Breathless

In the interest of keeping most of my thoughts for the upcoming assignment, I'm going to keep my talking about the movie Breathless here brief, but I couldn't resist talking about it a little bit.

Breathless perplexed me a bit. Maybe it's the plot that didn't seem like it was going anywhere (and in some ways never really did), maybe it's the characters that were similarly aimless, vain, and amoral to varying degrees, and maybe it's the fact that it's so rough around the edges in some ways and yet so refined in others.

I don't think I'll be able to say I fully appreciated the movie without watching it at least one more time, which I definitely intend to try to do. I say try, because the movie was a bit of an infuriating watch. And honestly, it's not even really the rampant sexism for me. I got used to that pretty quickly, once you know a guy is a scumbag you stop expecting him not to keep being such a piece of shit. If anything, it's trying to keep track of what the hell Michel is up to. I think his antics distracted me and sometimes seemed to affect the pacing of the film, although I wonder if the pacing would be better or worse if you pulled those more confusing, "I'm gonna go get my money from _______" scenes out.

In an attempt to grasp the film more clearly, I decided to look up some reviews of the film, and the first one that came up was by Roger Ebert himself. It was a four star review full of praise, and seeing why he liked the film so much definitely assisted in my retroactive enjoyment of it, and should hopefully help me enjoy it more on a second viewing. The most interesting part of his review to me is that he actually seemingly makes the claim that Seberg's character is more morally evil than Michel, which I think most of our class would find pretty absurd. The argument goes that she was "less deluded" than Michel which would make her more responsible, and while I'm not necessarily inclined to agree (this is the kind of take that only a white man who lived through the early '60s could make), I do think it's an interesting analysis nonetheless.

Overall, I think the movie is very straightforward and attempts (and succeeds) at being genuine and unafraid to be whatever it is trying to be. It feels like it could be the window into the life of a real scumbag Parisian from the early 1960s. If there's one theme I think encapsulates the film the most, it's youth.

The Hateful Eight / The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

 Although my last post was all about how I don't watch a lot of movies, as I mentioned, I have been making an effort to watch more lately. One well-regarded filmmaker whose work I have seen a fair bit of is Quentin Tarantino. I'd seen most of his movies except for Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and up until recently, The Hateful Eight. I had had a craving an old western movie for some reason. I had happened to see a tribute someone had made on YouTube when Ennio Morricone passed away, and the name sounded familiar but I could not remember who it was until I clicked on the video. When I found out that he composed for The Hateful Eight, I knew that that was what I was going to watch, especially because it was easily available on Netflix.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I thought it kept me on my toes for almost the complete film, and although Tarantino is most often praised for his dialogue, I actually think his character writing is the strongest element by far in this film. Although I didn't find all eight of the main characters compelling—Michael Madsen and Channing Tatum's characters are only so-so, and I don't care for Tim Roth's character at all—I do think that everyone else was pretty great. I couldn't help but analyze this film in mainly a historic and a political lens. Post-Civil War America, especially in the unsettled West, makes for a very compelling setting in both of these aspects. The level of respect for many things, race and gender most prominently, is entirely dependent on each individual character, not automatically assumed to be one specific way for every single character in the time period, like some less well-written period pieces. It allows each character to truly be their own, rather than just a fancied-up stereotype. Oh, and Ennio Morricone's music was absolutely incredible, right from the start. I was legitimately impressed by how strong the score was.

After finishing the film, I still had a bit of a taste left for a bit more western stuff. I had previously watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and decided that I wanted to revisit that and see how I felt about it compared to The Hateful Eight. And while it was still very enjoyable and certainly not poorly made in any given aspect, I did find that I was less passionate about it than Hateful Eight by a pretty decent margin. I like the anthology style, so that's definitely something I liked about it. However, watching the first chapter immediately made me realize what made Tarantino's movie so strong—the character-building, like I mentioned before. In comparison to Hateful Eight's characters, most of them just lack depth and really do feel more like the stereotypes I mentioned earlier.

The fifth story, "The Gal Who Got Rattled" was my favorite precisely because it was really good at building up stakes. Actually, all of them were good at building up some sort of stakes, but this and "All Gold Canyon" were the only stories where they made me really care about the stakes. The characters in those two were likable and compelling, and "All Gold Canyon" gets extra points for barely using any dialogue, and for being a bizarre sort of feel-good story, in its own dark way.

Watching both films helped me appreciate each director's strengths and weaknesses and I'd like to do side-by-side viewings of other similar films in the future to this same effect.

I Probably Need To Watch More Movies

 For someone who has engaged with film as a medium for most of their life, I sure don't watch a lot of movies. In fact, there are countless classic films that I still have yet to see. And I'm not talking about just the more obscure "classics" that film aficionados haven't seen either. I mean I haven't seen Jaws. I haven't seen any of the Back to the Future, Lord of the Rings (or Hobbit), Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, Alien, Terminator, or Matrix films. I pulled up this list of "25 movies nearly everyone has seen", and there are 9 movies on this list I haven't watched at all, and it goes up to 17 if you count ones I can't guarantee I've seen from start to finish. I'm almost just as bad with current movies, which I tend to also skip.

Before you go to yell at me, rest assured I've heard it all before!

To give me even less of an excuse, I am a projectionist at a movie theater where I can literally play the currently showing movies at my fingertips if I want to. I could pretty much give myself my own private showings any day of the week if I really wanted to. For free.

I think it has stemmed mostly from being very picky aesthetically and creatively. As a video editor and writer myself, I'm used to scrutinizing visuals, audio, and story pretty heavily. I don't want something that's too "typical" and straightforward, but I also can't go all the way down the art-house film rabbit hole. 

I say that but what's also funny to me is that I do actually tend to enjoy most of the movies I watch, even the ones I don't necessarily expect to. And that all being said, I have started to make more of an effort to watch movies lately. We do premiere day screenings of the big tentpole releases at my theater. I started going to those more often because:

1. I started to be the guy who ran the movie for them, so I had to go.

2. They're fun social gatherings and I love my coworkers at this job.

3. I stopped caring how much I personally resonated with most of the movies.

The third one might sound weird, but I can't tell you how much easier it was to enjoy Thor: Love & Thunder when I watched it like I was a complete film casual, rather than going in expecting it to be anything close to the best film I've ever seen in my life.

So now I'm really making an effort to catch up on seeing stuff, although I'm still weirdly picky and that might never change. Still, it's always good to be exposed to as much of your creative field/medium as possible. As an Interactive Media Studies major, I have a lot of fields I dip my toes into, so film is not the only one I have to worry about, but I do think it is one that I will continue to make an effort to experience more of.

A Second Reflection on Cinematic Moments

 I was pretty satisfied with how my Film Story Narrative turned out. I got to talk about what, in the grand scheme of things, amounted to an exciting and memorable moment with my sister (whom I often clash with), and it was certainly a moment that's fun to share. I love telling stories about my life, especially when things get crazy and go off the rails. And boy, let me tell you, sometimes they really do.

And that's actually what I wanted to talk about in this post. I really kind of "settled" when it came to the moment I chose. I didn't tell any of the stories I thought I would tell for the assignment. That was why I originally didn't want to share with anyone in the first place, because of the kinds of stories I had to tell. I love telling these stories when I know the audience will be sympathetic, but I fear to tell them to anyone who might not understand. All of the stories I really wanted to tell had something in them that I was truly regretful of or otherwise didn't think was appropriate to bring up in an academic setting. Some of them were moments of danger, others were moments of great wrongdoing. Some of them I can even remember almost innocently or fondly due to the amount of time that has passed, but still they were tinged with horrible decisions, if not the ugly consequences as well.

But that was what made them so CINEMATIC to me. That was what brought the life out of the brain inside of my body and put it in the room.... or parking lot.... or random field in the middle of nowhere. These were the moments that placed me firmly in the soil I stood on, the moments that made me hyperaware of exactly where and when I was on planet earth, and yet at the same time like I was nowhere at all. Nowhere, except "the moment." I don't regret the story I chose, but I do know that these other stories were far more impactful to me in the long run.

As I write this, I'm actually going through one of the hardest phases I've gone through in my whole life. A little while ago, I lost a certain person and it threw me through a complete loop that I'm still navigating. I realized that what I had/have been going through parallels my favorite series of cinematic moments, from Avatar: The Last Airbender. I couldn't find the exact moment I was looking for on YouTube but this clip from the same scene actually does a better job of explaining why I love this character moment so much.

In the context of this clip, Zuko is becoming physically ill because he is transforming from a bad person into a good person. He is starting to make moral decisions rather than selfish ones, and the inner conflict is eating him alive. For some reason, I picked up a certain "badassery" from the fact that he was suffering so much for the sake of being good. He's even resisting the goodness, insisting upon being evil. My favorite thing about this moment is actually that he ends up doing the MOST EVIL THING YET right after he recovers from his sickness. Yet you know that deeper down in his heart the good is winning, and he is truly growing, and when he comes back in the next season, he is a truly good man who has fully metamorphized, and from then on he is a great man.

The events that took place at the end of my summer shook me mentally and then it similarly hit me physically, like Zuko is going through in these clips. I got sick. All of the sudden, I had found myself laying in bed, trying to stay fed and hydrated and not just waste away. And much like Zuko below, you stop caring if you spill some water. All you can focus on is yourself, getting through your hardships, and continuing your journey, even if that journey only looks to be suffering for the time being. I didn't realize until recently that I had suddenly been in all of the same positions that Zuko had been, as pictured below.

Not all stories are happy, or easy to tell. Sometimes, the best stories are the ones where we fall the hardest. To us filmmakers, it's all about expression, and sometimes we have to remember it's just as important to express the bad things and the hard times as it is to express the good ones.

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