Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

I had a few reasons for giving this AFI showing priority. First, it's not available on Netflix even to save, so I wouldn't get much chance otherwise. Second, it's very highly rated on IMDb, Metacritic, and especially Rotten Tomatoes. Third, I'd never seen a Max Ophüls film before (tho the credits list him as "Opuls" for some reason). Fourth, male lead Louis Jourdan recently died, and I wanted to know him from something other than Gigi and Three Coins in the Fountain. Other factors that would have reinforced my decision include a Howard Koch screenplay, Joan Fontaine calling it her favorite film among those she's been in, and Ringu director Hideo Nakata calling it the best film ever.

Unfortunately, there was also a big reason to brace myself: the genre. Romantic dramas rarely do it for me, at least in terms of warming the heart. They tend to run low on originality and/or credibility; running less than 90 minutes doesn't help in that regard. Characters often let their passions override their logic, so I hardly feel sorry for them when their choices don't pay off. Granted, the same could be said of many an action flick, so maybe I'm biased, but it seems to me that that genre relies less on storytelling to begin with.

Ordet (1955)

The British Film Institute's favorite films include quite a few artsy numbers that do next to nothing for me. Taking a suggestion from the list, especially one that I'd barely heard of elsewhere, was pretty chancy on my part. I did enjoy The Passion of Joan of Arc and found Vampyr at least pretty interesting, so another Carl Theodor Dreyer hit would seem safe -- only I hadn't looked up the detail before. From the look of the title, I had assumed French, not Danish.

It means "The Word." If you guessed a religious connotation, congrats. The story concerns a Lutheran farm owner with three sons: Anders, who wants to marry a woman from a slightly (but too significantly for their fathers) different religious background; Mikkel, a bitter agnostic who nevertheless loves his wife Inger; and Johannes, who, having studied Kierkegaard, proclaims himself the second coming of Christ. When Inger has complications in giving birth, the philosophical focus rests almost entirely on whether faith can move mountains long after biblical times.

Ida (2013)

How appropriate: Immediately after a film with almost no female presence, I watch one in which the female presence outweighs the male presence. Both connect to WWII, only in retrospect in this case. You see, a Polish woman in her early 20s, who has spent most of her life in an abbey and is preparing to become a nun, learns that her parents were Jews and had given her a different first name from "Anna." This being the early '60s, you can guess how they might have gotten separated. She does have one known living relative, Aunt Wanda, who will reluctantly help her search for answers.

You're most likely to have heard of Ida via the latest Academy Awards, where it won Best Foreign-Language Film. But before I even knew of its nomination, I had taken Netflix's strong recommendation to put it on my list. Of course, one look at the deliberately black and white cover told me that it wouldn't exactly be fun.

Run Silent Run Deep (1958)

For multiple obvious reasons, there aren't many submarine movies, which puts a lot of pressure (heh) on the few of them to excel. I'm sure this one was expensive for the time, even if the exterior shots used mere models. The filmmakers did aim for authenticity by having real submariners train the actors. They did not aim for fidelity to the Edward L. Beach book, from what I can tell.

Apart from that, the main aspect that I appreciate is the casting. Sure, Burt Lancaster and especially Clark Gable were a bit old for captains, but as I heard Gable repeatedly call, "Dive, dive!", I realized what a natural he seemed for a combination of Commander Queeg from The Caine Mutiny and Captain Ahab from, oh, you know. And Lancaster knew how to project a disciplined officer who strongly disapproved a superior (somewhat reversed in Seven Days in May). The film is also notable for the silver-screen debut of Don Rickles, who does better at non-comic roles than I thought.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)

There's a Frank Capra festival going on, so I decided to check out an earlier work of his than any I'd seen before. It's also his only non-comedy besides Lost Horizon that I've seen. Historically, it's most significant for advancing Barbara Stanwyck's career, along with Capra's The Miracle Woman in 1931.

Of course, the title and year should tell you something about values herein. In fact, it kept reminding me of Broken Blossoms: A Chinese man played by a white man develops feelings for a white woman, they don't really have my idea of a romance, and it doesn't end well. But unlike the saintly other man, Yen is domineering, cynical, and coldly pragmatic in matters of violence. This contrasts as well with Stanwyck's Megan, a missionary who was about to marry another missionary before the chaos of the Chinese Civil War ushered her into Yen's ostensibly protective clutches. Their irrational on-and-off chemistry has a Beauty and the Beast vibe in a bad sense. I was actually relieved to see that they wouldn't end up together, which would carry the ultimate "Nice guys finish last" message.

