A Painful Delivery

Film: Bringing Up Baby
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’m going to say something relatively controversial here—Bringing Up Baby annoyed the living shit out of me. There. I said it, and I’ll say it again if I have to.

I really didn’t expect this. Cary Grant is one of my favorite actors, I’ve always liked Katherine Hepburn, and I even like Howard Hawks pretty well. This film is in many ways the birthplace of the screwball comedy, and so I came to it expecting to love every frame. Instead, 15 minutes in, I was ready to turn off the player and walk away from it. I. Am. Annoyed.

The reason is because Bringing Up Baby manages to do everything that a screwball comedy does, and does it all in a way that makes me angry. It gets all of the pieces right, but combines them into an annoying whole. Screwball comedies trade on the idea that crazy things happen in the lives of its characters mainly because of mixed-up communication. Because they are comedies, everything works out in the end, but it’s a long time getting there because of the trips and hiccups along the way.

In the case of this film, all of this falls squarely in the lap of Susan (Hepburn). It caused me to consider what makes this film different in my opinion from the typical screwball comedy that I tend to enjoy, and it comes in the form of Susan, the spoiled little rich girl who stands at the heart of all of the problems.

See, in many a screwball, things happen as a matter of course in the proceedings of the plot. Things get mixed up because of miscommunications or mistaken identities. That’s the source of Top Hat, for instance. One person thinks someone is someone else, and through a number of missed chances, continues to think that. And it works. Often, the zaniness is there for a specific reason. In The Philadelphia Story, for instance, Katherine Hepburn puts on an act as a way to shoo the press off of her. Sometimes, like with His Girl Friday, the characters simply get caught up in something above their heads. It’s not the fault of the characters, who are smart and funny.

But not here. Oh, not here at all. Here, our main female character is clueless and walks through life causing havoc for other people and not caring enough to realize what a complete menace she is. This isn’t an endearing trait. She steals people’s cars at random, destroys a man’s life’s work, potentially damages his professional reputation, and, because there has never been a single consequence of any of her actions ever, is oblivious to the fact that her actions are almost universally destructive. And we’re supposed to root for her.

Dr. David Huxley (Grant) has been working on the skeleton of a brontosaurus for four years and needs only a bone called an intercoastal clavicle to finish. Finally, one has been found on a dig he has sponsored, and it will arrive in the morning, which also happens to be the day he is to be married to his priggish and emotionally cold assistant, Alice (Virginia Walker). The day before the wedding, he is to play golf with Mr. Peabody (George Irving), the lawyer of the wealthy Elizabeth Random, who is planning on donating $1 million somewhere. David, naturally, wants that money to go to his museum.

Enter Susan, who destroys the golf game, wrecks David’s car and then steals it, destroys his tuxedo that evening, and knocks the lawyer unconscious with a rock. She also receives a live leopard from her brother in Brazil, and deciding that David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist, recruits him to help her. And, naturally, it turns out that the wealthy Elizabeth is her aunt. This doesn’t help, as she proceeds to destroy David’s reputation with the woman who can support his museum. Oh, and she decides that she’s madly in love with him to boot.

And, of course, there are the screwball antics that make the screwball comedy work otherwise—Elizabeth’s dog steals the bone (despite the fact that it would be petrified and unappealing to a dog unless the dog also likes rocks). The baby of the title—the leopard—gets out and causes havoc, and everyone eventually ends up in jail.

Through all of this, Susan is blissfully unaware of anyone but herself. Nothing that she does to David (and she does a lot) matters to her because it either serves her purposes or—and this is the key to my aggravation here—she doesn’t care enough to find out why it matters. No one can tell her anything, and it’s not because she knows better. It’s simply because she doesn’t care. She does what she wants, and if she’s not in trouble for it, damn the carnage and collateral damage. I know there are people who live in their own little bubble of self-satisfaction, caring nothing about what goes on farther away than three feet in front of them. I don’t like being told that this is someone I should like and respect. I don’t like this character, I don’t want her to get what she wants, and the predictable ending only makes it more frustrating.

The entire love story turns on this attitude, in fact. She decides that she loves David, and thus the poor man is doomed. He doesn’t get to have a say in it. Should he decide that he could justifiably kill her, it doesn’t matter. She gets what she wants because she just does, and if you don’t like that, too bad. That’s the world she lives in, and collateral damage doesn’t matter as long as her life continues blissfully unaware of consequence.

