1903: The Great Train Robbery

I guess you ought to have seen it once. In the end, someone shoots at the screen. (5)

1964: The Train

The movie about a team of French resistance members trying to keep the Nazis from deporting a collection of world-renowned paintings to Germany is another one of those incredibly well-crafted 1960s Hollywood pics that provide really good entertainment, but don't even intend to grab you by the lapels. (7)

1953: Ugetsu monogatari

Mizoguchi's film about two men who go out into the world to try their luck does have its moments of (typically Japanese) beauty, but overall it's hard for me to see what all the fuzz is about. (6)

2010: The Social Network

The Film Everybody's Talking about, a courtroom drama of sorts, is an all-around good, funny and well-photographed dramedy, though it's a little too textbook to excite me. (7)

1921: Manhatta

This silent ten-minute documentary, if you want to call it that, portrays a day in the life of Manhattan. Watching completely silent films (without music) is an experience I'm only getting used to, but it helps to look at the film as a series of animated photographs. "Moving pictures", you might say. (7.5)

1987: Kárhozat (Damnation)

Bela Tarr's early film deals with a man in love with a married woman in a small Hungarian town, but what it's really about is light and shadow and movement in space. Not quite Werckmeister, but recommended in the unlikely case you're into this kind of thing. (7)

1961: Léon Morin, prêtre

In a Nazi-occupied French village, a priest, played by Belmondo, converts a woman (Emanuelle Riva) from one false belief system (communism) to the next (christianity). Will he get into more than just her mind? - Melville's commercially most successful film, and of those I've seen the one I found least interesting so far. It's not bad, but it doesn't have a lot to recommend it either, except for a little of that old French film charme that's hard to pin down. (6)

1920: The Neighbors

The best Keaton short I've seen so far, with lots of cool stunts. A bit like The General, only shorter and without trains. (7)

1927: The Lodger

Though it is sometimes hailed as Hitchcock's first masterpiece, I was not that impressed by the story of a family who rents an apartment to a man who may or may not be the serial killer the whole town is looking for. Some interesting visuals at the beginning; apart from that it seems a little old, probably because it is. (6)

1958: Les amants

A woman is torn between her rich but boring husband and her fiery Latin lover. The film moves along decently until, while lying in the bathtub, she decides to solve this conflict by falling in love with a completely uncharismatic student. As he doesn't mind either, we get treated to a scene in which the lovers walk through nature accompanied by the sound of a string quartet, which possibly marks the low point of the use of classical music in the history of movies. At some point, the film ends. (4.5)

1935: Triumph des Willens

Riefenstahl's supposed masterpiece of propaganda filmmaking turn out to be surprisingly pedestrian. Though there are some nice shots, there's nothing that is truly spectacular apart from the sheer mass of people in some scenes. Not in the same league as Eisenstein, but recommended for fans of people marching. (5.5)

The Best of September 2010

1. The American (2010) - 7.5
2. Stardust Memories (1980) - 7.5
3. A Cock and Bull Story (2005) - 7.5
   
4. Masculin feminin (1966) - 7.5
5. Mildred Pierce (1945) - 7
   

Films Not Finished: September 2010

El espiritu de la colmena, Il Gattopardo, Gran Torino, Rich and Strange, Theatre of Blood

2000: Fail-Safe

The black-and-white remake of the 1960s classic (which I've never seen) about an impeding nuclear war between the US and the USSR is sort of outdated, but manages to entertain throughout with a tight screenplay and good visuals. (7)

2006: Un printemps à Paris

A gangster film with the standard ingredients heist, hustlers, homicide. Plus a sick "love story", just because we're French. Not a bad screenplay, and a master would have made this a really good movie, but Jacques Bral isn't one of them, so instead you get what feels like a made-for-TV movie. (6)

2005: Red Eye

Highly conventional thriller about a young woman who's forced to assist a stranger in killing a celebrity, or else. Nothing wrong with it, nothing impressive about it. (6)

1971: Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica

Though somewhat trashy in an Italian-film-from-the-1970s kind of way, the movie about a policeman and a DA with different approaches to fighting crime entertains throughout. (7)

1965: The War Game

Fiction-documentary about what it might look like if Britain suffers a nuclear attack. Given that the outcome is rather dreadful anyway, I felt that the film might have been more effective if it had tried less hard. (6)

1954: Ordet

Much like Vreden's dag, another sparse Dreyer film set in the Danish countryside. Generally a nice unspectacular offering, but the young man who thinks he's Jesus's appearances border on the unintentionally comic (at least in the dubbed-into-German version I saw) and the ending is, um, unconventional. (6.5)

1909: A Corner in Wheat

Evil capitalist gains control of the wheat market, as a consequence of which poor people can't buy bread anymore in Griffith's early short which, despite running for a little over 14 minutes, is too long. A must-see if you're writing a history of anti-market films. (4)

1963: L'aîné des Ferchaux (Magnet of Doom or An Honorable Young Man)

Melville's road movie about an industrialist fleeing France for the USA and a failed boxer accompanying him as his "secretary" is typically slow and melancholic and untypically unstylized. Certainly not for everybody, but for me. (7)

1945: Mildred Pierce

The story itself - about how a man came to be murdered - isn't all that interesting, but it is told at quite a pace, and the frames show this was directed by Michael Curtiz, the man responsible for Casablanca. Why this is often classified as a noir escapes me, though. (7)

1962: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The film about a deviant youth's time in a reformatory and how he got there is generally done well, and I especially like the use of music in the running scenes. Could have done without the grandstanding in the final scene. (6.5)

2005: A Cock and Bull Story

Winterbottom's postmodern mashup of a film version of Tristram Shandy and the behind-the-scenes story of the actors involved in this film is excellently structured and a lot of fun. (7.5)

1951: Ace in the Hole

The story of a reporter putting a man's life in danger in order to have a better story and hence enhance his carreer is sort of pointless: You learn he's an egocentric arsehole in the first five minutes, and then the film spells it out. Still, the script is tightly written in an old Hollywood kind of way, so it's a decent 100 minutes. (6)

2004: Enduring Love

You can't expect any movie to be as gripping as Ian McEwan's masterful novel Enduring Love, about a well-off man who gets stalked by a not-so-well-off one. The screenplay does, in fact, do a decent job - with the notable exception of its attempts to bring the evolutionary psychology of love onto the screen, a feature of the film which pulls off the trick of being trivial and wrong at the same time. But the quality of the movie that really sucks is its piss-poor "modern" visual style. The whole thing looks like a fucking Ikea catalogue! (5)

1991: Homicide

Starts out as a cool cop flick, then devolves into a drama about Jewish identity. Shame. (6.5)

1983: Zelig

Woody Allen's mockumentary on the "chameleon man" whose looks change in response to his surroundings pretty much takes the format of a standard History Channel documentary and is about as entertaining - but a little more so for the occasional typical Allen joke ("I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women."). (6.5)

1964: The Killers

A couple of killers wonder why a victim they killed just stood there and took the hit, and soon they're tracing the million from a robbery he was involved in. When they line up accomplice after accomplice, the victim's story is told in a series of flashbacks. - No-nonsense, hardboiled and well-photographed movie of the kind that one imagines Tarantino enjoys. (7)

1989: Thrash Altenessen: Ein Film aus dem Ruhrgebiet

Watching the late-80s documentary about Essen's then-not-yet-famous metal band Kreator and their social and architectural surroundings was an all-around weird experience. That is all.

1966: Masculin feminin

Another loosely structured black and white film about young French people from Godard. In this one, both the naive main character and the filmmaker himself (via all-caps intertitles) get on one's nerves with simplistic messages from the far left, but it doesn't really matter: Like previous pics, Masculin feminin has that hard-to-pin-down nervous energy that they don't teach at film school. (7.5)

1959: Plan 9 from Outer Space

Yes, this film features some terrible acting and a number of technical blunders that may, indeed, make the movie a valuable teaching example for film school, but on a more general level it is no more trashy than the widely-acclaimed 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, and certainly more entertaining.

2009: Me and Orson Welles

The theatre's an attractive backdrop for movies anyway, and the setup here is nice, too: Young wannabe actor lucks into a job with pre-Citizen Kane, but already famous, Orson Welles, who is directing Julius Caesar and falls for a fellow employee, whom everyone else, including the boss, also finds attractive. It could be a great film, but was apparently streamlined according to screenwriting 101, which is rarely a good thing. I'm looking at you in particular, canned stupid foreseeable ending. (6.5)

2010: The American

The title character is a killer, played by Clooney, hiding out in a village and getting to know a number of people. But there are films in which the plot is not important, and this is one of them. Anton Corbijn, who previously directed the masterpiece Control, again is in no hurry, and lets the film breathe slowly like an old animal. Naturally, many people find this boring. Which is fine, as long as they don't express their boredom in pseudo-conoisseurish phrases like "that's badly narrated cinema". (7.5)

1966: Alfie

You can read this film about a womanizer with a small conscience as either a statement about the advantages of conventional monogamy or a celebration of alpha maleness with a tacked-on ending to set the church's mind at ease. Either way, a bad basic idea. (5)

1966: What's up, Tiger Lily?

