The Miraculous Manu Memorial Movie Month, Mmmmm!

(she's fine, it's just for the alliteration)

Hi! I'm Chwoka, and for someone who really likes movies, I sure haven't seen a lot! I've created this highly alliterative movie month for myself to fill in the gaps in my filmic knowledge, from the culturally-ubiquitous movies that everyone always references but I've never seen, to the ones of great notability as great and Canonical Cinema, or even hopefully both! I'll be watching one movie every day in July. (This plan might collapse in on itself like a house of cards, but it's important to set goals!) The list I've made for myself:

1. Taxi Driver (1h 54m)
   
2. Network (2h 1m)
   
3. Mad Max (1h 22m)
   
4. The Thin Man (1h 33m)
   
5. The Godfather (2h 55m)
   
6. Sunset Boulevard (1h 55m)
   
7. Apocalypse Now (4h 49m, jesus christ!)
   
8. Eraserhead (1h 49m)
   
9. Brazil (2h 23m)
   
10. The Usual Suspects (1h 48m)
    
11. Fargo (1h 38m)
    
12. The Graduate (1h 46m)
    
13. Oldboy [2003] (2h)
    
14. Naked Lunch (1h 55m)
    
15. The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeois (1h 45m)
    
16. Breathless (1h 30m)
    
17. Clerks (1h 45m)
    
18. Annie Hall (1h 33m)
    
19. Do The Right Thing (2h 5m)
    
20. Jaws (2h 15m)
    
21. The Wild Bunch (2h 35m)
    
22. The Conversation (1h 53m)
    
23. The 400 Blows (1h 39m)
    
24. Easy Rider (1h 35m)
    
25. The Breakfast Club (2h 10m)
    
26. Scarface [1983] (2h 50m)
    
27. The Godfather II (3h 20m)
    
28. Boogie Nights (2h 36m)
    
29. 2001: A Space Odyssey (2h 41m)
    
30. Star Wars (2h 5m)
    
31. Drive (1h 43m)
    

Feel free to join in with me if you like, drop in to talk about movies on the list you've already seen, whatever. I'll try to keep up and say a little something about every movie I watch, get some screencaps. For reference, my personal spoiler policy is: I don't care at all about spoilers. If it would stand up on a second watching, and it should if it's worth a shit, then knowing what happens next doesn't ruin it. The plot's not the important part of a movie anyway.

I've only seen 3 of these, yikes.

An offering for the memorial

:o

breakfast club

iz great.

Jaws is also great. So I'm combining both to bring you this specialty flesh-fast.

Dig in, Chwoka.

You must be registered to view this content.

Out of this list, I've only seen Star Wars, Taxi Driver, and The Breakfast Club.

Hmm, I think I'll add Mad Max, Space Odyssey, Clerks, Jaws, and Do The Right Thing to my short list of movies to watch while on vacation. If anybody has any other good recommendations though, I'm all ears.

The Usual Suspects is GREAT

You must be registered to view this content.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Musical Accompaniment: Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five — The Message

Travis Bickle is a sick, pathetic man, a hypocrite ("walking contradiction," really) whose proclamations that "one day a real rain will come and wash away the scum" contradicts the fact that he revels in it — like, can you imagine Travis Bickle enjoying clean, country living, or even Rudy Giuliani's New York City? Like the movie itself, he is a mix of fascinated and repulsed by the city at night. (I can't deny the appeal myself, on a visual level at least. Very neo-noir — wait wait, NEON noir.)

For instance, early on there's a short scene where a girl (12 and a half years old!) hops in the back seat and implores him to drive, just drive anywhere, to get her out of a horrible situation, and he does nothing to actually clean up the city, just sits there until the split-second moral decision has passed out of his hands and into her pimp's. This moment does haunt him for the rest of the movie, in the form of the crumpled $20 her pimp tosses Travis through the passenger's side window, and glances at her on crosswalks and street corners.

One motif I loved keeping track of in this movie was its evolving use of the color red and, to a lesser extent, yellow. It kicks off in one of the first images we see (besides the credits), red lights (possibly of the stopping variety) passing over the eyes of Bickle:

At this point it really doesn't mean anything other than making a good image to hook us, combining with the music to create a sense of foreboding. Then, Travis eyes a young, blonde (that is to say, yellow-haired) woman dressed in white (virginal, holy white) and becomes lightly obsessed with her. Finally, when he works up the courage to ask her out on a date, her place of work is decked out in all red, he's wearing a red jacket, and her only non-white outfit in the entire movie is a mix of red and white:

Perhaps this red symbolizes love, now, the color of hearts and Valentine's Day cards. (Amusingly, throughout this scene, the coworker his sweetheart/target has been wittily flirting with for two scenes before this keeps inserting himself into the middle of the frame, between Travis on the right and the woman on the right, culminating in him peeking out from behind a pillar like a cartoon character:)

For his second date, Travis, betraying his monologues about how he despises the filthiness of the city, takes his date, his angel, to a fucking PORNO and thinks that's acceptable. I mean, it was the 70s, but come on.

(See the man with the red jacket like Travis' drumming? No idea what to make of that. He was the star of a whole establishing shot sequence, too.)

The frame floods with the red of the theater seats, drowning her and bringing her to storm out:

(The movie poster for the movie they're watching is even red and yellow!)

Finally, she catches a yellow taxi out of the movie:

This is our first act break, and after this the motif practically disappears.

With his object of desire having rejected him, Travis' thoughts turn ever darker, and he wraps himself up in a self-absorbed fantasy (something he also decries in the early parts of the film) of himself as his OWN angel, a masculine, righteous avenger — a "real cowboy" — but comes across, the whole time, as a boy playing at a man. See here, him aping a Secret Service agent:

The conceit is laughable and paper-thin, and retroactively makes the times I've seen the "You lookin' at me?" scene quoted to ACTUALLY sound like a tough type hilarious. This leads to maybe my favorite scene in the whole movie:

Note how the framing probably deliberately mirrors when Travis got dumped, earlier, and the red is so powerful it even takes the yellow away from the taxi. Because of this cue, the immediately preceding scene where a cuckold passenger outlined his plan to kill his wife to Travis, and the scene in act I where this man implored Travis to buy himself a piece for protection, we know almost exactly what's on Travis' mind, even though he never actually gets around to saying it because he's too nervous and awkward. The closest he gets is he says he's been having some "bad thoughts." The scene here works entirely on implication, small cues that the audience was meant to pick up on, and its meaning comes out clear as day. I love it. The other cabbie, not being the omniscient audience, though, doesn't quite catch his drift and thinks he's just going to kill himself. He gets a gun for him anyway, one that's "not a toy."

After this, the motif disappears for a while and red stops being an overwhelming color. Travis starts actually being the change he wants to see in the world, as opposed to earlier when he was a passive observer to the ills of the world, the underaged and unwilling hookers, but, again, he's acting out childish fantasies of masculinity, like when he shoots an aspiring grocery-store stick-up artist, the ultimate gun fantasy. It's practically the definition of doing the right things (debatedly) for the wrong reason.

He projects all the virtue he tied up in the previous blonde with the other blonde in the movie, the aforementioned 12-and-a-half-year old hooker Iris, which is quite the direct invocation of the old Madonna/Whore complex. Indeed, where Travis and the previous woman were persistently placed in the left and right sides of the frame in scenes with each other, the relationship is literally mirrored for he and Iris, perhaps because this time around Travis sees himself as the more virtuous one. And the red motif returns after its long absence, too:

But this time, it seems to symbolize that he is descending into the bowels of Hell itself.

Only when his plan to assassinate the presidential candidate that his previous focus worked full-time volunteering for falls through, does he go to take down her pimp and associates once and for all in a spree of violent frustration, illustrating where his priorities truly lie. Red finds one last potent association: blood.

After this, he becomes hailed by the public as a hero for slaughtering these gangsters and reunites with his object of adoration — though I like to think he's matured past the stage in his life where he needs an angel or needs to be an angel, or is, at least, sated. That's probably just what I'm reading into the ending, though, you could back up a thesis that he didn't learn his lesson just as well — after all, what feedback did he ever get from the world that this was not an attitude to continue indulging?

Overall, a very very good movie, and I liked it a lot.

You must be registered to view this content.

Yeah, her pimp said she was 12-and-a-half.

You must be registered to view this content.

Network (1976)

Musical Accompaniment: Steinski & Mass Media — It's Up To You (War Mix)

I'm not going to spill a lot of ink on Network, because it is a movie that compulsively analyzes itself. One of the characters announces specifically Acts 2 and 3. It's the wordiest movie I've ever seen, one where everyone is prone to break out into a beautiful monologues and impromptu alliteration. I don't mean that as a knock on it at all, I mean that in the best way possible. So instead, let us meditate on the visual aspects of a movie that doesn't show off much. Namely, its use of doorways to divide the screen up:

It's not exactly Wes Anderson, but this world undoubtedly exists in straight lines and right angles, which is part of the reasons Howard Beale's set is such a shocker when it's first revealed (although let's not kid ourselves, it's pretty over-the-top:)

Overall, a very very good movie, and I liked it a lot.

Oh, and speaking of extremely charismatic newsmen who aren't actually newsmen, Comedy Central is streaming all of Jon Stewart's Daily Shows this month!

Oh, and speaking of extremely charismatic newsmen who aren't actually newsmen, Comedy Central is streaming all of Jon Stewart's Daily Shows this month!

and lo, this video wasn't available in my location.

and it was bad.

(thank you for the neat thread though Chwoka.

also before anyone asks Comedy Central has some voodoo that ignores trying to use proxies when blocking vids).

You must be registered to view this content.

Mad Max (1979)

I apologize to those already expecting a visual feast from my commentaries. I did not take screencaps for this movie because:

a) I was worried about the time commitment on a work day, to pause and rewind it and crop it and export it and run them all through Irfanview to make them smaller and then upload them. This worry was unfounded, because I was careful to arrange shorter movies for work days, and I will not stress about this in the future. But also,

b) Mad Max is an action movie. For an action (or horror) movie, you the viewer are along for the ride, a passenger. Not that it can't be analyzed or that it is "just a movie, turn your brain off," but on a first viewing you certainly don't want to rob yourself of its pacing, and it doesn't traffic in delicately-composed shots and subtle nested levels of irony. (Instead, it traffics in traffic. Like, cars.)

No, Mad Max is a story about good and evil, justice and insanity. That is to say: good justice, evil insanity, evil justice, and finally good insanity. We meet the titular Max, quite sane actually, as a sort of police officer, indeed the force's most competent and bad-ass member, in a mildly post-apocalyptic future "a few years from now." (Indeed, it's hard to tell that there even has been any sort of apocalypse if you've somehow never become familiar with the premise of the Mad Max franchise. Everyone dresses and acts much the same, the only clue is really that our "police officers" are more like good samaritans in leather than any real organization.) This is demonstrated with one hella sick car chase that opens the film, in which all of Max's compatriots fail to apprehend The Night Rider until Max arrives and, before he's even done anything, reduces the whooping and hollering bad guy to tears. (There's an explosion at the end!) This is our Good Justice.

In doing so, however, Max has incurred the wrath of The Night Rider's affiliated motorcycle gang, the Acolytes, (name not mentioned in the film, I believe, but on the Wikipedia page,) who are the embodiment of Evil Insanity. They enact a campaign of terror against Max, sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently, as their evil insanity would imply, beginning really with immolating his partner on the force. He is driven to quit the force or at least take a few weeks off, stating, quote:

"Any longer out on that road and I'm one of them, you know? A terminal crazy... only I got a bronze badge to say I'm one of the good guys. "

He's righter than he knows. This does not stop the Acolytes from continuing to enact their brand of Evil Justice, killing his dog, wife, and child, and severely wound him. (Action doesn't really work unless the hero gets badly wounded, in all possible ways. You could say the same about all genres, but in action it has to be tactile and visceral.) For Max, it is no longer about maintaining order. It is about revenge. He suits up and kills every single person in the Acolytes. Finally, having killed the leader, he finds the lowest-ranking member of the gang scavenging for clothes. Instead of just killing him, or apprehending him (as we've already seen this man apprehended and let off on technicality — perhaps another form of Evil Justice,) Max devises a sadistic death-trap, hand-cuffs him to an upturned automobile, sets up a sort of fuse that will ignite the gasoline and oil, and implores him to cut off his own ankle, because it's faster that way. He drives away from the ensuing explosion without looking behind him. This is our Good Insanity. He truly was... a Mad Max.

A useful point of comparison for all of this, I think, is Dirty Harry. (The original, I haven't seen the sequels.) In Dirty Harry, the titular Harry Callahan, is, from the beginning of the movie to the end, in favor of cutting corners and using excessive force to lay down order. He does not really have an arc. Instead, the rest of the world almost bends around him to justify his existent values, showing how the due process of law impedes public safety, until finally these external obstacles are dismantled and Harry is able to have his druthers and chase down the evil, insane Scorpio — and in doing so, in killing his counterpart, erase his own reason for existing as a modern cowboy, lending a certain bittersweetness to his ultimate victory. (Until the sequel!)

These stories end in, essentially, the same place. But where Dirty Harry spends its time on negating forces external to the main character, Mad Max focuses on the journey of Max, how you can get this right-thinking man to internally embrace his insane world, making its hard-fought ending feel more justified and wholesome, less likely to irk the liberal-minded viewer leaving the theater. (Although you could say that's the point of Dirty Harry, along with soothing 1970s America's open wound shaped like the Zodiac.)

Overall, a very very good movie, and I liked it a lot.

I'm kind of surprised you liked that movie, because the original Mad Max was a hell of a mess. The whole first half of the movie was almost unnecessary and the second half wasn't much better :v The aesthetic didn't really kick in till Mad Max 2, either.

I'm kind of surprised you liked that movie, because the original Mad Max was a hell of a mess. The whole first half of the movie was almost unnecessary and the second half wasn't much better :v The aesthetic didn't really kick in till Mad Max 2, either.

The middle "vacation" bit went on stupid long, but at the time I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Figured, oh, they're earning their emotional stakes for when the girl finally kicks the bucket, and the bad guys will reappear any second. This one! Or this one! Or this one!

The Thin Man (1934)

I figured it was about time to leave the 1970s, and you know what those kids are crazy about these days? Screwball murder mysteries from the 1930s! Truth be told, I didn't know what to expect when sitting down to watch this one. It's not some stone-cold acclaimed classic, just something I've been meaning to get around to seeing. It's an oddball pick.

One thing these old-time black-and-white talkies had down pat was blocking, a holdover from silent films and theater. Take this scene for example:

The woman on the right wants to know what’s being said on the phone, and the woman on the right wants her not to know, if for no other reason than she’s annoying.

So she turns away from the camera, hiding now not only the news but her reaction to it from the audience, so our focus is pulled to the woman on the right and her intensity.

Now she’s hung up the phone and turned to profile, to continue to dodge questions. Later in the same scene we have this sequence:

Do you see it?

Peek-a-boo! Later still:

Mighty sly framing. We’d see a lot more of this type of thing in the 40s when deep focus was invented and became the new hip thing. Finally, this sequence takes place over a split-second. Now you see him:

Now you don’t:

Pretty slick.

I really don’t have much time for any more than this today, though, sorry.

I'm interested in watching the classic Universal monster movies along with old cheesy horror stuff. Is there any way we could arrange something and watch them together online? Is anyone even remotely interested in doing something like that?

The middle "vacation" bit went on stupid long, but at the time I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Figured, oh, they're earning their emotional stakes for when the girl finally kicks the bucket, and the bad guys will reappear any second. This one! Or this one! Or this one!

Ren and i decided one of the main problems with it is that the music and tone in general was really poorly done? Like, chilling in holiday town is given as much dramatic tension as running down and killing Max's wife, etc etc. I think the main problem was huge lack of experience from everyone making the movie

Anyway the main bad guy in Mad Max one played Immortan Joe! Fun Fact.

Ren and i decided one of the main problems with it is that the music and tone in general was really poorly done? Like, chilling in holiday town is given as much dramatic tension as running down and killing Max's wife, etc etc. I think the main problem was huge lack of experience from everyone making the movie

Anyway the main bad guy in Mad Max one played Immortan Joe! Fun Fact.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that Mad Max is on the level of a Die Hard (the platonic ideal of action movie,) but like I said, comparable to a Dirty Harry. I guess that puts it in like, the 3-star range. I don't know, I'm trying to avoid making these just reviews and value judgements. That's why I just said "Overall, a very very good movie, and I liked it a lot" at the end of every post, just to sort of thumb my nose perfunctorily at the concept. But I dropped it after I saw it causing confusion, and it was sort of immature besides that.

I'm interested in watching the classic Universal monster movies along with old cheesy horror stuff. Is there any way we could arrange something and watch them together online? Is anyone even remotely interested in doing something like that?

I'm constitutionally incapable of handling horror movies. I know the old Universal monster movies are just gonna be mostly goofy, but... still kinda iffy. Also my hands are kinda full with this thread.

The Godfather (1972)

Again, no screencaps, because I watched it on DVD. The same will be true of The Godfather Part II — and speaking of, my God, am I excited for The Godfather Part II, if it's 3/4ths the film this was. Same goes for Apocalypse Now. I do regret saying earlier that I was trying to refrain from making these little updates reviews and value judgements, because now I'd feel like a hypocrite for showering this movie with superlatives. And frankly, this film was so enrapturing as to shut down my usually-working-overtime critical faculties, so I'm left with very little to say (which is all well and good because technically this update is already screeching in past midnight.)

The most I can really say right now is that, more than any other film I've seen up to this point — my main points of comparison here are Zodiac and White Heat — The Godfather is sprawling. It's that near-3-hour runtime, has to be. That, or the lack of a little bar that tells you how far along in the movie you are, like I get when I stream the movies instead. Unlike other movies, it doesn't feel like it is contained in a neat, tidy 3 act structure, in and out. This is not to say it doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but it twists and it turns and it takes digressions that aren't actually digressions, until it ends, having covered a goodly sum of time while never being anything less than fascinating. Zodiac failed at accomplishing this same feat, flat out. White Heat, on the other hand, I only REMEMBER capturing this same sort of dizzying, all-encompassing feeling when I was younger than I am now, and I'm fairly sure it wouldn't have that same effect if I watched it again now. (I really should watch it again, I used to call it my favorite movie until I realized I had mostly forgot it. Maybe I just have a thing for gangsters.)

That's fine, not everyone can handle the spoop.