2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick

What's interesting is that final 20 minutes. 2001: A Space Odyssey, like most movies follows a narrative that is fairly understandable, the only object that needs a slight bit of working-out being that shocking and elegant monolith that pops up every now and again. But then something happens. The astronaut appears to get sucked into something inexplicable - and from that point on the movie really does go 'weird'. 

The point is that the final chapter looks like it's aspirational. It looks like it aspires to something akin to a musical movement doesn't it? The section has a deliberately obscure narrative that invites interpretation (and in my personal view therefore 'tricksy' and very tiresome) and then there's the post-film explanatory novel written by Arthur C. Clarke. 

But remove the narrative and you have something that, in the abstract, resembles a film equivalent of a musical movement, something that some audiences will respond to in the way people respond to music that has no 'story' at all. It 'stands alone' at the movie's end. It's how it does it (or fails to, if that's your judgement) that's interesting. The highly crafted images and doctored sounds do stick in some people's minds even if it makes no sense to them.

Man Of La Mancha - Arthur Hiller

It's Peter O'Toole's spindliness that's fascinating isn't it. He's a tallish but skinny man in Man Of La Mancha, and that armour back-plate that has a bit of the insect about it, a bit of the beetle's carapace, contributes to the impression; and Peter O'Toole's walk has always had a bit of the marionette's articulation about it, and his measured and varied delivery of his lines divided-up by his nods and his head-sweeps all go to make a man with a strong life-force, nevertheless a spindly one. 

Of course it has to be this way else the humour in Man Of La Mancha won't work: and so, good casting. Don Quixote essentially seeks out 'fights' and if his wandering adventurous life is to have, in the movie version at least, the humour of the ridiculous, the humour of a man who has no idea at all about how ill-equipped he is for knight-errantry, then his body must be fixedly somewhere in the 'puny' spectrum. And there are some great falling-sideways-unconscious jokes, and shaky-sword (with a whorl in it)-at-the-end-of-an-outstretched-arm jokes.

(If you haven't seen it - Man Of La Mancha is Cervantes and Don Quixote and the Spanish Inquisition all wrapped round a fine jokey medieval sort of movie, theatre-stagey and ac-tor-ly and plain fun somehow in an uplifting way too, and Peter O'Toole at his very very ar-tic-ulate best (A knight must not complain of his wounds . . . though his bow-wells be dropping out) and the songs, Oh dear the songs, songs that need to be fast-forwarded through if you are not trapped in a movie-theatre, with the possible exception of the one Harry Andrews song, the Knight Of The Woeful Countenance song which is done jokily anyway.)

The Last Picture Show - Peter Bogdanovich

If you tell somebody about a film, then perhaps say something original? No saying of the plot?

What's interesting about Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show is that to some of us it appeared to be the very first film that exposed the complete disconnect at that time between what many forms of media said should have been going on in the mind of a teenage girl (to a lesser extent of a teenage boy but they were more ignored) and what actually was going on in her mind. A very long history of written media (book and magazine form) a somewhat shorter history of song and an even shorter history of film, had mostly (with memorable exceptions) portrayed teenage couples as being in some form of young love. At what stage along the narrative of 'young love' a story was set, varied, but the young love narrative was usually there. And there was, still is, a huge disconnect between that and what is actually going through a teen girl's (boy's) mind during her early dating years. The Last Picture Show ripped off illusions, showed the (perhaps) more ugly truth, and at the time it was a shock. To put it bluntly - the media said that what should have been going through a girl's mind was 'I do really love him' and what actually was going through her mind was 'I'm going to let him fuck me so that I can find out how to do it. Wonder how I'm going to get out of this later on.'

Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show caused a fuss at the time because, at last, here was a bit of 'reality' and here was the huge disconnect torn up, in many ways, for good and here was something that permitted girls to say to themselves Oh, so I'm not 'just weird' after all!  The film showed what junior sex often actually is. Of course the Cybil Shepherd character was the one that hugely dominated the talk about the film, but Sharon Ullrick's character, her primary concern about where she is in the classroom pecking-order and her plucky confidence in how 'hot' she is (no doubt hiding the self-doubts which we all think we know comes with that territory), the dawning on an audience that it is these things that are in her mind and not any 'young love' for her boy, was a bit of crude reality; and the Timothy Bottoms' character with his easily transferred affections and his absorption in marriage plans before he's even bedded the girl, was also a freshly disturbing 'telling it as it sometimes is'.

Secondly: at the time, the Cybil Shepherd character was impossible to simply casually notice. At the time, I thought it was only me but it seems that the Web (at this moment at least) with one voice finds her as ugly as I did. 

Jacy is written and shown exactly as she should be (is it acting or casting?) for precisely what is shown on the screen is what you see in the real world, and no more. You have to divine what's really going on in the mind of a girl for in the real world rarely do you hear Jacys actually voice that they are using a boy to 'find out how to do it', or that they feed on attention, or that they are fickle.