In other words, I’d have been happier if Baby had eaten her.

Why to watch Bringing Up Baby: It’s where screwball comedy really got its start.
Why not to watch: Holy crap, Susan is annoying!

This is Hardcore

Film: Boogie Nights
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television.

The more I watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, the more I think he was raised on the work of Robert Altman. Like Altman, his films seem to hold too many characters to be contained within the story, Magnolia certainly had enough stars for three films, and the same is true of Boogie Nights Anderson seems to thrive in the ensemble cast atmosphere, and he also seems to use a lot of the same people over and over. About half of his cast from Boogie Nights shows up in Magnolia, for instance.

Boogie Nights is different in many ways, though, because in this film, all of the characters don’t have to come to one point of convergence, because they already know each other. In some ways, it feels like a film of a younger screenwriter/director, because there is a lot less to juggle here in terms of pacing and maintaining various stories. However, much of what Anderson does in his later work is first attempted in this one.

Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) is a high school dropout who works at a nightclub owned by Maurice Rodriguez (Luis Guzman). One of the frequent guests of the nightclub is Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), a pornographic filmmaker. Eddie has a couple of talents in which Jack is interested: he’s extremely well-endowed, and he’s capable of performing continuously. It isn’t long before Eddie has had a falling out with his mother, left home, and become Jack’s newest star, working under the stage name Dirk Diggler.

And we get to meet the rest of the cast of thousands here. Dirk’s frequent co-star is Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), and the stable of females includes Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), Rollergirl (Heather Graham, so named because she always wears roller skates), Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker), and Jessie St. Vincent (Melora Walters). Also making an appearance here is Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), who tries and sometimes succeeds at a sort of cowboy/Western persona.

Working on the films with Jack are Little Bill (William H. Macy), who’s wife frequently has public sex with other men; The Colonel James (Robert Ridgely), who we discover later has a thing for child porn; Kurt (Ricky Jay), who works the camera, and Scotty (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who is gay and has a massive crush on Dirk. All of these lives intertwine continually through the film, often tragically.

The story is really about the rise and fall of all of these characters, predominantly Dirk, although they all rise and fall as one throughout. Dirk starts his adult entertainment career on top, and has a number of years of essentially pure success, as do his fellow actors in Jack’s stable. But as time goes on, the industry changes, moving away from film and x-rated theaters and into videotape and home video productions made on the cheap with amateurs. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, is pretty much constantly coked to the gills, and so when everything goes to smash, it smashes hard.

The moment it goes to smash, in fact, is brilliantly choreographed. It happens at a New Year’s Eve party heralding 1980. We learn at this party that Buck unsuccessfully tries to reinvent himself. We learn that amateur performers and videotape will be the wave of the future. Scotty tries to kiss Dirk, which freaks Dirk out quite a bit. It’s also right at the stroke of midnight that Little Bill walks in on his wife one time too many, shoots her and her current sex partner, and then turns the gun on himself.

What follows is a straight crash into the gutter for almost everyone, and true to the sort of long and continual montage that Anderson likes, we see all of these characters hit bottom at the same time. Dirk coked up and kicked out of Jack’s films, resorts to essentially prostituting himself for cash, but is so messed up on various substances that he can’t perform and gets himself beaten for his troubles. Jack is forced to make no-budget videos, pimping out Rollergirl to random guys on the street, and when someone gets in the limo who remembers her from high school, things get ugly. Amber, thanks to her career in porn and past convictions, loses all visitation rights to her son. The Colonel James gets busted for child porn and thrown in prison. Only Buck walks out of his unscathed. Unable to secure a bank loan for his dream of opening a stereo store, he is the only survivor of a failed convenience store robbery, and walks off with the cash.

And then things really hit bottom. One of Reed’s friends (Thomas Jane) comes up with a plan to rip off a drug dealer named Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina). He doesn’t tell Reed or Dirk that he’s actually planning to rob the guy completely, and everything goes to hell. This is the true bottom for Dirk and Reed. The film ends on something of a return to the beginning, with everyone a little older and a little wiser, and in some sense relieved to be where they started.

As with Magnolia, which I watched a couple of weeks ago, the performances here really help carry the film. These are great performances all the way around, with not a weak one in the bunch. Anderson also liberally spiced the film with actual adults stars, both current and former. Little Bill’s wife, for instance, is played by Nina Hartley and the judge at Amber’s custody hearing is Veronica Hart. It adds an odd touch of authenticity to the proceedings.

