Monday, August 5, 2024

Next Batch of Criterion Films

 I returned to the library the 6 Criterion films I'd checked out a couple weeks ago, and got a batch more.
I'd watched half of the six. I couldn't bring myself to watch Woman Under the Influence, didn't want to watch Valley of the Dolls, and I gave up after 3 minutes of the melodramatic That Hamilton Woman
I wrote up here Secrets & Lies and Sunday Bloody Sunday--both worth watching––but The 39 Steps didn't interest me except that you can see Hitchcock inventing the visual vocabulary of cinema--how do you show that someone is being followed?

Here's the next batch:
Triangle of Sadness (I'd liked the director's Force Majeur);
Wildlife, dir. Paul Dano (know nothing about it);
Cary Grant & Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth (I saw it 40 years ago); Mississippi Masala (1991, I'd enjoyed Mira Nair's Bend It Like Beckham)

Mikey & Nicky, written & dir. by Elaine May; 
Carnival of Souls, 1962--one of Marz's favorite films;
Jabberwocky
, by Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python) (1977, I think I saw it then);
and Certain Women (2016--never heard of it).

I'm worried that Mikey & Nicky tragic, but I have to see it (why haven't I?) because I love Elaine May. Her film A New Leaf is in the first half of my Top 100 Favorite Movies. (I tagged nine blogs posts with her name.)
When I watched Mikey & Nicky's trailer on utube, May's speech in honor of Mike Nichols popped up, and I watched it again.
She is just so wonderfully weird. Can we still say "weird" as a compliment? I mean it, of course, in the best way.


(What she says about Nichols is true, that his name was Igor--
born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky
, November 6, 1931, in Berlin, Germany--and he really was Einstein's cousin--or anyway, his third cousin twice removed. We don't know about the peas.)

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