The Personal Recommendation Hall of Fame III: Foreign Language Edition

Although I'm a completely sober teetotaler, there are parts of this film that always make me think "I should probably be high right now".

But yeah, I'm a huge fan of this one. In other news, the pope is catholic.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

If you watch the battle scene really closely, you will catch a scene that I feel Spielberg cribbed when he made Saving Private Ryan.

Exactly. She is not in a place, emotionally or maturity-wise, to handle the intensity of what he is going through. There is literally one scene where he corners her against a building. And while we understand where his desperation comes from, she doesn't.

I liked that she was empathetic, but not some magical balm for the main character.

It is up there for me--that's for sure.

You've seen High and Low then, right? That is my favorite. And the train scene has been the, ahem, inspiration for many other films (I'm looking at you, Along Came a Spider!).

'The person who nominated Farewell My Concubine apologizes that it contained a scene of animal cruelty. They did not remember this was in the film and it was not on purpose. They are sorry.'

That one is from the early 60s so I'll be getting to it in April sometime.

I don't know what you're talking about

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Day for Night

Films about films can be really interesting, and this one delves into the filmmaking process quite a lot – I felt like I learned a lot, even though it was fictional! I didn’t understand the significance of the title until it is explained within the film to be a filmmaking term about shooting night time scenes in the day – in French, La Nuit Americane. There was some similarity with the Michael Winterbottom film A Cock and Bull Story – which I now suppose must have been influenced by this film.

What I find less appealing is French films where everyone sleeps with everyone else and they spend a lot of time talking to each other about love but without meaning any of it I always find it tiresome – I almost agree with Madame Lajoie who says, “ You call that a business? You've no morals. Everybody sleeps with everyone! What is it but a dirty lie.” However, in this film it’s almost part of the joke, as it were, or the commentary on films and filmmaking, the various affairs of the cast and crew coming close to derailing the film they are making on several occasions.

I liked that the film didn't take itself too seriously and showed both the love of moviemaking and the ridiculousness of it - the scene in which Severine suggests she can just say numbers instead of her lines, Joelle's line, "I'd drop a guy for a film. I'd never drop a film for a guy!", the whole bit with the cat that can't act.

I've seen that twice and quite like it

Also I liked the music. Forgot to mention that.

Holy balls done already? That has to be the quickest anybody has gotten a hall done.

I figured it was unintentional, and considering it was one minute out of a 3-hour film I'm not surprised they forgot about it. It isn't a "centerpiece" moment of the film.

In fact, it's not even directly mentioned on either of the sites that I use to screen for animal cruelty (IMDB guide or Doesthedogdie.com). No ill will toward the nominator.

La Grande Illusion, 1937

During WW1, French soldiers Marechal (Jean Gabin) and Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) are captured and end up in a prisoner of war camp run by the German military. Meeting up with another soldier called Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), the men begin to plan an escape. Against these plans, we watch the relationship develop between the Boeldieu and the man running the camp, Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), based on the fact that both men are upper class.

It's hard to go wrong with a prison escape movie, in my opinion, and what makes this film special is the way that it chooses to explore the anxieties and divisions around class rather than around nationalities.

In fact, the whole film often hinges on questions of elements that are entirely invented by people. In one scene, a character looks across a border and notes that you don't really see where the one country becomes another. "That is because men create frontiers" remarks his companion. It is a great moment because the distinction seems so absurd--there is this invisible line randomly drawn--and yet the lives and fates of the characters might rest on that invisible line.

Likewise the film portrays characters with an acute awareness of class, coming from both the lower class and upper class characters. Marechal and Rosenthal explicitly discuss at one point the alienation they feel from Boeldieu, chalking it up at first to "education", but then going on to say that there is a permanent way that society marks them as separate. "If we had no money we'd be beggars, but he'd still be a lord" remarks one character.

And on the flip side, we see the opposing viewpoints of Boeldieu and Rauffenstein. Rauffenstein sees his rank as something to be proud of. He is sad about the fact that the end of the war will mark the end of the aristocracy. Rauffenstein has been horribly damaged physically from the war, and walks around with a permanent neck brace, yet even them he bemoans being given an assignment away from the front. He repeatedly speaks about the noble enemy, and tries to keep the scope of the war in the field of "the pursuits of gentlemen". Boeldieu, on the other hand, takes a more cynical, almost fatalistic viewpoint on his own destiny. We repeatedly see Boeldieu chafe against displays of class privilege, such as openly questioning why his word is taken during a search while the other soldiers have their things rifled through.

I would not necessarily say that this film is anti-war, but more so that it sees war as yet another human invention, and a harmful one at that. Later in the film we meet a woman whose husband and brothers have all been lost in a battle --"Our greatest triumph," she says even-handedly--and now raises a child on her own.

And while this doesn't fit in anywhere else in the review, I did want to remark on one of my favorite moments in the film. (No spoilers!). Toward the beginning of the film the prisoners are putting together a theatrical production and they are provided with costumes. One of the soldiers comes into the room dressed in women's clothing, and slowly the other men becomes silent and just turn to stare at him. It would have been easy to play this as a comedic moment or make some homophobic joke, but instead the film lets us sit in the silence with the soldiers. You can just feel that all of the men are missing the women they left behind, and rather than being a punchline, it turns into a sweet, sad emotional beat.

This is a unique take on the prison-escape film, and specifically an interesting lens through which to view the prisoner-of-war escape film. I am still mulling over how I feel about the last 10 minutes or so.

I had heard of this but didn't know much about it except that it's a swipe at the rich. This is kind of a difficult movie to sum up because it's not a movie about plot and it's not a movie that builds up it's characters. So what's it about? I don't really know. Buñuel messing with people again? It's more a collection of scenes with a common thread running through them - starvation. The six upper crust characters are constantly setting up dinner dates in which something happens and nobody gets anything to eat, followed by a scene of the six of them walking a long, country road which I can only guess is a nod to the Greek legend off Sisyphus. Or maybe not. Maybe it's nothing more than showing them out of their comfort zone and completely exposed, ripe for the picking. They also dream a lot or have nightmares, depending on how you look at it, usually involving their deepest fear(s) ("I don't know how but they found me!" Doc Brown).

The movie is seriously silly. It's a comedy but it's not ha-ha funny. I haven't seen a lot of Buñuel but of the films I have seen, that seems to be his MO. Be funny without being funny and push some buttons along the way. It's a tricky strategy but I think he manages to pull it off - again. There's maybe one scene that had me really chuckling and that was the I'm eating that piece of lamb even if it kills me scene. Once I realized what one of you MoFo'ers had gotten me into I enjoyed this quite a bit.

I liked both of those, but I liked Charm more.

I think Takoma in the 24th. I wanted to beat that. lol

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Letterboxd

I feel like such a slacker at only 3 films watched You've guys have really watched a lot of neat sounding films lately! I haven't been commenting much because I have seen many of these but I hope to get a couple more watched real soon.

Contempt, 1963

A screenwriter named Paul (Michel Piccoli) is hired by a blowhard American producer named Prokosch (Jack Palance) to help rework the script for a film adaptation of The Odyssey being made by Fritz Lang (played by Lang himself!!). But things quickly go off the rails when Prokosch expresses interest in Paul's wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul almost seems to indulge in Prokosch going after Camille. This drives a wedge between Paul and Camille.

I am very grateful to the person (I think it was @crumbsroom) who told me, regarding Godard, that I had to see the alienation as intentional. This was a critical reframing for me as I was constantly frustrated by my inability to connect with Godard's films. In Contempt this aspect is amplified as there is also a meta element of critiquing the film industry itself and the crude constraints placed on directorial artistry.

The best realized aspect of the film is the quick decay of the relationship between Camille and Paul, best displayed in a long fight between the couple after Paul lets Prokosch drive alone in a car with Camille. In a disagreement that spans various rooms--and various states of dress and undress--in their home and evolving emotions of both characters, Camille outlines the way that her feelings toward her husband have gone from love to contempt. One suspects that this is something that has maybe been in the works for a while, but the argument shows how an incident can act as a catalyst and accelerator for such an emotional shift.

It is also delightful seeing Lang as himself, even if Godard seems to be using him in part as a stand in for himself, bemoaning the way that the film industry must always interfere and reduce art to the lowest common denominator. In one scene, Prokosch throws a fit while reviewing footage that Lang has shot.

Even with that critical reframing that I spoke about earlier, I still find the alienation of Godard's films challenging. The most admiration I ever feel for them is a sort of abstract, "Well, I guess he . . . accomplished what he was trying to do" feeling. The well-realized dynamic--and chief model of alienation in the film--between Camille and Paul doesn't quite fit, in my opinion, with the rest of the movie, which feels more winking and over the top. And certain aspects of the meta critique, such as the numerous, numerous sequences in which the film lingeringly pans over Bardot's nude body, just didn't work that well for me. It is too like all of the other pandering nudity you get in other films to distinguish it in any meaningful way.

As with much of the Godard I've seen, I appreciated elements of it but didn't really click with it on an emotional level.

I watched Rocco and His Brothers (1960) today. Directed by Luchino Visconti, the film stars Alain Delon as Rocco Parondi, a young man who moves with his mother and brothers to Milan. The bonds of family are tested when Rocco and one of his brothers fall for the same woman. The film is beautiful shot and well acted, but it did feel overlong to me. I don't think it needed to be 2 hours and 59 minutes. The story could have been told just as effectively in less time. Overall, a good movie, but I don't think it is Visconti's best film. For me, his best film is Senso. My rating is a .

Umm, this was pretty ****in' amazing. Upcoming review, probably tomorrow, but damn

I'm at 2, so you're not the slackerest