What’s Happening Next Week?
If you can believe it, I’ve lost my way. I’ve lost touch with what’s on the menu. I’m not eating gluten-free or sucrose-free, just hand-to-mouth. Chungking Express and The Tree of Wooden Clogs are me doing the great ad-lib. Adding The Searchers is my last ditch effort to make something of this week. I’ve fallen out-of-step with the program. I’m still on track if I watch all the rest of the important films for the next (thirty-one-done) twenty-one weeks. Five-a-week, nets me another one hundred and twenty-five films to add to the coffers.I know where the wheels fell off. It was Ozu and Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. I entered that land of Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido and Shikoku and it all fell apart. Then there was the unexpected surprise of Macbeth week: Kurosawa, Kurzel, Shakespeare and Welles.
Week 33
If you can believe it, I’m starting the last third. 141to go.
10 (1979)
Tonight, I have the girls in bed by 8.15pm. It’s time to watch something my wife won’t want to watch again but which I like on many levels, not least the music score by Henry Mancini and the piano-playing by Dudley Moore. It needed a time to watch the blu-ray which I purchased from America four or five months ago, when I can crank up the sound and listen to the soundtrack without worrying about other very local occupants (trying to sleep). There’s a piece in this film which Dudley Moore performs which is the climax – unhappily for his character, not a sexual one – of the movie. The rest is Coda and denouement and deus ex machina.. Everything else that occurs resolves the plot but this is without doubt the real moment where the artistic sense of the film climaxes. Everything that occurs afterwards is part of a failed personal fantasy he has which he gets to live for two or three hours. This film, is appreciated by some but unheralded generally, presumably because it seems to be so one-dimensional on the outside that most people don’t look for extra dimensions on the inside. Has anyone made a film that better explores male menopause? The point in life where they buy sleek-looking fast cars, divorce their aging wives, and take up with a blonde bimbo (or any extremely intelligent other with no requisite hair colour).
