How goes it, SMD folk? Nice to see you guys are still at it. Hopefully, I'll put up a better average than one post per term, but I figured that some of you might appreciate film class recaps from me, so here it goes.
This past term, I taught two classes at two different institutions. The first class was a broad film history elective entitled "History of Cinema II: 1945-1975." The second class was an upper-level undergrad film school class entitled "Cinema Analysis and Criticism." I'm going to start with History of Cinema II. For that class, as I mentioned a while back, I laid out the term as follows (with some deviations from my original syllabus posted in here):
Week 1 - American Cinema in the 1940s -
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Week 2 - Italian Neorealism -
I Vitelloni (1953)
Week 3 - American Cinema in the 1950s -
On the Waterfront (1954)
Week 4 - Postwar Japanese Cinema -
Fires on the Plain (1959)
Week 5 - Ingmar Bergman: Authorship and the Arthouse -
The Virgin Spring (1960)
Week 6 - French New Wave -
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Week 7 - American Cinema in the 1960s -
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Week 8 - Britain on the Brink -
Get Carter (1971)
Week 9 - Hong Kong Martial Arts Cinema -
Fist of Fury (1972)
Week 10 - American Cinema in the 1970s -
The Getaway (1972)
Each week, I would zero-in on one or two historically important occurrences, an important genre, etc., so that the lectures wouldn't just feel like me rattling off names and titles. So, for Week 1, I focused on WWII, the "Hollywood war effort," and the collaborations between William Wyler and Gregg Toland (Orson Welles got the shaft this week, though I did show a clip from
Citizen Kane because, you know, it's
Citizen Kane)
. Surprisingly, the whole class loved
The Best Years of Our Lives. I figured there was no sense easing into shit, so I just threw a three-hour black-and-white movie at them, and they all enjoyed the hell out of it.
However, much to my surprise and I'm sure to your surprise, as well,
@chickenluver, the whole class FUCKING HATED
I Vitelloni. I'm pretty sure you were the one who mentioned how you thought that was a good Italian cinema pick that'd be palatable and enjoyable for the students. I thought the same thing. We couldn't have been more wrong. The kicker was Fausto. They hated him so violently that it soured the whole experience for them. And, to make matters worse, during my lecture I showed them two clips from
The Bicycle Thieves, which I was thinking about having for the screening, and afterwards they all agreed that they loved those clips and wished they could've watched that instead of
I Vitelloni. It wasn't all for naught, though. For myself, in preparation for the week, I rewatched a bunch of Fellini's movies. I still think that both
La Dolce Vita and
8 1/2 go beyond being overrated to being genuinely bad films. However, I like
I Vitelloni even more now; I now think that
Nights of Cabiria is even better than
La Strada, which dropped off a bit in my estimation upon rewatching it; and
Amarcord might just be my new favorite Fellini movie, possibly even nudging
I Vitelloni out of the top spot.
Moving on, for Week 3, I focused on the influence of communism in Hollywood during the 1950s and the popularity of "social problem" films and the rise of sci-fi movies. For the screening, I used
On the Waterfront to catch both the social problem and the communism angles as well as to introduce Method acting ahead of
Midnight Cowboy. Again, I was pleasantly surprised at how much the class loved it. I can't imagine Brando ever
not resonating, and it was encouraging to find that, as of 2019, Terry Malloy still has the power to captivate.
For Week 4, I was originally planning on having them watch
The Burmese Harp, but I switched things up and had them watch
Fires on the Plain because it was easier for them to watch on their own (it was streaming on Kanopy). No surprise, they thought that it was incredibly dark and dour, but they all connected to the movie and the main character and, if they didn't
enjoy the experience, at least found it engaging and interesting. And for me personally, I loved getting the chance to revisit Ichikawa.
The Burmese Harp is an absolutely beautiful film, but rewatching
Fires on the Plain, I'm now having a hard time picking which one is better. The former is easier and more enjoyable to watch, but the latter is such an amazing trek into the darkest recesses of humanity when pushed to the most extreme edges of survival. Plus, I had no recollection of how aesthetically rich the film was. I also took the opportunity, for the sake of my lecture, to revisit Ozu and Mizoguchi, and I am firmly in the Mizoguchi>Ozu camp. Kurosawa is a CLEAR #1 as far as Japanese cinema goes, but in the battle for #2, Mizoguchi trounces Ozu. Aside from
Ugetsu - which I did rewatch and appreciated more this time around even if I still think it's vastly overrated - and
Sansho the Bailiff - which IMO is so clearly his best film and just an amazing film all the way around - I watched two of his early 1930s films that I'd never seen before and that sort of set the table for
The Life of Oharu. First, I watched
Osaka Elegy, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and then I watched
Sisters of the Gion, which, while "rougher" than his more mature
The Life of Oharu, I actually prefer. As for Ozu, I really have no use for him. It took him until his last fucking movie,
An Autumn Afternoon, to make something worth a shit, and even that movie isn't anything spectacular. I rewatched some of his greatest hits and they're just so fucking dull.
Tokyo Story might be my new pick for the most overrated movie ever made, at least in scholarly circles where everybody jizzes all over that horrendously boring turd.
For the Bergman week, I honestly used this as an excuse to get my hands on that amazing Criterion collection. Hot damn is that an amazing collection. There were multiple titles in there that I'd never seen before. I fucking LOVE the movie
The Devil's Eye. Right before he embarked on his Silence of God trilogy and spent all of the 1960s in Godardian modernist territory, he made a lovely, funny, and sharp romantic saga featuring Don Juan in Hell being sent back to Earth by Satan to seduce the virginal Bibi Andersson before her wedding. I also loved getting to rewatch Bergman's early pre-
Smiles of a Summer Night catalogue. No disrespect to Harriet Andersson, who in
Sawdust and Tinsel is especially gorgeous, but I'm on team Maj-Britt Nilsson. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about
Summer Interlude, but that might be my personal favorite early Bergman flick, mainly due to how much I love Nilsson in it but also because it's just such a small yet profound disquisition on time and memory in the context of love. Anyway, for the class, I originally had them down to watch
Through a Glass Darkly, but, again,
The Virgin Spring was on Kanopy, so I called an audible. It ended up where some of the students watched one and others watched the other. I told them whichever one was easier, I didn't really care. The ones who watched
The Virgin Spring really dug it, and one of them asked me, "Did Wes Craven know that this movie existed or is
Last House on the Left just a coincidence?" The ones who watched
Through a Glass Darkly, on the other hand, just had "WTF?" reactions. But it was fun spending the week on Bergman.
Moving to the French New Wave, I showed them a good line-up of clips, but when it came to the screening, I didn't want to go the standard Truffaut/Godard route, so I went
Last Year at Marienbad courtesy of
@HenryFlower. I wasn't surprised to hear that most of them didn't exactly care for it, but I was happy with the discussion, as they clearly watched it very intently (one of the girls in the class was even trying to teach her classmates Nim when I showed up), and one of the students said it was her favorite film of the class while another one said that a few weeks after the screening and being unable to get the movie out of his head he rewatched it and liked it more. Even so, in the future if I teach this particular class again I might use a different film still beyond the Truffaut/Godard route and which can still open the door to the modernist stuff. I'm thinking I might swap
Last Year at Marienbad for
Play Time, if for no other reason to justify picking this sucker up:
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/play-time/9780231193030
Back to 'Merica, I decided I'd split the 1960s and 1970s lectures up between sex and violence. I focused on Natalie Wood in the lecture, showing clips from
Love with the Proper Stranger and
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and then had them watch
Midnight Cowboy. They all loved Dustin Hoffman, which wasn't a surprise, but a few of them said that they hated Jon Voight. That was a surprise to me, because I not only love Jon Voight in general but I really love Joe Buck in particular. He's such a great dumb guy, just a doofus with a heart so much bigger than his brain.
