![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Agatha Christie post(s) are still coming. In the meanwhile, though, the current For Better or For Worse storyline - with its shameless insistence that 'always hoping' a married man will eventually hook up with your daughter is OK, because Fate said so - is making me so mad I want to spit. Which is in turn severely hindering my ability to work out the fine points of how to discuss Christie novels without giving away endings wholesale.
So I thought I'd take a break for now and discuss something else of vital importance to the nation: my favourite movies.
My attitude toward the cinema - such a lovely, expressive term, isn't it? - anyway, the relationship is a curious one, at least for your average online blogger. I have no qualifications in re: the discussion of film as an art form, nor a cultural influence. I don't even watch that many, is what I'm saying here. These days I go into the cinematic experience mostly for whatever good time I can't get in books - the big, the beautiful, the lavish visual spectacle...sometimes just the indescribably cool. Hence, my real, sincere appreciation of Transformers: The Movie.
That said, I have a rather more complicated and intimate rapport with certain classic films from the bygone age of - well, elegance, is the first word that comes to mind. Movies made when the pervasive pop-culture assumption was still that audiences wanted to have their intelligence flattered and their literacy rewarded. In the best of American cinema from roughly 1930 through 1950, there is a fluid rhythm to the dialogue that demands responsive thought, an attention to the details that compels not only attention but respect. At least, they get that respect from me.
Thusly we come to the three particular celluloid bits of my heart: Billy Wilder's noir classic Double Indemnity, the unsung Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn collaboration Holiday, and Gene Kelly's masterpiece, Singin' in the Rain.
***********************************************
To begin with, Double Indemnity. I've noticed, in the course of what serious movie-watching I have done, that there exists a curious sort of perfection in the film mileu that results from being able to manipulate reality so closely. The characters are so perfectly cast, the story so engrossing, the dialogue so sharp and pointed that the movie chimes exactly with the viewer's conception of what should be happening, regardless of how outlandish any of the above actually is.
( Read more... )
So I thought I'd take a break for now and discuss something else of vital importance to the nation: my favourite movies.
My attitude toward the cinema - such a lovely, expressive term, isn't it? - anyway, the relationship is a curious one, at least for your average online blogger. I have no qualifications in re: the discussion of film as an art form, nor a cultural influence. I don't even watch that many, is what I'm saying here. These days I go into the cinematic experience mostly for whatever good time I can't get in books - the big, the beautiful, the lavish visual spectacle...sometimes just the indescribably cool. Hence, my real, sincere appreciation of Transformers: The Movie.
That said, I have a rather more complicated and intimate rapport with certain classic films from the bygone age of - well, elegance, is the first word that comes to mind. Movies made when the pervasive pop-culture assumption was still that audiences wanted to have their intelligence flattered and their literacy rewarded. In the best of American cinema from roughly 1930 through 1950, there is a fluid rhythm to the dialogue that demands responsive thought, an attention to the details that compels not only attention but respect. At least, they get that respect from me.
Thusly we come to the three particular celluloid bits of my heart: Billy Wilder's noir classic Double Indemnity, the unsung Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn collaboration Holiday, and Gene Kelly's masterpiece, Singin' in the Rain.
***********************************************
To begin with, Double Indemnity. I've noticed, in the course of what serious movie-watching I have done, that there exists a curious sort of perfection in the film mileu that results from being able to manipulate reality so closely. The characters are so perfectly cast, the story so engrossing, the dialogue so sharp and pointed that the movie chimes exactly with the viewer's conception of what should be happening, regardless of how outlandish any of the above actually is.
( Read more... )
