Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme, and writing a bit about them.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled Thursday programming.
October was a crazy month for me. I'm glad it's all over and that my life and schedule is back to normal. I look forward to talking more movies with everybody!
SO. To the matter at hand! Strangers can be mysterious or friendly, but generally speaking, in movies they're bad news. Whether as harbingers of things to come or an interloper who completely upends everything around them, you pretty much don't want to run into anyone unknown if you're in a movie.
Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968) Terence Stamp is the living embodiment of desire as a character known only as "The Visitor", who comes to a bourgeois Italian household and disrupts their lives. Mostly by having sex with them, and then leaving. But even that description doesn't really do a good job of describing this movie, which is much stranger and more alienating than it sounds. It's a completely singular experience.
10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016) A young woman has broken up with her fiancée on the eve of a massive, near-extinction-level event. While driving away, she gets into a car accident, and when she wakes up, she finds herself chained up in an underground bunker. The man who has chained her up, Howard, insists that he's saved her from whatever happened outside, but she's not so sure. Who's the real bad guy here? Why can't we all just get along? Billed as a "spiritual sequel" to the "found footage" monster flick Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane starts out as a great littler thriller/character study, but the last act throws that all out the window in favor of positioning itself as the second film in a franchise. It ALMOST completely ruins the movie, but thanks to the terrific performances of Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman, this is still plenty of fun. BUT SERIOUSLY, if you didn't see that ending coming from the second you saw the trailer for this, I don't even know what to do with you.
Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnes Varda, 1962) Pop singer Cléo has had a cancer scare, and is waiting for the results of a test to tell her whether or not she has it. That's it. That's the whole movie. But, oh, what a movie Agnes Varda spins from such a simple premise! It's a beautiful, lyrical piece on how to appreciate every little thing around you. But why do I include it here, you may ask? Well, that would be because Cléo isn't truly able to process her feelings about her pending diagnosis until she meets a stranger, a soldier on leave from the Algerian War. It is only in meeting this man that she is able to appreciate life for what it truly is. Sometimes, a stranger comes along right when we need them - an impartial observer who can force us to see ourselves from a different, life-changing perspective.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them - we won't disappear on you!
Fear not, my friends! I haven't disappeared, I'm just CRAZY busy and tried to do this on my lunch break at work but that didn't work because I haven't really had a lunch break all week. Anyway, this week's theme is disappearances, which can be traumatic - for the disappeared as well as the ones they left behind.
The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2016) A Puritan family is exiled from their village after their views are deemed too extreme (which, since we're talking about Puritans, must have been pretty damn extreme!). They settle on the edge of a wood and before long, when teenage Thomasin (a star-is-born performance from Anya Taylor-Joy) is playing peek-a-boo with her baby brother, the baby disappears. As it turns out, he was stolen by a witch who lives in the wood, and the young twins insist that the family goat, Black Phillip, is talking to them. One of the best films of last year, The Witch (or, if you prefer, The VVitch) is supremely chilly, a tense, beautifully shot freakout that never feels anything less than completely authentic, and features outstanding performances from Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson as the heads of the household.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) On Valentine's Day in the year 1900, three schoolgirls and their teacher disappeared during an outing at Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia. This didn't actually happen, but after watching Peter Weir's gorgeous masterpiece, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was based on a true story. The film knows that not knowing what happened is scarier than giving a definitive answer, and it accumulates a lot of power in its depiction of the disappearance and its aftermath.
L'Avventura (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960)A woman disappears during a Mediterranean boating trip, and her fiancée and best friend become attracted to each other during the course of the investigation into her disappearance. Because of the ennui of the Italian socialite set. Or the landscape. Or something. I don't know. I just don't like this movie. No one is likable and the pace is too slow. I'm sure it all MEANS SOMETHING, but I could care less about these poor sad beautiful rich people.