Of Gods and Men (2010)

The preview had gotten me interested in this one. It's based on a true story of nine French Trappist monks in Algeria under threat from Islamic extremists during the 1996 civil war. With all that we hear about Middle Eastern violence to this day, a little tale like this can easily be overlooked.

That said, an early massacre elsewhere that sets fears in motion is about the only violence you'll see in this film. Mostly it's the monks talking with each other, authorities, unhelpful soldiers, or aggressors at their door. Despite internal and external pressures to pack up and leave, they continue to treat injuries in the community, no questions asked. Alas, it's not the next Hotel Rwanda: What little we know of the reality dictated an unhappy, if largely unseen, ending (putting aside the question of what happens to Catholic martyrs).

I Remember Mama (1948)

It's too bad my mom didn't come when my dad and I saw this in a theater. Few movies in any era have more female major characters than male, breezing thru the Bechdel Test. And few of those are also this good.

The title is a little curious, as "Mama" (Irene Dunne) is still very much alive and living with the narrator, Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), at the time of the narration. It hasn't even been more than a few years since the 1910 events in question, when Katrin was in her teens. Also strange is that Wikipedia, before my last edit at least, classified the film as a comedy. It has quaintly funny moments, such as dubbing a tomcat "Uncle Elizabeth" to accommodate stubborn youngest sister Dagmar, but I'd call it a "comedy" only in the old-fashioned sense of The Divine Comedy. It's more of a heartwarming melodrama.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)

Yeah, it's one of those foreign films that had to wait a year for the Academy to notice. I made a point to see it before the Oscars for the sake of knowing as many Best Animated Feature nominees as possible, tho I knew from the outset it wouldn't win. The last non-CG winner came out in 2005, and TTotPK sports a watercolor look with a dash of charcoal.

I had thought that director/writer Isao Takahata, being older than Hayao Miyazaki, had retired. He has made few movies in the last 15 years, none of them well known in my circles. His works tend to be more quintessentially Japanese than Miyazaki's, as evidenced by Disney's embarrassing attempt to redub Pom Poko for an American audience. But I'll give him credit for variety: The tragedy Grave of the Fireflies and comic-in-motion My Neighbors the Yamadas could hardly have differed more. TTotPK, based on a Japanese folktale, makes a worthy addition to his legacy.

Broken Blossoms (1919)

I first heard of this silent as evidence that D.W. Griffith was not really a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, just a storyteller who used whatever structure he found convenient. Coming four years after The Birth of a Nation, it has also gone by The Yellow Man and the Girl. Despite what you'd think, it tries for a positive depiction of a man from China and his feelings for a young white woman (Lillian Gish), while the main villain (Donald Crisp) is a white bigot. Sure, a white actor plays the protagonist, identified only as the Yellow Man, but he's more convincing than some cross-racial actors from much later decades and appears to mean no insult.

That said, there's not much of a romance. I thought I'd remembered reading that they got married, but no, not even close. The only line between them (as far as the intertitles tell us) is "What makes you so good to me, chinky?" Yeah, real sweet. The man shows clearer passion, which the narrator assures us is most "pure and holy." So...chaste? I wonder if Griffith even entertained the idea of letting them be happy together for long. I'd've given him major bonus points for that.

Boyhood (2014)

It finally came via Netflix, and boy (heh), am I relieved not to have seen it in a theater. Oh, I've sat thru longer movies without breaks and felt fine about them, but when the action takes place across 12 years with 143 scenes, not always clarifying the year, it sure feels longer than 2 hours and 45 minutes. A $2.4 million budget across that time won't get you much in the way of visuals, either. I started getting uncomfortable in my seat about half an hour in.

Not to say it bored me. I didn't find myself waiting for something great to happen. And yet...nothing great does happen. It's never especially funny, intense, heartwarming, or tragic. Like in same director Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, the apparent point is to keep everything credible -- pretty much the opposite of escapism. That's basically the whole advantage to the 12-year shoot: no fake aging and no anachronisms. IMDb trivia indicate that the makers threw in some personal elements from reality to boot. You can call it sweet; I just say, "That's all well and good, but how is it for art and entertainment?"