Author Topic: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time  (Read 50802 times)

MartinTeller

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #240 on: May 21, 2020, 10:14:17 PM »
One of my predictions was going to be that you would LOVE that one. I'm not as enthusiastic about it, but it's very original. I also haven't seen it in 13 years.

Bondo

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #241 on: May 21, 2020, 10:53:41 PM »
And nary a mention of Twelve Monkeys. Not sure if watching La Jetee without having seen Twelve Monkeys would have made it completely untenable for me, or allowed me to appreciate it outside the context of how it inspired Twelve Monkeys.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #242 on: May 22, 2020, 12:01:26 AM »
And nary a mention of Twelve Monkeys. Not sure if watching La Jetee without having seen Twelve Monkeys would have made it completely untenable for me, or allowed me to appreciate it outside the context of how it inspired Twelve Monkeys.

Just watched 12 Monkeys, a film I'd seen a long time ago and vaguely remember. Now that I've seen it in context of La Jetee, it is interesting, but only in how it interprets that film, its ideas. Even tried to channel a little Vertigo. I didn't think it was much good in and of itself, though. Overkill on the Dutch angle, and Brad Pitt was doing...something. Plus, you get the melodrama and over-dramatics in 12 Monkeys that you don't have to suffer in La Jetee. That's a big win for the the French short.

One of my predictions was going to be that you would LOVE that one. I'm not as enthusiastic about it, but it's very original. I also haven't seen it in 13 years.

 :D Well, let's see if you can go 2 for 2 here...
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #243 on: May 22, 2020, 12:03:01 AM »
Ugetsu Monogatari
KENJI MIZOGUCHI, 1953
3.5 STARS OUT OF 5

A film on seduction and losing one’s way with overtones of war, Ugetsu is another example of Kenji Mizoguchi’s ability to quickly put you under the cinematic spell. In this film, you fall under a spell just as protagonist Genjuro does. It may start as early as watching the spinning of his pottery wheel, or maybe it’s simply in the drums. For Genjuro, it’s definitely when he goes to sell off his wares, and returns with presumably more money than he’s ever held in his life. For Genjuro, it’s the promise of modernity, though that is quickly interrupted by the arrival of soldiers looking to pillage the town and enslave the peasants that live there. But he can’t be awakened from the spell, even when in such dire straights, as he risks death just to keep the kilns on. Eventually, he and his wife, along with friend Tobei and his wife, get their wares and head to the market, where misfortune awaits, for the men through their ambitions and, unfortunately, for the women because of their husbands’ misguidedness.

The fantasy elements of this film are quite fascinating, considering there is nothing all that ethereal about the production to truly make you feel that reality as altered. In that, when Genjuro is seduced by Lady Wakasa, you follow him into yet another haunted situation, under another spell. He messes up yet again, this starting with money and ending with seduction, follies upon follies. You’re none the wiser, but once the truth is revealed, it is a very cool, “ah-ha.” I have to say that even for a film made in the 1950’s, the bit of Wakasa’s father still being present and the sounds that come from his adornments is strangely affecting and frightening. This is definitely a scary story to tell in the dark, a quality ghost story, as well as a moral tale.

The final reveals regarding the outcomes of the women, while the men were off on their misguided escapades, aren’t too surprising, especially having seen Sansho the Bailiff not so long ago. Misery, inescapable. Another visit of a ghost, a revelation of rape. The only way it’s any happier is at least Genjuro has the opportunity to raise his son, Genichi, whereas in Sansho, the devastation is nearly 100% complete, save a too-late-in-life reunion. If anything, Ugetsu didn’t strike me visually as much as the visually stunning Sansho. When it comes to the cinematography, a lot of it revolves around the movement and positioning of the characters, especially Genjuro and Wakasa in her home. Bodies laying in various positions, horizontally, vertically, on each other, across from each other, it’s quite alluring. That doesn’t mean the craft isn’t good, only probably that it’s more subtle, comparing it to a film where a family walks between mythically large and lush flowers, a sister walks into and disappears into a lake with hardly a ripple, and a fantastic flourish of camera movement reunites mother and son when she has gone blind and destitute. The most visually striking element here is when Genjuro attempts to show others Wakasa’s home, only to return to rubble.

