As the leaves fell and the weather cooled in the wake of an exciting election, I settled back into cinema for its own sake, although quite a few of my subjects remained political. Resuming where I'd left off in mid-October, I covered Twin Peaks' second season and the last decade of D.W. Griffith's career; at the same time, I reviewed auteurist, genre, and cartoon classics (sometimes all three at once). As the year ended, I was able to slow down and loosen up my approach, tackling both ambitious round-ups and impulsive capsules.
Subjects include several silent comedies, a trio of political thrillers, a meta-analysis of The Magnificent Ambersons' aesthetic decline, a collection of every Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers dance sequence, and my first year-end tribute to favorite pieces by other bloggers.
The polemical The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush, my highlight for this period, offers a thorough account of how I perceived the passing zeitgeist at this time.
NOVEMBER
With the election over, I returned to classic film reviews, starting with the eerie way that (forced) form echoes content in Orson Welles' mutilated masterpiece
Disney's unexpected aesthetic weirdness (and its more expected ideological bent) animate an early cartoon classic
Griffith attempts a Birth of a Nation approach to the American Revolution
On my first re-visit, I was surprised to discover I didn't really like the season 2 premiere anymore (since then, I've seesawed - usually ranking it below other Lynch but above other Peaks)
Jimmy Stewart and his math genius son live on a houseboat where the boy builds a mid-sixties computer and is rewarded with a trip to meet his idol, Brigitte Bardot playing herself (not making this up, I swear)
Oscars for each letter of the alphabet
Stanley Kubrick shines in early outing (a film I'd cover several times on the site, usually in conjunction with The Asphalt Jungle)
Avery's ultra-modern riffs on the classic fairy tales: A Bear's Tale updates Goldilocks, Red Hot Riding Hood modernizes Little Red Riding Hood, and Wolf Blitz puts Three Little Pigs on a World War II footing
Despite misgivings about the previous episode, I was totally on board again for episode 9, captured by its unique, almost understated charms (though there's still a surprising number of big moments)
My first Anthony Mann western
Roger Corman's LSD trip spurred some musings on the unique nature of the sixties zeitgeist
Scattershot thoughts on a James Bond movie
Messy writer's room and ambitious young director make for uneven episode 11 with some very sharp visual moments
Griffith embraces a modern vibe with his Roaring Twenties tale
Underrated episode 12 closes with a dual climax at One Eyed Jack's and Harold's home
Lesli Linka Glatter's best episode, the best non-Lynch of season 2, episode 13 has a ton of great character moments and offers Al Strobel a juicy steak of a scene to bite into
Griffith attempts to create the anti-Birth of a Nation (or as close as he could come to that) with his first talkie
Two Harold Lloyd comedies reveal the angle he takes to distinguish himself from Chaplin and Keaton (as well as what they have in common)
With a jarring return to form after Lynch's penultimate episode, episode 15 experiments with showing the killer's point of view more than the detective's
Mixed feelings about how the Laura Palmer mystery concludes in episode 16
Raw, virtually forgotten Griffith talkie - his last movie - took me by surprise
Highlights from November 2008
DECEMBER
A simple YouTube clip - maybe my favorite sequence of all time
Another clip - when I stumbled across this one while channel-surfing at the turn of the millennium I had absolutely no context for what I was seeing
A young Sergei Eisenstein's breakthrough feature
Skipping most of the post-mystery episodes to cover the season 2 finale
Tony Scott's thriller tips its hat to the seventies but has a very nineties cast and a very zeroes story
My illustrated picks for a favorite actresses meme making the rounds at the time
Gus Van Sant's biopic of the gay rights trailblazer
Newsweek collected many perspectives on "the ways artists responded to the Bush era" and I found most of it pretty risible. This was my response.
Fascinating peek at life on a John Huston set
Hollywood - or at least a few within it - take on the Nazis as they roll across Europe
I'd heard a bit about this film (mostly for Grace Kelly's role) but was unprepared for how amazing Bing Crosby is
They cast the kid from E.T. in perhaps the most terrifying alien encounter in cinema history (albeit not as the abductee himself)
Two fifties films (or, in different ways, forties/fifties/sixties films) examined side by side
Every Astaire-Rogers dance sequence, for study and enjoyment
Finishing off 2008 with a full round-up of highlights - and favorite pieces by other bloggers
(I covered this period on Episode 3 of my Patreon podcast)
Next: Restless Hibernation (January - March 2009)
(in which, my big projects complete, I flit around for a new focus or approach)
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Previous: Engaging with the Election (October - November 2008)
(in which, my big projects complete, I flit around for a new focus or approach)
•
Previous: Engaging with the Election (October - November 2008)
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