While doing research for last week’s Disney Blogathon, I ran across several commentary lists and blog posts attacking Disney films for being “anti-Mom” because some of the studio’s notable movies feature young protagonists who are orphans or who lose their mothers. The idea that these viewers could arrive at such a superficial and misguided subtext of the films boggled my mind and made me believe more than ever that media literacy should be a required part of school curriculums. Media literacy teaches young viewers not only to be wary of the manipulative power of media but also how to interpret and examine movies in ways that are informative and productive. Of course, there are many ways to look at any given film, and aspects of certain films are deliberately ambiguous, which makes key scenes, events and characters open to debate, but interpretation should involve more than personal opinion. Highly speculative interpretations based on nothing but personal opinion are just confusing and inaccurate. 

While I was reading some of the anti-Mom rants, the French New Wave classic The 400 Blows popped into my mind, because of its thoroughly unsentimental depiction of motherhood. I thought if these viewers think Dumbo is anti-Mom, they would feint dead away if they were to watch The 400 Blows. Then, as coincidence would have it, I discovered that TCM is showing Francois Truffaut’s masterwork at the end of this week. I highly recommend this wonderful film, even if you have seen it several times before, but be prepared to time-shift with your home-recording devices because The 400 Blows airs on December 21 at 3:34am EST.  READ MORE

As usual, I come to praise all things passé today.

Have you made your last run to the store for that much needed carrot, bottle of bubbly, or pearl onion? If not, maybe, like me, you’ll find that mulling over what’s really needed makes you believe you’ll get by without it by now–especially since the rising crescendo of anxious shoppers may peak to a grumpy roar by 3 o’clock today, when people are making one more resentment-filled return to the market. I’ve decided to forgo the hunt for fresh sage and to review a few of those intangibles in my mental pantry today.

Oprah and her myriad acolytes discovered the power of being grateful some time ago, though I’m always a bit reluctant to be a “joiner”. Many of the unenlightened, like me, distracted by the sometimes overwhelming business of keeping our proverbial heads above water, sometimes forget what we’re grateful for in this world. Though I don’t fill my days with kvetching, it wouldn’t hurt to make a point of occasionally taking stock, and noting what has been good about the last year, at least cinematically.  As we try to find ways to express our gratitude for what we have in the here and now, as well as our personal memories, I thought I’d dog it this week and throw out an eclectic and personal list of a few things great and small that make me grateful for classic movies, especially since I recently realized I’ve been pushing a verb up against a noun here at this blog for one year now:

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I recently saw a new 35mm print of Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, 1956), and followed that with a screening of Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du ballon rouge, 2007), by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. The former short film (it’s 34-minutes-long) was an obligatory viewing experience for children growing up in the sixties and seventies, making it, according to Michael Koresky (who wrote the essay in the DVD booklet) “the largest-selling non-theatrical print in American history.” By contrast, the latter feature (113-minutes-long) had a limited release beyond the festival circuit and has only been seen by a few arthouse faithful. READ MORE

I adore the past. It is so much more restful than the present. And so much more reliable than the future. ~ The narrator of La Ronde (1950)

Ain’t it the truth! And no one knew how to bring the real, remembered and imagined past to vivid, extravagant life on screen quite like Max Ophüls. In the course of a brief, peripatetic lifetime, the director Max Ophüls, born in 1902 in Alsace-Lorraine of Jewish descent, tried as best he could to outrace the overwhelming tide of history. He forged a career in the theatre and the movies, dodged the Nazis, and made his way out of Europe to Hollywood. There he almost starved for years while waiting for a job, but survived the studio system, producing a few gems in the process.

Of the Hollywood films, one was a bright entertainment, the unjustly neglected The Exile with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in 1947. Two were flawed but engaging attempts at film noirs, Caught (1949) with Robert Ryan,  and The Reckless Moment (1949) both starred James Mason at the start of his U.S. career. In the latter film Ophüls also evoked a fine performance as a desperate, respectable housewife from one of the most interesting actresses of the ’40s, Joan Bennett. The director also made one possible masterpiece, Letter from an Unknown Woman in 1948 with Joan Fontaine.

While waiting for his friend and then MGM producer John Houseman to find financing for a proposed biography of Edgar Degas that might have featured dancers Leslie Caron and Cyd Charisse, the director returned to postwar Europe. Ophüls took all his pent-up creativity, the polished techniques he’d absorbed and hoped to translate to the screen back to France, where the film industry was struggling to be reborn. There, on a shoestring budget not evident on the screen, he adapted the controversial, sexually frank play Reigen,  by the early 20th century Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler. READ MORE

I program an art-house calendar film series in Boulder. The auditorium we screen films in has 400 seats and our projection booth is outfitted with two Century SA projectors from 1983. Aside for the occasional specialty event that requires digital projection, all our shows are reel-to-reel 35mm gigs operated by a Union Projectionist (John Templeton, the head projectionist, has over 35 years in the business). While we have many success stories, we also have our fair share of experiences that still make me cringe to think about. Here are just a few: READ MORE

Ay Carumba!  He’s been compared to Casanova and Don Juan, and during his lifetime romanced a slew of the most gorgeous — and frequently wealthiest — females around, yet he’s far from a household name today.  He’s been dead for over forty years, but scandalous tales of his legendary erotic prowess live on.  Such is the legacy of Porfirio Rubirosa, sometime government attache, much-in-demand man-about-town, ace polo player, daredevil racecar driver and the quintessential Latin Lover, for real.  Many women fell under his powerful romantic spell, but only five women walked down the aisle with him, beautiful French movie actress Danielle Darrieux among them.

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Amid the avalanche of overproduced, overmarketed summer films flooding the local cineplexes is a retro import that flew in under the radar and is delighting any moviegoer willing to give in to its droll Gallic humor and fond appreciation of the spy thriller genre of the sixties. OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES was a huge boxoffice hit in France (and Europe) in 2006 and is just making it to these shores now but you’d better hurry and see it fast because it doesn’t have Indiana Jones’ legs or Iron Man’s robust constitution. READ MORE

Even as a pre-teen in Richmond, Virginia, I always
had a keen interest in movie promotions in the newspapers. I would study
the poster image, the featured actors, the taglines and slogans, the
title treatment, even the font style if it imparted any kind of
information about the movie’s essence. Consider, for example, the
title treatment for A Man Could Get Killed in
which the two L’s in Killed are represented by dead men with their
legs up in the air. READ MORE

How often do you see a movie that won’t leave you?

The minimalist outlines of Journal d’un curé de campagne or Diary of
a Country Priest (1951) are deceptively simple, telling the story of a man whose life appears to be a failure through his diaries. Yet the power of the movie seems to grow after seeing it and it is hard to shake its spell. In a medium that mostly glorifies and relishes the lushly beautiful as it documents our material existence on film, this movie pares down the merely visual, leaving every concentrated physical gesture such as opening one’s eyes, the feeling the sensation of the wind on a motorbike, the sound of a pen scratching on paper, of leaves being raked and the depth of feeling conveyed in a seemingly blank expression to remind us that so much of everyday life is filled with a not so prosaic significance. To feel this film’s full power, it should probably be viewed more than once. READ MORE