I like this film a lot. It’s ugly and prurient and the sex is rarely attractive, which is exactly how it should be. It is, after all, about an exploitative industry, and the film has that sort of ugly and raw feel to it. There’s a touch of the grindhouse here, and that only makes the film work even more. Boogie Nights is the film that put Paul Thomas Anderson on the map, and with reason. It speaks to his level of talent that his follow up films have lived up to this coming out party.

Why to watch Boogie Nights: It’s poignant and raw, funny and scary, brutal and great.
Why not to watch: Think of something that would give you an R-rating. It’s here, many times over.

Unsafe Harbor

Film: The Docks of New York
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’ve made it a point over the last few months to really try to get through the first 100 films on The List for a few reasons. Part of this is because older films require a particular mindset to watch, and this is especially true of silent films. The main reason, though, is that these films are where film history started and became something to pay attention to. What happens in films today started with the silents, and many a modern film owes a debt to these first forays into the art of filmmaking. Knowing where things came from gives me a particular perspective on current movies. The Docks of New York is the next to last silent I have to watch, at least until The Artist makes the list in the upcoming edition.

In many ways, this is an eye-opening film in terms of its subject matter. We have a stoker, a guy who shovels coal into the engines of a ship, named Bill (George Bancroft) who has just pulled into port. Almost immediately, he dives into the water of the harbor to save Mae (Betty Compson), who has tried to kill herself. Mae is a prostitute minus the heart of gold, and attempted suicide because she was at the very end of her rope—no money, no clothes, no prospects.

While she is world-weary and tough, she and Bill make a sort of connection, and after a night together decide to be as married as they can be without a license or certificate. What he doesn’t tell her is that he has to ship out the next day, because the ship is pulling out again. And it’s on this fact that the plot turns. Mae feels abandoned with Bill’s departure as might well be expected. When a co-worker who hates Bill moves in on Mae, things get tense and then get violent, and Bill’s reaction here is what ultimately makes the last part of the film work.

The plot is a bit melodramatic and simple, but that’s really okay. A big part of this is the quality of the acting. There’s a bit of the sort of broad acting that always happens in silent films to compensate for the lack of actual dialogue, but less so here than in other films. There’s a subtlety to many of the performances, particularly that of Betty Compson. Early in the film, for instance, after she’s been rescued and taken care of, she sits in bed smoking, and she gives off the look and appearance of a woman so tired of life, so weary of her own existence, that no or title cards are needed to demonstrate exactly how she feels about being rescued. For Bancroft’s part, Bill is all about the physical. He gets in plenty of fights throughout the film, and does what he can to impress Mae with the size of his biceps.

Another selling point here is just how seedy this film is. I have no way to be sure, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I were told that The Docks of New York was one of the films cited in the eventual creation of the Hays Code. The bar in which much of the action takes place is filled with drunken derelicts, the women are floozies and the men are looking for a quick thrill. It’s sex and booze and infidelity and sinful behavior every moment here, which is somewhat in line with how we might think of the ‘20s as an era, but not how we think of the pure and wholesome movies of the time. The Docks of New York is anything but pure and wholesome. It’s tone is far more in line with modern films in that respect. This is not a film that could have been made twenty years later, but could be made today.

All of this is fine, and with the exception of the performances, doesn’t make the film specifically worth watching. What does is the overall look of the film. The camerawork here is truly amazing, and the film is crisp and beautiful to see. Joseph von Sternberg gives many of his shots a depth that shows the power of the medium and the level of sophistication that had been reached even in these early days. It’s one of the best looking films from its decade, which is saying something.

This is a tough film not to like start to finish. In many ways, the next few years of film with the advent of talkies are a little disappointing, because so much was focused on the novelty of sound that much of what was possible in film was lost. Yes, the look and feel and overall effect of this film are that good.

Why to watch The Docks of New York: It’s a film that truly epitomizes the power of silent film as a storytelling medium.
Why not to watch: You have a hang-up about silent film.

Nothing is Perfect

Film: Ordinary People
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

I’ve owned a copy of Ordinary People for about a year but have never watched it until today. I have a history with this story, though, despite never having seen it. When I was a junior in college, I was in the theatrical version. I played the jackass from the swim team, the same role that Adam Baldwin has in the film. So I know this story. I have pretty vivid memories of this story, having seen it acted out in front of me every night for a couple of months. When I saw a copy for sale, I bought it because I knew I’d have to watch it eventually. I’d have bought it anyway, just for that small connection to my past.

