The Frame

Welcome to My Study: Halloween Edition

You’re always welcome to enjoy the things that I’ve found. This weekend’s Halloween Movie Marathon [late post]:

1. Repulsion

One detail made this film great: the skinned rabbit rotting on a plate in the salon. Like in Rosemary’s Baby (probably my favorite scary movie), it’s subtle but it creeps you out long term. 

But unfortunately there are more differences than similarities between the two films. Rosemary Baby tapped into a fear and anxiety that you already unconsciously hold - the fear of what neighbors do in their private lives. And after watching Rosemary’s, you can’t help but wonder about your neighbors. Its mood lingered. But in Repulsion, the fear is not internal, but it’s outside you and belongs only to the main girl in the film. We don’t share it. It’s the symptom of a psychiatric ailment. This made the film less scary to me than Rosemary’s. I guess you could say it’s a little easier to digest. Speaking of digest, I was just happy that at some point the girl didn’t bite into the rotting rabbit. 

2. The Exorcist

This was my first time seeing it - and my wife’s 600th. I heard the writer, a humble and likable guy, on the radio Saturday morning and he said, “I’m not being cute. I really wasn’t trying to scare anyone with this book. It’s a story about faith.” After seeing it, I realized he was right. It really was about faith and love. Good movie, but not really the satanic horror movie that everybody makes it out to be. Yes, a possessed girl masturbates with a cross. But besides that…

I was a little disappointed. To be fair, I realize the effects aged poorly and that scenes that were probably mind-blowing in the 70’s now looked silly. I also realize that my viewing experience was doomed from the start by all of the ridiculous parodies I’ve seen of this movie. But I just didn’t expect it to wrap up so neatly. A good scary movie, in my opinion, should leave you unsettled. This movie wrapped itself up so nicely, you’d think it was a full house episode. Yes, the priest dies. But he dies so nobly. Oops, spoiler alert. 

3. Don’t Look Now

I was really expecting big things from this one. While the film had a nice circular structure to it, it left too much unexplained. Basically a couple loses a daughter and moves to Venice. Then they encounter a couple of seers and the wife starts freaking out  and returns home to England to check on her son. The husband starts seeing things, including his wife, who was supposed to have left Venice. I won’t spoil the rest. 

I was loving the creepy vibe the husband was getting from everybody in Venice as he tried to track down his wife, but it never developed into anything. The film did not age well at all - the clothes (actually, she looked modern, while he, mustachioed and afroed, looked ridiculous) and the crazy 70s zooms were loony. And the sex scene was awwwkwardly long.

4. Eraserhead

“In heaven, everything’s all right…”

The first 30 minutes of this film was awesome. It got a little tedious after that. I loved the scene in the family room where the main character joined his girlfriend’s family for dinner and the man started shouting, “Look at my knees,” and they served those little disgusting oozing chickens. It reminded me how film is the perfectly suited medium for the surreal.

Welcome to My Study

You’re always welcome to enjoy the things that I’ve found. Here are some things I’ve enjoyed lately:

After watching SO MANY stupid movies, I’ve decided to take control of my movie-watching again. I’m not trying to be a snob about it - I just don’t want to wake up one day and find myself at Ghost Rider II. Which apparently will be a real thing soon.

So I took to the internet. I once thought IMDB’s Top 250 Movies was a good place to start, but after seeing that Inception was listed as the 11th greatest movie ever made that list was out, needless to say. I found this spreadsheet of the 1000 Greatest Movies “as voted by 2,138 critics, filmmakers, reviewers, scholars and other likely film types” at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They.

So far, it hasn’t let me down.

No surprise, Citizen Kane, is number one. And one of my favorites, Vertigo, is number two. I’ve started with the Top 50.

Needless to say, in the last six weeks, I’ve watched some amazing films. Here are some thoughts on a few of them:

• Seven Samurai: I thought it would be a little more sober in tone - I couldn’t understand why the samurais thought everything was so funny. Kikuchiyo was an interesting character. You want to write him off as a goof off, but you can’t. I need a film type to explain it to me. There were some great shots of the battle scenes through the fences, etc. that I thought were pretty cool and maybe even innovative for the period but I don’t know anything.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey: Talk about not knowing anything - this movie made me feel dumb, but at the same type I could enjoy it visually. I was fascinated by the monolith. It was at once the least and most interesting object conceivable. A black slab. Plopped down in the middle of a movie. No further explanation. It could be argued that the monolith was pretentious or indulgent or whatever. I thought it was awesome. If I were in film school and had to write an essay on the movie, I’d mine the significance of space food. Why all the scenes of eating in space? 
• L’Avventura: When I finished it, I thought, Meh, but then as time went on, it really stuck with me. It haunted me. It was so empty and subtle, but I keep going back to it. I’ve been recalling lines (“Why should we be here talking, arguing? Believe me Anna, words are becoming less and less necessary; they create misunderstandings.”) and scenes (knocking over the ink well, the smiling in the mirror). Something about it reminds me of a Maguerite Duras book - its subtle emotional intensity, perhaps, or its disjointed narrative. Visually, it was beautiful. 
• Lives of Others: Loved it. I loved the visual pun - or perhaps more - where the stasi dude’s writing seemed to be more than mere recording, but almost like he was writing a play involving the characters he was spying on. The close ups of the typewriter striking the dialogue, his mapping out the apartment. The stasi was the silent director, controlling their lives. 
• Other movies I’ve enjoyed: The Searchers, Assassination of Jesse James, Temple Grandin, Passion of Joan of Arc, Batman (Tim Burton’s). Kicking and Screaming was pretty good.