Quoted/Screened: May 2012

"My personal hope is that he lets a hundred (or maybe a dozen) Whedons bloom. Let's hope he repays the loyalty of his fans by opening the doors of the entertainment kingdom to the kind of writers and creators who might not get a crack at the big time without his backing. Nobody's done more than Whedon to create and inspire a generation of TV writers; many of the best scribes working today got their start on Whedonverse programs and most of the rest were powerfully influenced by his shows. I hope he throws his weight behind those writers' most impassioned passion projects..., backs those writers' pitches, gets their shows on the air and brings more fine entertainment products to the Web."

- Maureen Ryan, "Avengers Fans: Thank TV for That Awesome Movie (And What Joss Should Do Next)" at Huffington Post

I thought I'd let this stand as my Screened post for May, since the bulk of my movie viewing was contained in three trips to the theater to see The Avengers. (All 2D) (The only other movie I saw was We Bought a Zoo, which was much more charming than I expected.) The best was the first showing I went to, on Saturday the fifth, where the opening-weekend crowd responded to quips and plot developments with raucous laughs and cheers. The quippy banter of the script was perfectly suited to the viewing experience - it felt joyous to be among the crowd in a way I seldom feel in a packed theater. I rewatched some of the lead-up movies in the week before I saw The Avengers; while my opinion of Iron Man 2 hasn't really changed, I can see how The Avengers benefitted from letting that movie do a lot of heavy lifting in establishing SHIELD's presence in the broader plot and defining Tony Stark's relationship with them, and I think the weaving together of the various plot strands actually elevates the first Thor and Captain America movies a bit.

I also liked this LA Times interview with Joss Whedon - I think the comparison of Bruce Banner with Oz from Buffy is a really interesting one to make among the many "how does The Avengers fit in the Whedon-verse" analyses floating around. That was the other great feeling I had watching the movie for the first time - in that much-heralded shot that tracks from hero to hero in the midst of the final battle, my cult-TV-loving self couldn't help but think, "Holy crap, he really did it."

Screened: October 2011

October 2: I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Screened: For class

October 5: Drive
Screened: In the theater

I'm so glad I let the buzz prevail over my action-movie misgivings, because I loved this dreamy, pulpy movie. A side effect of working in the film class I TA'd for this semester was thinking more about the impact of seeing a movie in the theater as opposed to watching it at home - watching Drive in the theater felt like being steeped in a pure distillation of the essence of an action movie.

October 7: Hanna
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

October 9: Moneyball
Screened: In the theater

I think Moneyball at its heart is a perfect expression of its story's central thesis, an idealized portrait of moving parts working in concert. It felt like it had just the right amount of everything - the wonkiness of delving into sports statistics, the emotions of tracing players through the ups-and-downs of the sport as commercial enterprise (including the flashbacks to Billy Beane's start as a player), and the ultimate embrace of pure sports-movie cliche in the culmination of the A's lengthy winning streak. 

October 9: Maurice
Screened: At home, DVR from TCM

October 11: The Ides of March
Screened: In the theater

I liked this movie, particularly the performances from the ensemble and Clooney's command of the current media climate, but I wondered whether the relatively insular focus on the campaign at the heart of the story prevented Clooney and his collaborators from making broader claims about politics in general. Not that I think the characters here needed to map more clearly onto familiar political figures; I wasn't expecting, say, Primary Colors, but I think I was expecting something more like Peter Morgan's studies of Tony Blair, where at its heart it's making larger points about the difference between persona and reality or the substance of today's political climate. 

October 12: Limelight
Screened: At home, DVR from TCM

October 16: She Done Him Wrong, Gold Diggers of 1933
Screened: For class

October 21: Bad Teacher
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Screened: September 2011

September 3: Sunset Boulevard
Screened: At home, on TCM

September 5: The Birth of a Nation
Screened: For class

September 10: Paul
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

September 11: Within Our Gates
Screened: For class

September 13: Thor
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Like the Iron Man movies, Thor was ultimately a bit too concerned with moving necessary pieces into place looking ahead to The Avengers, but Chris Hemsworth did a good job of establishing his character and I think Natalie Portman, like Hayley Atwell in Captain America, made the "superhero's girlfriend" role seem not entirely thankless.