I though it was a joke when it said on the back of the DVD case that they took a Japanese action movie and added a new soundtrack. Not so! Quite silly. I wouldn't want to see a hundred movies like that, but one was quite entertaining. (7)

1980: Stardust Memories

This almost plotless picture is Woody Allen's Otto e mezzo, a film about a famous director (Allen) who gets pestered by half of the people about how brilliant they are and the other half about how his old films were funnier. But it's better than Fellini's movie, or at least the 25 minutes I managed to sit through, merging Allen's usual humour with some shots of real beauty. And aliens. (7.5)

2009: Antichrist

Lars von Trier is a director that has nothing on his mind but to deliver extreme emotional experiences to his audiences. That's fine with me, though in this shocker - about a couple retreating to the woods after their son's death - at times he's trying a little too hard. Even so, the somewhat Lynchesque film, which features the usual imagery like imposing trees, insects, talking foxes and a woman cutting her clit off - is a coherent and attractive audiovisual system. (7)

1961: Experiment in Terror

The thriller about a bank clerk blackmailed into stealing 100,000 dollars is shot in pristine black and white and all-around well made. Not much else to say about it. A weak 7.

1971: Straw Dogs

Goodness gracious! If you are looking for a film to make you really, really aggressive, I recommend this one featuring Dustin Hoffman as a nerdy American mathematician whom the locals in his new, English home village dislike. Of course, things get out of hand. Everybody involved certainly did a very effective job on this one - the screenplay in particular is well-constructed - but an enjoyable experience this is not. (unrated)

The Best of August 2010

1. Synecdoche, New York (2008) - 8.5
2. Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963) - 8.0
   
3. Le petit soldat (1963) - 7.5
   
4. Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) - 7.5
   
5. Vanilla Sky (2001) - 7

Films Not Finished: August 2010

Gertrud, Repulsion, Storm, Toni Takitani

2010: Salt

Pointless film in which a proper plot is eschewed in favour of almost constant, but not particularly spectacular, action. Even genius cinematographer Robert Elswit apparently could not be bothered. (5.5)

1974: The Odessa File

Yes, the screenplay makes suspension of disbelief hard at times, but it's a 1970s Hollywood thriller involving an upstanding journalist, old Nazis and Israel. Is it going to be entertaining? Of course it is! (7)

1963: Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (Muriel, or The Time of Return)

Four people meet in a room in Boulogne-sur-mer and their interconnected lives proceed from there. There's love and hate and the war in Africa and a lot of stuff I'm sure I didn't get on the first viewing. But, if that's a basis for that kind of opinion, it's not about the plot anyway, it's mostly about style. Muriel has a modernist soundtrack (think Stockhausen), shows lots of modernist architecture, both interior and exterior, and employs at least two ways of quick editing: First, a kind of proto-hip hop cutting, in which quick successions of cuts skip only a few minutes each; second, quick cuts away from the main plot to show small scenes that are not allowed to take any longer than they absolutely must (e.g., four seconds). That's a main technique for presenting a film not only about specific people, but also one about the city on the whole, as a kind of side order. Or is it the main order?

For the time being, I'm giving it eight points, but I think it's a grower.

1963: Le petit soldat

Godard's second feature, starring Anna Karina and some bloke who's not Jean-Paul Belmondo, was banned by the French government for three years, for telling the story of a man who gets caught between the fronts of the opposing fractions fighting the Algerian war in Europe. More importantly, like the earliest talkies, it was apparently shot silently, with only the most important sounds overdubbed later. To me, that's a technical weakness rather than a bold artistic move, but I got used to it at the time. With its grainy black and white and its nervous energy, it feels like a lesser version of À bout de souffle, which is not to say it is a bad film at all. (7.5)

2008: Flammen & Citronen (Flame and Citron: The Nazi Assassins)

The film about resistance fighters in Nazi occupied Denmark is generally good, but little not-so-good elements here and there make it merely o.k. (6)

1960: Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers)

Visconti tells the story of four southern Italian brothers who come to Milan in search of a better life, focusing on the tender Rocco and the up-to-no-good Simone. - It's got a last half hour to die for, but the other two have some (mild) lengths. Overall, a very good movie, though. (7.5)

1962: Salvatore Giuliano

The nonlinearly told film starts with the death of the title character, a 1940s Sicilian outlaw, and tells the stories of people connected to him, as well as the history of Sicily during that era. It's a little hard to follow at times, but nicely contrasts the city with the countryside, Sicily with Rome, and darkness with light. (7)

1962: Birdman of Alcatraz

You shouldn't think a film about a prisoner in solitary confinement who becomes a bird expert is all that interesting, but it's pulled off in a very professional manner: a well-structured screenplay (Guy Trosper) and no-nonsense direction (John Frankenheimer). Old Hollywood: It did have something going for itself. (7)