2015年11月16日
A Few of My Favorite Things
Hello, all—
It seems like everyone is posting about their favorite things this week! Leigh posted about The Hunger Games, Taylor posted about her collectibles, Sue posted about snow, and Alex posted about Warren Zevon. As for me, I enjoyed The Hunger Games books, I don't really collect anything (because I am a boring person), I also love snow, and my favorite song is The Arrogant Worms' "I Am Cow." (I don't know much about music, but I know that a "performance" by The Arrogant Worms is not quite like anything else you'll ever see.)
I have many favorite things, but one of my favorite favorites is old movies. Seeing how the art of film has changed over the past 100+ years is fascinating... and there are so many great classic movies people don't watch anymore! Let me recommend a few that everybody can enjoy:
5 (tie). Orson Welles, Touch of Evil (1958), and Carol Reed, The Third Man (1949)
I couldn't decide which film noir I liked better, but both of these movies have Orson Welles, so I'll call it a tie! Touch of Evil has one of the greatest opening shots in cinema: in a single cut, we watch a man plant a bomb on a car and run away. The car drives through a lively town and crosses the border between the United States and Mexico, and then—it explodes! Solving the mystery requires American and Mexican police to work together, and the movie has a lot to say about racism, identity, and the fact that sometimes, "justice" is also "evil." Orson Welles plays a hugely obese cop who spends most of the movie eating chocolate bars. "It was this or the cigarettes," he explains, "and the doctor told me to give up the tobacco." Charlton Heston is in the movie too—as a Mexican!
In The Third Man, a writer travels to Vienna just after World War II to find his old friend, Harry Lime. (Harry Lime is played by a much thinner Orson Welles!) When he arrives, he hears that Lime is dead... or is alive, and helping sick children... or is a vicious criminal! Who is Harry Lime, anyway?! This movie is so good I can't spoil anything for you. All I can say is that Orson Welles gets one of the best speeches ever: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce?
"The cuckoo clock!"
That speech was ad-libbed. All hail Orson Welles!
4. Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
No one watches silent movies anymore, and many of them seem very strange to us. But The Passion of Joan of Arc is like no other silent movie. It was the first film ever shot using mostly modern close-ups. It was the first film to use "natural" make-up to make its actors look like people, not movie stars. It was the first film to use anything like "method acting." The star, Jeanne Falconetti, shaved her head, knelt on hard stone floors for hours, and acted the same scenes over and over again to achieve the best possible performance. Her suffering in the movie is real! Even today, the movie is an intense emotional experience. You owe it to yourself to watch this one!
3. Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows (1969)
Army of Shadows is a very unique World War II movie. It follows the members of the French Resistance to Nazi occupation, as they try their best to fight an overwhelming force of oppression. They are "heroes"—but they are also evil in their own ways. They plant bombs, kill their countrymen, and sometimes must commit suicide rather than be captured. Sometimes, people doing the "right thing" wind up committing terrible crimes, but that doesn't make their actions any less "necessary." This movie will make you think about how even a seemingly black-or-white war like WWII is all in shades of gray.
Army of Shadows stars Lino Ventura, maybe my very favorite actor. The man's face is an entire movie! He gave another great performance in Claude Sautet's amazing 1960 crime movie Classe Tous Risques, which is about a "noble gangster" on the run from the cops. Not many people know about the movie, so it's a "hidden gem"!
2. Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
Now here is a movie you've all heard of! But why is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly so famous? Simply because it is so. Darn. Good. I have shown this movie to my grandparents, to junior high school students in Korea, to all my friends, even to my sister, who hates all movies. Everyone finds something to love here. Clint Eastwood trading barbs with men even dirtier than he is? Check. A commentary on the sheer stupidity of the American Civil War? Check. The most memorable musical theme ever written? Check. Spectacular high-stakes gunfights? Wonderfully evil double-crossing? A buried treasure? Murder in the bath? Jailbreaks? Epic battles? Vengeance? Check, check, check, check, check, check, and check! The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly may be nearly three hours long, but trust me... you'll wish it were six!
