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TM2YC's 1001 Movies (Chronological up to page 25/post 481)

TM2YC

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^Did the film hit you with a lot of sadness in the end?
When I last rewatched it (about 10 years ago) was the first time I saw things from Perkins' perspective. It's a ride. I mean, it's not overblown here, but you have to think the first reaction is "Eww, you creep, you manipulated my choice to sleep with you!" She goes from feeling used and lied to, to having sympathy and dealing with what Josh's struggle must be, to realizing that he doesn't even get everything that's happening, to being the adult in the situation and knowing that even though she has genuine feelings for him, he can't possibly reciprocate on the same level. She has to suck up all those previous feelings and realize that he's quite literally innocent and just wish him well. It's a real melancholy gut punch for her at the end.

I'd say "bittersweet" because at the end you know and she knows that Josh has changed her life for the better. She was a person who really hated herself and hated her job at the start because she didn't understand being a kid any more, just focus groups and statistics. Isn't there a line early on where Josh says something like he can tell she's "a really nice person deep down" and she's a bit baffled that he would think this about her. I'm left with the impression that she is going to very much cherish the new perspective on life that Josh gave her.
 

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Yeah, "bittersweet" is a pretty good descriptor. I think you're right, she's baffled by that "deep down" line, like she's lost perspective on what a normal person would think she comes off as at first. Somewhere there's something like an outright horror movie waiting to be made about this concept though...
 

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The Producers (1967)
Director: Mel Brooks
Country: United States
Length: 88 minutes
Type: Comedy, Musical

I haven't seen all of Mel Brooks' movies but it seems like most of them are anarchic pun and sight-gag filled parodies but his first film 'The Producers' isn't really parodying anything and has a tight, story-focused script. It's also really well directed and fast-paced, maybe he missed his true calling. IIRC Bialystock and Bloom are already putting on the show by the halfway point of the 88-minute runtime. Gene Wilder usually outshines anybody else on screen but Zero Mostel is even better. Dick Shawn is perhaps the only weak link, playing a send-up of a very specific sort of New York beatnik actor that probably went over gang-busters in 1967 but is a little disconnected from it's context a half-century later.

 

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Mean Streets (1973)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Country: United States
Length: 112 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama

This was maybe my third watch of 'Mean Streets' and it really worked for me much more this time. I'd first seen it long after all Martin Scorsese's other classics, so it felt like just an early low-budget (only $3m) draft for his later celebrated films. This time I was watching after seeing Abel Ferrara's 2010 documentary 'Mulberry St.', in which he's discussing the history and atmosphere of the very same neighbourhood and time-period (plus the feast of San Gennaro is a central feature of both movies), so 'Mean Streets' made so much more sense. Seeing Scorsese's 1974 documentary 'Italianamerican' also helped me appreciate where it was coming from. The Catholic themes hit me much stronger this time too and I'd totally forgotten that two of the Carradine brothers have a significant cameo. The combination of slow-motion, long tracking shots, that intense red light and the jukebox soundtrack is a style that was unmistakably Scorsese's but which has has been copied and copied by other film-makers since. The clothes of almost everyone looks very 70s, I don't know if it's by accident or design but Robert De Niro's "Johnny Boy" is the exception, his Mod clothes and haircut still look current.


Martin Scorsese: Back on the Block (1973)
A short promotional featurette about Martin Scorsese as he films 'Mean Streets' in his old neighbourhood, hangs with his friends and has dinner with his mama. It makes clear how close the movie is to Scorsese's heart and upbringing.

 

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One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Director: Marlon Brando
Country: United States
Length: 141 minutes
Type: Western

