Okay, finally there's another movie I'm watching for the first time. Other than that, more oldies but goodies. Without further ado...
I love this movie. The acting is phenomenal, the plot is both propulsive and thematically complex, and the production details have a pleasingly meta quality that appeals to the film geek part of me. It's also a notably weird movie, juxtaposing the stylistic excesses of silent-era fame with the hard-boiled pragmatism of more modern screenwriters in a way that is deeply unsettling. Chimpanzee funeral, anyone? The odd thing is, for as rich of a movie as Sunset Boulevard is, I really don't have a lot to say about it. That's not to indicate that it's in any way a lesser movie or one unworthy of discussion; I just can't think of an angle right now. So, uh, moving on... nothing to see here...
For me, The Graduate is basically a certain kind of pop album. What I mean is, there are albums with deep cuts, where the interesting music stretches beyond the well-known hit songs, and then there are albums in which the hits are unquestionably the best things the disc has going for it [1]. More and more I'm feeling that if The Graduate were an album, it would be of the latter kind. The parts you remember—the humor, the ennui, the Simon and Garfunkel, "Plastics," "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me," the final scene (and good golly that final scene, it never ceases to hit me like a truck [2])—are all great and totally deserving of their spaces in your memory. As for the rest of the movie, though, the problem is that The Graduate has no deep cuts. I don't mean that it's a bad movie or anything; I quite like it. But save for the famous bits, I think it's a merely good movie, not a great one. The cinematography and editing, for example, are competent, but not remarkable outside the iconic scenes. And there's the use of the music, which in many spots really hasn't aged very well at all—not the songs, mind you; those tunes are pretty timeless, if you ask me, and perfect for this movie. However, the way those songs are employed in the film (particularly their repetition; poor "Mrs. Robinson" is wrung dry) seems occasionally artless and primitive to these modern ears, and yeah, I know that The Graduate was doing a lot of innovation in this area, but still. You won't hear me knocking the use of "Sound of Silence," though, which again, that frikkin' final scene! I'm going on and on about it, I know, but the film's conclusion is so good it almost makes me forget that most of the preceding hour and a half isn't quite the classic that the final moments deserve. I suspect a lot of other people share that experience, too, which explains AFI's putting this film in the top twenty.
A thought occurred to me while watching Buster Keaton's fantastic The General. Now, I'm not really a silent film guy. It's not that I don't like them; I just haven't seen that many. I say I love Charlie Chaplin, and I do, but I haven't even watched close to half of his feature-length films. What I'm getting at is, take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, given that I know even less about the silent era than the rest of cinema. That being established, the idea is this: that the most direct inheritor of silent comedy's legacy is the modern action movie, especially in its contemporary, CGI-laden form. The nimble choreography, softened violence, stunts that bend the laws of physics, the controlled uncontrollability of environmental details on said stunts—these are all characteristics shared by both the silent-era comedy and the CGI-era action flick, characteristics that rarely appear together in other contemporary genres. If you ignore obvious differences in production and culture, it's not that hard to draw a line from the staging of the setpieces in The General to those in Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies or the Marvel superhero films. Of course, ignoring production differences is ignoring a huge aspect of what makes The General so incredible: that they're real, and they're spectacular, and I'm not talking about anything to do with Teri Hatcher. I mean that those are honest-to-goodness real trains in the movie, not models or CG polygons or whatever. Real trains! Buster Keaton is jumping from car to car on an actual moving engine! He's on a legitimate cowcatcher! They crashed an actual locomotive on that bridge scene! Modern special effects can be super cool, but they would improve nothing about The General. It's cinematic derring-do at its best.
Do you agree with me on any of these films? Disagree? Want to add something more insightful than my non-response on Sunset Boulevard? Let me know! Next time on this blog series: more movies I've already seen. I promise we'll get to a point where the unseen movies are more plentiful, but first we've got to work our way through the more popular first quarter of this list. Until then!
If you're interested, you can read the previous post in the series, entries 13-15, here.
Update: Read the next post, 19-21, here.
1] Yes, I just used the words "album" and "disc" to describe a collection of music. Yes, I still buy CDs. Come at me, bro.
2] Plus, it's also responsible for spawning my favorite recurring joke from last year's new season of Arrested Development. Now that's what I call taking ownership of a pop culture reference.
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