Then we hopped across the pond to jolly old England. This was the most fun week for me personally because I watched A LOT of stuff I'd never seen before. First, I watched two of the most famous British black comedies,
Kind Hearts and Coronets and
The Ladykillers, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed, the former especially. If there's a better British black comedy, I want to know it, because fucking hell was that dry, dark, and hilarious. In the lecture, I showed an extended clip of the first Alec Guinness he kills. That's one of the most comedically brilliant murders in the history of cinema. Then I watched some British New Wave stuff, sticking mainly with Tony Richardson. I watched
Look Back in Anger,
A Taste of Honey, and
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, none of which I'd ever seen before and all of which I enjoyed to various degrees. Then I rewatched
Alfie, which is an absolutely insane movie, used the lecture as an excuse to rewatch
Blithe Spirit, which is just such a fun time at the movies to say nothing of the spectacular color cinematography, and then, the capper, I finally crossed off a movie that'd long been on my "to see" list: Lindsay Anderson's
If.... I'd known about it ever since I first saw
A Clockwork Orange and I'd always planned on getting around to it for Malcolm McDowell if for no other reason, but I just never did. Now, I'm glad I finally got to it. What a weird, sort of beautiful, mostly disconcerting movie. I showed the clip where they skip out on the rugby match and go into town, steal the motorcycle, and pick up the girl at the diner, and the whole class was speechless as to WTF they just watched. However, on the last day of class, when we were just shooting the shit and talking about all the clips and screenings, one kid asked me, "What was that movie you showed the clip of where it went from color to black-and-white and the people having sex were growling?" I had to laugh at that description, but I was also happy that
If... had made an impression on at least one of them. For the screening, though, I had to go with
Get Carter. And
@europe1, you will be pleased to know that I gave them the extra credit option of also watching and writing about the Stallone remake, and of the three kids who availed themselves of that option, it was 2-1 in favor of the original.
The Bruce Lee week - I mean, the Hong Kong martial arts cinema week - was kind of a bummer, as we had a huge blizzard and only like a third of the class was there for the lecture. But the screening was
Fist of Fury and it was a ton of fun talking about Bruce Lee and listening to kids who'd never seen a Bruce Lee movie before talk about their experience. I also showed a clip during my lecture of Angela Mao kicking ass in
Hapkido and for her final paper one girl actually wrote about
Hapkido. When your job includes reading kids talking about Angela Mao and Bruce Lee, you know life doesn't get much better.
And then we capped things off with Steve McQueen for a Bruce Lee-Steve McQueen one-two punch. Two of the guys in my class said that
The Getaway was their favorite movie of the term, but I was surprised that a few people really didn't dig it. Even so, it made for really good discussion.
I also had them write some papers and it was a blast reading them writing about stuff like
Dr. Strangelove,
Them!,
The Third Man,
The Great Escape,
Detective Story, etc. Just an all around fun class with students who were surprisingly gung ho for this many black-and-white and even foreign films.
As for my advanced film school class, that was literally the most fun that I've ever had. The way that class is structured: There are three "units" at the end of which the students have a big paper to write. The first unit is Aesthetic Analysis, the second unit is Ideological Analysis, and the third unit is a Research Paper. As the professor, I pick the three movies for each unit, and then each unit is comprised of a screening, a film analysis, and a scholarship analysis day. The discussions were amazing, their papers were great, and I even found myself learning new things. For the Aesthetic Analysis unit, I selected
Taxi Driver, and holy shit is that one of the aesthetically richest movies ever made. I always thought that, hence my selecting it for that unit, but watching it and analyzing it in-depth with a room full of film school students gave me a TOTALLY different perspective and it's a legit aesthetic masterclass. For the Ideological Analysis unit, I selected
The Fountainhead. Watching that movie with all of them is now one of my top five favorite moviegoing experiences. They were so vocal, cracking up at different scenes, sometimes for intentional humor, other times for unintentional humor. And the discussion weeks were so fun and intense that on one of the days when we took a break one of the kids joked on his way out of the classroom, "That discussion was so intense I'm actually sweating!" It was also a lot of fun reading their essays. One student would pick one scene and talk about how ridiculous and insane it is, another student would be talking about the exact same scene and would talk about how moving and profound it is. The exact experience that I was hoping for with that pick was the experience that played out. And then, for the Research Paper, I picked
The Dark Knight Rises and we dug into the political make-up of the film (specifically its connections to the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Occupy Wall Street, and post-truth/fake news), its relation to Nolan's filmography, and its relation to other Batman and superhero films.