I first heard about 'One-Eyed Jacks' in some movie magazine article about great "lost" movies back when it was only available in public-domain VHS transfers. Thankfully it's now got a 2017 4K blu-ray restoration thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, which looks absolutely glorious. I wondered if it was going to be one of those things that doesn't live up the myth that gets created in it's absence but it really does, it's a masterpiece of the Western genre. 'One-Eyed Jacks' was the only film Marlon Brando directed but it's debatable if he deserves all the credit. Stanley Kubrick dropped out of the director's chair just 2-weeks before shooting began for unknown reasons, so he'd presumably already designed every aspect of the production, storyboarded it, built the sets, chose the locations, the crew and cast the movie (several actors from other Kubrick films appear) and finalised the script (co-written by another legend Sam Peckinpah). Brando deserves full credit for directing the incredible performances by all the actors and of course his own turn. The story sets up what you expect is a fairly simple revenge plot, a bank robber betrayed and left for dead for by his friend and partner, tracks him down 5-years later. In the middle of the movie you think the two men have changed after all the years, one has become hard and bitter, the other respectable and mild but it later becomes clear they are still who they once were. These are rich and complex characters. The vulnerability but inner strength of Pina Pellicer's heroine is really captivating. It's sad to read that she committed suicide a couple of years after 'One-Eyed Jacks' flopped critically and commercially, when she should have earned an Oscar. The decision to set a Western by the sea was a surprising but fitting location, the blue ocean waves churn like the passions of the characters set against them.

 

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Director: Ang Lee
Country: Taiwan / China / Hong Kong / United States
Length: 120 minutes
Type: Martial-Arts, Fantasy, Romance, Drama

I watched the hell out of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' back in the early 2000s, including seeing it twice at the cinema but it feels like I've not re-watched it in ages. Happily it's at least twice as good as I remembered. Everything about it is beautiful, the landscapes, the period costumes, the cinematography, the dance like fight choreography and Tan Dun and Yo-Yo Ma's evocative cello score. The way Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh play their unrequited romance is devastating. The more reserved and unspoken they are, the more powerful it becomes. That reservation is carried through into the fight choreography. At one point Li Mu Bai (Chow) takes on an opponent without needing to draw his blade. Each fight scene tops the previous one, they're all awesome but it's the clarity of the movement and strong underpinning by character and story that makes them so effective. The last and greatest encounter is between Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh) and Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) in the courtyard. You can see Shu Lien is the superior fighter but Jen Yu is armed with the indestructible 'Green Destiny' sword, so we are taken on a journey through different weapons and techniques as Shu Lien seeks to find a weakness. Finally using the Green Destiny's very invulnerability to defeat Jen Yu. Some of the wire work looks like what it is but more often than not it looks graceful and perfectly executed. None more so than in the tavern scene where Zhang Ziyi rapidly spirals upwards into the air and executes a precise landing on the second floor. IIRC, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' was one of the early blu-rays so I wondered what the transfer would be like. It's a bit soft perhaps but it's clearly an "unremastered" 35mm print source which looks great, detail, texture and colour wise.




Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)
Having revisited the superior 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' I thought why not give the belated Netflix sequel (which nobody asked for) a whirl. It's as pale an imitation as all the negative reviews had suggested, not outright terrible but a failure to live up to it's predecessor on every artistic and technical level. The first problem you encounter is that it's in English, not Mandarin. I first tried watching with the Mandarin dub to make it feel more like the first movie but since it's not dubbed by the actual actors (including the recognisable voices of Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen) that felt even weirder. The second thing that becomes apparent is that it's mostly shot on green screen, or has been heavily CGI enhanced, which is more or less the exact opposite aesthetic of Ang Lee's film. Everything looks much cheaper, even though the budget is about 30% higher. The FX shots reminded me of video game cut scenes. There is a harsh, unpleasant digital grade look which often renders the 'Green Destiny' sword of the title blue, again in opposition to the first movie which revelled in the colours of nature. The sound FX were distracting and overdone, constantly using this "bone crunching" sound that doesn't match the actions and adding crass swooshing sounds to the camera moves. The script misses the point of the sword being far less important than the skills of the person who wields it and makes it's power central to the plot. I did think they'd found a couple of quite clever ways to continue the story but the execution falls flat. Another plus point is the well done fight scenes but they lack the meaning that motivated the action in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. I wasn't aware that one of the new younger cast Natasha Liu Bordizzo was Australian until her accent started to creep in. Then I surmised correctly that it was shot in New Zealand, which might be why it looks like 'The Hobbit' (in a bad way). The disappointment is underlined by the final shot of Wudang Mountain seen from afar, to hide the fact that it's a poor matte painting and not a breathtaking real location in China like in the first movie. Since this was one of the last movies where Harvey Weinstein acted as Producer, let's blame him for everything wrong with 'Sword of Destiny'.

