movie madness
11:40 26/02/2004
Dear Reader,
In my previous two letters, the tone has been very morose and I have been charged with feeling quite sorry for myself. I hold my hands up! It is most probable that I am suffering from a case of self-pity. I hope you have it in your hearts to forgive me. I make no promises that future installments will not have a similar vein, but I do promise that if there is such a mood in my writing, that it is merely how I feel at the time. I must stress that I expect nor want no pity. I am writing solely what I feel like expressing, if only for my own benefit of getting it down on paper. In any case, I want to let you know that whilst things do not sound like much fun, this has not been the case. Over the last several weeks, I have been reaquainting myself with my collection of films.
As I have previously stated, I have been experiencing a complete lack of interest in my course. In that time I have been thinking about what I want to do, which is to create and tell stories. My recent elaboration of this desire is to create films, something which I had not really considered before. Partly because of this I have been catching up with my video collection, watching films that I have taped over the last few years, but had not gotten round to watching. Over the last few weeks, mostly at the weekends I have been feasting on cinematic classics.
I started by catching up with a few films that I taped this Christmas, and then continued with a Hitchcock marathon, watching a season of his films that was shown on RTÉ the Christmas before last. The list as best I can remember, in the order watched is as follows: “The Asphalt Jungle”, “On The Waterfront”, “Sorry, Wrong Number”, “The Lady Vanishes *”,”Spellbound *”, “I Confess *”, “Sabotage *”, “Suspicion *”, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “The Third Man”, “Notorious *”, “Citizen Kane” and “Strangers on a Train *”. Up to Notorious, I watched about two a day. Those marked by an * were directed by Alfred Hitchcock
In need of particular mention I feel is The Third Man whilst it is admittedly one of the later films I watched has lingered quite vividly in my mind even though it is near to two weeks since I watched it. This is a fantastic film. It’s use of music and light and shadows is exciting and often I found amusing, yet also at the same time, they induced a lot of suspense. Orson Welles gives a super-cool performance. His entrance into the film is perfect! I guess that only leaves to mention the ending, which I found to be supremely tense and claustrophobic.
Also in movie related news, the week before last, I bought 10 DVDs. On the Friday I went a bit crazy and bought nine DVDs…I couldn’t resist the special offer. One of the bigger splurges I’ve gone on in a while. “American Beauty”, “American Graffiti”, “Harvey”, “Kelly’s Heroes”, “Rio Bravo”, “Strangers on a Train”, “The Bourne Identity (2003)”, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, “The Sons of Katie Elder”, and Willow.
It had been quite a while since I had watched American Beauty, the film continues to speak to me. It is a beautiful film and I feel it holds the answers to many questions. I hold it up as a great message from the writer about how to go about your life, and also how not to go about your life. Conincidentally, there are two Jimmy Stewart movies in the lists above, which I also consider to have good messages about how to live your life. The character of Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey is one that I hold dear to my heart, and strive in some ways to be like. Whilst I have only seen It’s a Wonderful Life once so far, the character of George Bailey is another useful role model, and one that I will probably grow to like more, as I watch the film again and again.
I must add that these are not the only movies I have watched over the past several weeks, just the ones that I watched for the first time. Most of them you will notice are quite old, in fact I don’t think any of them were made after the 50s. I did go to the cinema at the weekend, to see The Barbarian Invasions. It is the one new film out at the moment that I would recommend to everybody. It is a French Canadian film, up for Best Foreign Language Film at this weekend’s Academy Awards. The story is fairly simple, a man is dying from cancer, and his ex-wife asks his estranged son to come back from London to look after him. The son and father live by two very different ideologies from which some of the early humour is derived. Oh and yes, it is funny, very funny. At the same time, it has touches of drama and tragedy and it’s not all laughs, but it does not fall into being overly sentimental. It is not a film about death, it is more of a celebration of life. I do not want to go anymore into the details of the story, suffice it to say, it is a very well made film, with very good performances, most notably by the father played by Rémy Girard.
Finally, whilst I am on the subject of films, I must mention Kill Bill. I have been meaning to talk about this film since it arrived on the screen. Very rarely, if ever have I wanted to see a film again in the cinema, but I did with this film and it is only by chance and misfortune that I did not see it a third and a fourth time. It is a deluge of action and colour. It seemed obvious to me that Tarantino was having a ball whilst making this film. The director’s glee at being able to make this film and have anything that he wanted in it was apparent on screen. For me, this is Tarantino’s best film by far as a director, perhaps not his best film as a writer, which would go to Pulp Fiction, but as a director, it is in this movie that he shows off his talents. It was a joy to watch, a pick’n’mix of different genres and styles. No doubt, the fact I enjoyed it so much is the fact that the two dominant genres were that of the Western and Samurai films from the east. These two genres have long since been associated with each other, feeding off each other to develop, but in Kill Bill, they are combined to spectacular effect. I could tell you about all the little things that I like about this film, it’s structure, the pop culture references, the music, the different visual effects used, a black and white segment and another sequence shot in silhouette, the anime in the middle and the best fight sequence of the year to name but a few. I must mention the fight sequence in The House of the Blue Leaves though, it really was the best fight sequence of the year and beat hands down anything that the Wachowski brothers could ever dream up. I was very disappointed by the Burly Brawl of The Matrix Reloaded, it was clearly CG in places and simply didn’t work for me, it appeared too long as did a lot of things in that movie but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t as long as the finale of Kill Bill Volume 1 which at no time felt too long. So if you haven’t seen Kill Bill Volume 1 yet, do your best to see it. It will be out on DVD in April, followed swiftly afterwards by Volume 2. The release date was pushed back from Febuary, due to some editing issues to the best of my knowledge. I know that I’ll be there to see it.
Yours truly,
The Writer.