Saturday night marked the return of the annual A Day of Silents program at the Castro, one of the many events the San Francisco Silent Film Festival hosts outside of its weeklong extravaganza in the spring. I was only able to catch the evening double bill – missing out on the very silly-looking The Last Man on Earth, Henry King’s dark pastoral Tol’Able David, the Ivor Novello-starring The Rat, and, saddest of all, Reiniger’s Prince Achmed, one of the earliest entries in the Counter-Programming series — but it was, as usual, delightful.
Commentary
As November staggers to its close, amid an endless avalanche of horrific revelations about terrible men and also whatever calamitous idiocy the U.S. President committed while I was literally writing this sentence, some things are still good. Twin Peaks! Everyone likes Twin Peaks.
Quick quiz: in 1934’s MGM classic The Thin Man, what is the key piece of evidence that leads Nick (William Powell) and Nora Charles (Myrna Loy) to convene the dinner party at which the killer of Claude Wynant (Edward Ellis), Julia Wolf (Natalie Moorhead), and the stool pigeon Nunheim (Harold Huber) is revealed?
It’s dumb—I know it’s dumb—but watching The Professional reminded me I have never completely gotten over the strangeness of seeing schlock blockbusters from traditionally art-house countries.
Is that Jean-Paul Belmondo of Breathless and Pierrot le Fou fame offering goofy quips about “kicking ass” and beating up blonde henchmen?
The tagline for The Big Heat —“A hard cop and a safe dame!”—is, to quote Otto, “flagrant false advertising.”
Combined with the poster, it promises a classic noir clash between a sultry dame and a hard-boiled detective. In reality, the two of them (Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame) barely share three scenes with one another.
Hearing Guy Maddin narrate My Winnipeg last week was important to me.
I remember trying to watch The Saddest Music in the World early in high school, when I was digging up anything people on movie forums described as “weird,” but lacked any of the cultural touchstones to understand what I was seeing.
It’s almost Thanksgiving and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is holding fast to its top-tier position on many folks’ Best of 2017 list (mine included), rightfully generating some awards talk. His Tangerine was one of the very best films of 2015.
If Howard Hawks was right in saying a good movie is “three great scenes and no bad ones,” how many great scenes does a TV show need? I’ve been wrestling with that question ever since the first season of Channel Zero went off the air.
Recollection or repetition?
Kierkegaard asks this question repeatedly. Recollection is pagan and, more specifically, Greek, representative of all the moral failure of the ancient world. Repetition is Christian and representative of the positive and the good. Recollection is backwards-looking, repetition looks forward.
It’s so hard to pin down, or even to make out the boundaries of, the feelings that horror movies have towards the late adolescent white woman, aged roughly 17-23. Maybe hatred is too strong of a word – it’s more a mixture of envy, contempt, worship, and desire.