still more movies

隠し砦の三悪人 (Hidden Fortress) (1958, dir. Kurosawa). Good fun. — I don’t understand Japanese, but noticed that the princess seemed to use her title hime as pronoun.

Rio Bravo (1959, dir. Hawks). Drags some. — When I saw this years ago on AMC(?), the presenter told the story that, when Howard Hawks started to pitch the plot, John Wayne quickly recognized it as one they had made before (which I think I had also seen, though its title now escapes me) and asked, “Do I get to be the drunk this time?”

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (1958, dir. Truffaut). My One True Ex warned me that it’s quite boring. I watched some of the beginning, and a bit near the end, and concluded that she was likely right. — The translation of the title is unfortunate: coups here is better rendered as strokes, and anyway the phrase really means, roughly, every trick in the book. — Most movies on DVD have twenty or thirty scene-markers; this has only six.

Ohayô (Good Morning) (1959, dir. Ozu). Amusing slice of suburban life. — Someone says “sayonara” and I think, is this the first time I’ve ever heard a Japanese use that word?

Orfeu Negro (1959, dir. M.Camus). Pretty but unsatisfying: the drivers of the plot – Eurydice’s nemesis, and Orfeu’s love for her – are never motivated. — I was surprised to understand so few words of a Romance language; and more surprised at the frequency of the pronoun você. Is tu as dead in Brazil as thou in the Anglosphere?

The Immaculate Collection, Madonna videos of the Eighties. It turned out to include only two that I hadn’t seen a hundred times (“Borderline” and “La Isla Bonita”), plus a staging of “Vogue” that’s even sillier than the familiar one. I was hoping it would have “Justify My Love” which was deemed too racy for MTV. No luck. — When she wore that sheer top in “Vogue”, where did her nips go?

An Ideal Husband (1999, dir. O.Parker). Not all of Oscar Wilde’s plays, I find, are as fluffy as Earnest. Excellent performances, too.

I forgot to mention last week that my One True Ex dragged me to see Stage Beauty (2003, dir. R.Eyre), a comedy about gender issues during the Stuart Restoration. It’s a treat.