Having been in the play, and having read the play multiple times based on Judith Guest’s novel, I made the assumption that the film would be about Conrad Jarrett (Timothy Hutton), since he very much seemed to be the focus of the play. And yes, in many ways, the film is about him, which is why it seemed so strange to me going in that Timothy Hutton won the Oscar for Supporting Actor. After all, he’s on screen a lot of the film—isn’t he the lead?

I get it now. Ordinary People is the story of the Jarrett family, and while Conrad is certainly a part of it, there is far more going on here. The Jarretts, when we meet them, are a family torn apart. The older of the two boys, Buck, was killed in a boating accident, and months later, crippled by guilt, younger son Conrad tries to kill himself, but survives. We pick up the story about a month after Conrad has come home from a psychiatric hospital in which he spent a few months to recuperate both mentally and physically. Naturally, there is still a great deal of tension between him and his parents, Calvin (Donald Sutherland) and Beth (Mary Tyler Moore).

So really, while we do spend a lot of time with Conrad, the film is more about the family as a whole, and as soon becomes evident, the central character is Beth, despite the fact that she spends the least time on camera. Conrad’s relationship with his mother and Calvin’s relationship with his wife take center stage, because much of the film revolves around how Beth deals with the death of one son and the attempted suicide of the second.

Much of this we don’t know at the beginning. Conrad seems like a pretty typical high school kid. He sings in the choir and swims on the swim team. His coach (M. Emmett Walsh) notices that Conrad isn’t his old self, and we get hints from his father that there is a doctor he should call. Eventually, Conrad does call the doctor, a psychiatrist named Berger (Judd Hirsch), and it is in these scenes that the exposition takes off, and where, in my mind, the movie really takes shape. Hirsch’s performance here is the best of his career.

What Conrad wants is for everyone to stop treating him with kid gloves. He’d also like some sort of connection with his mother, which seems impossible. It is Calvin who coddles him the most, but this is because he feels a sense of guilt as well. Beth here is the most interesting character in the film, though, because of how the events from the backstory have shattered her world. The death of her older son wounds her, of course, but it is Conrad’s attempted suicide that destroys her. Beth is someone who needs that illusion of perfection at all times. She must appear to be in control and have every t crossed. The death of her son can be handled because no one had any control over it. But Conrad’s suicide was intentional, and it is something she takes personally.

Much of this comes out in some of the best dialogue written in the last few decades. In a session with Berger, for instance, he indicates his mother’s problem with his suicide attempt by telling the doctor that towels had to be thrown out and the tile regrouted. She fired the maid for dusting wrong, she could never forgive him for the mess he created. And he’s right. When Beth finds out that, midway through the film he has quit the swim team, he accuses her not of being angry that he quit, but of being angry because she found out from his friend’s mother. It’s a great moment because it is so real and so human. Beth needs that vision, that illusion of perfection, and anything that takes it away from her is viewed as an attack, as something intentional.

That, more than anything, is the strength of this film. These are real people going through real problems and trying to deal with them in a real way. I never got the sense that I was watching movie caricatures or allegorical characters. These people are real and human and tragic.

As important as this film may have been for Timothy Hutton (he did win an Oscar, after all), and as much as it established Robert Redford as a potential director (he won one, too), the real revelation here is Mary Tyler Moore. This is a woman who had, for years, made people laugh on television. She was (and presumably still is) a fabulous comedienne with great timing. And here, she plays so much against type and does it so flawlessly, that I wonder why she didn’t do more serious dramatic work.

I didn’t love my time in the theater. In fact, after I performed in the stage version of this story, I gave up acting and changed my minor from theater to psychology. Now, in retrospect, I’m damn proud to have been a small part in bringing this story to life, because the story is that good, and this film is better than just good. See this if you haven’t.

Why to watch Ordinary People: Because it's incredibly good.
Why not to watch: Because it hurts.

What I Learned

Film: Zabriskie Point
Format: DVD from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

Zabriskie Point marks the third of four times The List crosses paths with “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time,” leaving only one film left for me on both lists. I hated the first (L’Annee Derniere a Marienbad) and didn’t love the second (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). I’d like to state that my luck changed with the third, but that would be lying.

