Winters Menagerie

I have three sources of inspiration for this post. Firstly, the UK has just been struck with this mysteriously frigid perspiration that has caused our entire transport infrastructure to grind to a halt. Second, I didn’t want to turn this place into a mausoleum with yet another RIP post but Mr. Kershner does deserve a quick nod of appreciation – so here is the Hoth scene – but here is the superbly illuminating interview with him from Vanity Fair some months back. Third and finally I have eventually caught up with Winters Bone over the weekend through illicit methods, it was very good and should be seen but no cinema visit means no full review – that’s the rules. So as I was mentally musing about what I could write about this week, given that there is nothing hitting cinemas for at least a few weeks I thought I’d turn the menagerie to another list post – Winter Movies. As per usual I’ll do my best to avoid the blatantly obvious, I haven’t thought this through so I’m not sure if I can even muster* a list of ten or so, thus we’ll see how it goes. First up, lets skip over to Sweden for some hilarity;

I’ve inadvertently caught a few more of Ingmar’s movies this year but Winter Light which I saw a few years back is one of the most ‘Bergman’ Bergman’s I’ve seen and enjoyed, if that’s the right word. Stoic, meditative, brilliant and baleful, he really is one of the cruellest directors to his characters, in terms of other characters relations to their anguished souls. This reminds me of  The White Ribbon which I must watch again. This is fun!!

What was that about being obvious? Oh well, this is still one of the Coens most loved movies and I like it, I watched it again last winter and it really does build a great antarctic atmosphere.

One of the great and most quietly moving movies of the Nineties, with a terrific performance from Ian Holm. What happened to him? Haven’t seen him in anything for ages.

I recently picked this up, 外人 that I am, as the above is one of my all time favourite Japanese films and although I’ve seen this I’d not got around to the rest of the trilogy.

Back before the prevalence of studio masking and special effect subterfuge, films were shot for real out in dangerous and demanding conditions. This is a celebrated sequence of an early Griffith, the hoary old grandfather of American cinema. I’m not mature enough to really enjoy all of these elderly films as I’m of a generation that does find them occasionally hokey and well, let me be honest, mostly dull, even if on an aesthetic level I can appreciate the birthing of an art.

A change of temperature and era to a nasty little noir, proof positive that when Raimi abandons the cartoon (and I love the cartoon of course, I’m just saying) he really is a talented, ‘serious’ film-maker that when  given the opportunity can produce a compact, dark little tale of greed and retribution.

Strange that this clip is disabled, considering that this isn’t? Still, as I said on my Ingrid Pitt post Where Eagles Dare is one of the greatest action films, and you quite clearly do not fuck with Eastwood. It’s amusing that it has its own fan site and for me it’s Burton’s finest hour, a great mesh of agility and suspense with that double and triple agent intrigue….

Unsurprisingly Spielberg’s favourite Kurosawa. It shows what a versatile director he was, not only a crime and samurai pedagogue but also someone who could turn his talents to more humanist concerns, a modest tale of one man’s regret and salvation. Through the reasearch of this post I’ve unearthed this which could be interesting , a Vangelis score always stokes my aural interest.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before….

And finally abandoning any pretence of seriousness, I want my $2. It makes me laugh. So that’s enough, I’m off to see if there is anything remotely interesting being released over the next couple of weeks, it’s a frigid wasteland out there….

* A lame joke but it could have been worse, right?