The 39 Steps

Smiles of a Summer Night

My second Bergman film. It was wonderful! Really hilarious, wonderfully performed, and a great underlying theme of young loves and endless summers.

Dekalog: The Ten Commandments Part 5

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Rediscovering Woody at the moment. I may have seen this before, but can't remember.

Thinking of it now, it's almost a predecessor to Match Point (which I seem to be utterly alone in the human race in actually liking), full of tragedic moral and religious dilemmas, a murderer getting away with, yep, murder. Actually, I guess it's part of a strand that runs through the whole of Woody's work. The Greek chorus in Mighty Aphrodite, the religious angst of Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters, marriage break-ups and infidelity in pretty much every one of his films, the stories about 'castrating Zionists' in Manhattan. I never tire of it, his perfectly fine-tuned balance between that deep interrogation of the meaning of life and the hilarious consequences of our pathetic attempts to understand it all. No-one captures it quiet as well, I don't think. As Woody's Mickey says in Hannah and Her Sisters, "All these great minds who've written all these books, and none of them have any more answers than I do. I've read Socrates, he used to knock off little Greek boys, what's he got to tell me?"

Rewatch: Hannah And Her Sisters

Darwin's Nightmare

Rewatch: Festen

Or as the American DVD I have of it is called The Celebration.

The first Dogme 95 film, it's still just as devastating as it was when I saw it nearly ten years ago. For a film set in such palatial surroundings, it is so immediate and visceral.