One more week of freedom.
Movies
I was expecting to like this more. To be clear, I did like it, but "Soviet soldiers captured by Nazis are a subversive allegory for Jesus and Judas" seems like a sure-fire all-time-favorite for me rather than a movie I had a positive but measured response to. Grade: B
I didn't realize this would be basically The Wire, by which I mean a POV-agnostic investigation of a particular crime, giving equal weight to the stories of all parties involved, legal or otherwise, and so doing, also giving a city-scale overview of the inequalities at play in the interlocking worlds that make up an American urban landscape. It's pretty good, though as with The Wire, I had trouble keeping track of the sprawling cast of characters, and unlike The Wire, I didn't have a whole season of TV to get them all straight. This movie is also incredibly dimly lit, too, which also makes it kind of hard to keep track of people. I probably would have liked this a lot more if I hadn't been constantly a little confused about the secondary characters. Still, it's an engaging, incredibly grimy portrait of a city with some awesome location shooting, plus that Bobby Womack soundtrack, which slaps. Grade: B+
Pretty good, spooky horror anthology that has the decency to put its segments in order of escalating quality. The first one is an okay thriller about a mysterious person who keeps calling this woman and saying menacing things over the phone; the second one is basically a vampire tale with lots of spiderwebs and Halloween-ish props; the final is psychological horror in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, involving a nurse who has to prepare a body for burial, and it's genuinely hair-raising at times. All three segments are a little creaky and low-budget-y (which the Boris Karloff framing device delightfully calls attention to in the final scene), so the more the movie leans into the arch B-movieness of its aesthetic, the better it gets, which is another reason the last segment is the best: it's willing to use some otherwise hokey makeup and sets in inventive ways, like you're in a particularly clever haunted house attraction. I dig that. Grade: B
Interesting to compare this to The Hitch-Hiker, which has a similar premise and structure: a criminal on the run holds some people hostage in a confined area. Given that The Hitch-Hiker takes place in a moving car, while He Ran All the Way's hostage location is an apartment, it's surprising that it's He Ran All the Way that ends up being the more expansive and dynamic. Despite the fact that The Hitch-Hiker is literally finding new locations each scene, this movie builds a small world out of its apartment and the lives of the people who go in and out of it: we see people's daily schedules, where they work, etc.; basically, we learn who these people are outside of the immediate emergency in which we see them, which makes a pretty big difference to me. Also, John Garfield gives an absolutely ferocious performance (his final one, heartbreakingly). Grade: B
I was watching this expecting merely an object of historical interest (it's one of the first narrative feature films with queer representation), but I ended up being completely swept up in it, because it turns out that one of the first narrative feature films with queer representation is also extremely good. Set in an all-girls boarding school in the twilight of Wiemar Germany right when the Nazi party was about to take power (i.e. the same moment the movie itself was released, which makes the meta position of the film within its country's history extra heartbreaking), it's of course got a metaphorical political sting, and it also does that Portrait of a Lady on Fire thing where it gives these characters pockets of utopian worlds without the structures of oppression (in this case, the delirious liberation when the schoolgirls are left to their own devices when the authoritarian school administration isn't present), only to starkly impose those structures by the film's end, which is devastating, especially considering what we all know now ended up happening to Germany after the film's release. It's just this beautiful little gem of a movie, and in a world in which English speakers weren't so terrified of subtitles and people in general weren't so homophobic, this would have the same broad cultural cachet and ubiquity as things like Goodbye Mr. Chips and Dead Poets Society. Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment