What movies did you see last week? (2/15/2/21)

Laughter (1930) 6
The Testament of Mabuse (1933) 7
Scarlet Street (1945) 8 rewatch. “This is the Happy Household Hour…”
Heat (1963) 7
The Lost Man (1969) 6
My Sweet Charlie (1970) 7.5
To Be Young Gifted and Black (1972) 7.5 rewatch
The Secret Night Caller (1975) 6.5
The Deadly Tower (1975) 7.5
Mikey and Nicky (1976) 9.2 rewatch
Paris by Night (1988) 7
Mostly Martha (2001) 7 rewatch
The Statement (2003) 6.5
Body Brokers (2021) 5

If you ever get the chance I'd recommend watching Bunuel's follow-up The Phantom Of Liberty (1974). It's a much better film (Bunuel's best and actually a masterpiece for me) and he goes full plotless and absurd on that. It's perhaps the single funniest film I've ever watched and the satire is incredibly on point.

The films I watched last week were the following:

When The Tenth Month Comes (1984) - 8/10
Judas And The Black Messiah (2021) - 7/10
Monster Hunter (2020) - 6.5/10
I Care A Lot (2020) - 6/10

Black Bear - 8
Undine - 7.5
Let Him Go - 6
The Personal History of David Copperfield - 8
The Glorias - 5.5
Run - 8
Enola Holmes - 5
The Half of It - 7.5

and one doc: Dick Johnson Is Dead, which is really sweet and I cried my little heart out 8/10

One of the top reviews on Letterboxd is all about how a man dressing as a woman is portrayed as a sign of madness in this film, which I think misses the point of what Polanski was attempting... but I understand how it could offend.

As for me, I'm open to offending everybody. You can't do comedy if you're afraid to step on toes. You have to be careful, of course, but I feel that Polanski did a good job of making his character's madness have to do with the social pressures upon him, with the transformation into the previous tenant being an outcome of that, instead of a "ha ha, he's dressing as a woman, sure is crazy" bit of geek show taunting.

Finally watched Lynch's Dune yesterday. yep, it's all true...

Happy Birthday Agent Cooper... hope to see you in better things.

50 First Dates
Dead Pigs
Coming to America
Splash

I liked Tristana as a drama. The Exterminating Angel was a brilliant piece of surreal horror (I label it closer to horror than anything else), which is a genre I'd love to see more of, as many of my favorite comic books use more abstract modes of horror and I love the horrible dream logic of those books. I disliked Viridiana for being pointless and randomly plotted, and that's the problem with Discreet Charm. I don't get what the movie is doing, and there is nothing to hook me in. I don't care enough to read anything into it.

Surreal comedy is a term that doesn't make me very excited, as it conjures up images of random nonsense that tries to make you laugh at its randomness. That can work to a point - I enjoyed the bit with the diplomat firing a warning shot at the terrorist outside of embassy - but it gets so very boring if you don't have a skeleton to hang your kookiness on.

If you do have that skeleton - also known as a plot - you can make something surreal and wonderfully odd while still obeying an unseen set of rules, or as I called it before, a "dream logic." The Trouble with Harry is perhaps the single funniest film I've ever watched, and I'd label it as surreal comedy... but it had rules. Nobody acted in any sort of objectively logical way in that movie, but they all seem to follow a set of laws that are known only to them. In the world of Harry, it's not all that strange to discover a corpse in a field and use it as a model for your painting.

What you say about The Phantom of Liberty gives me a lot of trepidation, as it sounds much more like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie than The Trouble with Harry.