1 (tie). Kenji Mizoguchi, Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and Akira Kurosawa, Red Beard (1965)
I'm sorry there have been so many European films on this list—I like movies from everywhere! My two favorite Japanese films are very different. Ugetsu Monogatari is a beautiful, dreamlike ghost story. It's about two peasants who decide to leave their village (and their families) and make their fortunes. One tries to become a samurai; the other is taken in by a mysterious woman in an almost-ruined house. Both discover that they don't understand their own desires. The final ten minutes of this movie contain my personal favorite shot, maybe the greatest ever filmed. It is impossible to watch without crying. When I watched this movie in America, one of our Japanese exchange students walked in half an hour before the end, sat down, finished the movie, then stood up, got the disc out of the DVD player, and went off to watch the rest. He couldn't talk, because he was too emotional. The movie is that good.
Red Beard is an honest-to-goodness melodrama, but it will also make you cry—and laugh, and wonder if you can't try to live a better life. Set in the Edo period, the movie is about an arrogant young samurai doctor who is "banished" to a clinic run by Dr. Kyojō Niide, nicknamed "Red Beard." Niide is played by Toshiro Mifune, in his greatest performance. Stubborn, brutal, often just short of abusive, Red Beard personifies a "harsh mercy" that is amazing to watch. The film has little "plot"; instead, it's a series of episodes in which we watch the young doctor learn that status is not everything, that life is what we make of it, and that compassion is an irresistible force just as strong as evil. These episodes are heart-stoppingly powerful, as only Kurosawa can make them. In one (funny) episode, Red Beard calmly disables six thugs who try to attack him, snapping their bones in the most horrible way... and then walks around examining their injuries and muttering, "but this is awful! Awful!" In another (moving) episode, a dying old man thrusts his hands up out of his futon as he screams his departed wife's name, the shadow he casts upon the wall dwarfing the faces of those gathered around him and, for one moment, connecting all the living and the dead. (Red Beard was a disaster during filming, and Kurosawa and Mifune never worked together again. Most critics still think it's one of Kurosawa's weakest movies. Even so, it's one of my favorites!)
...I could write about Read Beard forever. I also have to mention that I think Kurosawa's other Great movie is 1985's Ran, which is based on Shakespeare's King Lear. (My favorite Shakespeare play!) Ran is artistically the best movie ever made (and I can prove it)... but the message is the opposite of Red Beard's! In Ran, human beings are hopeless savages who don't understand compassion at all. It's so interesting to watch the two films together and compare Kurosawa's two ideas.
*****
That's it—next week I won't write more than 150 words. I hope some of you watch at least one of these movies. I promise, if you do, you will enjoy it!
—Matthew
It seems like everyone is posting about their favorite things this week! Leigh posted about The Hunger Games, Taylor posted about her collectibles, Sue posted about snow, and Alex posted about Warren Zevon. As for me, I enjoyed The Hunger Games books, I don't really collect anything (because I am a boring person), I also love snow, and my favorite song is The Arrogant Worms' "I Am Cow." (I don't know much about music, but I know that a "performance" by The Arrogant Worms is not quite like anything else you'll ever see.)
I have many favorite things, but one of my favorite favorites is old movies. Seeing how the art of film has changed over the past 100+ years is fascinating... and there are so many great classic movies people don't watch anymore! Let me recommend a few that everybody can enjoy:
5 (tie). Orson Welles, Touch of Evil (1958), and Carol Reed, The Third Man (1949)
I couldn't decide which film noir I liked better, but both of these movies have Orson Welles, so I'll call it a tie! Touch of Evil has one of the greatest opening shots in cinema: in a single cut, we watch a man plant a bomb on a car and run away. The car drives through a lively town and crosses the border between the United States and Mexico, and then—it explodes! Solving the mystery requires American and Mexican police to work together, and the movie has a lot to say about racism, identity, and the fact that sometimes, "justice" is also "evil." Orson Welles plays a hugely obese cop who spends most of the movie eating chocolate bars. "It was this or the cigarettes," he explains, "and the doctor told me to give up the tobacco." Charlton Heston is in the movie too—as a Mexican!
In The Third Man, a writer travels to Vienna just after World War II to find his old friend, Harry Lime. (Harry Lime is played by a much thinner Orson Welles!) When he arrives, he hears that Lime is dead... or is alive, and helping sick children... or is a vicious criminal! Who is Harry Lime, anyway?! This movie is so good I can't spoil anything for you. All I can say is that Orson Welles gets one of the best speeches ever: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce?
"The cuckoo clock!"
That speech was ad-libbed. All hail Orson Welles!
4. Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
No one watches silent movies anymore, and many of them seem very strange to us. But The Passion of Joan of Arc is like no other silent movie. It was the first film ever shot using mostly modern close-ups. It was the first film to use "natural" make-up to make its actors look like people, not movie stars. It was the first film to use anything like "method acting." The star, Jeanne Falconetti, shaved her head, knelt on hard stone floors for hours, and acted the same scenes over and over again to achieve the best possible performance. Her suffering in the movie is real! Even today, the movie is an intense emotional experience. You owe it to yourself to watch this one!
3. Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows (1969)
Army of Shadows is a very unique World War II movie. It follows the members of the French Resistance to Nazi occupation, as they try their best to fight an overwhelming force of oppression. They are "heroes"—but they are also evil in their own ways. They plant bombs, kill their countrymen, and sometimes must commit suicide rather than be captured. Sometimes, people doing the "right thing" wind up committing terrible crimes, but that doesn't make their actions any less "necessary." This movie will make you think about how even a seemingly black-or-white war like WWII is all in shades of gray.
Army of Shadows stars Lino Ventura, maybe my very favorite actor. The man's face is an entire movie! He gave another great performance in Claude Sautet's amazing 1960 crime movie Classe Tous Risques, which is about a "noble gangster" on the run from the cops. Not many people know about the movie, so it's a "hidden gem"!
2. Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
Now here is a movie you've all heard of! But why is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly so famous? Simply because it is so. Darn. Good. I have shown this movie to my grandparents, to junior high school students in Korea, to all my friends, even to my sister, who hates all movies. Everyone finds something to love here. Clint Eastwood trading barbs with men even dirtier than he is? Check. A commentary on the sheer stupidity of the American Civil War? Check. The most memorable musical theme ever written? Check. Spectacular high-stakes gunfights? Wonderfully evil double-crossing? A buried treasure? Murder in the bath? Jailbreaks? Epic battles? Vengeance? Check, check, check, check, check, check, and check! The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly may be nearly three hours long, but trust me... you'll wish it were six!
1 (tie). Kenji Mizoguchi, Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and Akira Kurosawa, Red Beard (1965)
I'm sorry there have been so many European films on this list—I like movies from everywhere! My two favorite Japanese films are very different. Ugetsu Monogatari is a beautiful, dreamlike ghost story. It's about two peasants who decide to leave their village (and their families) and make their fortunes. One tries to become a samurai; the other is taken in by a mysterious woman in an almost-ruined house. Both discover that they don't understand their own desires. The final ten minutes of this movie contain my personal favorite shot, maybe the greatest ever filmed. It is impossible to watch without crying. When I watched this movie in America, one of our Japanese exchange students walked in half an hour before the end, sat down, finished the movie, then stood up, got the disc out of the DVD player, and went off to watch the rest. He couldn't talk, because he was too emotional. The movie is that good.
Red Beard is an honest-to-goodness melodrama, but it will also make you cry—and laugh, and wonder if you can't try to live a better life. Set in the Edo period, the movie is about an arrogant young samurai doctor who is "banished" to a clinic run by Dr. Kyojō Niide, nicknamed "Red Beard." Niide is played by Toshiro Mifune, in his greatest performance. Stubborn, brutal, often just short of abusive, Red Beard personifies a "harsh mercy" that is amazing to watch. The film has little "plot"; instead, it's a series of episodes in which we watch the young doctor learn that status is not everything, that life is what we make of it, and that compassion is an irresistible force just as strong as evil. These episodes are heart-stoppingly powerful, as only Kurosawa can make them. In one (funny) episode, Red Beard calmly disables six thugs who try to attack him, snapping their bones in the most horrible way... and then walks around examining their injuries and muttering, "but this is awful! Awful!" In another (moving) episode, a dying old man thrusts his hands up out of his futon as he screams his departed wife's name, the shadow he casts upon the wall dwarfing the faces of those gathered around him and, for one moment, connecting all the living and the dead. (Red Beard was a disaster during filming, and Kurosawa and Mifune never worked together again. Most critics still think it's one of Kurosawa's weakest movies. Even so, it's one of my favorites!)
...I could write about Read Beard forever. I also have to mention that I think Kurosawa's other Great movie is 1985's Ran, which is based on Shakespeare's King Lear. (My favorite Shakespeare play!) Ran is artistically the best movie ever made (and I can prove it)... but the message is the opposite of Red Beard's! In Ran, human beings are hopeless savages who don't understand compassion at all. It's so interesting to watch the two films together and compare Kurosawa's two ideas.
*****
That's it—next week I won't write more than 150 words. I hope some of you watch at least one of these movies. I promise, if you do, you will enjoy it!
—Matthew
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