I suspect that there is an audience of girls though that fancies it sees more to Shepherd's Jacy Farrow than the Web sees or will admit, and they are probably right surely. A girl audience that certainly 'recognizes' all those Jacys in its world, and that fancies it sees that there is more self-doubt in them and indeed more 'feeling' in them than is usually granted them. After all, Jacys are of their gender. And this audience might fancy that the Web audience has got it wrong. The word was not in circulation at that time, but nowadays Jacy can be identified pretty clearly as a narcissist; and Jacy's 'perceptive' audience might flatter itself that it sees a complexity in narcissism that others miss, and that Jacys therefore are almost to be forgiven. This audience might fancy that Jacys far from 'feeling nothing at all' for their boyfriends and acting 'coldly' according to what they want at that moment, are in fact more complex than that. The audience might fancy that it understands a couple of deeper truths; that there is a self-doubt even in the class-beauty when she complains "But he always wanted me", and that Jacys are complex girls, that in fact they do have (some form of) feelings for their boys, and that what you've missed is that it is her particularity to be fickle, which is something altogether quite different. She is drawn to (her idea of) the various types of 'alpha' boys, sure, but that's not to say she's free of feelings for the boys, it's just that those feelings, perhaps, are a bit easily usurped by feelings for another. And that's not her fault, though how she acts on her feelings might be.

And the Jeff Bridges' character. Ever so sad actually and in fact the only character to fit the old media 'young love' that this film was ripping apart. Jacys do indeed move-on from Duanes perhaps disgustingly quickly and certainly they do not dwell. The Last Picture Show paints a Duane who does indeed dwell; and perhaps fears that he will dwell every month of the rest of his life, and perhaps will be reckless of his safety in the war that he sets off to. Perhaps he fears a (truthfully) pointless predicament.

(If you haven't seen it - Peter Bogdanovich's Last Picture Show captures a brief time in the life of a small town in early1950's America, a small habitation whose local economy is collapsing and over whom a growing sadness seems to hang. The film focusing on two groups, the grown-ups and the teenagers, peers around this dusty windswept place to 'reveal' some of the complexities of friendship, but more than that to turn-over messy sex-lives amongst the grown-ups, and to hold a mirror up to the self-absorption of a particular type of teenager (not all) as she, or he, 'has sex' rather than has something that hitherto had been given a more grandiose title.)

The Third Man - Carol Reed

You can watch Carol Reed's The Third Man and see running all the way through it, a city 'on the mend' and a people 'on the mend'. The city is of course more fascinating than the people. Rubble has already been manoeuvred into piles ready to be cleared away, flights of stone steps connecting a lower cobbled-street to a higher one are broken but they are brushed-clean broken and ready for the mender, the shell of half a marble-clad apartment-block is propped up and equipped with a temporary staircase ready for its repair, and of course beneath the surface 'on the mend' lie the reassuringly healthy conduits and chambers that are the city's astonishing sewer system. The people are on the mend too. Everyone seems anxious to some degree or another in The Third Man. Anxiety is a healthy part of the human condition perhaps, but a struggle for survival is anxiety on a different level and the people in this Vienna seem like they are on the mend from just this. In addition to which there is a bustle and a commerce, a night-club scene and a book-club scene, that's on the mend; and just look at the clean-shavenness, and those new clean-pressed uniforms on the quasi-military pursuers. Of course that zither music by Anton Karas twanging its way through the whole thing is just about as perfect an 'on the mend' piece of music as you can imagine.

Strangers On A Train - Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train - what a neatly-drawn sketch of a character Miriam (the young adulterous wife) is. It's so economically done. She has only a handful of scenes, yet they are meaty ones, and she's memorable. The actress is given a concise and articulate script and called on to simply move from fickle girl-wife who now sees the main chance, to the girl who plays victim, to the girl absorbed in the fun in life, to girl vagina-power (all glances back over the shoulder at the new admirer and positioning herself for an approach) - and then she's killed off. She's far more 'girl' than 'woman' despite being married, she's the sort of scrubby little slightly-flirty type common to everywhere, small high breasts and specs and good arms, and Oh isn't she much more fun (though always unreliable and therefore never to be invested-in) than the full 'woman', the grown-up, whom the leading-man, and we, are supposed to marry.

The Birds - Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock's The Birds is one of those very few films that 'just stops' isn't it. There are a couple of strong stories running through the film, a new romance that has just started to go places and a mystery as to why thousands of birds are turning on the humans, and then the film simply stops. Stories nearly always end with a resolution or several. Not this time. Hitchcock's characters, trying not to make any sort of disturbance, drive a nice sports-car ever so slowly through a huge flock of intimidating birds; they have escaped the birds several times before, and they're doing it again. Then the film stops. It's as if Hitchcock simply couldn't think of an ending and therefore he simply turned the cameras off. And it's worth watching the thing for that reason alone.

Also - two pieces of Hitchcock wizardry. Tippi Hedren having a cigarette and all the while, shown in short cuts, she can't see the birds gather on the climbing-frame behind her; then the camera stays on her for an exasperatingly long time; the cleverness in the 'reveal' is that rather than do the expected 'cut' as he has been doing, Hitchcock has Hedren look up to one bird that is flying in to perch and the camera follows the flight of that bird to a reveal which really is quite a shock. And secondly: following the explosion at a fuel-station and the chaos down below, cut to a gull-high shot looking down, and after a short suitable pause, cue one of the 'perpetrators' coming into shot from the side. Beautifully done.