September 17: Something Borrowed
Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Since I wrote about my thoughts on the trailer back when it came out, I figured I should check back in post-viewing. A lot of my concerns expressed there were indeed borne out by the film - much of that boils down to changes made from the original book that negatively impacted the movie. The alterations to the characters of Ethan and Claire contributed to a feeling of overly broad humor that permeated the tone of the movie. The transition from the book's first-person narration obscured the emotional underpinnings of both Rachel's friendship with Darcy and her relationship with Dex. And while I recognize that it's probably too much to expect the screenwriter to draw from Giffin's other books to bolster this adaptation, I think the Thaler family dynamics she lays out in Heart of the Matter are much more interesting than the fairly boilerplate parent-son relationship depicted in the movie. (Not to mention the third-party perspective she gives in Tessa observing Dex and Rachel's relationship.) The crazy thing is that I liked John Krasinski and Kate Hudson enough in their roles that I was still really curious at the end to see how a film version of Something Blue might work. But maybe it's for the best that that doesn't seem likely to happen.

September 20: The Sheik, It
Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

September 25: The Jazz Singer
Screened: For class

September 27: Beginners
Screened: In the theater

I keep wanting to call this movie "sweet," but I feel like that's suggesting something shallow about it that isn't quite what I'm trying to get at. It's a clear-eyed portrait that interweaves romantic love and family love, always conscious of its medium but also emotionally honest in the best way. It doesn't shy away from its moments of deep sadness, but ultimately embraces a feeling of hopefulness. Heartwarming, but not pandering. Yes, sweet.

September 27: The Breakfast Club
Screened: In the theater

Screened: August 2011

August 6: The Deer Hunter

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

A long-standing entry on the "Movies I Feel Obligated to See" list, crossed off!

August 9: Captain America: The First Avenger

Screened: In the theater

Probably the best I've seen of the leading-up-to-The Avengers movies. Captain America embraced its period setting with vigor, and established its cast of characters so well that the movie's flash-forward ending felt like a bit of a tragedy. It's not only a good movie on its own, it established its ties to the broader Avengers narrative in a much less clunky fashion than the Iron Man movies. By the end, I actually felt like I was really looking forward to next summer.

August 17: Jumping the Broom

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

A nice little wedding melodrama ideal for an afternoon viewing chilling on the sofa. It feels a little facile to compare any black-cast drama with those of Tyler Perry's oeuvre, but to that end I appreciated that this movie had plot-driving conflict without outlandishly demonizing any of its characters. Also, I love the opening credits.

August 19: The Help

Screened: In the theater

I've been thinking a lot about this movie, and trying to capture my thoughts about it without my commentary becoming a treatise. It's not a bad movie - in the most basic sense, it is a very good, faithful adaptation of its source material - but it is a deeply flawed movie. Ultimately, what I come down to is that what bothers me about The Help is similar to what bothered me about X-Men: First Class (and how interesting that they take place within a year of each other) - the movie claims a specific point in history in its setting, but presents an overall picture that is troublingly ahistorical. Outside of the scene of Skeeter perusing issues of Life following the murder of Medgar Evers, there is little, if any, sense of the broader civil rights movement. No mention of the fact that the action of the story takes place nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education. No indicator of how Skeeter, recent graduate of Ole Miss, reacted to James Meredith's integration. And no sense, upon the story's completion, that in the next year activists will focus their attentions specifically on Mississippi and push for the state's black residents to receive the rights due to them as American citizens. The movie doesn't argue that Skeeter isn't naive. But it's unwilling to ask whether she has been willfully ignorant in the years leading up to the opening moments of the story, or what kinds of prejudices she may have left to challenge even as she disagrees with the actions of her former friends.

There's also a distinct, irksome lack of historical specificity. The churchgoing scenes were well-anchored by David Oleyowo (and I do hope that Lee Daniels' Selma can find financing before it fades into the ether, because - among other reasons - this movie made me really curious to see how Oyelowo's take on Martin Luther King would play out), but reinforced the ongoing issue in depictions of the civil rights movement of the lack of recognition for the increasing radicalization (and distance from church-based groups like the SCLC) of younger activists by this time. Besides Nelsan Ellis' quiet soda jerk, there really aren't any younger black characters around to even begin to offer different points of view of the way the world should be. There's also the fact that while Evers' murder serves as a narrative turning point, he is never specifically identified as working for the NAACP and his death plays as more random than targeted. I was also surprised that even with the film's focus on 1963, they declined to mention the Birmingham church bombing. There is merit in Kathryn Stockett's decision to focus on the domestic sphere and the interplay between intimacy and distance enacted there by black and white women. But the story is then done a disservice by allowing the world outside these individual homes to fade into a hazy background where nothing much important is going on.

