A day late! Sorry internet! Long weekend confused me.

  1. Paula (Rudolph Maté, 1952): So you guys all know how I love the maternal melodrama. Paula is kind of an example par excellence: Paula is a woman who is all depressed and “neurotic” because she found out she can’t have a baby. Then she hits a little boy with her car — which this old dude blames her for, and the movie acts is like totally her fault, but it’s not really her fault that this other truck was driving in front of her and then pulled out suddenly and there was an unsupervised orphan child in the road at night — but anyway, somehow through the shock of the accident he…forgets how to talk. She winds up taking him in and teaching him how to talk, and it’s unclear whether her motives are good or selfish, and then he remembers she’s the one who hit him. Basically, it’s all about this woman who is racked by guilt for…not really doing anything wrong. Loretta Young is really good in it though; I never really thought much of her but she totally carries this movie, and I think the way Paula’s characterization kept shifting was on purpose or at least, worked well.
  2. The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007): This got incredibly poor reviews, but I don’t really understand why. Like, it’s got everything you want in a zombie movie: pretentious intoning about human nature, a broken nuclear family, references to earlier film in the cycle, and ridiculously blunt political allegory. Plus I thought they did the subtle, intense scary pretty well. The scene where Nicole Kidman’s trying to stay awake and then her son has to inject adrenaline into her heart? Hard core.
  3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941): I’ve been inspired to re-watch this ever since I read this Pajiba review, in which it is essentially asserted that Orson Welles is the Michael Bay of his day or something and Citizen Kane is just a hollow, technical masterpiece. You’ll probably see me in the comments noting that Citizen Kane was more of a frustrated mystery than everything else: it was an anti-biopic, a rejection of the idea that you could sum up someone’s life in a two-hour movie. “Rosebud is a sled” is such an inadequate answer to “who is Charles Kane?” because there is no answer to “who is Charles Kane?” Everyone just knows fragments, so that’s all our intrepid reporter can get from them. Basically? It’s as modernist as Hollywood ever got. This, of course, means that it was consciously difficult, lofty in tone, and drew attention to its form. Anyway, re-watching it, the idea that he’s just showing off his special effects is kind of silly. There’s nothing in it that others hadn’t done before — there are a couple of killer crane shots and stuff, but it wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before. It’s best known for its consistent deployment of long takes in deep focus — a technique that Andre Bazin praised for its lack of artifice, “trickery,” or directing the audience’s attention — but Welles definitely wasn’t the only one doing this, William Wyler’s The Little Foxes came out the same year and uses a similar technique. Welles didn’t really do much that as new, but he was bold about what he did do. Anyway, the video I have comes with the trailer that RKO apparently used to promote Kane, in which a bunch of characters express different opinions about Kane, and then Welles voiceovers that you should go see the movie and decide for yourself — and I think that’s a guiding principle to watching Kane — it doesn’t do the thinking work for you. I understand why contemporary viewers don’t all dig it, but to say that Welles puts style over substance misses two things. One: style is substance, and two: I don’t think easy-to-watch entertainment is the only thing the cinema should do. Sigh. Anyway, I don’t think Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time (right now as far as I’m concerned it’s Killer of Sheep but I change my mind a lot), but I still think it’s a pretty great film.
  4. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955): Maybe it’s not as great as Kiss Me Deadly though. It opens up with a woman, naked except for a trenchcoat, screaming on a highway. It also features a glowing box that contains Cold War era nuclear anxiety. And sexism! But mostly, it’s awesome. It’s so unapologetic about how terrible everyone is. Also, finding a glowing box of death is a pretty good punishment to the unflagging detective who has to barge in everywhere with his phallic car. Oh, film noir.
  5. The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich, 1955): This was shown with Kiss Me Deadly as part of a film noir series at the Cinematheque and it’s so, so not film noir. Embrace the melodrama, people. The melodrama is your friend. What’s not to love about the story of Jack Palance, film star, who’s married to Ida Lupino and feuding with crazy studio executive Rod Steiger, who has an awful secret shared with Shelley Winters, and who gets seduced by Jean Hagen? It the craziest cast ever. In the great subgenre of 1950s Hollywood movies about Hollywood — which includes The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and A Star is Born (1954) — this is definitely the darkest. Because it was made outside the system, the studio is portrayed as basically unalloyed evil (they let some flack go to jail in place of the star and they also basically give girls contracts to whore around for out-of-town investors), and our hero is really kind of a terrible person, too. It is kind of overwritten and overacted, but in an entertaining way. I kind of believe that Hollywood people would totally overact even in their lives. Also, I loved the really loud drumbeats when Palance and Steiger are facing off.