Two of these movies feature the sinking of a boat at their climaxes. How's that for synchronicity?
In the moments immediately after seeing Sunrise for the first time, my overwhelming feeling was that this movie is jaw-droppingly beautiful in a way I haven't seen in other silent films (or even films in general). I mean that in a couple different ways. First of all, there's the pure philosophical beauty of its story, which ends up saying that love is infinitely more valuable than physical comfort or even happiness. I'll admit that that's not exactly the most sophisticated or original idea to place at a movie's center, but for all its misuse and overuse, it really is a profound sentiment worth repeating, especially when it's conveyed with as much conviction as it is here. I know I'm fresh off seeing this movie for the first time and that such gut reactions tend to be exaggerated, but right now, I sincerely feel that the forty-ish-minute sequence that follows the reconciliation of the Man and the Wife[1] (seriously, those are their names in the credits) is one of the most touching depictions of human affection ever captured in a movie. It's not complicated or even logical—they seriously make up mere minutes after the Man tried to kill the Wife?—but that's not the point, since the flow of the film is more that of a fable or fairy tale anyway. Which brings me to the second beauty in Sunrise: its formal eloquence. Sunrise takes the reality-bending set designs of German Expressionism and puts them to use in a romance, and the results are stunning, especially when coupled with the striking use of rear projection and the superimposing of footage. As in German Expressionism, the imagery is meant to show the characters' states of mind, though instead of Expressionism's usual horror, Sunrise is much more concerned with the twin poles of grief and joy, and to great effect. What's really special, though, is how much these two types of beauty in the film depend upon and deepen one another. The visuals help to flesh out the Man and Wife into living human beings capable of love and heartbreak, and the human elements add a gravity to the technical excellence often lacking in similarly technically meticulous films. In fact (and I realize the enormous anachronism of this comparison), the only other film I can think of that weds technique with romantic resonance so expertly is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is one of my favorite movies ever. We'll see what happens with Sunrise once it's had time to marinate in my mind.
I prefer to think of Titanic as two separate movies, one of which I enjoy, the other I pretty much can't stand. The first is Titanic: The Operatic Tragedy, in which capricious nature, human hubris and good, old-fashioned stupidity culminate in the horrific wreck of the fateful ocean liner, ending hundreds of lives and forever altering hundreds more. In this film, director James Cameron does fantastic work capturing the visceral spectacle of the ship's destruction. As usual, Cameron knows his way around a setpiece, and to watch the RMS Titanic break to pieces is to watch some truly phenomenal filmmaking on both a technical and emotional level. In other iterations, the movie's basking in the spectacle of a real-life catastrophe could have come across as callous (and maybe it does a tiny bit), but the movie also depicts with impressive breadth and depth of the human tragedy of the sinking, mixing personal tragedy with the more effects-driven elements to give the action humanitarian weight. That's a good movie. The second movie, though, is Titanic: The Hacky Period Romance, in which two boring characters meet and do boring things for one night and forge a boring bond of eternal love that somehow transcends death, time, fathoms of ocean, and even the lengthy marriage (to someone else!) of the female member of this boring couple. I care not a whit for these two love birds, and I care even less for them when they're together, which, as you can imagine, distances me from the film considerably. It's not for lack of trying on the movie's part, though. No, for (literally!) hours on end, the movie puts on its Sunday best and tries with desperate sincerity to sell us on the life-changing power of the relationship between these two crazy kids (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, in case you've somehow missed out on the legacy of this movie). I don't care if the movie spends two-plus hours building that relationship, though. With a screenplay as brick-droppingly clunky as Titanic's, there was never any chance I was going to buy the love story. The half-hearted and entirely tone-deaf nods toward class and gender commentary don't help, either. Plus, there's the whole structural issue of this supposedly epic romance only taking place over the space of an evening!! There is no trope I would love to have a swifter and more permanent death than the two-people-know-each-other-for-an-improbably-short-time-but-fall-madly-and-permanently-in-love-anyway trope. It's the worst. Oh yeah, and did I mention that Celion Dion song? Let us speak of it no more. So yeah, one movie I really like, one movie I really hate. The problem is that the latter is at least double the length of the former. I guess I'll take a generous average between the two and say that overall, I like Titanic okay. That's fair, right?
Titanic I am conflicted about; Easy Rider I am not. There are so few movies on this list I dislike entirely that it's notable when I come across a movie that bugs me as much as Easy Rider does. So let's establish something up front: I really, really don't like this movie, and thus far in this project, you'd have to go all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to find another movie I have a comparably deep level of antipathy toward. As with Snow White, I acknowledge the historical significance of Easy Rider. I understand that this film was a landmark and even foundational work in the New Hollywood movement, and that it also featured some important innovations on the cinematography front (in fact, I'll even go to bat for the acid trip sequence, which is a pretty interesting bit of filmmaking). And it's not lost on me that this movie ended up being one of those "voice of a generation" films. Oh no, that point in particular has never been lost on me, and that's a big part of the problem. Because oh my Godard, does this movie try way too hard to be the voice of its generation. Maybe it's my frustration with the cultural dead end of the late-'60s "hippie" movement or just that the movie's characters are generally self-obsessed and the blandest of authorial mouthpieces to boot, but I swear, if Easy Rider had thrown one more empty counter-cultural platitude (e.g. "doesn't matter what city [I'm from]; all cities are alike"—that's like... heavy, man) at me, I might have rage-quit the movie and had to come back to it in a few hours. It's not so much that I don't agree ideologically with the characters—that's true of plenty of movies I like. It's more that the movie is both determined not to say anything at all interesting about that ideology and simultaneously confident that it has—which isn't the zen-ish contradiction that it might seem to be as much as it is a complete failure at self-awareness on director/co-writer Dennis Hopper's part. That lack of self-awareness is death for this film, too. The movie sincerely postures itself as having captured the "real America" and poses its characters as wise pilgrims experiencing "real life," yet it doesn't seem to realize that (or have a problem with how) it completely withholds any coherent motive or psychology from the non-vagabond Americans and reduces rural residents ugly caricatures. Even more problematically, there's no narrative logic for why this film's protagonists should turn into "martyrs of the cause" at the film's end beyond a sort of shrugged off "just because" as a few random yokels gun down (and, ugh, canonize) our "heroes." So yeah, Easy Rider is a naive, narcissistic, self-mythologizing work that feels utterly false with forty-five years of hindsight. I guess it's another one of those "you just had to be there" movies, so maybe I should give it the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that I wasn't there. But man, this one just rubs me the wrong way.
And that's all, folks! Until next time!
If you want, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 79-81, here.
Update: You can read the next post, #s 85-87, here.
1] I can't find a good place to mention this in the writeup proper, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention just how fantastic the movie's acting is. The entire cast brings nuance and passion to the necessarily broad pantomime of Silent-Era acting, doing a ton of the heavy lifting in selling the film's sincerity. Janet Gaynor's portrayal of the Wife is especially moving, transitioning from terrified to miserable to incalculably happy with equal vulnerability and radiance.
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