March 13, 2014

The Last Ten Movies I Saw

By michaelgloversmith

1. Playtime (Tati)
2. An Affair to Remember (McCarey)
3. Out of the Past (Tourneur)
4. Mon Oncle (Tati)
5. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Tati)
6. Body and Soul (Rossen)
7. Unforgiven (Eastwood)
8. My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer)
9. Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier)
10. Citizen Kane (Welles)

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About michaelgloversmith

Filmmaker, author and Film Studies instructor. View all posts by michaelgloversmith
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2014 at 11:40 am and posted in The Last Ten Movies I Saw. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

5 responses to “The Last Ten Movies I Saw”

  • Mitchell
    March 13th, 2014 at 1:40 pm

    An Affair To Remember is mystifying to me. It is one of those movies that has achieved an unassailable position, like Singin in The Rain as the greatest musical of all times. It has become institutionalized. When I saw it for the first time I kept saying to myself ‘Surely it can’t be as bad as it seems’. Then came Sleepless in Seattle and it was taken up as the quintessential ‘chick flick’ (a very insulting concept in my opinion) and is now lionized. But it is just so BAD. I am curious to hear your take on it.

    Reply
    • michaelgloversmith
      March 13th, 2014 at 3:35 pm

      I stayed away from it for years because of the SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE connection but it’s now one of my favorite movies. I think Leo McCarey actually had a very delicate touch when it came to the melodrama. Take the final scene, for instance, when Cary Grant goes into Deborah Kerr’s bedroom and sees the portrait that he painted and she bought. A million other directors would have cut to a shot of the portrait but McCarey just stays on Grant’s face as he has the horrible realization that his beloved is, in fact, a paraplegic.

      I showed it in my “Screwball Comedy and Melodrama” class where it was the mystery film that the students had to write their midterm papers on. After having watched three films from each genre they had to analyze how AFFAIR was a hybrid of both genres. People often forget but the first half of that movie is really funny.

      Reply
      • Mitchell
        March 13th, 2014 at 6:40 pm

        I am really intrigued by the idea of contrasting screwball comedy and melodrama. They are both so stylized that they really do have a lot in common, I can’t imagine Maria Ouspenskaya in a screwball comedy, though.

      • michaelgloversmith
        March 14th, 2014 at 7:49 am

        I’m teaching two separate sections of the same World of Cinema class. As an experiment, I decided to teach two radically different syllabi: one class is my “feminine” class (screwball/melodrama), the other is my “masculine” class (westerns/film noir). It’s been interesting.

  • John Charet
    March 13th, 2014 at 6:45 pm

    Wow, I have seen every single one of these. I gave numbers 1,3,4,7,8 and 10 * * * * out of * * * * stars. I gave numbers 2,5 and 9 * * * 1/2 out of * * * * stars. I gave number 6 * * * out of * * * * stars. Body and Soul (1947) seems cliched by today’s standards and what really makes the film work (besides the boxing sequences which was one of the influences behind the undisputed classic Raging Bull) was Abraham Polonsky’s screenplay, which led him to direct a year later with the superior Force of Evil. With the exception of The Hustler (1961), I have never been a fan of director Robert Rosen, who (like Stanley Kramer) always seemed to have a thing for that dreaded sub-genre entitled the message movie. Putting all this aside, I have just posted the last two of the four new directors that I added to my list. Here are the links below:

    http://cinematiccoffee.com/2014/03/13/my-favorite-preston-sturges-films/

    http://cinematiccoffee.com/2014/03/13/my-favorite-andrei-tarkovsky-films/

    P.S. Keep up the great work as always:)

    Reply

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