Tuesday, March 27

By the end of this month, I will have to leave Mountain View. I still don't have a job, and I will definitely have no access to a collection of movies as good as here, or a way of watching them. There'll be a hiatus from the blog, but not for too long.

Movies since last post:
The Funeral
8 1/2

The Funeral is a charming Japanese comedy. As anyone familiar with the langauge of criticism knows, the word "charming" is a patronizing word. Well, there was a plenty to be impressed by in that movie, yet, at the end, it was hard to think that anything from it will stay. It did have one of the most fresh opening sequences. The man who recommended it to me at the library had given a short, rapid snort of a laugh when he said "all the best people of Japan worked in it," and I took it home, thinking, surely, it must be good, if "all the best people of Japan worked in it." I didn't know any of the actors, and I was certainly not disappointed by the movie, but it wasn't
of the calibre or character os a movie that satisfies.

In the tradition of the best dark comedies, it begins with a voice over--crisp, amused, melancholy, almost like a Raymond Carver sentence. It then becomes a bit silly, as if drunk on too much sake. There is a shot of the dead man's daughter running to the phone at the end of a movie set: she runs over all the debris of a shoot, her attendants picking the hem of her kimono. She manages superbly to step over cables and tracks and all the innards of benind-the-camera, but trips on her kimono at last, everybody tumbling to the floor in one big heap. We know what news awaits at the other end of the phone. This--tripping over the traditional, and not knowing exactly how to react to the sudden demise of a close relative--is the movie. It has everything in it: arresting eroticism, drunk men bawling about the dead man, children misbehaving as the head prient prays. And it is a comedy, yes, it is an uplifting story at the end.

I have less than two minutes to write about 8 1/2. Only this for now: Fellini is among the very, very few directors, whose images, if you were to isolate even just a single frame, would immediately convey the mood and meaning of the entire sequence.

More later.