 
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Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
Director: Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper & Eleanor Coppola
Country: United States
Length: 96 minutes
Type: Documentary

I was aware of this documentary through it being sampled in various songs by bands like Manic Street Preachers and U.N.K.L.E. before I ever watched it. I had also heard about it because the documentary itself heavily samples Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and makes reference to Welles' aborted attempt to film the novel. I didn't see it until it was presented in a beautiful HD remaster on the 2010 'Apocalypse Now' blu-ray boxset. Although finished with new interviews in 1991 by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, the bulk of the material was shot on set by Francis Ford Coppola's wife Eleanor, who also narrates the documentary. It successfully puts forward the argument that the narrative subject of 'Apocalypse Now', the intense atmosphere of the movie, the chaotic manor in which it was filmed and the Vietnam War were indivisible. The doc opens with Coppola famously saying "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane". There are loads of out-takes and deleted scenes shown, a decade before they would appear integrated into the 2001 "Redux" cut of AP. It must have been so exciting to these glimpses in 1991. The footage of Marlon Brando improvising all kinds of incredible dialogue in character as Kurtz is worth seeing. Even when he's saying "I can't think of any more dialogue today" it sounds like a comment by Kurtz on the approach of his death. John Milius is a great raconteur and interview subject but George Lucas, Martin Sheen and Laurence Fishburne provide fascinating insights too. Is this the best film about film ever made? It might be.


^ I think this might be the only case where the movie and the movie about the movie are both included on the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' list :) .
 

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
None more so than in the tavern scene where Zhang Ziyi rapidly spirals upwards into the air and executes a precise landing on the second floor.
Since you enjoyed this so much, you may enjoy (or enjoy revisiting) Come Drink With Me, the classic which the tavern scene....let's say "borrowed" from. In fact, most of the iconic scenes from this film are "homages" to previous wuxia classics, such as 18 Legendary Weapons of China, A Touch of Zen, Wing Chun, and Once Upon a Time in China, plus some other more subtle ones. Hopefully this film will stir people's interest to see the others!
 

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Since you enjoyed this so much, you may enjoy (or enjoy revisiting) Come Drink With Me, the classic which the tavern scene....let's say "borrowed" from. In fact, most of the iconic scenes from this film are "homages" to previous wuxia classics, such as 18 Legendary Weapons of China, A Touch of Zen, Wing Chun, and Once Upon a Time in China, plus some other more subtle ones. Hopefully this film will stir people's interest to see the others!

Oh yes, I meant to mention the 'Come Drink With Me' connection. Cheng Pei-pei who starred in that as "Golden Swallow", plays "Jade Fox" in CTHD. That different Gem+Animal name has to be a homage by Lee. 'Once Upon a Time in China' and it's sequels have some fantastic tavern brawls too. I kinda wish those comedic films had the serious tone of CTHD, although I did enjoy laughing a lot at OUATIC. I think that was partly Ang Lee's idea, to do a genre movie but with an art-house reverence for the material. The 'A Touch of Zen' blu-ray is on my DVD shelf, ready to watch soon! :) I'm not aware of the other two you mention, I'll look out for those.

I also need to revisit Zhang Yimou's wonderful 'Hero' some time, it's also on the list. I must make sure I watch the Director's Cut this time, as I'm almost certain I'd have watched the shorter US Theatrical Cut back in the early 2000s. Again I believe we can blame Harvey Weinstein for that decision.
 

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^I have issues with a lot of overly-serious Chinese films veering into melodrama for me. I count Crouching Tiger... among them, so Once Upon a Time... is far superior for me. I have somewhat similar issues with Hero, though not several of Yimou's other films. I'd recommend To Live in the same way I recommend Grave of the Fireflies or Schindler's List... something you'll likely only have the fortitude to watch once every decade or so, but a must-see.
 