Looking ahead, I have a light Winter teaching load at present - just one general Media and Cultural Studies class and possibly a class called Film and Society provided that the enrollment number cracks the minimum requirement - but then in the Spring I'm going to be teaching the Media and Cultural Studies class again but, more importantly, History of Cinema III: 1975-Present and Storytelling and Style in Film (basically an intro to film class with more emphasis on craft than history/industry). For the History class, I'm thinking of starting on Week 1 with
Taxi Driver and ending on Week 10 with
Joker (which I still haven't seen, so this would be the perfect reason for me to not procrastinate further). What do you think?
The Irishman (2019) [...] was mostly excellent.
The SMC is watching that this week and I posted this in there earlier today:
This movie was a fucking dumpster fire. Like, seriously bad. In every way, shape, and form. Two massive thumbs all the way down.
For starters, the make-up and computer crap couldn't change the fact that everybody looks like they're in their eighties. When Pesci called De Niro "kid" in that early scene where he helps him with his truck, I laughed hysterically. At no point in the movie does anybody look under the age of 60.
That obvious problem aside, the major sin committed by this movie was simply being boring. For a Scorsese comparison, The Irishman is more like Casino than it is like Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street. The latter two films do try to capture an era and a zeitgeist, but they're ultimately character pieces; you're there with Henry and Jordan and everything else is reflected through them. Casino, on the other hand, is very much about the time and the place, it's the story of the rise and fall of the mob in Vegas...and it just so happens that De Niro and Pesci are the major plot movers. The Irishman felt more like Casino with a sort of docudrama feel. Except that Casino wasn't boring. The Irishman was INCREDIBLY boring. And coming in at three and a half hours, that's a lot of time being bored.
Digging deeper, I thought that the script was very weak, with almost zero significant character probing, and that the acting stunk from almost everybody. The exceptions were Harvey Keitel, who was the oldest of the bunch yet who looked the best and who performed the best, and Sebastian Maniscalco, whose comedy I literally can't watch but who undeniably stole the show and honestly outperformed everybody. I also got a kick out of Jim Norton playing Don Rickles. But De Niro was lifeless in the main role (to be fair, the script didn't give him much to work with, but that didn't used to stop him), Pesci had zero menace or gravitas and was more like a neighborhood uncle than a plugged in mover and shaker, and Pacino was almost as bad here as Nicholson was in The Departed. Aside from the Hoffa make-up being terrible, the script made of Hoffa an obnoxious, neurotic little weasel. As if that wasn't bad enough, Pacino did nothing with the role. There were no lovable quirks, there was no genuine pathos. Nothing. Afterwards, I had to rewatch Hoffa with Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito (who actually directed the film) just to get the taste out of my mouth.
In sum, this is a terrible movie that's just the worst version of everything it's similar to. On one of his recent podcasts, Bill Burr made the observation that this movie felt like everyone in it was saying goodbye. That's the best way to think of this movie. It's just a big cinematic farewell tour with a bunch of old legends who probably won't be around long enough to ever come together for one film like this again. If that's reason enough for a shitty movie like this to be made in your estimation, great, but if you ask me, I'd rather they never worked together again than add a piece of shit to their resumes.
I’ve been getting into Sam Peckinpah (sp)?
His movie with Dustin Hoffman was weird as shit
If you're referring to
Straw Dogs, one of the definitive masterpieces in the history of American cinema and just one of the GOAT...then yeah, that movie's weird as shit. But that's why it's so amazing. Nobody digs under the floorboards of relationships and male-female gender dynamics like Peckinpah, and
Straw Dogs and
The Getaway together are such fascinating examinations, courtesy of one crazy ass dude, of what sustains a marriage in some unbelievably dire straits.
