Monday Midnight Movie Marathon!
Nothing like a campus-wide accreditation evaluation to induce some good old fashioned stress insomnia (stessomnia?)
With Pete Davidson’s “Gimme a short-ass movie” ringing in my ears, I took a late night swing at what Kanopy had to offer with a runtime coming in at around the 90 minute mark.
Days of Heaven (1978) -1h 34m
Cinematography is superb as advertised, taking the
Barry Lyndon approach of shooting largely during the Golden hour.
There are panning landscape shots layered with the creaks and thuds of plodding wagon wheels and crackling chirps of crickets that made me feel as though the screen had engulfed my living room and my couch was suddenly outside in the elements. Blocking is extraordinary too incorporating characters and buildings within the natural environment as if becoming an extension of the wild. Not yet sure on the exact symbolism of the wheat, but seems clear as it’s threshed, harvested, laid fallow, regrown, and finally ravaged by locusts and fire it’s as much a central character as the gruff little girl narrator.
Story is plain and mostly predictable, especially when juxtaposed to the striking grandeur of the visuals. But I thought the straight-forward love triangle and simple scheme-gone-wrong narrative added intimacy in its simplicity, and worked well as a foil or even complement to the vivid imagery.
What I cannot square my mind with though is the editing. I know it’s sacrilegious to disparage Malick’s masterpiece, the cleanly subtle genius of editing legend Billy Weber, and the general consensus of the tastemaker community, and in doing so I’m announcing to the world I’m a feeble-minded rube who just doesn’t get it.
But I just don’t get it.
In some ways, this is cut like an action movie - snapping from scene to scene with the breakneck speed of a golden retriever watching tennis. Dissolves before scenes or even sentences are fully finished. Entire scenes edited down to their most important words or revelations, with no setup and abruptly ended, ushering us off to the next truncated scene or an unrelated shot of horses.
I’ve done my due diligence and looked up opinions praising the editing specifically. Mostly, they call the editing approach economical, boiling down each scene to only its most important, salient, and memorable parts, cutting out the fluff and self-aggrandizing naval-gazing of other such visually stunning epics. They say the scenes work as independent, interconnected groups of cells emphasizing how each is specifically important rather than focusing on how they flow in and out of each other in the grander narrative. Or that it is meant to mimic the hazy memory or dreamlike experience of our child narrator
Maybe that’s all true. But I felt like I was trying to enjoy the Grand Canyon after Clark stole money from a cash register.
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) -1h 22m
This is a bit of a cheat because I only got through 20 minutes before I realized I’d seen it before. Probably indicative of how much of an impact it left the first time around. Cutesy nostalgic and playfully imaginative, but the “this is the real world, you can’t just … “ jokes are about on par with
Last Action Hero. The back and forth between the stranded movie characters and the confused audience is a highlight though.
Breathless (1960) - 1h 30m
Godard’s death in October inspired me to dive into his catalog again, but even still I hadn’t seen arguably his most famous film in more than 20 years. Not since my French teacher enthusiastically played parts of it for us assuming its genius would be self-evident.
She didn’t explain any of the experimental and revolutionary editing techniques for which the film is famous, skipped the entire middle section of the bedroom scene because she said it was “boring” (or maybe more accurately, thought we would find it boring), and was weirdly emphatic in pointing out the Humphrey Bogart allusions.
It didn’t connect.
I’ve come to appreciate Breathless now that I understand how its use of jump cuts, pan shots, handheld camera-work, 4th wall breaking, and guerrilla-style permit-less filming on location were giant middle fingers to the stagnated Hollywood style at the time. It’s got this raw punk rock vibe to it that I completely missed seeing it without context 40 years after its release.
Still not one of my favorite French New Wave films, nor even Godard films for that matter, but certainly worthy of the praise.
And the bedroom scene really ties the movie together.
The Limey (1999) - 1h 29m
Rather serendipitous I watched this right after Breathless because it prepped me for this one’s non-sequential experimental editing.
I’d been searching quite some time for a third Soderbergh film to join
Out of Sight and
Ocean’s Eleven as some sort of hyper-slick and jazzy cool trilogy, and this story of a cockney hitman searching for his daughter lands closest to the mark.
The non-linear jump cuts add an intriguing twist to what might otherwise be a fairly by-the-numbers Tarantino-lite revenge/redemption arc crime dramedy. If anything, I’d like to have seen Soderbergh push the gimmick a little further, but still a fun ride all the same.
Road House (1989) - 1 h 54m
This one’s a bit of a cheat too, because it came a few days before my midnight marathon, was on Netflix, and is well beyond the 90 minutes theme. But I really wanted to highlight it because my wife of all people picked it out and even more shockingly hung tight watching through to the end.
It’s aggressively stupid, and rife for the MST3K treatment. Yet, I can fully see why this became a cult classic. Only Swayze could have pulled off a “superstar” bouncer with a philosophy doctorate and made that even remotely believable.
In truth, the troglodyte DNA that would evolve into one of my own cult favorites
Point Break is present and thriving here. I might even be in the
Road House cult myself if it had stuck closer to the gloriously ludicrous Roaming Zen Warrior Poet Cleans Up and Moves On theme and nixed the Dalton goes Rambo on the twirling-mustached villain’s compound element.
Regardless, fantastically fun watch. Was the second time seeing this for me … and I remembered every bit of it.
Doesn’t do me any favors in the feeble-minded rube department, does it?
