February 2012

February 2012

Le Bonheur (Varda, 1965)|||||8.5
"P.T.A. extraordinary general meeting" (Shokuzai, Japanese mini-series) (Kurosawa, 2012) (TV series)|||||7
Now, Voyager (Rapper, 1942)|||||6.5
"French Doll" (Shokuzai, Japanese mini-series) (Kurosawa, 2012) (TV series)|||||5.5
The House Where Evil Dwells (Connor, 1982)|||||4
* Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)|||||7.5
Elephant (Clarke, 1989) (TV) (short)|||||6
Everybody's Famous! (Deruderre, 2000)|||||3.5
Storytelling (Solondz, 2001)|||||6
* Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)|||||8
The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Rossellini, 1966)|||||7
* The Changeling (Medak, 1980)|||||5.5
A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg, 2011)|||||7.5
A film about flailing intellectuals and their circuitous intellectual think, and aware of their desire to change the world and the ironies of their alternating successes and failures to do so. The ending is quaintly sentimental, but it's a wonderful way to end the film after all the film's proper restraint and historical perspective (without forgoing those things, just melding them with the film's ultimate melancholy).
* Bigger Than Life (Ray, 1956)|||||7.5
The Ruling Class (Medak, 1972)|||||7.5
The Wicker Tree (Hardy, 2010)|||||6
This is delightful. If you like your film-making dirty and 70s - spontaneous, non-cookie-cutter, not afraid of honest-to-goodness personality and film-making euphoria - you might be able to forgive the film its numerous failures and embarrassments, and rejoice that Robin Hardy still has the gleeful vision he imbued into The Wicker Man, if now with more outwardly camp goals and compromised [digital age] execution.