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Schindler's List... something you'll likely only have the fortitude to watch once every decade or so, but a must-see.
One of the most memorable parts of watching that back when it opened was seeing the reactions of the next-showing crowd in line when they saw us exiting the theater. We must have looked haggard. They quickly got that "Holy crap, what have we gotten ourselves in for?" look
 

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Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1993)
Director: Nick Broomfield
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 87 minutes
Type: Documentary

Revisiting this old Nick Broomfield documentary reminded me how manipulated, structured and glossy modern docs often are. Broomfield is in there with maybe one camera and his tape recorder and microphone in shot. Niceties like overdubbing, slick editing, lighting and composition are ignored in favour of just capturing spontaneous drama any way he can, or seeing the little telling things that happen in-between the big events. This is the first of his two docs on spree killer Aileen Wuornos but this first is much more focused on the people around her arguably exploiting her notoriety for profit, than the specifics of Aileen's life and her crimes. Her rather odd lawyer Steve "Dr. Legal" Glazer is an interesting character, he seems like an amiable old hippy, out of his depth and more interested in playing his self-recorded covers of Pink Floyd for the camera (to be fair they are pretty good) than actually fighting for his client. A lot of time is spent on Broomfield's troubles negotiating over the money to get an interview with Aileen, including him counting $100 bills into a gleeful Glazer's hands.




You have to watch the 2nd doc along with the first. It's not on the 1001 list too but it's better IMO:

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)
Documentarian Nick Broomfield gets drawn back into the circle of killer Aileen Wuornos as he acts as a witness at one legal proceeding leading up to her execution. Broomfield actually includes footage of a lawyer questioning a possibly misleading edit from his earlier film 'The Selling of a Serial Killer' during cross examination. I then noticed Broomfield reused a shot from the 1993 film cut in here to make it appear like it was happening in 2003, which felt a bit suspect. My first watch of 'Life and Death of a Serial Killer' really stuck with me over the years and it's still shocking two decades later. If Wuornos' killings were in self-defence, or as an act of revenge against abusive men, as she usually claimed, then this film's haunting description of the prolonged physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that she suffered since childhood makes the case that society got off lightly. This second film is a much deeper and more rounded portrait of the woman. In a key scene, Wuornos loudly "confesses" to camera that her crimes weren't actually in self-defence and she deserves to die, before Broomfield wisely keeps the microphone and camera secretly running as she whispers to him that she's just lying about that to get her life quickly over with. He also conducts her final interview where she is acting like the textbook case of a raving paranoid lunatic, a day after Governor Jeb Bush had her declared perfectly sane (a month before he was re-elected). This is a sad, disturbing life story which I don't think the later Oscar winning film 'Monster' fully captured.

 
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Director: George Roy Hill
Country: United States
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Western, Comedy

I know 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' is supposed to be a masterpiece of the Western genre but I only found it moderately enjoyable. There is virtually no plot, It's just two robbers trying to evade the law (who we never see) for two hours, it switches locations and keeps moving forward but nothing actually changes. There is zero character development or significant personal conflict. It's setup that the two bicker and gripe about one another but are basically good friends and that never changes from start to finish. A love triangle is presented but nothing is done with it. At a couple of points potentially interesting and different events are handled in musical montages and then we're back to the same cat and mouse play book. The winning chemistry between Paul Newman and Robert Redford and their endless wisecracking and comic shenanigans is what holds the film up. If that's enough for you (and for most it is) then you'll love it... it wasn't enough for me. The editing is quite dated to that experimental late 60s style. Burt Bacharach's pop score and particularly the whimsical 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' sequence seemed totally out of place. 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' is supposed to be a classic, so maybe I'll give it another go some day and change my opinion. By the way, the shot where the train carriage explodes towards the camera is probably the greatest bit of movie pyrotechnics ever filmed. It looks insanely dangerous and makes the movie worth watching for that alone. The last shot was also interesting to me as it appears to be a freeze frame but then zooms way out, so maybe it was some kind of optical effect?

 

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Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Country: United States
Length: 115 minutes
Type: Western

