I have a bad feeling about this
One cinema visit this week marked with a *. The week was marked by the passing of two great directors, to whom I paid tribute in my own way.
Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)
Although I hate to be the first to speak ill of the dead, Bergman’s reputation as a filmmaker has plummeted in recent years, especially in comparison with someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, who’s remained an inspiration 20 years after his own death. Bergman’s films seem to belong to another age when existentialism was all the rage and religious disquiet and bleak Scandinavian suicidal depression and terminal illness and death were proper subjects for serious filmmakers. The silence in The Silence (1963) is God’s silence. Very deep. I thought it would be nice to dig out one of his films from my DVD collection to watch as a kind of tribute before I realised that I don’t own any. I like Persona (1966), but I just haven’t got around to buying it yet.
Attack of the Clones (2002)
Of the three infamous Star Wars prequels, I like this the most. I did get to see this digitally projected, and it looked fabulous. To me, this is what the essence of Star Wars is all about: solid B-movie heroics, pulpy adventure cliches, stupid jokes, and all done on an A-list budget. Sad Star Wars geeks from my generation who were all 10 when they first saw Star Wars (1977) in the cinema and think George Lucas has betrayed their childhood seemed to have expected the prequels to be the equivalent of the New Testement. Star Wars was only a movie, and not a very good one at that. Expecting it to contain the meaning of life is idiocy of the highest order.
Sexy Beast (2000)
Mysteriously, it’s taken me seven years to get around to watching this, and it was beyond great. Entire cast explodes, as they say, especially Sir Ben Kingsley, who can and has spent the succeeding years popping up in a variety of dreadful genre flicks in the sure and certain knowledge that he will be forgiven by critics because he acted the role of Don Logan in Sexy Beast.
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)
If there was anything funnier in 2004 than Ben Stiller saying “freaky naughty” with a 70s porn star moustache, then I’d like to see it. Because I don’t particularly believe in research, I like to think that there really is a world series of dodgeball on ESPN 8, also known as The Ocho.
Shrek the Third (2007) *
I don’t know what’s the matter with people. Maybe this won’t seem as good when I watch it again on DVD, but I liked this one more than I liked Shrek 2 (2004). The first Shrek (2001) was so good that I wasn’t very keen on the idea of a 2nd film; I very much felt it had all been done. So in theory a 3rd one should have been even more redundant, except it wasn’t. Roll on the fourth, I say.
Blowup (1966) [Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)]
Unable to mark the passing of Bergman with a DVD watching style tribute, I was able to do so when the news came a couple of days later of the death of Antonioni. As anyone remotely familiar with arthouse cinema knows, Antonioni had been in poor health for a number of years. But back in 1966, he was one of the icons, and Blowup is an extraordinarily rich film, to which I am not going to do justice here. Not only can you write a book about Blowup, people have. Not only is it a thriller, not only does it capture the zeitgeist of the 60s, not only does it have a young working class photographer as its hero, not only does it have Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar, not only does it have Jane Birkin’s pubic hair, but it’s a film about film in a postmodern sense, a film about the more you look, the more you see, and about political and emotional commitment as well. Although Thomas (David Hemmings, who hung around with Terence Donovan and David Bailey to research the role) doesn’t find out the truth about the murder (if there was a murder), he does start to interact with other people instead of just photographing them in a voyeuristic way (as indicated by his fetching of an imaginary tennis ball at the end of the film). The film both has and hasn’t dated. The surface has changed but the depths remain. It is the work of a director at the height of his powers. And I think Zabriskie Point (1970) is a work of genius as well and we could really do with it on DVD, hint, hint.
Blow Out (1981)
Famously, Brian De Palma’s film is a conflation of both Blowup (1966) and The Conversation (1974), as well as a film informed by the slasher genre success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) and the political cynicism of Watergate and the Carter administration. And it has one of John Travolta’s best onscreen performances, wondrous cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond, a nicely sleazy turn from Dennis Franz, and Nancy Allen, who is as cute as a button and was Mrs Brian De Palma at the time. This film rotates at the top of Quentin Tarantino’s all time best movies list as well. When the film came out in 1981, it failed at the box office because Ronald Reagan had just been elected and the film’s dark tone was entirely out of keeping with the public mood of the time. Nevertheless, it is another one of those films that fits into the category “last great films of the 70s” along with Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Raging Bull (1980) - in some ways, it may be better than either of those two. And it’s certainly as fully realised a film as its prestigious antecedent, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup.