Broadening my film background...

For various reasons, I've recently foregone renting new releases and have been expanding my repertoire of classics that I should have seen ages ago. Yes, James, I finally saw sex, lies, and videotape, so now I know what I was missing when I was five years old. :)

Last weekend I rented Saturday Night Fever; Stayin' Alive is on the Madagascar soundtrack that my mom just bought, and when I heard it at home I commented that I had never seen the film that it's from. Of course that got my parents into reminiscing about how they saw it in the theatre when it was released (!) and that it was nothing like what they expected. So of course I had to see it. I'm vaguely annoyed that the famous pose from the poster is actually not in the movie at all (and I looked for it), nor is Stephanie's dress red; it's white. But yeah, it's kind of a disturbing film, the scene in the car as they leave the dance contest was particularly difficult to watch.

And then there's Bonnie and Clyde, which my brother has been trying to get me to see for the past two years. But James had a video on his blog with Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg, and after watching it I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Right now, all I have to say about the film is that when it was over, I thought, 'Holy crap.' and then spent a good five minutes just sitting there trying to get over it's shocking brilliance. Why have I not seen it before?

I also feel I should include the following (also on James' blog...sorry dude) -- I have no idea what this film is or even who Anna Karina is, but I just love it, especially her look right at the end before the fadeout:


I also ordered Vol II of the Journal of Short Film before spring break, and found it in my mailbox on Sunday evening when I got back to school. It's such a cool idea (it's a DVD of (in this case) 11 short films), and I think I might take out a subscription for the rest of the year. There's a cool experimental documentary of two kids walking through the streets of Chicago on a summer day, and a really beautiful kind of puzzle-film (literally...kind of hard to describe) about a little girl and her love of the night. And (all right, yes, this is why I ordered it, and how I found out about it to begin with) The Tourist, by James (this post has turned out to be all about you, hasn't it?) and his brother Jeff; it's about "a woman afraid to leave her Brooklyn apartment...as she struggles with her dreams, memories and the mundane." It has a hint of both Amelie and Run Lola Run to me, in the general style and (quite graceful) use of color vs b&w. It's shot on Super8 film, a look that I've realized is what I liked so much about a lot of the experimental films that I saw in my intro film studies course last spring -- now I have a name for it! Isn't that exciting... (P.S. I started drifting from our discussion of Langston Hughes in class this afternoon and spent a good 45 minutes writing part of a script for a short I've been thinking about since November 2004...if I ever get to shoot this thing, it'll definitely be on Super8 film...)