I was a bit underwhelmed by this later Sam Peckinpah Western on my first watch (I forget which version). This time watched the "Special Edition" (a hybrid between the Theatrical Cut and the "Turner Preview" version) and was much more impressed. It's flawed but the central themes are strong. James Coburn's Garrett spends two hours trying to work up to killing his former friend Billy (Kris Kristofferson). Both men know it's inevitable but they want to put it off for as long as they can justify. Garrett seems to sense that killing Billy will symbolise the final crushing of the free untameable spirit of the old west, beneath the heel of the all powerful capitalist cattle barons that are now Garrett's master. He's seen which way the wind is blowing and chosen the winning side, but Billy doesn't care, he's going to keep living free right into his grave. It might have been my imagination but it looked like Kristofferson was dressed up like Jim Morrison, who had died 2-years before. There's a brilliant bit where Garrett shoots Billy, then sees his own reflection in a mirror and shoots that too. I also loved the scene where Billy kills two law-men who had him chained up, then he merrily takes his time getting supplies, sings a song to himself, slowly rides off, then trots back for a blanket he forgot, all as the stunned townsfolk look on helpless. It's a picture of a remote Western town where there were no police sirens coming, the law was days away and Billy knows it. The pacing is quite episodic and disjointed, with several vignettes that don't really contribute anything to the narrative but do fit the mood of the piece. The 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' sequence is one such point. We observe a crying Katy Jurado watching her husband Slim Pickens die We've only only just met the two characters but the combination of the actor's faces, the heavenly skyline and Bob Dylan's beautiful song gives me goosebumps. Dylan plays a minor role in the film and is frankly terrible. He's so awful it goes beyond mere bad acting, where it looks more like Dylan has just wondered in front of the camera during a take and is looking back at the irritated crew. He ruins every scene he's in.


 

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Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Director: David Lean
Country: United Kingdom / Italy
Length: 200 minutes
Type: Epic, Historical, Romance

This was my second watch of 'Doctor Zhivago' but I'm still finding it inferior to David Lean's previous Epic 'Lawrence of Arabia'. The poster tag-line says "A love caught in the fire of revolution" and I think you need to be more interested in that romance, than in the huge canvas of Soviet political upheaval that Lean paints in the background. Nearly 3.5 hours is too long for this story, told at this pace in my opinion. Give me an hour less on the romance and an hour more on Tom Courtenay's frankly terrifying portrayal of a political fanatic. Omar Sharif's performance is powerful and empathetic, although Lean goes in for a glistening moist-eyed close-up of Sharif's quivering face so often it starts to become distracting. The film's view of Russia felt very English, I'm unsure if this was by naive accident, or a deliberate choice by Lean to make the lives of people who were sworn Cold-War enemies in 1965 as relatable as possible to the film's target Western audience. Ralph Richardson plays his upper middle-class Russian character as the quintessential English gent, his smoking of his final English imported Cigar symbolises the point at which civilisation has collapsed, the killing of the royal family is portrayed as utterly sacrilegious and the little paradise the main characters discover after a gruelling trek across frozen Russia looks every bit the idyllic little English cottage garden image. If Lean did intend his 60s English viewers to feel "this could've been happening to us", then I'm sure he succeeded. The directing and editing are masterful, full of strong symbolism, like cutting to an electric spark from a tram as the lovers first brush against each other, or intercutting Rod Steiger forcing himself on Julie Christie, with soldiers committing bloody violence on a group of peaceful demonstrators. This way Lean is often able to convey ideas, events and emotions without having his cast needing to say a word. This time I was appreciating the beautiful way that Alec Guinness' flashback narrative was constructed, with his past self rarely being shown talking, as if he is a ghost observing but not interacting with his own crystallised memories. Maurice Jarre's balalaika love theme is incredibly moving.


 

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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
There is virtually no plot.... It's setup that the two bicker and gripe about one another but are basically good friends and that never changes from start to finish.

I also feel like this one is a bit overrated, but I hazard a guess that this ^ is exactly what people loved about it. I think the stressors of being on the run and having Sundance fall in love with Butch's lady are meant to give you the feeling that the wheels could come off the thing at any moment. The beauty is in their friendship never wavering despite all that. It's an oddly optimistic movie coming into a very pessimistic time.
 

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Blazing Saddles (1974)
Director: Mel Brooks
Country: United States
Length: 93 minutes
Type: Comedy, Western

I didn't find this as funny as I think I was supposed to and ranks far below other Mel Brooks films in my opinion. The humour is often too low brow for my tastes, I know a group of cowboys farting is seen by some as one of the funniest scenes ever but it was the proverbial Western tumbleweed for me. I did enjoy the jokes specific to the Western genre, like the plan to build a real/fake old west town frontage, the succession of people/horses being hanged and 'The Waco Kid' being so fast to the draw that he doesn't actually move. Gene Wilder is utterly delightful as always and his chemistry with Cleavon Little really works. The 4th wall breaking ending seemed like the kind of thing you do when you can't think of a better conclusion.

 

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This was my second watch of 'Doctor Zhivago' but I'm still finding it inferior to David Lean's previous Epic 'Lawrence of Arabia'. The poster tag-line says "A love caught in the fire of revolution" and I think you need to be more interested in that romance, than in the huge canvas of Soviet political upheaval that Lean paints in the background. Nearly 3.5 hours is too long for this story, told at this pace in my opinion. Give me an hour less on the romance and an hour more on Tom Courtenay's frankly terrifying portrayal of a political fanatic. Omar Sharif's performance is powerful and empathetic, although Lean goes in for a glistening moist-eyed close-up of Sharif's quivering face so often it starts to become distracting. The film's view of Russia felt very English, I'm unsure if this was by naive accident, or a deliberate choice by Lean to make the lives of people who were sworn Cold-War enemies in 1965 as relatable as possible to the film's target Western audience. Ralph Richardson plays his upper middle-class Russian character as the quintessential English gent, his smoking of his final English imported Cigar symbolises the point at which civilisation has collapsed, the killing of the royal family is portrayed as utterly sacrilegious and the little paradise the main characters discover after a gruelling trek across frozen Russia looks every bit the idyllic little English cottage garden image. If Lean did intend his 60s English viewers to feel "this could've been happening to us", then I'm sure he succeeded. The directing and editing are masterful, full of strong symbolism, like cutting to an electric spark from a tram as the lovers first brush against each other, or intercutting Rod Steiger forcing himself on Julie Christie, with soldiers committing bloody violence on a group of peaceful demonstrators. This way Lean is often able to convey ideas, events and emotions without having his cast needing to say a word. This time I was appreciating the beautiful way that Alec Guinness' flashback narrative was constructed, with his past self rarely being shown talking, as if he is a ghost observing but not interacting with his own crystallised memories. Maurice Jarre's balalaika love theme is incredibly moving.
Absolutely lovely review! I have nothing to add, just really appreciated your thoughts on this.
 

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Memento (2000)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Country: United States
Length: 113 minutes
Type: Noir, Thriller

When I first saw this on a VHS rental I really disliked it. I've got the kind of mindset where I'll spend a murder-mystery movie furiously trying to work out the answer to the puzzle before the movie tells me what it was, so 'Memento' not showing who the killer was and saying he was "Just some guy, does it matter who?" left me frustrated. I realised that hadn't been the point, so on the second viewing I loved it and also had a watch of the fascinating bonus reversed version. So this was my third or fourth watch and probably first since writer/director Christopher Nolan has became such a big name. Little of the familiar style he's used for the last 10-15 years, the propulsive action, fast pacing and the heart-pounding Hans Zimmer music is evident. David Julyan's atmospheric score and the slow considered pace of the mystery is quite different. It's clearly operating in the film-noir detective genre but doesn't fall back on any of the 1940s cliches that "neo noirs" usually revel in, it's a fresh, modern, cerebral take on the genre. As the plot concludes (or begins) it increasingly becomes more of a phycological horror, as we start to understand that Guy Pearce's Leonard is essentially a serial killer and the villain of the piece. One trick that maybe doesn't work as well 2-decades later for new viewers is the re-casting of Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano from 'The Matrix' (which was a huge hit 6-months before 'Memento' was shot), I'm sure a lot of people like me went into 'Memento' instinctively and mistakenly trusting and distrusting the actors based on our feelings toward them in the 1999 blockbuster. I noticed Nolan cleverly frames the first scenes where we meet characters to feel like a standard movie meeting scene, in a diner for example (even though they are actually the final scene between two characters) and structures the "romance" to feel natural in reverse.

Of course I then had to re-watch the chronological version hidden on the blu-ray again too. It's interesting how determined, focused and in-control Leonard seems in the normal version but how hopelessly lost, amiable and malleable he looks when the scenes are playing back in normal order. It makes it look like Guy Pearce is giving a different performance. This must be some kind of "Kuleshov effect" where the absence of chronological information and context changes our perception of the material.

Here is the "FULL HD!" VHS trailer from back in the day:

 
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mnkykungfu

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^I'm still halfway convinced this is Nolan's best film. I was lucky enough to see it in the theater and got on the Nolan hype train from the jump. There's probably no going back, but I'd love to see something more like this and less like Interstellar in the future, particularly in terms of tightness of plot and motivation.
 
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