I had long wanted to wean myself from series TV and back to more "intentional" viewing, using Netflix. Now that BSG is gone, the only series I'm watching is Lost, and since my partner in crime-drama is gone, I regretfully have the time.
Months past I had rented some older films that it seemed like everyone had seen but me, given the frequency with which their names came up, so I 'flixed them, and then they sat on my desk for months.
Now, one thing you have to know about me, is that when I was a kid, if a movie was black & white, I would refuse to watch it. I was 12 when the first Star Wars film came out, and after that, nothing that came before it held any interest for me, so it was science fiction & horror from that point on. More about that, perhaps, later. At one point my father forced me to watch "Casablanca" in an effort to rectify this, but it failed. I didn't care about anything that happened in Casablanca (then).
So, in order to make up for this, I watched the following three films.
The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948).
I rented this knowing nothing about it other than that it has often been described as one of the finest movies ever made. I'm not sure about that, but it was well worth watching. The images of postwar Rome are haunting in themselves: the streets are choked with pedestrians and cyclists; cars seem like rare luxuries. Work is scarce and people are forced to rotate their possessions through pawnshops, paying interest as they go (possessions such as the bicycle that the protagonist will need to gain employment hanging posters advertising Hollywood films, the posters' impossible glamor clashing with the poverty on the streets).
The movie has the structure of an Odyssey; the father, Antonio, whose bicycle is stolen on the first day of his job, threatening his family with starvation, takes his engaging, 7 year old son Bruno with him in a quest to recover it. To the audience, the effort feels futile, as Antonio is repeatedly mocked by bicycles owned by others that seem to swarm around him. Together, they search swap meets, and pick up what seems to be a clue at one of them, after a thunderstorm thoroughly soaks the proceedings. Following the clue takes them on a behind-the-scenes tour of Rome, and ultimately to the movie's denouement.
All of this is worth seeing in itself, whether or not the stolen bicycle is ever recovered. Plot wise, the move has one simple idea, and that alone. There are no excess characters or complications and the focus never shifts from the increasingly desperate Antonio and the irrepressibly boyish Bruno, who is a delight to watch. The movie's only a little more than an hour long, so if you want to experiment with foreign or classic cinema this is easy to recommend.
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953).
Most people would ask how you could get to my age without having seen this. I was pretty impressed with the film, an unsentimental look at military life in peacetime; soldiers with a little too much time on their hands, perhaps, eagerly awaiting the weekends when they could spend time at a gentlemen's club wherein women were paid to feign interest in them. Burt Lancaster is extraordinary as the underachieving sergeant who sees a romantic opportunity in his captain's neglected wife. Frank Sinatra's performance as the hotheaded Italian strikes me as a smidgeon overdone. Montgomery Clift delivers an interesting performance as the stoic new man in town who is hazed mercilessly because he will not join the boxing team, having seriously injured a friend while practicing the sport.
The movie's portrayal of the damaged relationships within it must have been controversial at the time. Even today the handling of the personal matters has a realistic, adult feel. Of course the attack on Pearl Harbor comes to "change everything," and it offers the chance for the soldiers to show their good sides by organizing what resistance they can, but it seems unnecessary to the film itself, except insofar as it sets up the ending scene where the two leading ladies stand on the deck of the ship departing the island and contemplating what they each have lost, only to realize at the last moment that their lovers were in the same unit.
The movie shares some themes with the Caine Mutiny, and it's interesting to compare the two. But while the Caine Mutiny builds toward the trial scene, clearly the seed of many trial scenes to follow (obviously the genesis of A Few Good Men), and achives a kind of closure, Eternity seems more like a section extracted from the middle of the characters' lives. Each of the characters wants a stable and loving union, for the right reasons, but none seem available: the raw materials are absent, human nature too fallen, the embrace and kiss as the surf washes over too fleeting. While the useless and venal captain and the racist, sadistic sergeant-at-arms loom large over the proceedings during the center of the film, it's not ultimately their fault that permanent, happy relationships elude the characters who seek them.
Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960).
This film blew me away. It instantly became one of my ten favorite movies of all time (I don't really maintain such a list so I don't know what film it displaced). It has everything you might desire in a French film, consciously or not: a protagonist gripped by existential doubt, hiding a secret former life; voice-overs, trenchcoats, walks on the wet streets of Paris at night with a beautiful waitress who might become your girlfriend; your female neighbor's breasts, briefly but unself-consciously displayed (now
that at least would have appealed to my twelve-year-old self, despite being in black & white; he lived in a more innocent time, before the firehose of pornography had soaked the nation).
The movie juxtaposes comedy and tragedy with no thought for any categories or sense of dramatic propriety you may have brought with you to the film. Gangsters capture Charlie, only to hold forth on their theory of what women really want; the cops pull them over, allowing him to chance to jump out of the car. Charlie walks home from work, wondering whether the waitress would like him to hold her hand; as is usual in such situations it's better not to overthink it, but of course Charlie is fated to. During one scene at the bar where Charlie plays piano the bartender jumps up to sing a ribald song, which is subtitled in French, and then again in English, for a delirious double-effect for the English speaker who speaks some French.
Flashbacks wash over the movie's structure like large, slow ocean swells. As the settings shift, you keep wondering: what kind of movie is this? Where is the center of gravity? The movie (perhaps like most good ones) resists your mind's automatic attempts to classify it and to anticipate the next move. That is not to say the movie has twists: it does not. It tells an old-fashioned story, at heart. Along the way, though, it dispenses with convention, and so earns the label "new wave."
The humor in the film keeps the mood light: it is not a brooding film--but by the end, the two loves of Charlie's life are dead, one in the past, one in the present, in a disturbing parallel to my own life (and not the only one). That may explain some of the resonance the movie had for me. Even so, I recommend it to you.
To indulge in an Ebertism, I hated, hated, hated the Matrix Reloaded when it came out. I had recently joined Google, and was delighted to learn that they bought out a few halls of the Mercado 20 to take the whole company to the movies, and Reloaded was the first of these for me, a n00b. Days before the outing, Matrix-inspired graffiti began to appear on the whiteboards ("there is no spoon"). Excitement was high on the day.
