Just a List

So the film watchin' rolls on with the following:

1. Dazed and Confused. I actually didn't spot Ben Affleck playing the High School Jerk until very late in the film.
2. A Woman is a Woman. A Godard film filled with much homage to American musicals.
3. The Riflemen. A strange Godard film that is supposed to comment on the folly of war. An extended sequence where soldiers returning from war take out postcards of things, places and people, slamming them down on the table, one after another, which just kept going on and on, really forces one to try to work in an interpretation.
4. The Virgin Spring. An early (and pretty conventionally plot driven) Bergman film. His 'other' medieval film, dwarfed by "The Seventh Seal".
5. The Color of Pomegranates. This was the strangest film that I've watched in a long while (and this includes some weird Peter Greenaway stuff). It was made by an Armenian Soviet film maker in the late 60s. It's amazingly slow and many of the shots are meant to replicate the interior life of an Armenian poet / troubadour. The shots are composed like still frames in a photo, with gestures and symbolic objects carrying the weight of the action. It's thus devoid of almost any traceable narrative or dialogue. Dreamlike in its juxtiposition of images and use of recurring images, it also mimics the iconography of Byzantine Church art. (I think ... like Byzantine Mosaics?)
6. The Thin Blue Line. This was a documentary by the same person that did "The Fog of War", Errol Morris. It's about the wrong conviction and sentencing to death row of Randall Adams, for a cop killing in 1977. After the film was made (and shown, in 1989), the case was actually re-opened and Adams got out. Talk about the power of the movies. In probably the best moment of the film, the actual killer just about confesses that he was the one that did it (we see him interviewed earlier but only hear his voice on tape during this confession, the final sequence of the film, making it even more powerful, because he has already been executed on another murder charge), but being 16 and scared, he quickly formulated a story that the cops eventually went for, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
7. And let's not forget the Zadie Smith novel that I ploughed through over the weekend. After about 200 pages of "On Beauty" and being really irritated by the flaccid, sensationalistic story-telling and unimaginative, cliched writing, I forced myself through this one, just so that I didn't feel as if I cheated in forming an opinion. There are smart ways of referencing literary traditions and great books and while "On Beauty" tries to do this, it just rips off without really doing anything clever or profound in the referencing. Just acknowledging that one is stealing (and thus turning it into an 'the-inspiration-for-this-book-was' note) doesn't absolve from the sin of doing it poorly. And I usually don't have anything bad to say about anything.