Screened: December 2010

December 1: Leap Year

Screened: At home, DVR from HBO

While it's mostly the slate of original series and documentaries that keep me paying an exorbitant-for-a-graduate-student monthly fee to receive HBO, I have to say that access to terrible romantic comedies requiring no effort on my part to obtain them is an added bonus. I couldn't stop feeling bad for Amy Adams and Matthew Goode while I was watching this; underneath her character's unbearable shrillness and awful, awful personality, they actually had decent chemistry that could've really worked in a movie that was more about the interpersonal relationship than the cliché-riddled concept driving the plot.

December 1: Waking Sleeping Beauty

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I love a good behind-the-scenes film history, and I'd been waiting for this movie to come out on DVD ever since the trailer was first released. The film, looking at the resurgence of Disney animated films in the 1980s and 90s, benefits immensely from a sense of candor and self-reflection on the part of director/narrator Don Hahn, a former producer for Disney. It celebrates the accomplishments involved in creating movies like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but doesn't shy away from chronicling all manner of behind-the-scenes discord among animators and executives. While there were a lot of things that I liked about this movie, I have to say that I really enjoyed the focus on the late Howard Ashman. It's clear that Hahn places great value on Ashman's contribution in bringing a musical theater sensibility to the movies, and the clip of Ashman coaching Jodi Benson through the recording of "Part of Your World" is a small treasure.

December 5: The Boys: The Sherman Brothers Story

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Another in-house Disney documentary, this time about the Sherman brothers, the wonderful songs they wrote for Disney ("Feed the Birds" is one of those songs that's grown on me in leaps and bounds - I think I didn't have a lot of patience for slow songs when I was little, but "Feed the Birds" is too beautiful to deny) and their enduring mutual enmity. It was interesting to watch this after Waking Sleeping Beauty, if only for the contrast between the different Disney eras they depict; the Shermans' tenure began during the era when Walt Disney was still alive and actively shaping the brand, and you really feel the impact of his role as the driving force of the company when the Shermans talk about him.

December 11: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Screened: At home, DVR from HBO

December 16: The King of Comedy

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I finished my last paper on the evening of the fifteenth, so it seemed like as good a time as any to dive back into the Scorsese filmography. This go-round represents my first viewing for most of the eighties selections, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked The King of Comedy. Not that I was expecting to dislike it, but critical or satirical looks at entertainment can feel kind of dated sometimes; while the film is very eighties, its take on fandom and celebrity felt eerily prescient.

December 17: After Hours

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Conversely, the major discovery for me here was learning that, for me, there is such a thing as comedy that's too dark. The downbeats - especially the suicide midway through the film - were so down that I couldn't really get into the "isn't this zany?!?" vibe of the rest of it. Like Less than Zero, it's an interesting snapshot of a particular urban eighties scene, but there wasn't much beyond time capsule appeal for me.

December 17: The Godfather

Screened: At home, from personal collection

So, after that downer, I started puttering around my apartment looking for a good two-movie pairing, preferably for a nice little theme night. I landed on The Godfather since a) it was there, borrowed from my parents and b) I've previously seen bits and pieces, and have the sort of base-line familiarity with the catchphrases and whatnot just from growing up in middle-class America, but hadn't seen the whole thing beginning-to-end before. I mused for a while on potential themes for the evening - branching off on different actors (if Netflix had had Brian's Song on Instant Watch, it may very well have been "James Caan: Hot in the Seventies" Night(just because I like Brian's Song - obviously, I know there are other movies that could serve there)), the Coppolas, the "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" era; a friend suggested looking for a movie with positive representations of Italian Americans, but I couldn't come up with one off the top of my head. Ultimately, the theme was the path of least resistance - Godfather Part II, which I didn't finish until the following evening as I fell asleep in the middle.

Ah, the movie: Good performances, but I had a lot of trouble keeping track of who was who among the various enemies.

