Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne)

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  • Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin)

6/4/24 (Tues)

A French friend had raved about Jacques Demy’s 1970 musical fantasy and practically insisted that I watch it. The director’s earlier Umbrellas had been not only a joyous burst of song and color but a unique approach to musical film, so it didn’t take much persuading to watch this one. I had never heard of it, but it’s apparently a cult classic in France. It’s based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault, author of, among others, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all of which feature in this film in some form or other.

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Let It Be

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  • Let It Be

5/30/24 (Thurs)

I kept having déjà vu as I watched this, making me think I’ve seen it before. Apparently, though, my mind was playing tricks on me as the film reportedly had only limited release at the time and has never been shown publicly since. Peter Jackson’s three-part remix of the rest of the intended documentary footage, called Get Back, inspired a re-release of the film for the first time in more than half a century.

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Still Walking (歩いても歩いても)

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  • 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

5/29/24 (Wed)

The title of Koreeda’s superior 2008 film is taken from Ishida Ayumi’s old pop hit “Blue Light Yokohama”. It literally means “regardless of how much [one] walks” or “despite walking and walking”, the implication here being that the person will never reach the destination. The song itself features in the film in a startling confession muttered off-handedly by the mother.

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Noh: Genji Kuyo (源氏供養)

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  • Noh: 源氏供養 (Genji Kuyo)

5/19/24 (Sun)

Genji Kuyo (Commemorative Prayer for Genji) assumes an awareness of the 11th-century Tale of Genji, the classic story of the imagined romantic life of a randy former prince. The Noh play is based on the idea that fiction, being an invention of the mind, is a violation of Buddhist strictures against falsehoods and must be atoned for. The text alludes to a Tang Chinese poet’s musings on the sin of “wild words and flowery language” (狂言綺語). The anonymous drama has been around since at least 1464, when Genji would have been over 400 years old or as far as Shakespeare is from the present day.

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Nights of Cabiria (Le Notti di Cabiria)

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  • Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)

5/7/21 (Fri)

Fellini’s fantastically uplifting 1957 film, with an astonishing performance by his wife and muse Giulietta Masina, fresh off the previous year’s La Strada. I watched the film mainly as the source material for Sweet Charity, which turns out to have followed the bare bones of the plot fairly closely. But the musical turned the lead into a dance hall girl and played her tribulations mainly for laughs, whereas the film’s Cabiria is a girl of the streets in a gritty post-war Rome still getting back on its feet. Continue reading →

Sweet Charity (1969 film)

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  • Sweet Charity (film)

5/17/24 (Fri)

Bob Fosse was evidently a controversial choice as director of this 1969 work, never having helmed a film before, but he had ample Hollywood experience as a dancer and was championed by Shirley MacLaine, who had gotten her break in the Fosse-choreographed Pajama Game. Plus, of course, he had staged and choreographed the Broadway version of this show to tremendous success just a few years earlier. Stories of his battles over the film with the powers-that-be could be a book on their own, but his vision ultimately prevailed. A pity.

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The Favourite

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  • The Favourite

5/1/24 (Wed)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film reinvents the relationships between England’s 18th-century Queen Anne (a tremendous Olivia Colman) and two confidantes, cousins Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone), who vie to displace one another as the monarch’s favorite. The queen bears various ailments that leave her unable to walk steadily and doesn’t always appear to be entirely on the ball. Often in a moody state, she tends to anger when she sees people enjoying themselves, often screaming at them to stop. Her infirmities leave her dependent on her aides. Which is where the conflict comes in.

The movie revolves largely around the war of tongues among the dueling cousins, both in their verbal sparring and more literal use on the queen in the bedroom. While the characters are loosely based on history, Lanthimos ups the lesbian quotient significantly, though for their part, the cousins, both comfortably married, use sex purely as a weapon to win over the sovereign (who at one point praises how Abigail “puts her tongue in me”).

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Ministry of Fear

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  • Ministry of Fear

4/30/24 (Tues)

Adaptations of Graham Greene’s typically convoluted plots range from the supreme (The Third Man) to the ridiculous (This Gun for Hire), so I didn’t know what to expect here. Moreover, I had read that the script of Fritz Lang’s 1944 flick, based on Greene’s book of the previous year, was considerably rewritten to the director’s intense displeasure after he signed a bad contract. Greene himself reportedly disapproved of the completed film due to some significant deviations in theme. I was ready for anything.

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The Ghost & Mrs. Muir

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  • The Ghost & Mrs. Muir

4/18/24 (Thurs)

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 fantasy was based on a female-authored book released two years earlier. I knew the title from the short-lived TV series back in the 1960s, but that played the situation for laughs. The film takes a more romantic approach.

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Happy End

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  • Happy End

5/11/24 (Sat)

Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out. Czech director Oldrich Lipsky’s time-bending 1967 feature opens with the words “The End” followed by the end titles, some in mirror image. Then a disembodied head jumps out of a basket and reattaches itself to a body slumped over a guillotine as the blade flies upward. The man revives and is led back into jail, and the story begins, or more properly, heads backward toward its beginning.

We learn eventually that, in real life, a butcher has caught his wife with her lover and murdered them, throwing the latter out a window and gruesomely dismembering the woman with a knife. But the narrator – apparently speaking from the dead, a la Sunset Boulevard – relates events only as he sees them: the un-guillotining of the man is his birth, and he is seen putting his wife’s sliced-off parts together and giving her life. Unlike other reversed stories like the later Memento or Betrayal, the film here is actually run backwards, so that a newborn child is shown being sucked back into the womb (the narrator says sadly that the child is dying), or a man thrown from a building is shown rising up to the original spot.

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