I could complain about the aimlessness of this film. I could also get angry about the wooden acting of almost everyone involved, particularly our two leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin. I could talk about the fact that Antonioni evidently knew nothing about the counter-culture movement in the United States but made a film about it anyway. All of this I could do, but I will not. Instead, I’d like to talk about the things that I learned while watching this film.

• You can shut down the ROTC with a single Molotov cocktail.
• You should be willing to die, but not of boredom.
• Anarchists still have to go to meetings.
• Hippie girls don’t dig secretarial work, but they do it when they need the bread.
• Joining isn’t a matter of choice, but a matter of survival.
• “Associate Professor of History” is too long for a police form, so “clerk” is a good substitute occupation.
• Trying to bail someone out will get you arrested.
• Policemen have never heard of Karl Marx.
• Gun salesmen will break the law and sell you a gun without a waiting period if you need to protect your women.
• The law says you can protect your house, so if you shoot ‘em in the backyard, be sure to drag them inside.
• Mannequins are better spokes models than people, and an address is a suitable replacement for repeating a phone number in an advertisement.
• No one will trust you for the price of a sandwich.
• You should get a pilot’s license just in case you ever need to get off the ground.
• To get a hippie chick attracted to you, buzz her with your stolen airplane, and then drop her a giant shirt.
• If you go to a named spot out in the desert (like, say, Zabriskie Point) you should still feel free to have sex in the open in daylight. Don’t worry—no one will see you. Try this at the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore.
• If you do have sex in the desert, a group of hippies will appear around you and have sex, too.
• If you roll around in the desert naked and then proceed to sex, oral sex is not specifically off the table, regardless of the inevitable mouthful of dust.
• It’s better to go to prison than to get a haircut.
• Old creepy guys who live alone in the desert have tons of paint around, and will help you decorate your stolen airplane with drawings of giant boobs.
• If you’re going to return your stolen airplane with the hope of getting away, you probably shouldn’t radio ahead and tell them you’re coming.
• If you do return your stolen airplane, don’t try to land, because the police will shoot you when you are trying to stop.
• When you get to your final destination after dirty desert sex, don’t change your clothes.
• If you can find water, you can find gold.
• Never show an explosion once when you can show it a dozen times.

• Nothing says “anti-consumerism” like an exploding loaf of Wonder Bread.
• Zabriskie Point has more Zabriskie than point.

Why to watch Zabriskie Point: Because you have nothing better to do.
Why not to watch: Because it’s pretentious, and not in any good way.

A Cinematic Cadbury Creme Egg

Film: La Dolce Vita
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on big ol’ television.

Great directors get known for both their body of work and for specific films. Say “Hitchcock,” for instance, and given enough time, people will come up with a good number of his films, but the first and most visceral reactions will probably be films like Vertigo and Rear Window and not The Manxman. With Fellini, one of those visceral, go-to movies is undoubtedly La Dolce Vita.

Because of this, and because of the structure of the film, it has been broken down, studied, and analyzed like few other films. In truth, the film takes place over a series of seven non-consecutive days and nights, and this brings up some interesting religious parallels. There are, for instance, seven deadly sins and seven virtues and a great deal has been written tying the seven nights of this film to the seven deadly sins. I’m not going to go there. It may well be what Fellini intended. He may also have chosen the number seven as the seven days of the week or Shakespeare’s seven ages of Man, and I could probably work out something with a few more watches of the film that would fit either of those—especially the second one.

I’d rather look at the film as a whole, though, and discuss the gestalt of the film rather than the individual pieces because regardless of how each piece of the film fits together or works symbolically, the film itself does have—at least to me—an overarching feeling and a meaning that I take from it.

The title, La Dolce Vita translates roughly to “The Sweet Life,” and on the surface, that is exactly what the film is about. As characters, we have the idle rich, the dilettante artists, the aggressively hipster, and the bored bourgeoisie. Our main character is Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a former author who has sunk to the ranks of journalist and who essentially looks for celebrities to write stories about. He is frequently accompanied by Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), a celebrity photographer willing to do virtually anything for a picture (and thus the source of the word “paparazzi” for omnipresent celebrity photographers). Marcello has a sometimes suicidal girlfriend named Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) and frequently may or may not have sex with wealthy heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimee).