My only drawback might be that the ghostly reveals, while perfectly positioned, still didn’t totally bowl me over. I’m almost of the mind that a rewatch might make it more pleasing, since I’ll already know all of the revelations in advance, and I can look out for clues and other bits of meaning. As well, Tobei’s parallel story of becoming a samurai is far less interesting or necessary that what Genjuro experiences. These flaws aren’t all that major, and after two Mizoguchi’s, I’m wondering if they aren’t growers that require more thought and further viewings. Either way, I did come out of this viewing intrigued and a fairly enchanted. Ugetsu deals with timeless issues that go all the way back to the advent of trading actual value (goods and services) for an socially-accepted abstract object of value (money) that can later be traded for other goods and services of actual value*. What follows is prosperity coupled with the degradation of our habitat and debasement of our identity as the conscious species. With the ghost story on display here, that may indeed be the aspect in Ugetsu that truly haunts.

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*I know trading money for goods way predates the last 16th Century setting of Ugetsu, but having money is novel for the family and the introduction of money and surplus into their life parallels the beginning of their misfortune.
« Last Edit: July 15, 2020, 08:09:41 AM by etdoesgood »
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MartinTeller

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #244 on: May 22, 2020, 09:29:03 AM »
I thought you'd be a little cooler on that one, but I'm glad you weren't.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #245 on: May 23, 2020, 01:53:32 AM »
City Lights
CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1931
4.5 STARS OUT OF 5

Let’s focus on emotion. The two Chaplin films and one Keaton on this list so far have affected me in ways I did not expect. I chose the image above for this one, because of the very basic question(s) it asks: Am I OK? Do you accept me? Chaplin is the perfect actor/creator to pull this off because he is far from the stereotypically attractive man; short, scrawny, pale, and a narrow face with no remarkable features. As the tramp, you see him in tattered clothes, and in City Lights he’s being picked on by newspaper boys. He basically spends day and night feeling and looking like something the cat dragged in, but manages it without drawing pity upon himself and giving everything a good go. Then, when the opportunity comes up to do something right and decent, well, he tries. In that, he has a path to being the People’s champion.

In City Lights, if you really boil it down, it’s about a poor man who falls for a blind flower girl, and goes through hell and back to be there for her. On the way, he makes friends with a rich man who only recognizes him when he’s stone drunk, tries to go the straight and narrow by getting a job to get her some money, and eventually ends up in a boxing match to try to pay the flower girl and her grandmother’s rent before they’re evicted. He’s metaphorically raked over the coals, repeatedly, whether he’s being beaten, shot with a pea shooter, or put into prison for crimes he didn’t commit, and takes it all in stride in a way that should give the common person heart, even amidst all the laughter. It’s hard to exactly put a finger on, but it’s as if persisting in life is an act of self-deprecation on the part of the tramp, and perhaps that is another way to look at life, if you can do it soberly enough.

This is essentially to ignore all the gags and comedic set pieces, all/nearly all of which landed for me. Funniest scene is for sure the boxing scene, just killed me. The whistle gag might have been a little overplayed, but it still gave me a bit of a chuckle. Obviously, City Lights as well as Modern Times are comedies, even if I’m becoming more attuned to the melancholy beneath the humor and light romance.

Maybe because melancholy is more a mode of existence for me than just another emotion, but again, that last scene where the flower girl finally sees the tramp for the first time is a strange kind of magic that makes the tramp character really click for me. Whether the whole “cure from blindness” thing is just a step too far for you is a matter of taste, but to me it’s an element where the ends justifies the means in regards to the emotional appeal of the picture. Do I actually believe that she’d fall for the tramp on his merits? Well, the answer has to be: The magic of movies. Sometimes it might just spill over into life; or, is it that the great creator can wring the little bit of magic out of life and infuse it into their work? Either way, it’s a fundamentally affecting ending in a lovely and hilarious work of art.
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Bondo

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #246 on: May 23, 2020, 06:57:25 AM »
I don't know that I'd classify Chaplin as scrawny. I guess he plays a bit scrawny perhaps but I'm pretty sure he was actually a gymnast build of compact, dense musculature.

Anyway, City Lights is definitely another absolute gem.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #247 on: June 03, 2020, 10:42:30 PM »
Histoire(s) du Cinema
JEAN LUC GODARD, 1989-1999
3.5 STARS OUT OF 5

E.T. and I go back for as long as it and I have existed. E.T. are my initials, both my birth and E.T.’s release went down in 1982, and crucially, I often feel I’m on an alien planet and would just like to go the CINECAST! home. I don’t have any urge to destroy you all, I just don’t belong here, and belonging is so crucial. It’s that final point that makes E.T. more than pop culture iconography to me, and maybe it all seems too arbitrary and superficial, but it has stuck for 38 years. It stuck so much that I got the E.T. tat in like 2012(?):

(I share. It’s what I do.)
I also know the problems with and limitations of E.T., and could write a convincing one-star review of the film that would make it seem that I hate it. I could go lukewarm on it, throw out a 3/5, which angle should we try? “It generally fulfills Spielberg’s vision and critique of modern suburbia, but never transcends the kid-and-creature trope it portrays.” Or…”It’s a stupendous ride that will make you feel like a kid again, but nothing more than that.” Obviously, I can do five stars.

To penetrate even further, E.T. in and of itself is a piece of Hollywood entertainment that falls enormously short of the promise of cinema, a blockbuster in growing era of blockbusters leading to the homogenization and status quo-maintaining cinema that continues unabated to this day and seriously separates people who love cinema as art and people who are just mesmerized by overstimulating sounds and moving pictures that are so simple morally and ethically so as to mean basically nothing. No one sees themselves as being of the “Dark Side”, everyone imagines themselves a Jedi master or Han Solo, although Hong Kong is falling and George Floyd is dead for no good reason. You might not want to speculate on why most people go to the movies, but just look at the box office numbers, IT IS ESCAPE! With maybe just a side of the confirmation that the viewer is just as righteous as the characters they so love. Some legit good crossover movies are making some bank, too, just look at how Parasite or The Grand Budapest Hotel performed at the worldwide box office, something I don’t know that Jean Luc Godard could have seen happening in the decade he spent of Histoire(s) du Cinema, but also, maybe he’s more of a curmudgeon than I am. Actually, if you just look at my Letterboxd ratings of films, for sure he is, but for the duration of his 8-episode, 4-part dissection of cinema and the 20th Century by extension, I felt where he was coming from. I can simultaneously hold his passion and hang-ups in one hand and agree with plenty, while also holding a broader view of cinema that encompasses films that really can be seen as merchandise ads and reap the value there, whatever I perceive it to be, too.

Histoire(s) du Cinema is a difficult work to sit through, and its ultimate meaning can only be known by its creator, Jean Luc Godard. The confluence of still and moving images from an array of films, text, music, poetry, Godard at the word processor organizing his thoughts with a cigar in his mouth, all often superimposed on top of each other, is truly sensory overload, especially since it does not follow any solid audiovisual grammar that we would recognize. Yet for me, it facilitated further reflection on cinema, even if I only can be said to have processed - in some way that I can write down or can just understand in the more abstract sense - maybe 15% or 20%. It also challenged me to keep up, get on its wavelength, soak it in, figure it out, which I love, because if I agree with one of the more explicit points of the film - if it truly can be said to have any - it’s that the same films get made over and over again. While experimental docs and deep dives on the art certainly exist, I would think it unlikely that Histoire(s) du Cinema is derivative of anything except cinema itself.

Something to be appreciated is how openly personal and subjective this exploration is, and yet how convincing it is in its purpose. Godard brushes away the low-hanging fruit with simple statements, while exploring the core of the issues surrounding beauty, exploitation, truth, time, and annihilation with the wealth of audiovisual information organized in a very impressionistic manner, full of seemingly free associations that are, at second blush, just a bit more coordinated than that. One of the more challenging sequences comes in Episode 2, where Godard confronts cinema that portrays childhood with images from The Night of the Hunter (among others, that goes without saying) and a girl reciting poetry (don’t blame me for not knowing the half of what’s cut in here), seemingly contrasting the beauty of youth with unyielding time, playing into a phrase used often in this series, “Fatal Beauty”, sometimes seemingly translated to “Deadly Beauty”. From my point of view, it is a warning against falling into the trap of beauty and youth, or to understand what beauty and youth are to time.

In a sense, Godard’s crafted perspective exhibits simultaneously both great love and skepticism toward cinema, and he moves between both states (and honestly, many more between, but these are major) even when he thinks about humankind itself. His love can be seen to turn to preciousness to turn to snobbishness. In the context of Histoire(s) du Cinema, you can see his disposition as all three simultaneously without conflict. Maybe they’re a package deal and this is no real observation, maybe not. But even as he flashes images early of “a girl and a gun”, he expresses his love for Hitchcock as (paraphrasing here) one of the true poets that was able to crossover into the mainstream. He emphasizes cinema as giving voice to the poor and suffering, while also lamenting its failure to revolutionize human civilization. He certainly had lofty ideals of what cinema could accomplish, further qualifying the offhanded remark about Spielberg and film-as-pure-entertainment in America, whatever you personally feel about it. He takes films incredibly seriously, as can be seen within the interweaving of snippets from religious films repeated over a lot of the series, likening the creation of film to the creation of the world itself. When you take that perspective, how can you not be precious about the subject?

There are so many more themes to explore, but making a laundry list isn’t all that useful. Perhaps it’s important to mention that he often compares film to literature, photography, theater and (bitterly, despite it being the format for this miniseries) television, often calling it (paraphrasing again, maybe) not a technique and not an art. Herein lie further contradictions, because he continuously compares it to art while saying it might not live up to that label. But ultimately, either you watch it or you don’t, and only if you do see it can you fully comprehend the experience. It’s like a lot of modern art - and the MOMA indeed has a description of it on its website - in that your reaction will likely be based on impressions and experience, where the object itself and its meaning don’t take the path of logic or grammar. In my opinion, that is what makes it fun! And I think you have to approach Histoire(s) du Cinema that way if you’re going to get anything out of it.

So I hold onto E.T. while knowing what E.T. is, and knowing that the deepest depths of cinema are far deeper. As I continue through the Sight & Sound 100, I do rather worry that certain big and ambitious projects done out of passion and humanity never get made because the only films that are really profitable known are the major blockbuster franchise films, MCU and the like. A lot of indies are starting to blend together as just pictures of people talking together in apartments and restaurants likely because they’re cheap to make and resonate with enough people to make sense profit-wise. (Some of them are also quite good, don’t get me wrong). But then, I stop and think on the art of Jafar Panahi, Andrea Arnold, and Bong Joon-ho, on the daring cinema that still makes it out, that is visionary in its perception of time, death, humanity, misery, and struggle, and maybe even some beauty, fatal or otherwise, recognize that my own Sight and Sound ballot would be comprised primarily of films of the 21st Century, and I don’t feel too terribly worried. The art house is still there, the little multiplexes off to the side (at least in big markets) are willing to spare a few screens to art. And maybe even one or two pictures of the big, colorful, overstimulating stuff manages to emerge from the muck and seem worthwhile. Maybe. Therefore no, I’m not as curmudgeonly as Godard, but I appreciate his preciousness and his vision, and think it is well-expressed in the at-times confounding, ever-fascinating Histoire(s) du Cinema.
« Last Edit: July 15, 2020, 08:10:02 AM by etdoesgood »
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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #248 on: June 04, 2020, 12:09:44 AM »
I've never been a fan of Godard, but this was where I saw him as the Andy Kaufman of cinema, inverting all expectations not for the experiment of it but to piss on those who truly love the art. It's where I decided Godard can kiss my ass.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #249 on: June 04, 2020, 04:40:09 AM »
I've never been a fan of Godard, but this was where I saw him as the Andy Kaufman of cinema, inverting all expectations not for the experiment of it but to piss on those who truly love the art. It's where I decided Godard can kiss my ass.

My knowledge of Kaufman is admittedly limited to the Jim Carey film, but I believe I see what you're getting after. I don't see this at all as you do, and I've already said my piece (maybe too much), so I'm wondering if I can wrangle a few more points out of you as to why you think Godard was pissing on those who love the art. Not to debate, but to know, because I know this isn't a necessarily popular work 'round these parts. I'd just like some perspective on that.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

 

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