December 18: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Screened: At home, from personal collection

Normally, I don't go for bleak in movies; it's proved to be a major stumbling block for me with the filmographies of Woody Allen and the Coens. For some reason, though, I flat-out love this movie. I love the weary cynicism radiating from Jane Fonda's performance, I love the uncomfortable frenzy of the derby scenes, I love the creeping dread that permeates every minute of this bleak, bleak film.

December 18: The Godfather, Part II

Screened: At home, from personal collection

December 23: Easy A

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I feel kind of ambivalent about this movie - I really liked it, but I've got quibbles. Emma Stone's performance was great, but the attempts at meta-commentary on the teen movie genre in her narration were way too self-conscious. The connections to The Scarlet Letter were tenuous at best, but the denouement to the Huck Finn joke made all the other broad swipes at literary allusion worth it. Romantic comedies seem to be in such a sorry state that I appreciated the genuine humor in Easy A, but hopefully future additions to the genre can be funny without being so hyper-aware of their predecessors.

December 29: Black Swan

Screened: In the theater

I think I'm still sorting out all my thoughts about this one, but I know that I liked it a lot. Deeply, deeply unsettling in the best way possible. Having known a lot of high-strung, driven people, I felt like Portman and Aronofsky tapped into something about the way they think and function that was very real, even as the movie spiraled out into crazier and crazier places. I was also really impressed by the way that Black Swan managed to draw very heavily upon the kinds of themes that have distinguished some of the best ballet movies up until now - mother-daughter relationships and company politics in The Turning Point, life imitating art in The Red Shoes, etc. - and still feel daring and novel.

December 30: Eat Pray Love

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Not as horribly self-indulgent as I'd feared, mostly rescued by good performances by charismatic actors and gorgeous visuals of sweeping vistas and delicious-looking food.

Screened: October 2010

October 1: Iron Man 2

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I didn't think it was bad, necessarily, but in this movie much more than the first you could really see all the pieces being moved into place for the 2011-2 Marvel Universe Cinema Explosion. I'm sure for some superhero fans that really gets them pumped, but now I'm feeling a bit wary of Thor and Captain America. If the path to The Avengers doesn't unwind organically, I'm afraid that the whole enterprise is going to collapse under its own weight.

October 2: A Home at the End of the World

Screened: At home, DVR from HBO

October 4: Date Night

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 6: Who's That Knocking on My Door

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

So, sometime around the end of September/beginning of October, forces conspired to prompt me to dive headfirst into Martin Scorsese's filmography. I've seen quite a few of his movies, having taken an undergraduate course that studied his work alongside that of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, but there are still quite a few I haven't yet seen, and several I haven't watched since that class. The press around the beginning of Boardwalk Empire frequently invoked different ideas of how Scorsese's artistic vision framed the show, and the kinds of continuing criticism one reads when one frequents the websites of television critics paint an interesting portrait of what people view as markers of the Scorsese-esque. After letting it rattle around in my head for a few days, I decided to give in to my self-imposed movie marathon impulses and institute Scorsesefest 2010, watching the features in chronological order.

Introductory movie, and a first-time viewing for me. There's something sort of charming about the fact that even the early work of acclaimed directors can feel so student-y - as an American Studies person with a few film studies courses under my belt, I couldn't help but be amused by the conversations he has his characters engage in regarding The Searchers. It was interesting to watch this film in relatively close proximity to Mean Streets - you can see where a lot of the ideas about male camaraderie, Catholic imagery, and the relationships between young men and women got more refined as Scorsese got more experience as a filmmaker.

October 6: Daughters of the Dust

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 8: Boxcar Bertha

Screened: At home, DVR from TCM

Another one that was new to me. I'm left mostly fascinated by how unbelievably fake the blood looks in movies from the sixties and seventies. It looks like paint, the kind of bright primary red that kids use. How alarming would it be if something the color of a stop sign came out of your body?

