I See Dead People (no. 2)

[koganbot]

Look, this is really sad. No list of all-time great movies whose top ten includes only movies I've already seen can be credible.* Or if it is credible, this is a sad world. Not to denigrate my own tastes, judgments, and habits, but round '78 I decided that I didn't have the time or money to watch a lot of movies. And in 1999 I made the decision, I can either be a writer or someone who owns a TV set, but I don't have time for both. So not a lot of movies made in the last 35 years have unfolded (or unspooled or whatever) in front of my eyes.

Not that I've seen nothing in that time. Likely any movie with Steven Seagal that appeared on cable in the late '80s got viewed by me. But in general I no longer have my explorer's hat on.

I'm sure the Sight And Sound poll included gobs of people excited by right now, but obviously there was no consensus in it, no "Here's a movie that's changed the game" or "Here's the flick that called out to everyone."

Strange: visit a local lending library and you'll see just the opposite, the past a bare flickering shadow, westerns all but nonexistent, everybody relaxing into the here and now.

In any event, what's the next movie you're gonna see? Here's mine, if I can find it streaming somewhere for free (was taken down from mysoju):

Watch on YouTube

*Unless the list is entitled Frank's All-Time Top Ten Movies (Restricted To Movies That He's Actually Seen).

Comments

Re: Library

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"Night of the Hunter" has the distinction of being a film that I saw once, didn't really like, and then perpetually grew in fondness in memory that I don't really want to see it again, although I probably should. Ditto Daniel Reeves's Obsessive Becoming, an uneven experimental film about childhood abuse and about a hundred other topics. (The latter was the first film that I "argued" myself into liking -- i.e. I wrote a paper about it that was better than I remembered the movie being, and my new "liking" of how I remembered it seemed to trump the actual experience of watching it. This rarely happens with music because it's too easy to re-listen.)

Re: Library

[christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)]

I know what you mean, skyecaptain. Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Fellini's "La Strada" are the same for me. I even wrote a paper about "La Strada" and "8 1/2" in film school but I have no desire to ever see either film again. "Vertigo", like "Citizen Kane", has always struck me as a great film to study but not a film to love.

On the other hand, I have watched "Night of the Hunter" probably 10-12 times since first seeing it in the early 1990's.

Re: Library

[koganbot]

My friend Rob saw Vertigo on my instigation and thought it was extraordinarily great but he knew he'd never want to see it again, the way it captured the latent pathology in his own romanticism.

Impossible to talk about that movie without creating spoilers; watching it, I was thinking to myself "This is hooey" for the first two-thirds of the movie — albeit eerily gripping hooey — but then of course the last third makes you rethink everything. I imagined doing a remake set in the '70s punk rock/no wave Lower East Side, with the lead characters regularly dropping in at a bar so that they can play "Hunter Gets Captured By The Game" on a jukebox full of new punk, reggae, and old soul. They joke that it's their song, the male lead taking the song one way, having no awareness that the female lead is taking it differently.

Re: Library

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

A professor I had (for an experimental cinema class) had us watch Vertigo at the stroke of midnight on a Friday night in winter. He was big on framing experiential viewing carefully. And I'll tell ya, I've seen Vertigo five to ten times and this was the one that had the strongest impression on me. It's one that I actually think gets stronger with re-viewing, and I agree that it's also really really good for film analysis. I don't count it as a personal favorite, per se, but it's an incredible film. Glad it's #1 if the top ten is going to be so conservative anyway.

Re: Library

[koganbot]

Fwiw, I was made very unhappy and uncomfortable by The Searchers when I first saw it, age 17 or so — not just by the main character's disturbing social attitudes, but by Vera Miles' teasingly aggressive nice girl. Incredibly, I thought the movie's emotions were overdrawn and hammy.

Then, with my reading up on film over the next couple of years, the movie was opened up for me by the analyses I read of it. So much of it had gone by in the subtext, two characters near the start having been deeply in love with each other, and my not even noticing it. Next time through it was like watching a different movie. Still not sure what are my insights on it and what's from stuff I read.

(The movie's social attitudes are still problematic, but when I first saw it I wasn't distinguishing between the main character's attitudes and the movie's attitudes. It works as a regular oater (high-budget for a western, but still a western, for the popcorn eaters, not a message film or an art film), since it leaves its profundities to the subtext. In fact, they wouldn't have been profundities had they been spelled-out for us.)