My Week in Film (10/19 - 10/25)

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
(Directed by Ernst Lubitsch)

Maurice Chevalier unknowingly smiles at a princess (and winks at her! The scandal!) and she gets all crazy and things happen and there are things which do not happen and songs are sung and there's sex everywhere and Chevalier is a true Viennese and you just can't uproot him like a tree and I'm not sure how much I like Colbert (she was amazing in The Palm Beach Story) but that was a different roujin and while I appreciate her garter-givin', I'm just not how sure I dug everything that went down (she's a sophisticated lady though) and Chevalier will not drink the water and sometimes The Princess just has to sex it up (and that is the hottest thing ever) and the frenchman can't resist and you got yourself some HOT STUFF and roujin is amused and roujin enjoys being amused and he specially enjoys lacy lingerie and things like that (well, you can't have it all) and the only reason this isn't as good as One Hour With You is just because there's not enough good jokes and, even at 90 minutes, there's not enough distribution of the music/jokes/whateverz and although while I love Chevalier, that cheeky son of a gun, we can't win all of them and well, roujin, SHIT IS REAL. I must agree.

★★★

Scenario de 'Sauve qui peut (la vie)' (1979)
(Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard basically comes clean about the reasoning for a lot of the techniques he uses in his 1980 film, Slow Motion and they're pretty fascinating. He talks about he doesn't like shot/counter shot stuff because it reduces dialogue to something like a ping pong match or a competition. He talks about his use of crossfading not as just linking two images, but, that he sometimes he starts with a sequence as an image and he says that he sees cross-fading images as "doors" that will either open or close to new ideas and shit. He talks of his use of slow motion as slowing down to see if there's anything even there. Godard talks about a lot of times music is used to highlight emotion in events so he had various actors wonder out loud where the music was coming from and always saying that it was coming from the neighbour's radio. And that leads us to the amazing ending of Slow Motion and although I didn't love that movie, it was always interesting and I imagine watching this film can only unlock more and more stuff from that movie and I'm eager to check it out and I am not gonna change my name to godardfan27 OKAY. But, yeah, fascinating stuff.

★★★

Sink or Swim (1990)
(Directed by Su Friedrich)

Composed of 26 short vignettes, each for each letter of the alphabet, but presented in reverse alphabetical order, Sink or Swim is about Friedrich's relationship to her Father. A young girl comes on the soundtrack to tell stories about her Father and about herself all while home footage (?) plays. The stories are sometimes shocking like when the Father basically almost drowns the children (twice) and sometimes kind of funny. Sometimes the links between the names of the sections and the stories/images aren't that clear and sometimes they are, but that goes only to show that none of these elements take us toward a single answer that wraps up everything nicely. By the end of the film, the girl from the previous stories is grown up and her relationship to her Father is still ambivalent, still ill-defined. Anyway, this was really good. roujin is watching movies again! (but only short ones)

★★★


Jhon's Movie of the Week is... Sink or Swim