October 9: Mean Streets

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

I love, love, love the first twenty minutes of this movie. The opening credits, the character introductions, the soundtrack choices. (Listening to "Tell Me" about five times in a row was a crucial step on the way to instituting the one-woman film festival.) Perfection. While the film then starts to drag a bit for me, I think on this viewing I was better able to appreciate the way that it captures a sort of age of liminality when you're trying to be an adult even though you don't really know how to do so.

October 9: The Social Network

Screened: In the theater

The movie managed to address the ongoing discussion around Facebook and how it has or hasn't altered the meaning of friendship to its relevant generation without directly engaging those debates that always seem to involve a lot of hand-wringing over the fate of the Millenials. Take away the millions upon millions of dollars, and you've still got a painfully honest picture of the way people in their late teens and early twenties come together, fall apart and learn (or avoid learning) how to become adults. Great performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield; Eduardo Saverin should send Garfield a fruit basket or a bucket full of cash or something - Garfield's wounded-Bambi eyes generate more sympathy than favorable press or positive legal outcomes ever could.

October 15: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

Of all the Scorsese works I didn't see for class, I think this was the one that I was most interested to see for the first time. When you're watching Scorsese alongside Woody Allen and Spike Lee, it quickly becomes evident that you're dealing with a lesser-evil situation as far as depictions of women go - when I get to The Departed, I can talk about how excited I was when I first saw it that Vera Farmiga's character had a real job - so the female protagonist is really intriguing. (Boxcar Bertha doesn't really have much of a personality, unfortunately.) While I liked Ellen Burstyn's performance a lot, it's a very seventies movie, in a dated way rather than an iconic one. Not that I didn't like it, just that I don't know that I'll ever feel a burning desire to watch it again.

October 15: Taxi Driver

Screened: At home, from personal collection

The Scorsese filmography is one where, generally speaking, men recur and women do not. Which is to say, from Harvey Keitel through Leonardo Dicaprio, you've got a number of actors who show up in more than one Scorsese film, and few actresses for whom the same is true. Watching Taxi Driver this time around, I couldn't help but wonder what it might've been like if Scorsese had worked with Jodie Foster as an adult. She has such a dynamic presence, in that sardonic-seventies-tween sort of way that doesn't seem to exist among child actors nowadays, that it's intriguing to speculate on how she might work as a Scorsesian adult.

October 16: New York, New York

Screened: At home, from personal collection

- I'm trying to think of what a contemporary analogue would be to Scorsese taking De Niro and making New York, New York as the film following Taxi Driver, but I'm fairly stumped. Young directors on their way up the ladder of industry success generally don't do things like this these days. It's especially jarring to watch the films in order, as both feature pans from De Niro's feet up to his head - Taxi Driver towards its end, when Travis is first revealed in shaved-head, ready-for-crazy-action mode, and New York, New York at its beginning, showing Jimmy for the first time. It's a bit of a downer, and it'll never have the same reputation as the films of the great book musicals, but I love New York, New York, flaws and all.

- I love the many layers of meta-commentary in the "Happy Endings" sequence. It is so very perfectly fifties, and utilizes Liza Minnelli and all her attendant history (baggage?) so well.

- "The World Goes 'Round" seems like it could be a perfect song for Glee. It has just the right tone for a bittersweet, episode-ending montage.

October 17: The Last Waltz

Screened: At home, from personal collection

I'd been fighting it since the "Tell Me" scene in Mean Streets, but this was officially the point in this endeavor when I realized that the impulse to accumulate soundtracks was going to become a problem.

October 21: Raging Bull

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

In terms of Scorsese's period pieces and the way he incorporates aesthetic elements of contemporaneous films, it was really interesting to watch Raging Bull so closely after New York, New York. He doesn't broadcast his influences as explicitly as, say, Tarantino or Todd Haynes, but you can feel a love of those unique things that mark each era as distinct from one another. This was the movie where I most appreciated the opportunity to watch it outside of the class setting and just take time to absorb the beauty of the film.

October 22: Please Give

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 30: Winter's Bone

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix