undoubtedly have repercussions, one way or the other, in our future and other people's future.

Now follows a man, Jakob (Mads Mikkelsen), making one of those choices when he marries Lisa (Elin Klinga). The thing is that Jakob eventually develops affections for someone else, Adam (Mikael Persbrandt), which maybe means that Jakob's choice was made for "now"; perhaps to please those around him, but not realizing that what he did *now* will echo into eternity.

There are some striking visuals and some powerful elements in this short film. However, the cold and distant direction doesn't really leave much space for a connection. Mikkelsen is great, which is a lot for a role that has no dialogue and demands a mostly stoic and emotionless performance. I just wish there could've been more for me to latch on to and give more weight to the powerful elements.

Grade:

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Copyright 1946 Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=86583328

My Darling Clementine - (1946)

I was reading an old interview last night, the subject of which was great cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg. I only mention this because at one stage he explained that in the old studio system, the aim was not to call attention to cinematography as an artform. So few films had any really great bravura shots. John Ford though - in his movies you see compositions and shots and are always thinking to yourself, "Hey, that's nice." My Darling Clementine is so easy to watch because of how it looks, and because of four memorable performances from Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature and Cathy Downs. If you know anything at all about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, you'll know what to expect - but Ford had an advantage here, for the real Wyatt Earp spent his last years carousing with a lot of John Ford's players, and would often recite what went down to Ford himself - drunk of course. So this is a kind of version that emanates directly from a boastful (and probably self-congratulatory) Wyatt Earp. It was great to watch. I kind of choked on my corn flakes when Earp yells out, "Okay, who gave this Indian liquor??" though.

7.5/10

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Have you seen:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Sergeant Rutledge
My Darling Clementine
Grapes of Wrath
Fort Apache

Night and Fog is a documentary that chronicles many of the events that happened at Nazi concentration camps during The Holocaust. Starting with the rise of Nazi ideology, the documentary offers details of how Jewish people were transported and led into camps, how they carried on their daily lives while imprisoned, and how they were treated, tortured, tested on, and eventually executed.

It is hard to write about this documentary from a filmmaking standpoint and not detour into the events it portrays. Resnais intercalates "modern" footage of the ruins of camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek, with stock footage taken during the Holocaust. The narration by Michel Bouquet offers a somber and melancholic account of the events. It is indeed a neatly constructed documentary.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot and the 5th Short Film HoF thread.

That's probably my #1 film from him.

I'm partial to the Searchers but love both.

I think his biggest Blindspot for me is The Quiet Man. Hoping to see that relatively soon.