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The Philadelphia Story Previously seen by me, unseen by Mary-Jane. Ok, reassessment time! I saw this probably at least 15 years ago, and loved it. And as far as the level of craft, the acting, writing, directing, it holds up. Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, directed by George Cukor--how could it not? What I somehow missed entirely on my previous viewing was the utterly toxic sexual politics. Hepburn is Tracy Lord (yeah, one letter 's' shy of a porn star), a strong-willed daughter of a socially connected family. That is, she's more or less playing herself. She's divorced from Grant and about to remarry. Stewart plays a newspaper reporter. (Her actual fiance is more a plot device than anything, and not terribly important.) So it's a basic 1940s comedy setup, deftly executed. Ever wonder what it must have been like to be Katherine Hepburn as a young woman? Let's venture to say it was no doubt a challenge. The social mores of the day (and/or the Hayes Code) apparently made it necessary to put such a woman in her place before the final reel. So Tracy is lectured twice in the movie--once by Grant, who's penchant for drink was apparently a large factor in their divorce, and once by her father--on what is her basic Failing as a Woman. It seems to amount to being too morally rigid, which is to say, too intolerant of the failings of men. Oh yeah, her own parents are also divorced due to her father's philandering. In one scene, her father actually says that his adultery is indirectly Tracy's fault. I'm very much not kidding, or even exaggerating. Worse, the film seems to endorse this view. Jimmy Stewart manages to go the entire movie being nice to Tracy, which makes him far and away the most likable male character. Of course, it's just a movie. Hepburn, though, had to live this sort of thing, and managed to thrive. Go her. 24 Eyes This is a wonderful Japanese movie from the 1950s about a schoolteacher in a rural village and her 12 students (hence the title). It follows the relationship of the teacher with the students from their childhood to young adulthood, and comments on Japanese society from the late 1920s through the postwar years. It has a couple utterly heartbreaking scenes and an underlying tone of sadness yet somehow is ultimately uplifting. I learn from the dvd special features that apparently this is a classic and beloved movie in Japan. I love Japanese film and I've sought them out for, hmm, at least 20 years. The frustrating thing is that for anything older than, say, the 1980s, what's known in the west is essentially the films of Kurasawa, plus a couple of Ozu and a couple more of Mizoguchi. This movie (not by any of those three) I had barely heard of. I miss things I don't even know I miss because I don't know they exist. It's one reason I think we'll stick with Netflix even though we don't have the free time to fully take advantage of it; their selection is impressive. Come and See Oh my. Continuing the above theme, I had never heard of this film until seeing a mention of it a few years ago in Empire magazine. To my knowledge it was never released in the U.S. This is a Russian movie from 1985 about the German invasion of Russia in World War II. I've become fascinated with the Russian war experience in the last few years. I read Antony Beevor's brilliant book Stalingrad, watched an excellent BBC documentary on the subject. Now this, this is a masterpiece, a cataclysmically brilliant movie. It's set in Belorussia, contains no conventional battle scenes, but follows a boy of maybe 14 or so who runs off to join the partisans fighting the German army. What follows is a succession of surreal nightmarish scenes I can't adequately describe but which seem to capture the incoherent random madness and cruelty of war, in particular war waged on civilians, like no film I've ever seen. The dialogue is sparse, scenes are stretched out languidly or brutally (or both), exposition is minimal. A number of indelible images. We watched straight through without a pause. It ended, I could only say, "That was harrowing." Mary-Jane: "That was easily the best World War II film I've ever seen." Yep. Unforgettable stuff. Post a comment in response: |
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