Day: May 1, 2005

closer

we watched this some weeks ago. i didn’t blog about it then because i thought sunhee–who liked it more than i did–would; but she didn’t. then yesterday we were at a party where a number of people raved about it. i heard what they had to say but remained largely unmoved. has anyone else seen it? it is about four (beautiful) people in london who fall in and out of love over the course of a few years. i found parts of it funny and touching and it is a stylish production (in the way that mike nichols’ films are) but other than clive owen’s performance there’s nothing here i would recommend to anyone. beautiful people fall in love, are shallow, cheat, swap partners, get back together, have control issues and deal with them differently. on the whole i had a hard time caring about any of them or any of it. in many ways it goes over a lot of the same ground as “we don’t live here anymore” (did we discuss that here?) but i preferred that film (which i didn’t like that much either).

someone want to convince me otherwise?

fritz lang–“m”, “metropolis”

watched the criterion disks of these in the last week. i’d seen “m” a long, long time ago and if you can believe it i’d never seen “metropolis”.

“m” first: i can’t remember what my original response to “m” had been–i wasn’t a very engaged film-viewer then and in any case was probably too aware of its status to register a genuine response. watching it now i was struck by all the things that make it such a landmark film–the use of voiceover, the use of music as narrative device, the camera-angles, all the noir devices that would soon become mainstays of the genre etc. etc.. but i was most struck by the fact that exactly because it has been such an influential film these things don’t really have an effect anymore (not on me anyway). now that every crap film and television show uses all these devices it seems, to me anyway, hard to register “m” as anything but a historically significant film–it didn’t surprise me the way “the testament of dr. mabuse” did. i’m interested to hear your takes on this both in relation to this specific film and in general. (by the way, i can see what welles took from lang for “citizen kane”, but again i have to say that while i recognize “kane” as a historically significant film the welles that remains fresh for me is “touch of evil”.)
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