I imagine over the coming months and years this movie will keep popping up, especially as I continue refining my academic interests in race and representation in popular culture. It's been invigorating to see those issues discussed in national, mainstream publications as The Help gained popularity. I just hope the discussion continues once the movie leaves theaters, and that filmmakers see its legacy as a challenge and call to offer more complex takes on a rich, complicated time in U.S. history.

Screened: Catching Up

Same disclaimers as the books piece, but with what little commentary I already wrote staying put. (Not included: a second trip to the theater for Bridesmaids and a failed attempt to watch Biutiful, which proved that there are indeed limits to my desire for Oscar-field completism.)

May 1: Rabbit Hole

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

May 3: Dick

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

May 4: Requiem for a Dream

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

May 14: No Strings Attached

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

May 20: Blue Valentine

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

May 25: Bridesmaids

Screened: In the theater

June 23: X-Men: First Class, Jane Eyre, Fish Tank

Screened: In the theater, In the theater, Netflix Instant Watch

Yeah, so the day may have been "Michael Fassbender's Out-of-Control Hotness"-themed. (I started to watch Inglourious Basterds, too, but I fell asleep in the middle.) What of it?

I guess I liked X-Men, but with serious reservations. The lack of historical specificity in this movie is irking me. It seems like the creative personnel behind the movie had an idea of wanting to set it in "The Sixties," but were then unprepared to tie it to a specific date with the way the story ultimately uses the Cuban Missile Crisis. The few period songs seem oddly placed - my mind is still trying to wrap itself around the use of "Palisades Park." It's very stylish, but in a way that struck my eye as very post-British Invasion. (The most striking example of this weirdness is alleged-CIA agent Moira McTaggert in her miniskirt-suit, which no professional woman by any means would've worn to the office. In my imagination, January Jones' first costume fitting for Mad Men Season Five involved Janie Bryant asking some form of, "What on earth was going on with that movie?")

Ultimately, I'd love to have another two hours of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender smoldering at each other, but I'm not particularly attached to X-Men as the context in which that needs to happen.

Jane Eyre was a gorgeous film, and did a solid job of condensing the book's material. There were a few odds and ends I'd have liked to see make it in - the story with Mr. Rochester and Adele's mother, the girl St. John has a crush on and the contrast between her and Jane in perceived suitability to missionary life and of course, the classic Brontë weirdness of the whole "Rochester poses as a old fortune-telling gypsy woman" thing, which never seems to make it into the adaptations. (Hey, after watching all these movies in fairly short succession, I believe Michael Fassbender can do anything.) The casting worked really well, too - Jamie Bell has a sort of quiet intensity that made him well-suited to playing St. John. And while Fassbender has a sort of magnetic screen presence, this adaptation really allowed Mia Wasikowska to shine as Jane and show why she's our heroine.

June 28: Super 8

Screened: In the theater

July 2: Inception, The Social Network, Black Swan

Screened: At home, DVR from HBO; personal collection

July 9: Peyton Place

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

July 17: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

Screened: In the theater

Someday, when I have the time, I'm totally going to write a series of posts devoted to nitpicking the entire series of Harry Potter movies - for some reason, this series provokes that impulse within me in a way that no other adaptations do. I felt like this was a solid conclusion to the group of films, but also found that it really showed how many emotional beats and story threads from the books were sacrificed in favor of plot efficacy over time.

July 21: Red Riding Hood

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

Screened: April 2011

April 3: Sex and the City 2

Screened: At home, DVR from HBO

April 9: 12 Angry Men

Screened: At home, from personal collection

April 15: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

April 21: How Do You Know

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

April 23: Trainspotting

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

April 24: Prodigal Sons, Life as a House

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

Screened: January, February and March 2011

Someday, I'd like to think that I'll get my thoughts together enough to offer opinions on some, if not all, of these movies. I liked a lot of them, and enjoyed some quite a bit. The crop of films nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars were pretty uniformly excellent. The new animated movies were a joy to watch, and reminded me of how it used to feel to see that kind of movie fresh in the theater. Then there's the ongoing (currently stalled out) trip through the Scorsese filmography, finally watching movies that have hovered on my list for over five years, gaining a newfound appreciation of Robert Altman and James Brooks, why I prefer Katharine Hepburn with Cary Grant over Spencer Tracy, man vs. myth in the biopic, knowing what's going to happen in a twenty-five-year-old movie and crying at the end anyway (Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias), etc., etc., etc.

Moving and other work meant that the last few months got away from me, and I know if I don't start fresh with April then the whole thing will just turn into this insane snowballing mass of half-written posts. So, a multi-month aggregate, presented without commentary but not excluding the possibility of adding it in the future:

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: November 2010

November 7: For Colored Girls

Screened: In the theater

What a two-headed monster of a movie. The performances were pretty uniformly great, especially Thandie Newton and Kimberley Elise, but the monologues from the original stage work never gelled with Tyler Perry's dialogue or his script's tendency toward over-the-top melodrama. (Michael Ealy's character dropping his children out of the apartment window? Good grief.) Add to that the fact that various of the actresses had pretty clearly performed the work in some prior theater experience, giving the cadences of their readings of most of the monologues a disconcertingly stagy quality. I admire Perry for even trying to adapt the work for the screen, but this was kind of a glorious mess.

November 13: Oklahoma!; The Young Victoria

Screened: At home, DVR from TCM and Netflix Instant Watch

I spent the better part of this day having an epic neurotic meltdown, so this was my movie night. A soothing inoffensive-film-romance balm to my weary soul. Oklahoma! holds up pretty well for material that's nearly seventy years old, even if the dream ballet is really boring if you've seen it more than twice. And The Young Victoria is exactly the kind of British period romance that's useful to have around for woe-is-me weekends. (Although I always sort of wish the epilogue added some sort of title card about how Victoria and Albert's descendants messed Africa up. But I digress.)

November 22: Dead Presidents

Screened: At home, on HBO

I probably wouldn't have checked this movie out if my TV hadn't already been tuned to HBO. I always thought it was predominantly a heist movie that was emblematic of some of the issues of the post-Do the Right Thing/Boyz n the Hood "Will there be a Black film revolution? No? Okay, then!" moment in the mid-nineties. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a film that mostly mused on urban discontent in the Vietnam years, then in the last twenty minutes devolved into a heist movie that felt like it got edited in from somewhere entirely different. It's really interesting to read the comments on the movie's Netflix page - half say something like, "I thought this was a heist movie, what an interesting surprise!" and the other half are like, "I thought this was a heist movie, WTF?"

November 24: Burlesque

Screened: In the theater

Sometimes it's really nice to go to the movies and see a film that is exactly what it was advertised to be. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a cheesy-bordering-on-trashy "country girl dreams of stardom" movie. The movie benefitted from having as good a cast as they could've hoped for - where a lower-budget endeavor might have looked for a "Cher type" or a "Stanley Tucci type" or an "Alan Cumming type," here they actually had those actors, which made it as classy as possible within the constraints of the central premise of the film. A delightful trifle of a film - I envision errant cable viewings for years to come.

November 25: Babies

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

A totally perfect movie to watch while lying around like a beached whale after Thanksgiving dinner and dessert.

November 27: The Family That Preys

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

November 29: I Can Do Bad All By Myself; Madea Goes to Jail

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

I always sort of knew that being interested in race and cinema meant that I would have to familiarize myself with the Perry oeuvre sooner or later. To some extent, I land a bit on the Spike Lee side of the argument - like, "Some people like minstrel shows!" is not a valid response to criticism, Spike Lee knows some people like minstrel shows, it's central to the core premise of Bamboozled - but I respect the extent to which he's employed a lot of black actors who aren't getting a huge amount of work or attention in Hollywood, even if that employment is situated within some of the heaviest melodrama I've ever seen (and I own three seasons of Dynasty on DVD).

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

Screened: September 2010

September 1: The Lady Eve

Screened: At home, DVR from TCM

September 3: The Turning Point

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

September 8: Broadcast News

Screened: At home, Netflix Instant Watch

September 9: You've Got Mail

Screened: At home, from personal collection

September 10: Little Women (1949)

Screened: At home, from personal collection

September 11: Going the Distance

Screened: In the theater

September 11: North by Northwest

Screened: At home, from personal collection

September 17: What's Love Got to Do With It?

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

September 18: Walk the Line

Screened: At home, from personal collection

September 22: Birth of a Nation (1933 edit)

Screened: Class screening

September 23: Within Our Gates

Screened: Class screening

September 24: Less Than Zero

Screened: At home, DVD from Netflix

September 28: Grease, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Screened: At home, on AMC

September 29: Gone With the Wind

Screened: At home, from personal collection

I'm going to be honest: I looked back at this list and don't really feel compelled to add extended commentary on any of these. I liked all of the movies I hadn't seen before, and I found Going the Distance to be heartening evidence that the romantic comedy may not be totally doomed. However, this month was kind of exhausting, and went by in a blur. Maybe I'll have more to say in October. For now, I'm just going to leave this list as it is.