As he moves through the film, it becomes evident that Marcello is different from many of othe people he interacts with in one significant way—he is sometimes introspective enough to realize that he is wasting his life in the constant and worthless pursuit of the life of pleasure that seems to be the central existence of the celebrities with whom he hobnobs. He meets, for instance, Swedish-American movie star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), whose life seems to consist of thinking whatever is in her head at the moment is frightfully important to everyone else, and who flits from idea to idea at a moment’s notice. She finds a stray kitten, for instance, and sends Marcello off to find milk in the middle of the night, but the moment she sees the Trevi Fountain, the kitten is forgotten in her desire to jump into the water.

There’s a part of Marcello who desires nothing more than this sort of existence, of living on a whim and an impulse, and having the money and power to do exactly what he wants whenever he wishes it. Not able to make it as a more artistic writer, his method of doing that is by attaching himself to those around him who can live in this fashion, and thus he is able to partake in this sweet life by osmosis, a sort of human remora living on the scraps. His reattachment to the world in which he truly lives comes from the person of Steiner (Alain Cuny). Steiner is an intellectual and has the sort of life that Marcello seems to want, but Steiner, too, has doubts. Near the middle of the film, he tells Marcello between a comfortable, material life and the more interesting and risky world of a spiritual life. So, when Steiner kills his own children and himself, it appears evident that in the end, he couldn’t make that decision.

Marcello does, though, eventually fading even from the ranks of journalism into those of the press agent, talking up stars and trying to arrange publicity for them, all in his continual attempts to latch himself to that sweet life that he has chased for the entire film. It eludes him for the entire film, too. Why? I think it’s because he thinks too much. Those people throughout the film who seem pleased with that indulgent, hedonistic existence are those who don’t appear to have a thought beyond their next pleasure. Marcello, on the other hand, is essentially excluded from that life for the very reason that he thinks about it so much—he can’t have it because he wants it.

The film is bookended by scenes that seem like they play into this idea. At the start, a helicopter flies a statue of Christ over Rome en route to taking the statue to the Vatican. The spiritual world is, in a sense, leaving Rome behind, and while the statue appears to bless the masses below, it is also something entirely out of reach. At the end, fishermen haul what looks like a dead manta ray onto the beach. Unlike the Christ statue, the manta is real, disgusting, and dead, and is also close enough to touch. In essence, while Marcello has forced himself to strive toward that goal of unobtainable life in the clouds, all he can really achieve is the real, and the real is unattractive and a little terrifying.

It is a great piece of art and a great film. I find it interesting that the film is frequently listed as both a drama and a comedy. I can’t call this a comedy. This isn’t because it’s not funny in places, nor even because of the brutal murder of children in the last hour. I can’t call this a comedy, because it is entirely the opposite of one—it’s a tragedy in the classic sense. Marcello is a tragic figure because he can’t have what he wants, and the reason for it is two-fold. First, he can’t have it because he wants it too much. Second, and more importantly, the life that he desires really only exists in fantasy. Even Sylvia, who is as much a muse to this sweet life as anyone in this film, is forced to return to dry land and suffer the indignation of being slapped in front of the press for the peering and leering eyes of the public in the tabloids.

That life might truly be sweet, but it's an empty sweetness. And that's the point.

Why to watch La Dolce Vita: It’s influential enough that it added a word to the lexicon.
Why not to watch: The characters are vacuous intentionally.

Month 27 Status Report

What can I say? I make plans and then change them on the fly. My original thought for March was to watch a number of the films I have found on the internet, but time and pressure worked against me. I tended to need my laptop for work, and thus couldn't really give it over to movie watching for any length of time. On the other hand, another goal was 25 films, and I knocked out 27.

As I move on and what's left becomes a shorter and shorter list, it still seems like I have so many classics left to watch. I'm at 78 reviews for the year, which seems like a huge number for the end of March, but I still have nearly 450 to go, including a few that I've been looking forward to since the start and a few that I've been dreading.

As a personal milestone, I'm five movies away from having seen and reviewed the earliest 100 films, and I have plans to watch most (if not all) this month. There are a few other spots I need to concentrate on, and a few genres I should spend time with, but I think for now, April will simply be a month of watching whatever flits in over the transom. If I don't plan too much, I can't disappoint myself.

As a final note, I should regularly thank my librarian, Cynthia Reynolds. Once per month, she finds an obscurity for me--Pasazerka most recently, and this last time, she had to send to freakin' Amherst College to do it. Librarians are awesome people, and Cynthia is the best one I know.